How did an authoritative gibberer make it to becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs?

05 September 2021

Do we embrace bamboozlers at the peak of US military authority?

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, apparently has elected himself to provide an example of this phenomenon.

Two demonstrations of such are listed below.

First instance — of General Milley's bamboozling gravitas

Here is Milley answering Jennifer Griffin's (Fox News) question about vetting the Kabul airport refugees:

So I talked to the security folks. You saw it. So what they're doing as people come in, they're getting their names registered. They're doing the biometrics. They check their irises. They do their fingerprints. They take a full facial photo. They run that against the 20 years of databases that we have in the interagency. They run it against the NCTC checks and the FBI checks.

If the individual, if the evacuee has some sort of derogatory information or something suspect at all, it'll pop up as red or yellow.They've popped about 30,000 or so people through here.

And they've had I think, I think they said a couple of hundred or something like that have popped red.

Once the individual comes out as red, something is up. Then they go into an individual room and they interview- start interviewing with FBI, CID, NCIS, those sorts of folks. And then they work through whatever the issues were.

© 2021 Thomas Lifson, Gen. Milley says to relax, the Afghan refugees have all been vetted, American Thinker (05 September 2021) (see the video here) (quote is Thomas Lifson's transcription of what was said)

Sure General. We saw the chaos at the airport that you and your ilk so cleverly designed.

And we can image the unprepared disorder at the outside-of-Afghanistan receiving ends of that evacuation.

We can deduce that a significant proportion of the desperate child brides and young male hangers-on — whom we saw on television at the Kabul airport — statistically probably have no previous record with American government. Either in Afghanistan or the United States.

For instance, we know that many loyal US-helpers have been left behind because all their years of courageous (and sometimes wounded) service were not enough to get them a record with the United States.

See Colonel (retired) Lawrence Wilkerson angrily on that topic (and many others that are related to Afghanistan and the Military Industrial Complex) — here:

MintPressNews, Lawrence Wilkerson: Afghanistan Pullout a Sign of US Empire in Decline, YouTube (26 August 2021)

Thus, deductively speaking, General Milley's red and yellow vetting signals are, most likely, misleading bullshit. They are as likely to be wrong, or completely unjust in their preferences, as they are right.

When we combine this screening nonsense with the American-manned perimeter's reported refusal — see here and here — to let some real US passport holders into the airport, we can reasonably suspect that the (allegedly good) General is either lying, deeply confused, or simply spouting a convenient Party Line.

Second instance — of General Milley's gift for gibbering bamboozlement

Here is Milley is trying to defend the nationally embarrassing Kabul airport evacuation effort:

The whole idea of Bagram, for example, and securing Bagram and whether it’s Bagram or KIA [Kabul International Airport], that kind of thing, people should go back and take a look at the type force we had. The 2,500 troops, those are advisers.

Those aren’t infantry battalions, those are advisers. And in order to secure Bagram, you need roughly speaking about a brigade. So you need about a battalion to secure the 72 towers that are at Bagram.

You’ve got entrances, you’ve got QRFs, you have an outer perimeter security that you have to do patrols. It’s about another battalion.

So right off the bat, that’s three battalions.

Then if you’re going to be north of Kabul by whatever it is, 60 kilometers or so, you’ve got a battalion that’s going to secure that quarter. You’re looking at, roughly speaking, about 5,000 or 6,000 additional troops on top of what it would take to secure KIA.

And when the president made his decision in April, we had a change of mission. And that mission was very clear. It was to take the force down to zero by the end of the summer, by 31 August, and to provide military forces to protect the embassy as a bridging solution until a contract solution was in, because the president’s intent was to keep the embassy going and to help the Turks secure KIA.

To secure the embassy, to secure KIA about a 750 person, maybe a little bit less than a thousand military mission. And that was the basically troop cap.

So you could not with the – with the conditions that existed and the constraints and restraints of the mission, you couldn’t secure Bagram.

And – and then the question is for what? Why would you secure Bagram? And the issue was, of course, to do the NEO, right?

We got 124,000 people out of KIA. So the flow, the volume was never an issue. And in fact, you got more people out of KIA than you would have ever got out of Bagram because they would have had to go from Kabul, north 60 miles, 60 kilometers.

So the planning was extensive. Those were actually thought out options.

There were various branches and sequels to all of these things. And what you – the other thing was a permissive environment. We had a government. You had an army. When the government and the army fell apart, then you’re into a different contingency, which was the NEO. And that was called and we brought in the forces to do it.

Or as paraphrased by me:

You see, my fellow Amuhrikans, it was all the President's fault.

And it was overwhelming, Jennifer.

There were branches and sequels.

(Oh my.)

And, of course — QRFs, a KIA, and even an NEO!

My gosh, it was so confusing.

And we had so little to work with.

If Congress would only fund us more adequately, we might be able to do our jobs, Jen.

Can I call you, Jen?

Surely, you cannot think that I am responsible for any of this.

(Except, of course, if History comes to view our US withdrawal as a grand success.)

From my perspective

I would be nice if the General could speak coherently, even cogently, and with a hint of genuinely insightful smarts.

Readers should keep in mind that General Milley has academic degrees from Princeton and Columbia. What that says about the Ivy League is probably worth evaluating.

For its part, the US Army should be humiliated by this Authoritative Gibberer's strut in the sun. Though I suspect, based on decades of reading military-written analyses and projections, that the military institution prizes jargon-laden drivel above all else.

In that regard — and certainly in the Paraded Gravitas department — General Mark Milley arguably excels.

Notice, most pertinently, that . . .

. . . rather than object to President Biden's allegedly inadequate withdrawal plan — by resigning, retiring and going public — General Milley went along with the Commander in Chief's subtly alleged idiocy.

We saw, and will continue to see, the probably depressing result.

But again, that is all the President's fault. The US military command chain — according to Meandering Milley — had nothing to do with it.

The moral? — Where do they get these guys?

General Milley is shining proof of John T. Reed's critique of the US military's promotion process.

Milley arguably exemplifies the lack of genuinely professional Honor and Principle that is so uniformly characteristic of our interminable supply of Military Industrial Complex stooges.

No offense, General.

You are just an example of the toxic sausage that the System creates from willing ingredients. My perversely oriented side admires your aptitude for bamboozling the masses.

Windbag is probably an accurate description. Would 'blowhard' go too far?

The United States intentionally selects for both qualities.

Blowhard-ism sails the American boat. Nobody seems to notice that we are repeatedly crashing into comparatively unforgiving geopolitical rocks.

PeteFree.com

How did an authoritative gibberer make it to becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs?