“The hour is fast approaching, on which the Honor and Success of this army, and the safety of our bleeding Country depend.” —George Washington (1776)

I take a fair amount of ribbing over a shared name, having doled out a fair amount of well-earned criticism in the direction of Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Alexander Milley. No relation, thank you very much. That friendly agitation resurfaced three weeks ago from colleagues at the White House celebrating our friend Larry Taylor at his long-overdue Medal of Honor ceremony.

Unlike Joe Biden, who left the ceremony early to avoid any respectfully challenging questions that might pop up about his abysmally failed tenure as commander-in-chief, Milley and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stayed for the reception. I give them due credit for honoring Larry, but Biden, Austin, and Milley are the “three strategic stooges” of our nation’s badly fractured frontlines of security and defense.

Milley is retiring at the end of this week, and not a New York second too soon.

A consummate Massachusetts blue-stater indoctrinated with unmitigated arrogance at Princeton and Columbia, Milley had previously served under the very capable leadership of former CJCS Gen. Joseph Dunford (USMC), who was appointed to that post by Donald Trump in May 2017. Trump nominated Milley to replace Dunford in 2019, despite the fact that then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Chairman Dunford recommended Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein — who would have been a much better choice.

In terms of bad decisions, I would rank the Milley appointment only a few notches under Trump’s disastrous decision to empower Anthony Fauci with full authority over our nation’s domestic response to the ChiCom Virus pandemic.

The tenuous Trump/Milley relationship ended abruptly with the disgraceful post-2020 election J6 riots, with Milley having described Trump’s effort to overturn the election as “a Reichstag moment” and calling Trump’s erroneous statements about electoral fraud “the gospel of the Führer.” (“Erroneous,” I note again, only because Trump missed the point — the real election subterfuge was the Demos’ massive bulk-mail ballot fraud.)

Milley is proud of the comparison between his then-commander-in-chief boss Trump and Hitler.

Milley believed himself then to be the protector of our Constitution against domestic enemy Trump, according to a glowing tribute by leftist Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. “A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries,” gushes “true believer” Goldberg. Despite that assessment, Milley recently conceded that he never received any “illegal order” from Trump.

Like Austin’s military service record, prior to Biden retaining Milley as his CJCS, Milley’s service record was admirable. But the true test of both Austin’s and Milley’s character and integrity, and their ability as military leaders, was on full display during Biden’s surrender and retreat from Afghanistan. And their failure cost a lot of lives, including 13 American Patriots at Kabul Airport and 10 civilians days later in their mistaken retaliation effort.

There is no accounting for the number of men, women, and children slaughtered after Milley and Austin abandoned the country to terrorist Taliban control, leaving countless allied Afghan personnel and their families to be tortured and murdered.

Milley says he told Biden that they needed to leave troops on the ground as the U.S. retreated, which is to say basically do what Trump’s plan called for if the Taliban failed to meet their obligations. He declared in Senate testimony after the fall of Kabul, “My assessment was, back in the fall of ‘20, and remained consistent throughout, that we should keep a steady state of 2,500 — and it could bounce up to 3,500 — or maybe something like that.”

But when asked by Sen. Tom Cotton, who is both an Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, why he did not resign in protest instead of carrying out Biden’s plan, Milley responded: “It would be an incredible act of political defiance for a commissioned officer to just resign because my advice is not taken. This country doesn’t want generals figuring out what orders we’re going to accept and do or not. That’s not our job.”

Well, no. It would have been an act of the highest integrity and honor, and that was your job.

Moreover, five weeks before Milley’s deadly Afghanistan debacle, we called for his resignation.

At the time, it was because Milley had apparently found lots of orders he was pleased to carry out — including being the chief military advocate for all of Biden’s woke agenda orders pertaining to diversity and social justice, which are having a devastating impact on military readiness. Milley enforced Biden’s CRT agenda, executed his faux “white supremacist” military witch hunt, and instituted Biden’s military vaccination mandate.

He basically converted the Department of Defense into Biden’s pet Department of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Asked last week by CNN leftist Fareed Zakaria if our military is “too woke,” he responded: “No, not at all, this military is a lot of things, but woke, it’s not.” He then added, “And I’m not sure what that word truly means.” He is so steeped in Biden’s agenda that he can’t even define “woke.”

We should all be concerned about government waste, but there is no waste more costly than military morale, and Milley’s enforcement of Biden’s military policies constitutes a dereliction of duty second to none.

As Austin and Milley blundered out of Afghanistan, notable military analyst Gen. B.B. Bell (USA, Ret.) called for their resignation, asking rhetorically, “How is it possible, even conceivable, that our nation’s president and commander-in-chief could cave to the Taliban and order the removal of all U.S. military personnel from Afghanistan, while leaving American citizens and our Afghan partners at the mercy of the barbaric terrorists?” He added: “SecDef Lloyd Austin to Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley to the senior commanders at Central Command, should have long since resigned in protest. To date, not one of them has tendered their resignation — zero. Stunning.”

And Afghanistan was just the warmup. Vladimir Putin knew he had nothing to fear when he marched into Ukraine six months later.

As for Milley’s legacy now, it can be summed up in one word: “disgrace.”

All being said, Milley’s departure may not be a net plus. At least his ineptitude and capacity for using our military as a petri dish for Biden’s woke agenda was known.

Predictably, Biden’s puppeteers elevated and the Senate quickly confirmed Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown, whose record of race-based promotions is well established. He used his Air Force tenure to promote DEI. How he will conduct himself as the new CJCS will set that record straight.

Footnote: Milley centered his retirement ceremony on these parting words: “We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”

As the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted: “It was still dispiriting to hear Gen. Milley’s remarks about a former President, in public, while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army. Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Like it or not, he commands political support in the country. That doubtless includes a large chunk of the enlisted ranks of the United States military services. The end-of-tour catharsis of a swipe at Mr. Trump isn’t worth polarizing the force over politics.”

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

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