After a 43-year career, with four years as the 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) of the US Armed Forces, General Mark Alexander Milley, is set to ‘hang up his boots’ on 30 September 2023. Keeping with a soldier’s straight-shooting lightheartedness, he said that while he was clear that he wouldn’t accept a public office after retirement, he wasn’t exactly sure as to where he’d go, as he told his wife, “We can go to Dicks and get a tent. I’m good with that. We lived in a tent before”! Irrespective of his post retirement innings, he has managed to emerge as the best known CJCS since Colin Powell, who was famous for Operation Desert Storm.

Essentially a peacetime CJCS (not counting the continuing American troop engagement in the Middle East or pullout from Afghanistan), General Mark Milley’s epochal ‘moment’ was his inadvertent presence in military fatigues with the then President Donald Trump leading a walk to Lafayette Square, as protests following the George Floyd murder were spiraling.
The political symbolism and import of him in ‘uniform’ with the President in tow, was unmistakable, and he famously and publicly apologised, soon thereafter.

He did, rather correctly and uprightly (knowing the consequences of speaking out with a Commander-in-Chief like Donald Trump) concede, “I should not have been there” and clarified, “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military (being) involved in domestic politics”.

Expectedly, Trump wasn’t pleased with his CJCS but firing Milley (as he would have naturally preferred) would have come with even more damaging electoral prospects for a President who postured political ‘muscularity’ and usurpation with ‘his generals’.

It is the deliberate and visible preservation of the apolitical and nonpartisan guardrails for the institution of the ‘uniform’ that inks Milley’s legacy.
The circumstances of a CJCS’s tenure with a reckless and desperate Trump at the helm could have led to unimaginable consequences, had General Milley not displayed the steel, fearless uprightness, and avowed commitment to the Constitution.

As Milley was to later state the obvious (though the timing during Trump’s unpredictable reign was key), “We are unique among militaries. We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator.We do not take an oath to an individual”. Milley presciently clarified, “We take an oath to the Constitution. And every soldier that is represented in this museum every sailor, every airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman each of us will protect and defend that document regardless of personal price”.

The message was unequivocally directed at his boss, reiterating that the institution of the US Armed Forces would not bend to accommodate Trump’s personal whims and fancies, which could have easily led an acquiescing military to perpetuate his Presidentship unconstitutionally.

General Milley’s runins with his Commander-in-Chief on the potential (mis)use of the military are part of White House folklore, including resignation letters that were not put up. The good General was wise enough to block many of Trump’s electorally driven ‘wag-the-dog’ foreign operations, as also the subsuming of militaristic optics in a political way but did so with enough tact and plausible deniability.

Nothing came out in terms of quotes, only indirectly through claimed ‘sources’ and books ~ but the General maintained the decorum of mandatory restraint, rectitude and sobriety with only the constant reminder of the Constitution. The reiteration of standing behind and publicly protecting the Constitution was enough to suggest that the ‘Uniform’ would not stand by anyone who sought to defy the Constitution (read Trump).

The price that the constitutionally bound, thoroughly professional and apolitical General paid was to be slammed as ‘woke’ (e.g., for expanding on critical race theory) or even a ‘traitor’ who routinely disagreed with his Commander-in Chief but he refused to take the bait and continued reassuring the American citizenry that irrespective of political passions, the American military would refuse to be used as a political/partisan instrument or prop.

The extraordinary and controversial circumstances included speaking to his Chinese counterpart to reassure him that the US was not intending to attack, as purportedly claimed by Chinese intelligence. The hardline Republicans obviously claimed that it was ground enough to seek his resignation, though Milley stated that his conversation with the Chinese General was aligned with, and conforming to, the mandate given to him by the Defence Secretary, as a deescalatory initiative.

Milley testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I know, I am certain, that Presi dent Trump did not intend to attack the Chinese, and it was my direct responsibility by the secretary to convey that intent to the Chinese”.

General Milley would have witnessed enough unhinged capabilities in his Commander in Chief to disregard all notions of propriety and constitutionality, to therefore have played a pivotal role in avoiding disaster to the United States and to the world at large, by doing what he did, silently and professionally.

As if to continue the narrative of constitutionality, he has repeatedly and perhaps unlike any previous CJCS’s waded into civil discourse by insisting, “Every single one of us in this country, the United States of America, has freedom of speech. We’ve got freedom of the press. We’ve got freedom of religion. We are free to assemble. We are free to protest our government and redress any grievances”.

Such a discourse was uncommon and refreshing from a serving General who sensed the societal drift away from constitutionality. As if to blunt any suggestions of the ‘Uniform’ acquiesc- ing to such societal regression or compromise to the constitutional spirit, he confirmed, “We in uniform are willing to die to give our lives, our limbs, our eyesight, to ensure that that Constitution lives for the next generation”.

It is such reinforcement and reiteration of the Constitution that makes his tenure and legacy special, even if he is up for some valid questioning on other fronts like Afghanistan withdrawal etal. Now, as the baton passes to his successor, General Charles ‘CQ’ Brown Jr., General Mark Milley can hang up his ‘uniform’ with much pride knowing that he leaves behind an institution which is thoroughly apolitical, nonpartisan, and spared from societal passions of reimagining the Constitution.

(The writer is Lt Gen PVSM, AVSM (Retd), and former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)