Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was the commanding officer of the 10th Mountain Division in Iraq in 2004 when he joined one of his brigade commanders on a late-night run to visit a recently wounded soldier in a hospital.
“So we took Route Irish in Baghdad, which was known as the most dangerous road in the world, and we promptly got hit by an IED,” he recalled, describing how they narrowly avoided death or traumatic injury in an explosion that shredded their Humvee.
“Afterwards, I asked the general, ‘Has this happened to you before?’” Mr. Austin said. “And he said, ‘Oh, yes, sir. I’ve been blown up about five times now.’”
The general was Gen. Mark Miley, commander of the 10th Mountain’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, who would go on to serve under Mr. Austin again less than two decades later as the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman during both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
“He was always eager to get into the fight. He’s never hesitated to charge into danger for his troops or for his country—and I’ve seen that firsthand,” Mr. Austin said during a Sept. 29 change-of-command ceremony on Fort Myer’s parade grounds next to Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia.
Hockey-Playing Princeton Scholar
Gen. Milley becomes Mr. Milley on Oct. 1, ending a 44-year career that began as a tank officer and advanced with commands in the Army eight divisions and special force units, to retire as the nation’s highest-ranking military officer.
He was succeeded in the change-of-command ceremony, attended by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown—a “by-the-book” F-16 fighter pilot—who becomes the 21st Joint Chiefs Chair.
Mr. Austin said Gen. Milley is “a scholar and a warrior” from Boston working-class roots who parlayed his toughness as a standout prep hockey player into an ROTC scholarship at Princeton University, where he graduated in 1980 and was commissioned an Army officer.
“You may not know this, but he grew up in Boston. It’s a little-known fact unless you’ve ever met the guy. Boston is the holy land to him [and former Boston Bruins star] Bobby Orr is a patron saint,” he said.
That’s significant, Mr. Austin said, because Bobby Orr effused the discipline of “hard work and sacrifice. Without that, [Orr] said, skill is just potential. But Gen. Milley has never let skill languish as just potential. He’s always been eager to get into the fight.”
Tangles With Trump
Not all fights, however.Gen. Milley’s legacy will be notable for his entanglements with former President Trump during the 19 months he was Joint Chiefs chair under the Trump administration and in the years since, as well as for Congressional angst over “woke” policies he didn’t impose but had to implement.
Among Gen. Milley’s post-presidency claims about Mr. Trump is that, in the waning days of his administration, he thwarted the former president from launching a massive attack on Iran. His bark-to-bark banter with the former president has relegated him to the highest pantheon of MAGA enemies, along with Hillary Clinton, Anthony Fauci, and Christopher Wray, among others.
His tenure as Pentagon chief will also be notable for House Republicans’ uproar over diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] training and other “woke” policies in the military that they say are contributing to recruiting shortfalls and impairing readiness.
Those DEI programs and other “woke” policies were established by Trump administration Secretary of Defense Mark Esper during the pandemic summer of 2020 and encoded into the 2021 defense budget and further entrenched that same year by executive orders issued by newly elected President Biden.
Among them is a directive to reimburse travel for abortion and provide paid time off for service members or their family members who choose to terminate a pregnancy, and another one that repealed Mr. Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military.
Gen. Milley’s four years as Joint Chiefs of Staff also included Mr. Austin’s 2021 military-wide stand-down to contemplate “extremism in the ranks,” further aggravating conservatives who argued the general was all too enthusiastic about DEI and other “woke” programs and protocols being implemented across the Department of Defense (DOD) under the Biden administration.
Gen. Brown, the first black man to lead any branch of the U.S. military and serve as Joint Chiefs Chair, although confirmed by the Senate, is also likely to have a difficult relationship with House conservatives, who have criticized him for co-authoring an August 2022 memo that stipulated preferred racial quotas for Air Force recruiting efforts and for statements in support of DEI and other allegedly “woke” policies.
Boston, Maps, the Constitution
But none of that was directly addressed during the two-hour change-of-command ceremony that featured marching bands from all the services performing with drums and pipes and trombones under a colorful flurry of flags and banners.“Everyone who has spent time with Mark knows three things about him,” Mr. Biden said. “He’s from Boston, he likes maps, and loves the Constitution. Each of these three things points to something deeper.”
The president said Milley’s Boston heritage “is what shaped the values that have guided his whole life. It’s about a father and mother, both veterans of World War II, who set the example of the nobility in serving your country … about knowing where you’ve come from.”
Mr. Biden said Gen. Milley’s love of maps “is about knowing where you are, where you’re going. Mark wants to make sure he has the necessary facts, informed decisions as a leader and his advice to others.”
Gen. Milley never wavered in his support of the Constitution, which he has a scholar’s knowledge and appreciation for, Mr. Biden said.
“The Constitution is what makes us a strong nation, who we are as a democracy, and how the United States—for more than two centuries—has always managed to keep moving forward,” he said.
The United States is not about “fealty to any one person or to a political party, but to the idea of America, a nation unlike any other in human history, the idea that we’re all created equal,” Mr. Biden said. “That’s what the Constitution says. That’s what we swear an oath to. That is why generations of young women and men of every background and creed have stepped forward to be part of the greatest fighting force in the history of the world. And that’s not hyperbole—the greatest fighting force in the history of the world.”
Since being appointed Joint Chief Chair by Mr. Trump in October 2019, “Mark has been steady in guiding our military as they navigate what I would argue as one of the most complex security environments our world has faced in a long time,” Mr. Biden said.
He said Gen. Milley has “been critical in strengthening America’s existing alliances from NATO to the Indo-Pacific, to building strategic, keeping our forces at the cutting edge in the fields of cyber and space and in America longest war, continuing to take terrorists off the battlefield, standing with the brave people of Ukraine, making sure they have the equipment, the support they need, when they need it, to defend their freedom.”
Referring to Mr. Austin’s recall of the time Gen. Milley “got me blown up,” Mr. Biden said, “The part of the story that stands out to me is the reason they were on Route Ireland that night to begin with. The reason they were there. They were going to see a wounded soldier. That’s leadership. That’s patriotism. That’s strength. That’s Mark Milley.”
Striving For ‘A More Perfect Union’
In his farewell address, Gen. Milley did, indeed, focus on the Constitution, which he described as a living experiment in how “we the people,” who are imperfect, can continuously strive to “form a more perfect union.”“Today is not about anyone up here on this stage. It’s about something much larger. It’s about our democracy. It’s about our republic. It’s about the colors posted behind me. It’s about the ideas and the values that make up this great experiment in liberty,” he said. “Those values and ideas are contained within the Constitution of the United States of America, which is the moral North Star for all of us who had the privilege of wearing the cloth of our nation.”
The Constitution is a mere document, a piece of paper, yet it animates the “idea that is America,” Gen. Milley said. “That document gives purpose to our service, that all of us in uniform swear to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and,” he said with emphasis, “domestic.”
What has been true for generations remains as true today, he said. “We, in uniform, are willing to die to pass that document off to the next generation.”
The Constitution is the nation, Gen. Milley said.
“We are unique among the world’s militaries. We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king or queen, to a tyrant or a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual,” he said. “We take an oath to the Constitution, to the idea of America, and we’re willing to die to protect it. Every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, Guardian and Coast Guard. Each of us commits our very life to protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price.”
That commitment will remain steadfast under Gen. Brown, Gen. Milley said.
“Gen. CQ Brown is the right leader to accelerate change. He’s the right man at the right time to carry on the mission of this great military. CQ knows how to lead a global fighting force,” he said, turning to his successor on the stage, “Go to combat readiness. There’s no doubt you'll meet the challenges of tomorrow.”
