I Know General Milley, and He Was Just Doing His Job
Calls between top military leaders — friend and foe — are common and necessary to avoid potentially catastrophic misunderstandings.
Be glad he was doing his job.
Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
I met Mark Milley, the now-embattled chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, almost 20 years ago in the Pentagon, and I met him because I had a problem. My job was senior military assistant to the secretary of defense, Don Rumsfeld, and every week we had to brief him on the “orders book.” This was a breakdown of the pending deployments that would send military units into combat – often complex and controversial decisions that only the secretary could make.
My problem was that Rumsfeld, a notoriously hard principal, was chewing through briefers. It needed to be a senior colonel or Navy captain with gravitas and battlefield experience, but more importantly someone who could gain the confidence of Rummy. The latter was the hard part, because the secretary was skeptical and a shrewd judge of character. He had fired a half-dozen briefers, a couple of them on the spot.