The confused state of civil-military relations
What Mark Milley’s reported actions tells us about Jan. 6
President Donald Trump and Gen. Mark Milley speak at the 119th Army-Navy football game at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia on Dec. 8, 2018. (Jim Young/Reuters)
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The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts was skeptical that the latest crop of Trump books would produce much in the way of enlightenment. As an author of one of those books in 2020, Trump’s flaws, habits and provocations are visible for anyone who wants to see. Does the country really need new books confirming what we already knew?
In some ways, however, Trump books are like zombie films. Yes, the genre can get pretty homogenous, but what is interesting about it is not the zombies — it is how the human characters react to the zombies. Similarly, what is interesting about the Trump books has little to do with Trump and more to do with how his staffers, sycophants and subordinates respond to him.
Some of that is also predictable at this point: I am shocked, shocked that Ivanka Trump is trying to wash her hands of any participation in the events of Jan. 6. All of these narratives have folks like Mike Pompeo or Marc Short trying to sound as though they were the adults in the room. In Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker’s new book, Pompeo is literally quoted as saying, “You know the crazies are taking over.” Much of this is CYA leaking, and I share the disgusted reaction of MSNBC’s Hayes Brown to those trying to launder their culpability.
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Still, sometimes there is something new and interesting in these first drafts of history. In this crop of books, the most interesting thing is what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley thought about Trump. CNN reports that once Trump began installing last-minute acting appointees to the Defense Department after the 2020 election, Milley started pushing back:
Leonnig and Rucker recount a scene when Milley was with Trump and his top aides in a suite at the Army-Navy football game in December, and publicly confronted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“What’s going on? Are you guys getting rid of [FBI Director Chris] Wray or Gina [Haspel, CIA Director]?” Milley asked. “Come on chief. What the hell is going on here? What are you guys doing?”
"Don't worry about it," Meadows said. "Just some personnel moves."
“Just be careful,” Milley responded, which Leonnig and Rucker write was said as a warning that he was watching.
Milley reportedly feared that Trump would escalate a conflict with Iran before Jan. 20, Inauguration Day. And according to The Washington Post’s excerpt of Rucker and Leonnig’s book, Milley’s opinion of Trump by January could not have gotten any lower:
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff already had been on edge. A student of history, Milley saw Trump as a classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose. He had earlier described to aides that he kept having a stomach-churning feeling that some of the worrisome early stages of 20th-century fascism in Germany were replaying in 21st-century America. He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric about election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides. “The gospel of the Führer.”
After the events of Jan. 6, Leonnig and Rucker report, Milley had daily communications with Meadows and Pompeo. According to one senior official, “The general theme of these calls was, come hell or high water, there will be a peaceful transfer of power on January twentieth … We’ve got an aircraft, our landing gear is stuck, we’ve got one engine, and we’re out of fuel. We’ve got to land this bad boy.”
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This has caused many commentators who were warning about a coup in January to blast those who were pooh-poohing the notion at the time. Milley’s statements and actions have also caused many an observer on recent civil-military relations to curl up in a fetal position and ponder the fragile state of the republic:
The tricky thing about this is that the standard worries in civil-military relations tend to be twofold: First, that a hawkish military will drag a reluctant civilian leadership into a conflict, and second, that generals will refuse to comply with an elected civilian’s lawful orders.
The situation in late 2020 and early 2021 does not really fit either of those scenarios. Rather, the military was concerned that the lawfully elected president would attempt to give unlawful orders designed to preserve his power. This put the generals in a very dicey position. There is a fine line between legally refusing to comply with an unlawful order and illegally refusing to comply with a lawful but destructive order.
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Given this situation, how did Milley do? Some, like Michael A. Cohen, are underwhelmed: “other than pledging to do his duty — and not carry out an illegal order — it’s not clear what, if anything, he did to stop Trump.” Cohen castigates Milley for calling into question Trump’s last-minute civilian DoD appointments.
The hard-working staff is a bit more charitable toward Milley’s actions in the fall of 2020. For one thing, he took pains to state clearly before the election, “There’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election. Zero. There is no role there.” This was in response to Trump stating repeatedly before November that he would not accept the election results if he was not declared the winner. Milley’s declaration was a good marker to lay down.
Similarly, giving Meadows static about the last-minute DoD civilian appointments seems perfectly fine in the circumstances. What Trump was doing at that point in his term was at best unorthodox and at worst dangerous. He was already scraping from the bottom of the barrel for sycophantic staffers, and the interim civilian leadership’s performance on Jan. 6 validated Milley’s fears of incompetence. Warning Meadows about the caliber of the appointments seems like another useful marker.
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All of this is colored by Milley’s behavior last summer, when he stupidly walked with Trump in his combat fatigues to Lafayette Square after federal forces violently cleared that space of protesters. The mistake he made was real. Milley’s subsequent apology for that error, however, was forthright and helped to shore up the norm of the military noninterference in domestic politics.
With perfect hindsight, the thing Milley could have done better in January was to push the civilian leadership at DoD to have a contingency plan in place if the Jan. 6 protests got violent. That might have made that day less scarring.
In the end, however, the concerns about the degradation in U.S. civil-military relations are not about the military, not really. The concerns are about the fact that a radically unfit, immature commander in chief was elected in the first place.
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