Tag Archive for: Mark Milley

‘White Rage’: General Mark Milley Leaves Behind A Checkered Legacy

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  • Gen. Mark Milley retired Friday after serving four years as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under both presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
  • Some view Milley as an upstanding adviser and protector of democracy, but many conservative leaders deride him as a political actor too willing to make his views on controversial progressive policies known.
  • “It’s his nature to pitch into a fight if he sees one going on,” retired Lt. Col. Thomas Spoehr, who served with Milley in the Pentagon, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gen. Mark Milley retired Friday after serving four years as the top military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense. He is perhaps the most well-known individual to ever serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a development that seems likely to color his legacy for years to come.

Milley’s term was punctuated with crises: the Afghanistan withdrawal, nuclear tensions with Iran and North Korea, defense of Taiwan and Ukraine against would-be conquerors, and domestic turmoil. While some venerate Milley as an American hero who shepherded democracy through a chaotic administration turnover, many conservatives deride him as a political actor who obediently went along with the Biden administration’s progressive agenda.

“General Milley destroyed the U.S military’s 250-year tradition of staying above partisan politics. That’s his legacy,” Republican Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, a Navy reserve veteran who serves on the Armed Services Committee and leads the House Anti-Woke Caucus, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Milley was a brash, combative former special operations officer with strong opinions informed by his four decades of experience in the Army and his deep affinity for history and literature, retired Lt. Col. Thomas Spoehr, who served with Milley in the Pentagon, told the DCNF.

Former President Donald Trump, who appointed Milley as chairman, is thought to have appreciated Milley’s machismo and appearance as the general’s general.

“​​He kind of really seemed to have a warrior’s mentality. He was clearly an officer who wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. Or so it seemed,” retired Maj. Chase Spears, a former Army public affairs officer, told the DCNF.

The DCNF spoke to multiple current and former officials who served alongside Milley as well as several military experts to form a fuller picture of the former chairman’s tenure. Milley, through a spokesperson, did not respond to questions.

As chairman, Milley’s job was to advise the president and the secretary of defense on national-security threats and operations abroad and maintain military communication channels with friends and adversaries.

“Sometimes, that advice would be misinterpreted or purposely used by others for political purposes despite trying very hard to avoid politics,” Col. Dave Butler, Milley’s spokesman, told the DCNF.

Yet, Milley has shown willingness to delve into political fights and mud sling when it suits him, experts told the DCNF. In his farewell speech, Milley said the military does not answer to a “wannabe dictator,” which many interpreted as a jab at former President Trump.

In a June 2021 House Armed Services Committee hearing, Milley gave a full-throated defense of the Biden administration’s budget request for funding to purge “domestic extremists” from its ranks.

“There is no room in uniform for anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the values of the United States of America,” Milley said during the hearing.

Milley himself seemed to be aware of how he was being perceived. Speaking in November 2021 before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Milley lamented that he had “become a lightning rod for the politicization of the military,” targeted by both Republicans and Democrats, the transcript shows.

“It’s his nature to pitch into a fight if he sees one going on,” Spoehr told the DCNF.

Some congressional Democrats criticized Milley for defending the strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force in January 2020, according to CNN.

Then, Milley was blasted by Republicans when he apologized for having joined Trump in a march across Lafayette Square after the square had been cleared of people protesting the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Milley said he did not mean to give the impression the military had taken sides in a political fight.

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, called Milley’s apology video “self-serving.”

The apology proved the first major incident in a trend lasting for the next four years of his career through two politically opposed administrations. Milley would often project disdain for interfering in politics, but then make exceptions in crisis situations or to defend core military values.

Milley “tried his hardest to actively stay out of politics,” but if extraordinary events demanded he step in, “so be it,” an unnamed official told CNN in July 2021.

Perhaps Milley’s most politically perilous moment came after he admitted holding two calls with his Chinese counterpart in October 2020 and January 2021 during the tumultuous administration handover. Lawmakers hammered Milley for his actions months later during a September 2021 hearing. Milley defended his actions as apolitical and in the interest of national security.

“I firmly believe in civilian control of the military as a bedrock principle essential to the health of this republic, and I am committed to ensuring the military stays clear of domestic politics,” he told Congress.

This was a refrain he would reiterate time and time again.

“He’s been saying those things for as long as I’ve known him. And I do think he’s true to those words,” said Spoehr.

‘A Tight Rope To Walk’

Others have pointed to Milley’s willingness to defend social policies in the military and to comment on broader trends in society as undermining the very norm of the apolitical military he claims to embrace.

Milley showed himself “willing to wade into topics that many including myself would argue are beyond the scope of the Joint Chiefs,” said Spears, the former Army public affairs officer.

In the days following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, Milley took it upon himself to “land the plane” as he and other leading national security officials worried the former president was displaying increasingly erratic behavior, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their book “Peril.”

Woodward and Costa portray Milley’s acts — including convening a “secret” meeting of senior military officials involved in nuclear command and control on Jan. 8 to review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons — as orchestrating the peaceful transfer of power and restraining a rogue president from triggering an international crisis.

In November 2021, Milley told House lawmakers about a January 8 phone call he had with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who he described as “quite animated.” During this call, Milley sought to “assure her” of the security of the nation’s nuclear weapons systems.

“It’s clearly recognized that the President and only the President can authorize the launch,” Milley said, “so he, alone, can authorize the launch, but he doesn’t launch alone.”

“Best practice suggests that ‘regular order is your friend,’” Peter Feaver, an expert in civil-military relations who previously taught Milley, told the DCNF. But the military has no role in the democratic transfer of power from one administration to the next, Feaver said.

Many in the media framed Milley’s actions in the latter days of the Trump administration as heroic measures taken to safeguard democracy. Milley “saved the constitution” from Trump, The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in a glowing Nov. 2023 profile.

But, the savior of American democracy is not how Milley wants to be remembered.

“He would prefer not to be portrayed in that light,” a senior military official close to Milley told the DCNF.

While the chairman does not have command authority, he does serve at the top of the “chain of communication.” Some experts have argued this can give the chairman undue influence on policymaking.

“There’s a tightrope to walk here,” Bret Devereaux, a military historian who teaches at North Carolina State University, told the DCNF. “He’s expected to speak for the military as an institution and while, as an institution, the military does not have politics, it does have policies. In his capacity as an advisor, he advocates for certain policies.”

Milley repeatedly considered resigning during the Trump administration, according to reports. He felt Trump was “doing great and irreparable harm” to America and “ruining the international order,” according to a copy of the resignation letter included in Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s “The Divider.” But resigning in protest of a legal policy with which he disagreed would be the “consummate political act,” Milley said, and he never submitted the letter.

“Milley concluded that difficult times do not release him from a duty to uphold those norms and traditions,” said Devereaux. “Milley was put in a situation where those two parts of the oath might conflict. He might have to say that the president himself was the constitutional danger.”

In the end, Milley testified to Congress that he never received an illegal order. Milley also admitted to speaking with reporters, including Woodward, who were working on books about the Trump administration. The former joint chief also said he spoke to Leonning and Rucker, for their book, and to Michael Bender, for his.

Milley’s expansive media presence “comes with some clear downsides since it means he becomes part of many stories that he probably could have stayed out of, or at least minimized,” Feaver explained.

“I don’t think that served him well. I don’t think it served the country well, for him to be talking to those guys,” Spoehr added.

‘White Rage’

Milley may also not have been served well by his outspoken defense of “woke” Biden administration defense policies and his willingness to wade into the culture wars.

“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white, and I want to understand it,” Milley said, deflecting criticism of Critical Race Theory being taught at West Point, during the June 2021 hearing. “What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out.”

Republicans in Congress who see CRT as antithetical to American values derided Milley.

“That was a partisan political question, framed in a particularly partisan way, and so he could have and should have deferred to the political figure on his side of the hearing table,” Feaver said.

In a CNN interview on Sept. 17, just weeks before his retirement, Milley pushed back against assertions the military had gone “woke.”

“The military is a lot of things, but woke, it’s not,” Milley said. “So I take exception to that. I think that people say those things for reasons that are their own reasons, but it’s not true. It’s not accurate. It’s not a broad-brush description of the U.S. military as it exists today.”

When Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville held up military promotions in opposition to a new Pentagon policy facilitating abortion access, Milley elaborated on the detrimental impact it could have on military readiness. But he declined to comment on the policy itself.

“I don’t want to enter into the whole discussion of abortion and the culture war. I’m staying out of all that,” he told the Washington Post.

The accusation of wokeness “certainly wasn’t something that we expected to have to deal with,” Butler, Milley’s spokesman, told the DCNF. “We did not expect that to be a new issue brought up by Congress or anybody else.”

Nor does the chairman have time to spend focusing or advising on internal personnel policies when he has global crises to attend to, Butler said. Butler estimated Milley spent 13 hours each day on external threats and operations, and maybe one on other issues.

‘Some Very Difficult Dives’

Just two months after the “white rage” comment, Milley would be dealing with a catastrophe abroad.

Afghanistan collapsed amid the U.S. military withdrawal much faster than administration analysts expected. Both Trump and Biden sought to wipe out the military’s footprint in Afghanistan and end the war. But they planned for the Afghan army to resist the Taliban. It didn’t.

At the September 2021 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Milley echoed Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina in calling the Afghanistan evacuation “a logistical success, but a strategic failure.”

Milley did not explicitly describe conversations with the presidents, but he made it easy to deduce both Biden and Trump had resisted his “best military advice” to maintain a contingent of American troops in Afghanistan. Military leaders’ advice to Biden in the lead-up to the withdrawal had not changed from the previous fall, and that his opinion was to keep 2,500 troops in country. He had also pushed back on a signed order directing a full withdrawal by January, according to his testimony. Trump rescinded the order.

“Based on my advice and the advice of the commanders, then-Secretary of Defense Esper submitted a memorandum on 9 November, recommending to maintain U.S. forces at a level between about 2,500 and 4,500 in Afghanistan until conditions were met for further reductions,” Milley said in his testimony.

A national security official close to the situation told the DCNF that Milley repeatedly warned Biden “of the risks of a poorly-timed withdrawal by recounting details from the chaotic 1975 Saigon evacuation.” in the hours before the president announced his decision in April 2021.

Likewise, Milley saw Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine coming, The New York Times reported.  He is blunt and level-headed in his assessment of Russia’s capabilities and Ukraine’s challenges — and he has often proven correct, according to Spoehr.

“He’s been a very good chairman,” Spoehr told the DCNF.

As Milley closed out his career, high-level military communication between the U.S. and China, America’s greatest competitor, had been stalled for more than a year. The war between Russia and Ukraine shows no signs of abating. And his successor, Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, faces the same culture war pressures.

Military leaders should be judged like Olympic divers, “taking into account the difficulty of the dive they have to do,” Feaver told DCNF. “Circumstances have conspired to force General Milley to do some very difficult dives. Even though he has kicked up some splash that does not necessarily mean he has under-performed.”

AUTHOR

MICAELA BURROW

Investigative reporter, defense.

RELATED ARTICLE: China Is On The Fast Track To Wage War Against Taiwan — And The US, Experts Say

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The Insurrection of General Milley

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“Okay, I get it, it’s illegal, it’s wrong.”

“The riots over the summer, you know, I could make a case that those riots were riots organic to an aggrieved community that perceived that they had various injustices throughout their life,” General Mark A Milley told the J6 Committee. “It was sheer, unmitigated anger that expressed itself in the form of mass violence and rioting. And, okay, I get it, it’s illegal, it’s wrong.”

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had previously justified the study of “white rage”, went on to defend the riots and the double standard at the heart of the J6 Committee.

“I don’t think the intent of those riots was to overturn the United States Government and to destroy the Constitution of the United States of America,” he argued.

The mobs assaulting police officers, burning flags, attacking federal buildings in sieges, like the one in Portland, reminiscent of Fort Sumter, and calling for the destruction of America under the guidance of an organization of “trained Marxists” demonstrated that it was an insurrection.

And Gen. Milley’s testimony showed that he sympathized with the insurrectionists.

An account had described Milley pointing to a bust of Lincoln during the Black Lives Matter riots and telling Trump, “That guy had an insurrection. What we have, Mr. President, is a protest.”

The J6 testimony provided an opportunity to dig into Milley’s definition of an insurrection.

On the one hand, Gen. Milley conceded that, “All the President has to do is walk outside the White House and yell three times, you know, ‘Insurrectionists, disperse.’ And he just has to yell it, right? And then he can do it, according to the law of 1807 or whatever year it was, right?”

But Gen. Milley along with other woke brass did everything possible to dissuade Trump from doing so. Using a report assembled by his subordinates, he argued that an insurrection should have “significant national security implications”, which he claims that massive nationwide riots that included attacks on federal buildings and the White House somehow did not.

There, as so often, Gen. Milley contradicted himself, mentioning that, “I don’t want to go into anything classified, but there were other countries exploiting some of this stuff.”

A mass insurrection by Marxists, black nationalist secessionists and other domestic terror groups exploited by enemy nations is the definition of a national security threat. Gen. Milley knows this because Russian plans during the Cold War had included such scenarios.

Using his report, Gen. Milley contended that, “fifteen hundred people rioting in three or four cities of America at a moment in time” did not qualify as an insurrection, but somehow J6 did.

Gen. Milley’s definition of an insurrection involves scope and scale, but there’s no metric under which the Black Lives Matter riots at their peak were smaller in scope than J6.

And yet, Milley cheerfully told the J6 Committee that he began taking a step that he doesn’t appear to have taken during the BLM riots, that “immediately following the 6th, I knew the significance, and I asked my staff, freeze all your records, collate them, get them collected up.”

Why did records involving a riot need to be classified?

“The document — I classified the document at the beginning of this process by telling my staff to gather up all the documents, freeze-frame everything, notes, everything and, you know, classify it. And we actually classified it at a pretty high level, and we put it on JWICS, the top secret stuff. It’s not that the substance is classified. It was I wanted to make sure that this stuff was only going to go people who appropriately needed to see it, like yourselves,” Gen. Milley admitted.

On his own initiative, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had classified documents involving a political incident, not because of any innate need, but to make sure that only the politically correct would gain access to them.

What’s in those documents? Whatever is there is meant ‘for leftist eyes only’.

Throughout his testimony, Gen. Milley insisted that he was only a public servant.

“I cannot issue orders in my name. That’s illegal,” he told the J6 Committee, describing his position as an.”advisory role, not in the chain of command, but, yes, in the chain of communication And that applies to everything, by the way. I know the Speaker Pelosi call and some other things came under a variety of criticism, but that’s all part of the role of the Chairman, is to be part of the chain of communication, not part of the chain of command.”

Gen. Milley was asked about the call involving Trump, during which Pelosi said, “‘You know he’s crazy, don’t you,’and she is reported to have said, General Milley, that you agreed with her.”

In his response, Gen. Milley appeared to confirm that he did so.

While the China phone call has been widely reported, Gen. Milley apparently placed “50 or 60” other phone calls to the Russians, the French, the Japanese and even the Islamic terror state of Qatar which is an ally of Iran and a key backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, to convey “stability”.

That is a very long chain of communication.

Gen. Milley claims to be deeply concerned about the Constitution and civilian control of the military, yet he repeatedly undermined the president, cabinet members and other civilian appointees for his own political agendas. Under the guise of being a good advisor, he initiated processes, like the political classification of materials, the double standard on riots or the phone calls that usurped the constitutional authority of the executive branch. And he’s still at it.

While belligerent in congressional hearings toward Republicans, Gen. Milley was pathetically eager to help along the J6 Committee right down to selectively classifying documents for political reasons. He decries the politicization of the military, yet everything he’s done has been to further shift the military leftward. His only resistance to leftist political pressure came when he tried to dissuade Rep. Schiff from proposals to recall and court martial General Flynn.

“I’ve become a lightning rod for the politicization of the military. And I am constantly strung out as an individual and also with Secretary Austin and others, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Sergeant Major of the Army. There’s a whole bunch of us that have been,” Gen. Milley complained.

Secretary of Defense Austin is a political appointee. Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday has been among the most aggressive in pushing racism and hatred for this country.

“Some of it is comments that I made in testimony about critical race theory and white rage,” Gen. Milley conceded. “Months of this constant drumbeat that is very damaging, in my view, personally, to the health of the Republic, because there is a deliberate attempt, in my view, to smear the general officer corps and the leaders of the military and to politicize the military… and I think that’s something that we need to avoid.”

Gen. Milley once again gets it backward. Military leaders like him have the obligation not to politicize the military. Civilians have a right to be critical of military leadership: especially when it stakes out political territory and takes sides.

Instead of acting to restore an apolitical military, Gen. Milley continues to help the Biden administration further politicize it while blaming retired officers and other critics of his actions.

“When 137 generals recently signed a letter that Secretary Austin and I are, you know, the worst thing since sliced bread and we’re lower than, you know, whale stuff and we should be court-martialed and treason and all that kind of stuff, all former retired flag officers — I will say, none of them were four-stars, though; we had a couple three-stars — that’s politicization,” he objected.

Retired officers are not politicizing the military when they express their opinions. Gen. Milley is politicizing the military when he states that, “if generals are out there writing editorials about politics, I think that’s an issue. If you want to be involved in politics as a general officer, retired general officer, or a retired commissioned officer, you ought to run for office.”

On Gen. Milley’s watch, active duty personnel have repeatedly been allowed to express leftist and even anti-American views, to clash with civilians on social media and berate journalists, even while any hint of criticism of the Biden administration has led to court martials.

Just compare the respective fates of Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller and Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley has used his position to, at worst, conduct and, at best, sign off on an insurrection that threatens the constitutional order he swore an oath to protect. The insurrection is cloaked in bureaucratic shenanigans like the selective classification, in providing misleading advice, using double standards and initiating treasonous actions.

Any serious investigation of the crimes committed in 2020 needs to begin with Gen. Milley.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

RELATED ARTICLE: New Israeli Government Bans PLO Flags, Transfers Terror Cash to Terror Victims

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘That’s When I Realized He Was A F*cking Idiot’: Trump Slams General Milley For Past Military Advice

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Former President Donald Trump called General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a “f*cking idiot” Saturday, according to the Post Millennial.

At an event at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, hosted by conservative organization Turning Point Action, a C4 affiliate of Turning Point USA, Trump made the remarks about Milley in reference to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the outlet notes.

Recalling a conversation he once had with Milley, Trump told the audience that Milley said it would be “cheaper” to leave military equipment in the Middle East rather than bring it back home.

“Sir, sir. It’s cheaper to leave the equipment than to bring it,” Trump began, describing Milley’s advice. Trump listed the millions of dollars of brand new equipment in the Middle East. “You think it’s cheaper to leave it there so they can have it than to fill it up with a half a tank of gas?” questioned Trump.

“That’s when I realized he was a f*cking idiot,” Trump said as the audience erupted in laughter.

Trump also slammed  Milley in September, calling him a “dumbo” while criticizing the infamous phone call Milley made to China warning them of U.S. military strikes. Trump claimed “lightweight” Milley’s decision to make the call was counterproductive and outrageous.

Trump also pushed back on Milley in July after he accused Trump of wanting to launch a coup after the November election. “So ridiculous! Sorry to inform you, but an Election is my form of ‘coup,’ and if I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley,” said Trump.

COLUMN BY

KAITLIN HOUSLER

Contributor.

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Milley: ‘Reconstituted Al Qaeda or ISIS with aspirations to attack the U.S. is a very real possibility’

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Sen. Blumenthal on Chaotic Afghanistan Withdrawal: No Answers, ‘No Clarity,’ ‘Nobody In Charge’

“Reconstituted”? Neither was ever destroyed. This statement indicates that Milley severely underestimates the jihad threat, and will almost certainly be as incompetent in dealing with it at home as he was in Afghanistan.

Milley: ‘A Reconstituted Al Qaeda or ISIS With Aspirations to Attack the United States Is a Very Real Possibility

by Susan Jones, CNS News, September 28, 2021:

(CNSNews.com) – “It is clear, it is obvious, the war in Afghanistan did not end on the terms we wanted, with the Taliban now in power in Kabul,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday….

Milley made the remarks in his opening statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee:

And we must remember that the Taliban was and remains a terrorist organization, and they still have not broken ties with Al Qaeda. I have no illusions who we are dealing with….

A reconstituted Al Qaeda or ISIS with aspirations to attack the United States is a very real possibility. And those conditions, to include activity in ungoverned spaces, could present themselves in the next 12 to 36 months.

That mission will be much harder now, but not impossible, and we will continue to protect the American people.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

White House Says Woke Generals Will NOT Be Asked to Resign in the Wake of the Kabul Bombings

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WATCH: Biden’s Benghazi.

My latest in PJ Media:

In any sane and patriotic American administration, the generals who enforced diversity and wokeness upon the U.S. military all summer instead of planning the details of a safe and orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan would have already been fired and be facing trials for dereliction of duty and worse. But this is the Biden administration, and that means that Milley and company will probably just have to find space on their already crowded uniforms for a few more ribbons and medals.

On Friday, Al Jazeera English correspondent Kimberly Halkett asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki:

“Does [the president] believe he was given bad advice? And will he ask for any resignations of his generals given the high cost of American and Afghan lives?”

Psaki’s response was unequivocal:

“No to both of those questions. I think that what the president looks at the events of yesterday as is a tragedy and one that was felt viscerally by the leaders of the military as well. Losing members of your men and women working for you from the service branches is devastating. It is a reflection on all of them and the people on the ground that they are continuing to implement this mission even under difficult and risky circumstances.”

So the White House is now on record: Old Joe Biden was not given bad advice. It was a terrific idea for the U.S. to abandon Bagram Air Base in the dark of night, without informing our Afghan allies. This made the commercial airport in Kabul the only option for getting Americans out of the country and set the stage for the bombings Thursday. Also setting the stage was the fact that Biden’s handlers decided to heed another bit of good advice, and didn’t prioritize getting Americans out, preferring instead to bring 30,000 Afghans to the U.S., vetted only by woke officials who fervently believe that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Terrific idea! Most of them will likely vote Democratic, and that’s what matters, right? The advice was all good!

And so no generals will be held responsible for the wrongheadedness and mismanagement that led to the murder of thirteen Americans on Thursday. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will not be asked to resign even though he admitted that he saw none of this coming, saying on August 18: “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

While Afghanistan Fell, Military and CIA Focused on Diversity

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Milley should have studied Muslim rage, instead of white rage.

“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whined at a congressional hearing.

He might have done better to understand Muslim rage.

A week after his testimony, the Taliban had not only doubled their number of districts, but possessed hundreds of captured U.S. armored vehicles, along with artillery and drones.

The Pentagon’s spokesman told reporters to ask the Afghan military about the gear.

In May, Milley had shrugged off questions about whether the Afghan military would survive. “We frankly don’t know yet. We have to wait and see how things develop over the summer.”

The Afghan military was beginning to fall apart while Milley was defending critical race theory.

A week earlier, the New York Times had described “demoralized” Afghan forces “abandoning checkpoints and bases en masse.” Two days after Milley’s disgraceful performance, the media reported that even the Taliban were “surprised” at how fast they were advancing.

At the beginning of July, the Biden administration abandoned Bagram Air Force Base. A week later the Taliban reclaimed the Panjwayi District where the Jihadist movement had gotten its start, seized the largest border crossing with Iran and the millions in revenue that came with it.

The United States Army responded by announcing that it was putting “a renewed emphasis on diversity, inclusion, and equity” or DEI. Had the brass ordered it as diversity, inclusion, and equity, the resulting acronym would have been more reflective of the real world.

While the Taliban were conquering Afghanistan’s rural provinces and then moving on to besieging its cities, the Army was wrestling with the “effective messaging that demonstrates why DEI efforts are critical to the success of the Army”. The new messaging would explain how the “talents of a diverse workforce” that included “language, race, color, disability, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity” were vital to whatever its mission was.

The Taliban, who were mostly Sunni Islamist Pashtun tribesmen, would spend the next two months demonstrating that diversity was not a strength, but a serious weakness.

While the Afghan government and its military were divided between diverse tribal factions, some of whom would flee to Iran and others to Uzbekistan (depending on whether they were Hazaras or Uzbeks) while the Pashtuns would surrender to their fellow Taliban tribesmen, the Taliban showed that unity would stomp diversity in the face and then dance on its grave.

Meanwhile the military brass in this country, as discussed in my recent pamphlet, Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country, was busy dividing our own military from within in pursuit of diversity, pitting black and white service members against each other in “critical conversations” and urging them to accuse their country and services of “systemic racism”.

As the Army brass were striving to establish the “Army as a global leader in DEI”, America’s enemies were plotting to become global leaders in land, power, and military victories.

By late July, Milley admitted that, “Strategic momentum appears to be sort of with the Taliban.”

By “sort of”, Milley meant that the Taliban had more than doubled their territory again and were marching on half of the provincial capitals.

Few reporters asked follow-up questions about the “sort of” because the leading story in D.C. was an anti-Trump book which flatteringly portrayed Milley as preventing a Trump “coup”.

No one, from the media to Milley, cared about the actual coup underway in Afghanistan.

“This department will be diverse. It will be inclusive,” Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin insisted. “I’m committed to that. This department is committed to that. The chairman’s committed to that.”

While Biden’s brass were pledging allegiance to diversity, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi welcomed Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar to the People’s Republic of China. Yi praised the Taliban as a “a pivotal military and political force” and mocked the United States.

The United States Army was busy “developing and implementing a strategic plan to advance DEI across the Total Force” as the Taliban seized the capitals of Helmand and Herat.

But the Navy faced its own crisis when Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. John Nowell Jr. warned at a DEI panel at the Sea Air Space conference that removing photos from promotion boards, a diversity measure from last year, actually undermined diversity because the brass no longer knew exactly how many minorities they were artificially promoting to fit diversity quotas.

While the Navy was grappling with this dark night of the soul, Staff Sgt. Nicholas Jones with the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion received the Navy Cross for his heroism during a six-hour battle with ISIS last year during which he rescued a French ally and risked his life to try and rescue two wounded comrades.

Jones “continued fighting until forcibly evacuated”.

Sadly, Jones is a straight white man from Kansas, and doesn’t really fit the DEI template, but in happier diversity defense news, the new Navy Secretary is an immigrant,  the first female sailor graduated from Naval Special Warfare training, and the Naval Institute published a confession by Lieutenant Commander David Elsenbeck that he was “unconsciously biased” and a “member of the dominant group in a society suffering from institutionalized and historically ingrained bias”.

Eisenbeck urged immediate “bias education”.

American POWs used to be starved, beaten, and had bamboo shoots driven under their fingernails without repeating the Marxist dogma they were being indoctrinated with. But hardly a week goes by now without another litany of Marxist confessions at military struggle sessions.

The Taliban, who actually are a member of the dominant group, began swallowing up a series of provincial capitals and marrying off young girls to their Jihadists. Back home, the Virginia Military Institute’s first-ever Chief Diversity Officer, Jamica Love, announced that she intended to pursue “institutional change” to transform the VMI’s culture. That’s what the Taliban were also up to.

While the Taliban advanced, CIA Director William Burns commented that increasing “diversity and inclusion” was among his top priorities. “We cannot be effective around the world if everybody looks like me,” he complained. To that end the CIA had unrolled an ad campaign featuring a Latina cisgender intersectional worker wearing a pink gender power clenched fist t-shirt. But the widely hated woke ad was only the tip of the agency’s diversity iceberg.

“At CIA, we don’t just leverage diversity, equity, and inclusion; we embrace and celebrate it,” an agency diversity report insisted. “This ethos must be woven in to our day-to-day tasks.”

How were diversity and equity woven into the task of monitoring the Taliban’s advance?

No one knows. But, like the military, the CIA went on holding “critical conversations” in which minority employees were encouraged to spout racism accusations.

Sonya Holt, Deputy Associate Director of CIA for Talent for Diversity and Inclusion, who had started out as a mere recruiter, assured that through DEI, “the Agency will be better prepared to address intelligence challenges and support its customers.”

While CIA officers were learning “how diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to mission success”, the agency began belatedly considering how to extract its assets from Afghanistan.

Recent intelligence reports “warned that Kabul could fall to the Taliban within years”.

But while the CIA tried to figure out how it would collect intelligence on the Taliban after the withdrawal, its employees did have the benefit of 15 affinity groups including ANGLE (Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Officers and Allies), DAC (Deaf Advisory Council) and SALAAM (South Asian Leadership and Advisory Membership.)

The CIA was also working to hire “neurodiverse” personnel, which it defined as people suffering from ADD, Dyslexia, or Tourette’s Syndrome. Or as the CIA ‘wokely’ put it “differences labeled with” these syndromes.

Key Afghan figures had warned that there was a conspiracy underway to hand Afghanistan to the Taliban. The drumroll surrenders of cities and much of the Afghan military appeared to confirm that backroom deals had been made. The obvious players able to pull off such deals were Pakistan’s ISI spy agency, the original backers of the Taliban, along with Turkey and Qatar.

Biden’s CIA director had turned to Pakistan in the hopes of allowing the agency to run a spy base in the country that had harbored Osama bin Laden. The Biden administration’s military and diplomatic response to the Taliban was being run out of Qatar. And it had handed security at  Kabul Airport over to Turkey before frantically taking it back when the Taliban took the city.

The CIA should have been on top of this, but it had better things to do with its time.

An unclassified intelligence community report did warn that the Taliban was “broadly consistent in its restrictive approach to women’s rights.”

The Taliban have now taken over Afghanistan, but it’s not all bad news on the military front

.”While Trump administration Pentagon nominees were overwhelmingly white and male, the Biden administration says 54% of its national security nominees ― to the Pentagon, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development ― are women, 40% are people of color, and at least 7% identify as LGBTQ,” the publication thrillingly reports.

Better yet, “recent weeks saw two LGBTQ women confirmed to top military positions. Air Force Undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones is the first out lesbian to serve as undersecretary of a military branch, while Shawn Skelly, the assistant secretary of defense for readiness, is the first out transgender person in the job and highest-ranking out transgender defense official in U.S. history.”

The State Department is doing its part by asking the Taliban to form an “inclusive and representative government.” And if they refuse to have as many neurodiverse black transgender defense officials as us, Biden won’t give them any more humvees, artillery, choppers, or drones.

The Taliban may have won Afghanistan, but we’re winning the diversity race. And since diversity is more important than winning wars or being a military superpower, we’re beating the Taliban. Not to mention Russia, China, and Iran in the field of transgender defense officials.

As I warned in the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s booklet, Disloyal: How the Military Brass is Betraying Our Country, wokeness is leading our military to disaster, disgrace, and defeat.

Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity, (sorry, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is at “the heart of everything” that Biden’s military does and our performance reflects the focus on DEI.

Afghanistan is a disaster, but we’ll have the most diverse military in the world or DEI trying.

COLUMN BY

DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.