Mark Milley


Mark Alexander Milley is a United States Army general and the 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Chairman, he is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces. He previously served as 39th Chief of Staff of the Army.

Early life and education

Born in Winchester, Massachusetts, Milley attended the Belmont Hill School. Milley graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics in 1980 after completing a 185-page long senior thesis titled "A Critical Analysis of Revolutionary Guerrilla Organization in Theory and Practice". Milley also holds a Master of Arts degree in international relations from Columbia University and another Master of Arts degree in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College. He is also a graduate of the MIT Center for International Studies Seminar XXI National Security Studies Program.

Military career

Although Milley earned his commission as an Armor officer through Princeton's Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps program in 1980, he has spent most of his career in Infantry assignments.
Milley has served in the 82nd Airborne Division, the 5th Special Forces Group, the 7th Infantry Division, the 2nd Infantry Division, the Joint Readiness Training Center, the 25th Infantry Division, Operations Staff of the Joint Staff, and as a Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. In November 2000, he participated in the 2nd Annual Army-Navy Ice Hockey Game in Honolulu, Hawaii, a charity event benefiting youth ice hockey players in the area.
General Milley has had multiple command and staff positions in eight divisions and Special Forces throughout the last 39 years to include command of the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry, 2nd Infantry Division; Milley commanded the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division from December 2003 to July 2005, served as Deputy Commanding General, 101st Airborne Division from July 2007 to April 2008, and was Commander of the 10th Mountain Division from November 2011 to December 2012. He then served as the Commanding General of III Corps, based at Fort Hood, Texas, from 2012 to 2014, and as the Commanding General of United States Army Forces Command, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from 2014 to 2015. He was appointed Chief of Staff of the United States Army on August 14, 2015.

Iraq War study

In 2018, Milley was involved in deciding whether the Army would publish a controversial study on the Iraq War. Milley reportedly decided he wanted to read the two-volume, 1,300-page, 500,000-word document before making a decision. Milley also directed that an external panel of scholars review the work. After the panel returned glowing reviews on the study, including one that described it as "the gold standard in official history", Milley continued to delay publication so he could review it further.
In September 2018, Secretary of the Army Mark Esper and other Army officials decided to distance themselves from the study by casting it "as an independent" work of the authors, instead of being described as a project by the Chief of Staff of the Army's Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group. When confronted by a journalist from The Wall Street Journal in October 2018, Milley reversed these decisions, ordering the study published officially and with a foreword from himself. He said the team who wrote the study "did a damn good job", the study itself was "a solid work", and that he aimed to publish the study by the holidays.
Within days of this revelation, two members of Congress who sit on the House Armed Services Committee sent a letter to Army leaders expressing their anger over the delay. In a press release accompanying the letter to Milley and Esper, Speier said, "This is simply the Army being unwilling to publicly air its mistakes. Our military, Congress, and the American people deserve nothing less than total transparency on the lessons the Army has identified so that we may use those lessons to avoid costly, and too often deadly, mistakes of the past." The two-volume study was published January 17, 2019.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

On December 8, 2018, President Donald Trump announced that he would nominate Milley to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, although the Secretary of Defense at that time James Mattis and the incumbent Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford favored Air Force Chief of Staff General David L. Goldfein to be the next Chairman of The Joint Chiefs of Staff. With Senate confirmation on July 25 he was sworn in on September 30, 2019.
After Milley was nominated, he headed a commission with other American military officials that were responsible for designing a report on the country's impending near-term impacts from climate change. The report, which was released in August 2019, stated that the country and its military would experience a total collapse within the next two decades due to collapses in the country's aging power grid and food supply, as well as the increased risk of infectious disease outbreaks globally. The report also mentions the likelihood of increasing water scarcity in developing countries, which would result in an increase of civil and military conflicts due to a failure in the global food system.
After attending 75th anniversary commemorations of the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and Luxembourg on December 16, 2019, Milley met with the Russian military chief of staff Valery Gerasimov in Bern, Switzerland, on December 18. This continued a series of regular meetings between the American and Russian military chiefs reestablished by Milley's predecessor Joseph Dunford in 2017 to ensure open communication and avoid conflict, especially in Syria. The face-to-face meeting was arranged with the assistance of the incoming Swiss Chief of the Armed Forces Korpskommandant Thomas Süssli.
On June 1, 2020, during protests in Washington, D.C., in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Milley joined National Guardsmen and various police forces assembling in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House. Minutes later, the troops and police used tear gas and other riot control tactics to disperse peaceable protestors so Trump could stage a photo-op at nearby St. John's Episcopal Church. About half an hour after that, Milley, in combat uniform, walked alongside the president from the White House to the church, drawing sharp criticism from former military officers and others. Milley subsequently refused to testify in front of Congress regarding the military's role in the response to the protests. He reportedly considered resigning over the incident, but chose instead to address it in a video recorded as his commencement address to the National Defense University. In that speech, streamed on June 11, Milley said he should not have been at the event because his presence created a perception of military involvement in domestic politics.

Operational deployments

Milley has deployed for various military operations, including: