General Mark Milley Tells Bankers: “Thank You for Your Service”

Retired Gen. Mark Milley gave a fawning speech on Monday to a sea of tailored suits at the American Bankers Association’s annual convention in New York. Since retiring from his role as the U.S. military’s top officer, Milley has found a new calling: sharing his “strategic” expertise with those who can make him money.

Milley’s remarks give the impression that the Pentagon’s top brass is just as much at a loss for how to handle our forever wars as anyone.

“As General Milley enjoys a well-deserved retirement, he’s actually busier than ever, and among his new responsibilities, he’s now a senior advisor to JP Morgan Chase,” said moderator Peter Cook,Former Pentagon Press Secretary turned Chief Communications Officer for the American Bankers Association.

In warming up the crowd, Cook said that he had served alongside Milley during the Obama administration. “I had the honor of working alongside General Milley when I was serving as the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and Pentagon Press Secretary under the late [Secretary of Defense] Ash Carter, and I saw firsthand General Milley’s leadership, his wise counsel.”

From a capped military salary of $204,000 a year, Milley’s income has skyrocketed. He’s joined the faculties of Georgetown and Princeton, and also entered the lucrative paid speaking circuit. For his speeches, Milley is represented by the Harry Walker Agency.

In March, I reported on a speech Milley gave to a gathering of 160 CEOs organized by global investment bank Moelis & Company. After my article was published, the bank promptly removed its review of Milley’s speech from the Harry Walker Agency’s website without explanation.

It wasn’t as if his talk contained proprietary or classified information. It was that he said something — anything — that might attract media attention and consequently lessen his value as an exclusive commodity.

This week, in teeing up his brilliant geopolitical insight, Milley wasted no time planting his lips on the audience’s asses:

“I know people thank all of us in uniform for our service, but I want to thank you and your service because the two key components of national security and the international scene is a strong military and a strong economy. … I know that the people in the crowd are controlling basically 24, 25 trillion of a 30 trillion economy. So, good on you for doing that.”

When Milley finally got to substance — in a week that saw Israel’s attack on Iran, the deployment of North Korean soldiers to Russia, and a mildly important presidential campaign reaching its crescendo — he had very little insight to share.

On the Iran strikes this week, Milley said that "the Israelis answered with some precision strikes the other day, limited, not devastating, and those strikes were meant to send a message to Iran that Israel can operate with impunity."

It’s interesting that Milley stressed Israel’s ability to operate over Iran’s skies rather than some significant “military” effect it had by bombing the country.

He did acknowledge a reality of the Middle East that the Pentagon has steadfastly been denying for the past year: He called it a “regional war.” This might seem obvious, but the Biden administration to this day insists that the war remains contained and that any fighting in, say, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the Red Sea, etc., either isn’t happening or is just some schoolyard scuffle.

As Milley put it:

“Right now, it is a regional conflict in the sense that you’ve got attacks coming from multiple directions. But it’s not a very large regional conflict, yet. It could go that way. It may not. We’ll see what happens.”

The statement itself reveals how off-the-cuff Milley’s remark probably was, tempering his use of the phrase regional war by suggesting that it could be even larger. Milley went on to say that U.S. troops in the region were in an “exposed position,” as if they wandered down a blind alley rather than that national security leaders like Milley put them there. Milley continued:

“You've got a considerable footprint in the Middle East that are all in various levels of exposure if it was a broad regional conflict. So our guys are at risk. Nobody should underestimate the levels of risk our people are at in the Middle East right now."

He went on to say that those forces were in places like Syria, Iraq, and even Israel, countries that the Pentagon routinely avoids mentioning, insisting mostly that U.S. forces are in “undisclosed locations.” And of course, the Biden administration insists that there are no boots on the ground and that no one is in combat, a false claim that I’ve written about.

Milley’s remarks can’t exactly be said to be calling a spade a spade, but he is going off script.

This post-retirement era is a tricky one. There’s no battalion of talking points’ writers and anything that is said — even if it is not intended — that can be interpreted as partisan or critical. Most retired generals thus prefer to say nothing.

On Ukraine, Milley also let slip his judgment with regard to the war, saying:

“the probability of Russia overrunning Ukraine is very, very low, militarily speaking. And the probability of Ukraine militarily compelling the withdrawal of a quarter million Russian troops is equally low."

Milley isn’t saying that Ukraine can’t win. As an Army officer, he is merely saying that Ukraine can’t “compel” Russia to retreat “militarily,” meaning purely with military force and mostly on the ground. As such, it is not a very profound statement, and Pentagon and White House leaders are prone to say that the U.S. supports Ukraine to the “end,” not to victory. This is their own way of not ever saying anything that would get them into trouble (or offering a promise that they might have to deliver on).

In providing his strategic view of the world, Milley gives an unusually candid overview of the U.S. military’s sprawling presence. He said that “now,” which means every day, the United States has some 180,000 military people in “about 100 … 120 countries around the world,” with “100 to 150 ships in the oceans” while American military aircraft are flying some “5,000 sorties … every day.”

That’s what your tax dollars pay for.

What is outrageous though, is that Milley says that those ships are “keeping the sea lanes safe for commerce” and that the troops are “maintaining some degree of stability.” That’s not how I see it, when commercial shipping is already avoiding the Red Sea and traveling around Africa to avoid the fighting. That’s not how I see it when the U.S. and its Pacific allies are practically at war every day in the South China Sea. Where is this “stability”?

His comments are a reminder of just how disconnected the ends and the means are. I don’t see anything in the real world that looks like stability or international cooperation or norms that have ensured freedom of the seas. It’s just war on top of war tucked into more war.

Milley dares not stick his neck out to make any predictions or even offer any suggestions for an end to all this. Just this week, Milley was quoted all over the press as calling Donald Trump a “fascist.” But he didn’t make a single direct reference to Trump in his talk. For the national security state, it doesn’t matter who the next president will be. Even if Trump declared a straight-out isolationist foreign policy on day one of an administration, I would bet a good amount of subscriber money that the Pentagon budget and national security spending would still be higher four years hence.

If you’re looking for any solutions, I guess the “wise counsel” package doesn’t cover that.

There was one part of the talk toward the end that stood out to me. Milley described talking to an old timer who parachuted into Normandy during World War II:

“I leaned over to him in my uniform and I said, Sergeant, tell me your great lessons of World War II. And I thought he'd tell me some tactical lessons about shoot straight or stay low or something like that. And he looked up with tears in his eyes and he said, General, never let it happen again … The same message my dad, you know, hit the beach at Iwo Jima, same message my mother had who served in the Navy in World War II. Great power wars are horrible, terrible things. And we need to make sure that we put a great effort at maintaining our superior economy, maintaining a superior military, maintaining mature, seasoned leaders that are thoughtful, deliberative, not impulsive, not going to get out there and get us wrapped around the axle with a great power war.”

It’s a Spielberg moment, this pretense of wisdom from the greatest generation, this desire on Milley’s part to associate himself with the good old days of win and lose, good and bad. But there it was, if only in code: Donald Trump is that “impulsive” person, the opposite of thoughtful and deliberative. I don’t know how many bankers he convinced in that aside, him offering a thoughtful and deliberate World War III.