The Pentagon Purge Has Begun

The New Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is pulling the security detail for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, suspending his security clearance, and ordering a review of his activities.

Milley was given a personal security detail after the January 2020 assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Iran said at the time that it would “take revenge” on anyone involved.

Hegseth has ordered the Pentagon’s acting inspector general to conduct a review to determine whether Milley should retain his rank as a retired four-star general because of his actions undermining the chain of command late in President Donald Trump’s first term.

As the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley was technically not part of that chain of command, but according to several books published during the Biden administration, he took a number of actions that undermined Trump’s authority and sabotaged decisions within the Defense Department.

According to the 2022 book “The Divider” by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, Milley considered resigning in June 2020, even drafting a letter to that effect, but decided to stay and “fight” Trump “from the inside.” Milley reportedly told his staff, “To hell with it! … I’m just going to fight it,” and “If they want to court-martial me or put me in jail, so be it. … But I’m going to fight it from the inside.”

Milley also told then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) that he would not support Trump’s efforts to “deploy the military machine to achieve domestic political goals.” (This was about using the military to suppress the BLM riots.) According to Gdlasser and Baker, Milley also convened the Joint Chiefs of Staff to “strengthen their resolve to resist any dangerous political schemes coming out of the White House.”

According to Bob Woodward’s book “War”, published shortly before the 2024 election, Milley said he believed Trump was “a fascist to the core” and that he was “concerned about his mental stability and control of nuclear weapons.”

An earlier book by Woodward and Costa, “Danger” (September 2021), revealed that Milley ordered senior officers not to carry out Trump’s orders unless he first approved them — despite the fact that he was technically not in the chain of command. The book also says that Milley called his Chinese counterpart twice, telling him that the US had no plans to strike China and that he would notify him in advance of any strike.

It should be noted that all of these books were written during the period when Washington was under a Democratic administration, and Milley’s actions were seen as a kind of heroic deed behind enemy lines. Now, his actions amount to full-blown treason.