Don't Believe Everything You Read & Hear, Part 3: Gen. Milley & The Blob
Did Gen. Milley "go rogue"? Is Bob Woodward full of it? Is The Blob a real thing?
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Bob Woodworth’s Casual Relationship with Context
Every time Bob Woodward comes out with his latest anonymous-sourced blockbuster political exposé, I cringe. Why?
Watergate figure Alexander Butterfield aptly captured Woodward in a nutshell: “I thought, he’s sort of the master of being vague. He can be vague more smoothly than anyone!”
A book reviewer skewered Woodward’s The Last of the President’s Men as “fatally flawed by the classic Woodward sins of omission and avoidance.”
Legendary Washington Post editor and Woodward’s boss, Ben Bradlee, confessed to an interviewer about some of Woodward’s reporting, “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that isn’t quite straight.”
Ever notice how the famed Watergate reporter bobs and weaves in his interviews as he speaks in meticulously engineered, deliberately delivered pronouncements about his unnamed sources who allegedly were close to the president, event, plot, etc? While I, along with everybody else, gobble up every stunning new revelation, I nonetheless become exasperated with Woodward’s evasiveness and obfuscations in both his writing and his interviews. Could it be this demigod reporter maybe, just maybe, plays a wee bit fast and loose with the full factual picture in order to lend his claims that much more oomph? Essentially free from the rigorous editorial oversight that we mere proletarian scribes must operate under as a matter of course? In fairness, Woodward habitually goes out of his way to describe how his key source claims are cross-checked with multiple other sources for their veracity.
My more nuanced criticism is that Woodward has a longstanding habit of presenting things out of full context. And here’s where we get to his latest soon-to-be-released blockbuster, co-written with Robert Costa, Peril. He has lit medialand and the political landscape afire with his claim, first reported by CNN:
Milley worried that Trump could ‘go rogue,’ the authors write.
“You never know what a president’s trigger point is,” Milley told his senior staff, according to the book.
In response, Milley took extraordinary action, and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.
“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley told the officers, according to the book. He then went around the room, looked each officer in the eye, and asked them to verbally confirm they understood.
“Got it?” Milley asked, according to the book.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans wasted no time calling for Milley’s dismissal:
“A group of 27 House Republicans are calling on the U.S. Department of Defense to investigate Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley,” reported Newsweek.
In a letter to President Biden, Senator Marco Rubio charged that the general worked to “actively undermine the sitting Commander in Chief.” He further accused Milley of being involved in “the essence of a military coup.”
And conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote, “If Milley felt Trump was no longer capable of exercising his authority as commander in chief, then he had a duty to raise Trump’s removal — not to unilaterally assume the powers of commander in chief.”
Of course, what these partisans on the right and legal hair-splitters blithely ignore is that wigged-out Madhatter Donald Trump shouldn’t have ever been allowed within twenty-six light years of the nuclear button - and most aren’t so dumb as not to know this. As Group Captain Lionel Mandrake to Trump’s Jack D. Ripper, Gen. Milley may have saved the world from totaler krieg.
So much bullshit has been flung about Gen. Milley in response to the Woodward/Costa book that no wonder the average citizen is easily confused and doesn’t know what to think. And the flinging isn’t confined to the right. From the Daily Beast: “Top General Hatched Secret Plan in Case Trump Went ‘Rogue’ With Nukes, Book Says.”
Of course, those on the left and most of the SMSM (sane mainstream media) defend Milley.
Among my top secret clearances when I worked in government was the vaunted “Q” clearance - for those who work on nuclear warfare matters. That’s all I can say about that if I want to avoid prison time. Suffice it to say, I have perspectives the vast majority of feds do not. I also know fairly well how decision-making is made, and not made, in government.
Here’s the official defense of Milley’s actions:
JCS spokesman Col. Dave Butler noted that Gen. Milley regularly “communicates with chiefs of defense around the world, including China and Russia.”
“These conversations remain vital to improving mutual understanding of U.S. national security interests, reducing tensions, providing clarity and avoiding unintended consequences or conflict,” he added.
Moreover, he said, “All calls from the Chairman to his counterparts, including those reported, are staffed, coordinated and communicated with the Department of Defense and the interagency.”
Finally, according to the spokesman, “the meeting regarding nuclear weapons protocols was to remind uniformed leaders in the Pentagon of the long-established and robust procedures in light of media reporting on the subject.”
Fox News, of all media players, did some digging:
Fox News has learned there were about 15 people present for the phone calls, which were video teleconference calls. Sources familiar told Fox News that there were multiple notetakers present, and said the calls were both conducted with full knowledge of then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper and then-Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller.
According to the official, there was full civilian oversight of the phone calls, including a representative of the State Department, and Milley’s political adviser. Notes of the calls were taken and a summary note was sent to the Defense secretary and the intelligence community, the official said.
“This was not done like some sort of conspiratorial thing,” another participant who overheard the conversation told Fox News.
A rare admission from me - Fox News has got it right! They’re actually reporting the truth for a change.
Here’s a little unclassified factoid about how government works: Nobody wings it, especially on highly sensitive matters. A top official plans to talk with his counterpart of another nation? In this case, JCS involves SECDEF and the relevant DoD policy shops. The White House/NSC is consulted. The State Department is informed and asked for any input. Talking points, cleared within the bureaucracy, are drawn up and signed off. At the appointed time, any number of staffers will monitor the conversation in real time, taking meticulous notes which are then rendered into finished summaries which, in turn, are disseminated on a “need to know” basis. The Chinese, in this case, follow pretty much the same procedures.
Why all the fuss?
This is The Government talking. Not Gen. Milley (or whoever). The government speaks with one voice. Surprises and winging it - not welcome. A record is kept and distributed to ensure future decision-making is not done in a vacuum or in a disjointed manner. Take my word for it, Mark Milley didn’t just walk into the office one morning and, all hot and bothered over the unpredictable antics of the nutcase-in-chief, put down his coffee and order an aide, “Goddammit. Get me Gen. Li on the phone. I gotta talk to him.” It’s simply not done that way - with the exception of the Trump White House, as when his toadies tried to wall off in a super-secret database his communications corruptly trying to strong-arm the Ukrainian president. LTC Vindman enlightened us all on this in the first impeachment hearings.
This is not to say that short-cuts were not taken, or even that Milley’s actions were not a sort of Schlesinger maneuver. But Milley is a seasoned and cautious bureaucratic player. And it’s a very gray area. One day the transcripts and memos will be declassified and we should know the full picture.
Gen. Milley has said he will answer any and all questions during a scheduled congressional hearing at the end of this month.
Circling back to ex-Naval officer Bob Woodward, isn’t it noteworthy that he somehow missed all this context? Which leads one to wonder if in doing so, the motive was rooted in book sales over the straight (nuanced) truth.
Me and “The Blob”
Further on the matter of government accountability, suddenly there’s been a lot of debate about The Blob - no, not the 1958 B-movie starring a young Steve McQueen. Rather, what The Former Guy has popularized as the Deep State - an amorphous cabal of scheming like-thinking eggheads who necromance foreign policy behind the closed doors of academe, think tanks and national security agencies. The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, POLITICO and the American Conservative have all done pieces on this recently in reaction to the disastrous Afghanistan denouement. The inevitable finger-pointing is directed at The Blob.
Obama NSC official Ben Rhodes coined the term after finding himself, at the ripe old age of 32, frustrated at being called on questionable policies by a collective whose median education and professional experience in national security affairs is about 10,000 times his. He directed the term at the foreign policy establishment who, he claimed, hold an “unrealistic set of assumptions about what America could do in the world.”
On Afghanistan, peanut gallery critics are blaming our failed two-decade intervention on The Blob.
“I’ve got to say hats off to the Blob on this whole Afghanistan thing,” Matthew Yglesias tweeted. “They couldn’t achieve any of their stated war aims, but they’ve proven they can absolutely wreck you politically.”
Christened the “Pope of the Blob,” Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haas dismissed it as “a lazy term. It’s a pejorative and imprecise way to dismiss those who disagree with you, and it doesn’t advance the foreign policy conversation.”
Full disclosure: I am pretty blobby myself. Degrees in international relations from George Washington University and Columbia, traditionally feeder schools for the State Department and other national security agencies. And another degree from the Naval War College. Add to this a quarter century of public servitude to State and DoD.
But here’s the thing. At GWU and Columbia, they exposed us to so much revisionist as well as conventional thinking, punctuated by constant classroom and public debate on the issues that it sometimes made our heads spin. Groupthink? Absolutely not. Once inside the Deep State, debate was not the name of the game - at least not at the working level. You received policy direction from on high and worked your darndest to implement it.
As much as they might delude themselves otherwise, anyone of the rank assistant secretary and below basically implements policy without themselves providing major input - tweaks yes. National security policy is made by the president and his team - loyal friends, ex-campaign workers, imported think tankers and academics and a scattering of career bureaucrats. Policy ideas and orientation are largely formulated pre-presidency in policy articles in major journals like Foreign Affairs, books, media appearances, endowed university chairs - then distilled into a candidate’s campaign platform to be further fleshed out once in office. Thereafter major decisions are made at the cabinet and sub-cabinet levels as laid out in the National Security Act of 1947.
A cabal in the form of a gelatinous Blob? No. Groupthink by deep-staters? Again, negative. A loose Establishment of the smartest brains in America? Absolutely yes. Always right? Absolutely no.
Did The Blob therefore “lose Afghanistan”? To quote (via the Bard) that great military man and politician Gaius Cassius Longinus, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.
Another well reasoned comment on the obsurdities of the day. Bravo!