Has our “constitutional” military declared its independence?
If Biden is to be believed, the same military that went rogue under Trump has essentially disregarded Biden’s orders too.
Under our Constitution, the American military is under the command of the President of the United States. Thus, Article II, sec. 2, states:
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States….
However, our Pentagon went rogue under Trump. We know that because General Mark “White Rage” Milley freely admitted to it:
In the days following the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley held a top-secret meeting with senior military officials to take action against then Commander-in-chief Donald Trump, blocking the president from potentially launching nuclear weapons and ordering staff to ignore all orders except Milley’s, a new book entitled “Peril” by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa revealed, as reported by CNN on Tuesday.
[snip]
Milley was reportedly concerned the president could “go rogue.”
In the secret meeting, Milley ordered the officials in charge of the National Military Command Center not to take orders from anyone except him.
“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley ordered, according to the book. The general then moved around the room and received verbal confirmation from each person.
“Got it?” Milley asked, the book said. The authors wrote that Milley considered the order “an oath.”
According to the book, Milley engaged in two back-channel phone calls with China’s top general and promised he would warn the nation of an attack.
“General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley said. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.”
“General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years,” Milley added. “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
Well, that was to be expected because we know that the Pentagon despised Trump — and that was despite Trump having a much greater respect for the military than his immediate predecessor did. (You probably remember how Obama accused the military of casually murdering civilians.)
As with so many things, it was a matter of class in America: The college-educated class (the Pentagon people) loathed Trump; the rank and file loved him. (Regarding the latter point, there used to be a video contrasting the troops’ different responses to the two presidents, but I can no longer find it.)
But what if wasn’t just during the Trump administration that the Pentagon decided to ignore its constitutional obligations to be subordinate to the civilian commander-in-chief? What if the military has decided to declare its independence? I ask because of Biden’s most recent claim about the Chinese balloon:
President Joe Biden said shortly after the U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon that he gave the order to shoot it down on Wednesday but that military officials waited until Saturday to do so.
“I ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible,” Biden told reporters on Saturday. “They decided without doing any damage to people on the ground they decided that the best time to do that was when it got over water outside within a 12 mile limit.”
“They successfully took it down and I want to compliment our aviators who did it and we’ll have more to report on a little later.”
Biden added, “I told them to shoot it down on Wednesday. They said to me let’s wait for the safest place to do it.”
Yeah, I get it that Biden is claiming that the military’s advice was to wait until a safer time, but do you really believe it? If the spy balloon was so dangerous that Biden ordered on Wednesday that it should be shot down, presumably because it was an imminent threat to American security, the Pentagon basically ignored that order in lieu of shooting this threat down whenever.
And no, I don’t believe the military’s concern about civilian populations. I’ve traversed America several times, and the one thing I can attest to is the fact that, when you get away from the coast, large parts of it are mostly deserted. It would have been a relatively simple thing to clear a region under the balloon and then to bring the balloon down with minimal risk to life and limb. All the while, this minimal risk had to be balanced against this real concern that the Chinese balloon was feeling out American defenses, possibly delivering chemical or biological weapons, or prepping for an EMP attack.
The whole thing is wrong from ig to zack, and a significant part of that wrongness is the serious possibility of a rogue military chain of command.
Image: YouTube screen grab.
