It’s always dangerous when unelected military leaders like Milley decide they should secretly undermine and subvert the policies of the elected President. There’s a constitutional process to do it if necessary. This, by contrast, is pure Deep State abuse:https://t.co/CE9H3kMRql
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 14, 2021
Except that’s not at all what happened.
What chairman Milley was trying to do, as we show in the book, was contain a national security emergency.”
He added: “While these calls with general Li were held on a top-secret back channel, they were not secret. This is not someone working in isolation. He was reading people in in the national security community.”
Esper is a civilian. He (apparently) told Milley to reach out to the Chinese. If Esper told Milley not to do that and Milley did it anyway, that would be a breach of civilian control of the military. that’s not what happened.
confusing the idea of “civilian control of the military” with “Presidential control of the military” - i.e., that orders to the military must originate from the President and not his Defense Secretary.
that’s never how it worked before and not how it works today.