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11 June 2020



Cold War Colonel

Perhaps many in the ranks cannot not comprehend that their personal feelings are secondary to the Constitution, and that all service members have taken an oath to support and defend that Constitution, putting it above their personal feelings?

On the other hand, it is refreshing to see that the mission of the Guard is to protect lives and property. National Guard Bureau a few days ago put out a bone-headed press release saying the Guard was there to protect the right to protest.



We have to remember that the CJCS is not in the chain of command which runs from POTUS to SECDEF to U&S commanders. He has no troops under command and is a kind of adviser to the president as head of the committee that is the JCS.



Looks to me like CJCS was eliciting support from those who control troops. I wonder what else he has been doing.

Barbara Ann

This was a test - and Trump has failed it. His authority is consequently shot and he doesn't appear to have the will to reassert it (the memo is over a week old now). The soft coup just got a whole lot harder. Are we looking at the leader of a military junta?


By this memo CJCS has thrown in his hand with the coup. He claims to have a higher loyalty than obeying the CinC. This is what all militaries do when they get involved in revolutions.

What this means in practice is that the military will no longer obey orders from the CinC that are not approved by Antifa and its chief supporter in Congress - Pelosi. That means that Trump is effectively a prisoner in the Whitehouse if Antifa decides to keep him there. To put that another way, you can forget the National Guard assisting the police.

Expect other officials to follow Milleys lead shortly unless Trump successfully fires Milley and reassert his authority. What follows next is renewed civil disobedience and breakdown of law and order including demanding Trump resign, in response to which the police can do nothing and the troops will do nothing.

Trump will then be urged to go “for the good of the country”. We have scripted such morality plays in foreign countries ourselves.

Col. Lang, can you archive your blog overseas?


Looks like a 7 Days in May sedition letter.






How do you do that?


It means that the JCS Chairman is as historically and culturally literate as a social justice warrior.

"Equality" does not appear in the US Constitution, nor does "equal" except in so far as it refers to procedural and organizational matters.

This idiot appears to have confused the Declaration of Independence with a governing document.

No wonder we don't win wars any more.

Barbara Ann

Good advice from walrus, suggest you ask a techie you trust like TTG Colonel.

One big question is where does the senior military stand - they must have read the intent in Milley's memo. If moves are made to further undermine/eject the POTUS could we see a faction try and come to his rescue? What will Deplorables do once they realize what is happening? Time to ditch normalcy bias in any case.


Walrus—As Pat has pointed out before, our Oath is to the Constitution, not the CINC

Vegetius—Is the 14th Amendment a procedural and organizational matter?


Time for General Milley to step down and for Trump to put a CSM in his place as at least they understand the line of command.
I learned what perfumed Princes are from this site as they sit on their rears and obfuscate with both arms and index fingers pointing in opposite directions.
Our forces would be better served with this type of move.



"breakdown of law and order" it is the leftists that are rioting and looting, not the people on on the right.
"demanding Trump resign" They'll have to demand 60 odd million of people who voted for him leave too, which isn't going to happen, though an actual hot civil war probably. If that happens a lot of rich folk ought to be purging the ranks of their bodyguards, but then I'm sure they screened them all with the social media PC police long ago.


Does anyone have a copy of his honors thesis at Princeton?

The tile is ""A Critical Analysis of Revolutionary Guerrilla Organization in Theory and Practice"," but which side is he on?

Finally, I can quote William Henry Chamberlin :-)

The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society. Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire.



From what I understand that 7 Days in May was based on a real life confrontation by the late President Kennedy early in his presidency with an army general with extremist views, and that President Kennedy feared such a cabal was possible. In 1961 OSD McNamara, had been compelled to fire U.S Army Gen. Edwin Walker from his command in Europe after it was revealed that Walker had been indoctrinating troops with literature from the John Birch Society, which viewed both JFK and his predecessor Eisenhower as closet communist agents. Also Gen. Walker showed up in Mississippi to rally white bigots to oppose James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi. Which set alarm bells off with then AG Robert Kennedy. President Kennedy had wanted the book to be made as a preemptive strike against his enemies. Kennedy wanted it to be made as a warning to the generals

Eric Newhill

It means we are a gloried banana republic and nothing like the veneer CJCS is trying to paint on the pig. Do we go quietly into that good night? We don't have to.


JFK had encouraged the making of Seven Days in May as a film. The film and book was as apt then as it is now.

These letters could suggest both Esper and Milley, and with them the military, are willing to disregard presidential orders, at least to within the confines of the constitution. Maybe this is their way of dissuading the president from doing anything too rash, as we saw with the killing of Soleimani. Perhaps they know all too well that having the military patrol the streets could result in the sort of clashes generally reserved in truly oppressive countries.

Being as that may, the president has a duty to bring Americans together.

A lot of blacks still feel like they're being segregated and held back. The reality is many live under a vicious cycle. The clouds of systemic racism have long dispersed, but the impact it had on the past lingers to this day.

When Trump campaigned for president, he didn't shy from telling his own constituents at a rally in North Carolina that more could be done to help blacks in America feel more accepted in American society. That wasn't to say North Carolinians are still by and large racists towards blacks, but there was work to be done. I think that's precisely the kind of message the president should once again embrace.

Trump talks about the police and the military dominating the streets, but he should be dominating the discourse. He needs to change the conversation from police brutality to instead making black Americans feel like Americans rather than Iraqis living under occupied police force. He has to bring the country together rather than fall for the bait and play into the divisions that have been exacerbated by dishonest people. He needs to lead and unite the country.

Terence Gore

"While the Biden campaign insists it doesn’t support efforts to defund the police, it may happily profit from Black Lives Matter (BLM) efforts, and is complicit in taking money from an organization partnered with those spearheading the dangerous policy that has already taken root in Minneapolis, New York, and Los Angeles.

After reaching the BLM homepage, which features a “Defund The Police” petition front and center, if a user chooses to donate, they’re rerouted to a site hosted by ActBlue and prompted with the message: “We appreciate your support of the movement and our ongoing fight to end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy forever.”



Walrus, TP,
Archiving overseas (or any relatively safe location) can be done in variety of ways. Best: adequately large NAS box stored and housed at a trusted friendly location accessible through a competent firewall allowing only authorized access over internet. Of course this goes for archiving as in saving for posterity - worthy enterprise I may add. This archive would not be a live blog accessible by many.


the 14th amendment provides:
“No State shall... deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.”

Balint Somkuti, PhD


after reading through this Coelhoesque compilation of trivialities, two things came to my mind.

1. Reginam occidere nolite timere bonum est si omnes consentiunt ego non contradico.

2. One top brass officer's quite long speech in the War Room (Gen. Ripper?) in Dr. Strangelove in a crisis situation stating absolutely nothing when asked about his opinion.

But one thing is clear. There has been enormous political pressure on him. And it is not a good sign.

I fear the this is nearing a Europe 1919 situation like the Spartacist uprising or the Hungarian Soviet Revolution. Both worth taking note, since they were enabled by the lack of sufficient military/police force.

Yeah, Right

My take is this: Milley expected Trump to order the troops to crack down on the protestors who were gathering in Washington, and he feared that it would escalate to a Tiananmen Square situation.

He couldn't refuse such an order because - as you pointed out - the JCS are not in the military chain of command i.e. any such order wouldn't go through him.

Hence the open letter to those in the military that ARE in the chain of command reminding them where their oath of loyalty lies.

As in: the CiC issues the orders, but his authority to do so derives from the Constitution - which means that orders that are unconstitutional must be refused.

So I disagree with the take from most of the people in this talkback: this is not a Seven Days In May situation. This is not "sedition".

What it probably amounts to is "insubordination", and if Milley had any integrity then he would have resigned his post as soon as he saw that his letter had been distributed.


Yeah, right

the problem with your analysis is that an order for troops to disperse a mob would be neither unconstitutional nor illegal however distasteful it might be. We have done it many times, 14 specifically since the end of the Indian Wars.
1893 - Overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii
1894 - Pullman Strike
1898 - Battle of Sugar Point
1899 - Colorado Labor Wars
1901 - Crazy Snake Rebellion
1914 - Ludlow Massacre
1915 - Plan of San Diego
1920 - West Virginia Coal Wars
1932 - Bonus Army
1943 - Detroit Race Riot
1967 - Detroit riot
1968 - King assassination riots
1973 - Wounded Knee incident
1992 - 1992 Los Angeles riots


This memo seems to demonstrate that the "values embedded in the Constitution" are listed, in alphabetical order, on some inside page of the Constitution. As if this is not a complicated subject. I think, THEY think, they are sending a message to Trump in case he loses a close race in Nov.

This also relates to Milley's public statement expressing his regret and error 'participating' in a "political event" by accompanying Trump to St John's Cathedral. I wonder what oracle, definitively, informed the good General that it was a "political event"? The General does have an ability for reducing complex subject matter to simple, power point, 'answers'.

Yeah, Right

I completely agree with you: an order for troops to disperse a mob is neither unconstitutional nor illegal.

I doubt that Milley would be all that concerned if Trump issued such an order, so long as he was certain that it was that order that was carried out.

But I suspect he feared that such an order would (or could, take your pick) degenerate into a Tiananmen Square massacre.

Seen in that light this letter would represent a reminder to the troops that the US Army is not meant to be in the business of visiting massacres upon its own citizenry.

Maybe he is just being a Nervous Nelly - I don't know - but reminding the troops that there is a distinction between "dispersing a mob" and "massacring protestors" is not necessarily a bad thing.

It might represent an overly pessimistic assessment of the troops, but Milley might regard it to be better to be prudent than to be wise after the event.

But, still, the letter is insubordinate. He should resign.

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