Gen Mark Milley stepped down on Friday as the US military's top officer, with a parting swipe aimed at his former boss Donald Trump, saying no soldier ever swore an oath to serve a “wannabe dictator”.
The stunning rebuke from Gen Milley on his last day as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff illustrated the way the US military has been dragged into the increasingly volatile political arena since the Trump era.
At an elaborate military ceremony for his departure – attended by Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and President Joe Biden – Gen Milley did not name Mr Trump, but there was no doubt about the target of his barb.
“We don't take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator,” Gen Milley said of American soldiers. “And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator.”
Gen Milley will be replaced as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by Air Force General Charles “CQ” Brown – the second African American to hold the top military job. Colin Powell was the first.
A barrel-chested army veteran of countless foreign deployments and high-level command posts, Gen Milley served in uniform for four decades.
But he faced his highest-stakes challenge when Mr Trump appointed him in 2019 to the career pinnacle of senior military adviser to the president.
During a four-year term – continuing under Mr Biden from 2021 – Gen Milley managed the harrowing exit of US troops from Afghanistan, special forces operations in Syria, and the enormous programme to assist Ukraine's desperate fight against Russian invasion.
As chairman, “it was one crisis right after another”, Gen Milley told AFP last month.
His years at the top, however, also saw the military involved in an unusual number of politicised controversies.
While the Biden administration has pressed for changes including renaming bases named after Confederate leaders in the Civil War, senior Republicans have repeatedly lashed out at what they claim are “woke” leftist policies in the ranks.
That was nothing compared to the precarious situation Gen Milley found himself in during the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2020 presidential election – in which Mr Trump, in an unprecedented political nightmare for the US, refused to accept defeat.
At the height of tension after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Gen Milley secretly called his Chinese counterpart to reassure Beijing that the US remained “stable” and had no intention to attack China, according to the book Peril by Bob Woodward.
That revelation has caused lasting fury for Mr Trump, who this month wrote on his social media network that “in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH” for Gen Milley.
The barely veiled threat from Mr Trump – the clear front-runner to be the Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election – prompted Gen Milley to take “appropriate measures” for his safety, he told CBS News.
Mr Biden lashed out on Thursday during a speech at Mr Trump's “heinous statements” and attacked the “deafening” silence from Mr Trump's fellow Republicans on the threat.
Gen Brown – who officially takes the reins from Gen Milley at midnight on Saturday – was commissioned as a US Air Force officer in 1984 and is an experienced pilot with more than 3,000 flight hours, 130 of them in combat.
