Generals Should Not Have to Break the Rules to Prevent Nuclear War
Rather than criticizing Milley, we need to change the policy that put him in an impossible spot.
By Tom Z. Collina
Policy Director, Ploughshares Fund
September 16, 2021
Just after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Gen. Mark Milley faced an impossible choice: should he allow President Trump to retain sole authority to start nuclear war, or should he intervene to block such an order?
Convinced that Trump had suffered “serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election,” Gen. Milley decided to intervene, ordering his staff to come to him if they received a strike order from the president.
"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 Peril, a new book by journalist Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. “You never know what a president's trigger point is.”
But Gen. Milley—though chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president’s chief military advisor—is not formally part of that procedure. As former Defense Secretary Bill Perry and I explore in our book The Button, policy established during the Cold War puts decisions about the use of nuclear weapons are solely in the hands of the civilian president, not Congress and above all not the military. All the president needs to do is call the Pentagon’s War Room—using the nuclear “football” or some other means—then identify himself and give the order to launch. The president may choose to consult with senior advisors such as Gen. Milley but is not required to.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2021/09/generals-should-not-have-break-rules-prevent-nuclear-war/185398/