Actually I'm curious about something, does anyone know if Milley's ever seen combat in his career? I don't mean 'commanded troops who saw combat' either, I mean 'was actually in the thick of fighting and in serious danger of getting killed at least once' like past US military luminaries Hal Moore & Norman Schwarzkopf had been on the front-lines of Vietnam. A cursory look at his list of awards on his Wiki page shows me the Purple Heart is missing, unlike those two examples.
When the generals are just bureaucrats & politicians in uniform as opposed to actual soldiers, I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that they would be self-serving monsters playing politics like their equivalents in the civilian establishment. Up to & including spying for foreign enemies for their own benefit, and/or in an attempt to screw over countrymen they don't like.
As others have explained.Yes, I'm aware of all that - it was on the same article I was referencing. But as I was saying, I was curious not as to whether Milley has ever partaken in any military operation before, but did so on the ground and risked his life while a junior officer, or if he was the sort of staff officer who's never actually left base while on tour somewhere there was fighting.
I ask because I've legitimately never heard anything about him having actually fought anywhere, which is not the case with most other generals - Robert B. Abrams, for example, I can find led his unit as a lieutenant during Desert Storm (and also doesn't have the Purple Heart), and of course Jim Mattis had enough of a record to gain the Marines' reverence, regardless of his later politics. Even Hal Moore, who was such a humble dude that he tried to return his own Purple Heart because he felt he hadn't been injured badly enough to deserve it, hasn't made a secret of his combat record. The description of Milley's early military career on that Wiki article is in general much shorter and less detailed than pretty much all of his predecessors that I cared to look at just now (went as far back as Peter Pace and Richard Myers).
This is not to suggest that Milley cannot have ever seen frontline action - perhaps he has and I just didn't know about it, hence why I'm asking - or that if he did, then it somehow means he's above playing politics. There's been plenty of generals in history who saw combat and also turned out to be backstabbing, manipulative assholes. But if it turns out Milley actually is the kind of political general who never had to fear for his life on tour...well, first of all it'd be kind of ridiculous if the Joint Chiefs Chairman is a guy who's never ever seen combat, but secondly it would fit the pattern of what I've been hearing about a lot of Obama-era appointees to the military's upper echelons: that they're basically political operatives in uniform installed to ensure institutional loyalty to a partisan faction rather than actual soldiers chosen on the basis of merit.
You can tell if someone saw action by certain badges they earned.
The CIB or the CAB for POGs.
He has the CIB, Combat Infantry Badge. It means as someone below the rank of colonal had been in active Combat. Though one can get it from mortar shots and he like, he still was shot at and I'm an active firefight. Dude js Infantry, so definitely saw combat