General Mark Milley had his retirement ceremony today. The outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had a few things to say on his way out the door.

While Milley served for over 40 years, it is a known fact that as you move up the ranks of command, you become more politician than soldier. You simply can’t get to the top of the heap without rubbing shoulders with, and eventually becoming, a politician. We can see that in the way that Milley has talked about working with President Trump, how he says he should have stayed “apolitical,” and the disaster that was the Afghanistan withdrawl.

… Milley, who is retiring at the end of September, praised the courage of those involved while acknowledging the chaos that unfolded as the Afghan government collapsed before a planned power-sharing agreement with the Taliban could take effect after the U.S. left.

Raddatz asked Milley if he shared the feelings of Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former head of U.S Central Command, who said in a recent interview that he “particularly” regrets not evacuating embassy staff, American citizens and at-risk Afghans earlier.

“Of course, I mean, we lost, obviously, the 13 at Abbey Gate on top of the 2,400 that were killed from 9/11 on in Afghanistan,” Milley told Raddatz in a clip from his interview, referring to an attack at the Kabul airport in which 13 U.S. service members were killed along with scores of Afghans.

“It didn’t end the way I wanted it. That didn’t end the way any of us wanted it,” Milley said. “Look, at — when the enemy is occupying your capital … that’s a strategic setback, strategic failure. That’s what I testified to in public. And there’s no way you can describe that as a strategic success.”

However, Milley also pointed to successes during the withdrawal, calling the evacuation “an amazing logistical feat.”

“It exceeds that which came out of Vietnam during Operation Whirlwind,” he said. “And those people are free today because of the courage and the bravery of all of those that were on the ground at the airport.”

Nonetheless, he said, “In the broader sense, the war was lost. We were fighting the Taliban and their allies for 20-plus years. And they prevailed in that capital for a lot of reasons that we don’t have time to go over today. But, sure, lots of regrets by a lot of us from, from 9/11 on.”

Notably, Milley didn’t feel so strongly about the failures of Afghanistan to resign at that time, and McKenzie, who is busy fluffing Milley’s reputation right now as well as a “true strategic thinker,” shares the blame with Milley for the deaths of an innocent family in Kabul by drone strike. Neither of them resigned after that debacle, which murdered children in the administration’s haste to exact some revenge for the bombing at Abbey Gate. But yeah, we’re supposed to feel bad for Milley because Donald Trump yelled at him on social media.

On Truth Social, after decrying Milley for leading “perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Trump escalated:

“This guy turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

Milley has testified that in late 2020 and early 2021, he made a set of calls to his Chinese counterpart, in coordination with other top officials, after the intelligence community reported that China’s rulers feared a U.S. attack as likely.

You can draw your own conclusions about Trump’s comments, but asking anyone to gasp in horror over Milley’s hurt feelings is a stretch too far, considering his failures to his troops in Afghanistan, and the abuses that they were expected to absorb in insane circumstances during the withdrawl, and his inability to accept responsibility for the deaths of civilians.

But we’re all supposed to ooooh and ahhhh because Milley made a backhanded swipe at Trump during his farewell speech today.

JUST IN: Woke Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley appears to slam former President Donald Trump in his retirement speech, calling Trump a "wannabe dictator."

Milley, who once arguably committed treason by promising China he would alert them of a US attack, also accused Trump of… pic.twitter.com/Rl83P12TQn

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 29, 2023

“We are unique among the world’s militaries,” Milley said. “We don’t take an oath to a country, we don’t take an oath to a tribe, we don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or a tyrant or a dictator.”

“And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator,” he spat. “We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America – and we’re willing to die to protect it.”

It’s a line Milley has delivered before, including last year at the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps commissioning at Princeton, his alma mater. But he chose to use it Friday standing alongside the president, during a national address – his last as the president’s top military advisor and the nation’s top general.

On Friday, as he handed over the reins of the chairmanship to Gen. CQ Brown, the embattled Army general gave a fierce defense of his view of the military’s defining ethos: to defend, if necessary with the life’s blood of those in uniform, the Constitution of the United States. Throughout, Milley’s suggestion, both implicit and explicit, was that the Constitution’s greatest enemy came from within.

“It is that document that all of us in uniform swear to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Milley said, emphasizing the words “all” in “all enemies” and the “and” between “foreign and domestic.”

Politicians and comedians often like to recycle lines that they think get the most attention. This is neither edgy or special. This is just Milley pandering to the media covering the speech, and saying this again because he really, really loathes Trump. Fine. He can loathe Trump, but that doesn’t make him special. Lots of people do. But what the comments DO make him is a politician in a uniform, looking to cover his ass and buff up his own legacy, and play it up for a media looking to glorify him and villianize Trump.

Interestingly, when Trump chose Milley to head up the Joint Chiefs, his former defense secretary, James Mattis, was against it, because he saw Milley as “lobbying” for the job by cultivating a relationship with Trump by going over Mattis’s head. Well, Milley got what he wanted. He politicked his way to the top, and now, he apparently regrets it. And honestly, Milley’s appointment is yet another problem for Trump – he always goes with the last person who kisses up to him, and then lashes out when they don’t continue to kiss his butt.

Mark Milley will now probably spend the early days of his retirement with a ghostwriter, making sure that his memoir hits the shelves before the 2024 election. The press will continue to fawn over him because they know he despises Trump. In the end, Milley will have all his military honors, and pension, and life to live. His greatest shame should be that in his desire to fulfill Joe Biden’s political aim of leaving Afghanistan, he ended up sacrificing the lives of servicemen and women, not to mention abandoning allies and murdering an entire family on our way out. Will those regrets get more than a passing footnote in his memoir, or will he spend pages bitching about Donald Trump? I know which odds I would bet on – because Milley may have started his service as a soldier, but he leaves just as much a politician as any elected official.

Featured image: General Mark Milley, official Department of Defense photo by Chief Petty Officer Carlos M. Vazquez II and Benjamin Applebaum, cropped, public domain