EXIT INTERVIEW: Army Gen. Mark A. Milley has had a momentous — and at times polarizing — four-year run as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Trump and Biden. In the second of a series of articles ahead of the scheduled end of his tenure in October, Gen. Milley sat down with senior Washington Times military correspondent Ben Wolfgang to discuss some of the achievements and controversies of his time as the Pentagon’s highest-ranking military officer.
U.S. weapons stockpiles will not drop below “acceptable levels of risk” despite the constant flow of arms to Ukraine, said Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pushing back on the idea that America may be putting itself in danger by sending such a massive amount of military aid to Kyiv for its war with Russia.
In an exclusive interview with The Washington Times, Gen. Milley said he and other top Defense Department officials closely monitor the number of American munitions on hand and won’t allow it to drop below an acceptable threshold, though he would not be more specific. The debate about Ukraine is growing in Washington’s political and national security circles, including its prospects for a definitive victory against the invading Russian army and at what point the Biden administration may push Ukraine more aggressively toward peace negotiations.
The 18-month-old war has been a drain on U.S. munitions stockpiles. Many are warning that the country’s defense industrial base overall is increasingly stressed and unable to meet demand. Some national security analysts have sounded the alarm about current shortfalls and the ability to quickly replenish munitions for an unexpected conflict.
Gen. Milley said the Pentagon is working closely with the defense industry to refill supplies as rapidly as possible. He said the level of aid to Ukraine does not and will not endanger U.S. national security.
“We monitor this every day for [Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin] and for the president. We give them reports every day,” he told The Times.
The defense secretary’s “guidance to us is, ‘Do not, in any category of munitions, take us below levels that are acceptable levels of risk.’ I’m not going to go into those details, but we monitor it very, very closely,” Gen. Milley said. “So we are not going to jeopardize our own national security needs and capabilities to engage in combat operations with ammunition stockages, etc. We’re not going to put ourselves at that level of risk.”
The immense arms outflow has dwarfed what NATO allies have sent to Kyiv. Shipments have included more than 2,000 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, over 10,000 Javelin anti-armor systems and more than 2 million 155 mm artillery rounds, the Pentagon said this week.
Douglas R. Bush, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said the U.S. defense industry is producing artillery rounds at a rate of 24,000 per month and is on track to produce more than 80,000 rounds per month in the next year as it ramps up in support of Ukraine.
In a wide-ranging conversation about the Ukraine-Russia war, Gen. Milley stressed that it is far too early to draw any major conclusions about Ukraine’s 2-month-old counteroffensive in the disputed Donbas region despite “sobering” official assessments of Kyiv’s success to date against dug-in Russian forces. He acknowledged that “there’s a lot of fog” about the state of the Ukrainian advance, which by most accounts appears to be moving slower than Western military observers and planners have hoped.
Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its broader fight throughout the conflict have been highly dependent on Western military aid, including major shipments of U.S. artillery, anti-aircraft systems and missile defense batteries. All told, the U.S. has given Ukraine more than $41 billion worth of systems, weapons, equipment and other military aid since the start of the war in February 2022.
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Some of the Biden administration’s recent strategic decisions seem to be driven by munitions shortages or the fear of shortages.
Supplies of cluster munitions were met with fury from critics who say the weapons pose a much higher risk of accidental civilian deaths. President Biden signaled in an interview with CNN that cluster munitions were the only option because both Ukraine and the U.S. were short on key 155 mm artillery rounds.
“And we’re low on it,” the president said of those artillery rounds, acknowledging publicly that U.S. stockpiles are drying up. The specific figures remain classified.
‘An existential fight’
Gen. Milley stressed that U.S. assistance goes far beyond numbers on a page and is a piece of a much bigger equation.
“It’s our job to make sure he, the secretary of defense, and the president stay continuously informed, and Congress, stay continuously informed about those levels [of munitions], and to work with industry in order to replenish things and so on, so forth,” Gen. Milley said. “At the same time, we need to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs to successfully defend itself. The issue of Ukraine is much bigger than Ukraine. For Ukraine, this is an existential fight. So the Russians are trying to overrun Ukraine. … So it’s an existential fight for Ukraine. But for Europe, for the United States, for other countries in the world, it’s much bigger than that.
“It’s about a set of rules that were put in place by the United States, really, at the end of World War II that prevents large powers from arbitrarily changing borders by the use of military force for their own self-aggrandizement,” he said.
Despite the high stakes, recent data suggests that Americans may be souring on the heavy flows of aid to Ukraine. A Pew Research survey in June found that 28% of Americans say the nation is giving “too much” aid to Ukraine, up from 12% in May 2022, three months after Mr. Putin launched the invasion.
That shift has been driven largely by a change in attitude among Republicans, 44% of whom now say the U.S. is providing too much aid, up from 17% in May 2022, the Pew report said. The number of Democrats who say the U.S. is providing too much aid has gone up from 8% to 14% over the same period.
High-profile Republicans in Congress have increasingly tied the massive amount of U.S. aid to the questionable proposition that Kyiv will ever achieve a clear victory.
“Supplies that will take years to replenish are being exhausted by Ukraine in a matter of weeks,” a group of 19 congressional Republicans, including Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, wrote in a letter to Mr. Biden this year. “There are appropriate ways in which the U.S. can support the Ukrainian people, but unlimited arms supplies in support of an endless war is not one of them. Our national interests, and those of the Ukrainian people, are best served by incentivizing the negotiations that are urgently needed to bring this conflict to a resolution.”
The notion that the U.S. and Ukraine should prioritize peace negotiations rather than an open-ended war could gain more traction through the rest of the year, especially if Ukraine’s counteroffensive shows no clear, high-profile progress.
Gen. Milley acknowledged that the Ukrainian forces face a tough test to navigate deadly minefields and ultimately try to pierce defensive lines that the Russians have spent months fortifying, but he said it is too early to conclude whether the counteroffensive will succeed.
“They are fighting on their own turf, but they’re executing offensive combined arms maneuver warfare, which is very, very difficult to do,” he said. “And they’re going through some highly dense minefields that are obviously very dangerous.
“There’s a lot of fog, there’s fear, there’s blood, there’s violence,” Gen. Milley said. “And at the pointy end of the spear here, there are Russian and Ukrainian forces engaged in very intense conventional warfare at a very high cost to both sides. And it is not over. And I think it would be premature to say victory or defeat one way or another just yet. It’s not over yet.”
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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