Jeffrey Goldberg has a fantastic profile of Gen. Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in The Atlantic:
“In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces.
But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve.”“‘For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,’ one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a ‘unique challenge’ for Milley, Dubik said.”