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 in 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 amount of American munitions on hand and won’t allow it to drop below an acceptable threshold, though he would not be more specific. His comments come amid a growing debate in both political and national security circles in Washington about Ukraine, its prospects for a definitive victory against the invading Russian army, and at what point the Biden administration may change course and get more aggressive in pushing Ukraine toward peace negotiations.
There’s no doubt that the 18-month war has been a drain on U.S. munitions stockpiles, at a time when many are warning the country’s defense industrial base overall is increasingly stressed and unable to meet demand. Some national security analysts have sounded the alarm about both current shortfalls in American munitions and the ability to quickly replenish them in the event of an unexpected conflict.
But Gen. Milley said the Pentagon is working closely with the defense industry to refill stockages as rapidly as possible. He said that the level of aid to Ukraine does not and will not endanger American 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 arms outflow has been immense, dwarfing the amounts sent by NATO allies to Kyiv, and include more than 2,000 Stinger antiaircraft systems, over 10,000 Javelin anti-armor systems, and more than 2 million 155-mm artillery rounds, among other items, 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 currently producing new artillery rounds at a rate of 24,000 per month and is on track to produce in excess of 80,000 rounds per month over the following year as it ramps up in support of Ukraine.
In a wide-ranging conversation about the Ukraine-Russia war, Gen. Milley stressed it is far too early to draw any major conclusions about Ukraine’s two-month-old counteroffensive in the country’s disputed Donbas region — despite new, reportedly “sobering” official assessments of Kyiv’s success to date against dug-in Russian forces. He acknowledged “there’s a lot of fog” about the state of the Ukrainian advance, which by most accounts appears to be moving more slowly than Western military observers and planners had hoped.
Ukraine’s counteroffensive, and the country’s broader fight over the course of the conflict, have highly dependent on Western military aid, including major shipments of U.S. artillery, anti-aircraft systems, missile defense batteries, and a host of other systems, weapons and equipment. All told, the U.S. has given Ukraine more than $41 billion worth of military aid since the start of the war in February 2022.
More recently, at least some of the Biden administration’s strategic decisions seem to have been driven by munitions shortages, or the fear of them.
For example, the administration’s choice this summer to supply Ukraine with controversial cluster munitions was met with fury from critics who say the weapons pose a much higher risk of accidental deaths for civilians. But 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 155mm artillery rounds.
“And we’re low on it,” the president said of those artillery rounds, taking the unusual step of admitting publicly that U.S. stockpiles are drying up, though 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 such high stakes, some recent data suggest that Americans as a whole may be souring on the heavy flows of U.S. aid to Ukraine. A June Pew Research survey found that 28% of Americans now say the nation is giving “too much” aid to Ukraine, up from just 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 America is providing too much aid has gone up from 8% to 14% over the same time period.
High-profile Republicans in Congress have increasingly given voice to that view, tying 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 President Biden earlier 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 place a priority on peace negotiations rather than an open-ended war could gain more traction over the rest of 2023, especially if Ukraine’s counteroffensive moves along without 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 draw conclusions about 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 of the Ukrainians. “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.