General Mark Milley
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Mark Alexander Milley was born in June 1958 in Winchester, Massachusetts. He holds a B.A. in political science from Princeton University, and a Master of Arts degree in international relations from Columbia University. He also received an M.A. in international security and security studies from the U.S. Naval War College, and is a graduate of the MIT Center for International Studies.
Milley earned his commission as an Army officer through Princeton’s Army ROTC program, and spent most of his career in Infantry or Special Forces assignments. He has served as the commanding general of U.S. Forces Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and for III Corps based at Fort Hood, Texas. Prior to that, he served as the commander of the 10th Mountain Division.
He has been involved in the U.S. invasion of Panama, Operation Uphold Democracy, Operation Joint Endeavor, several operations in Iraq, and also in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
A four-star general, Milley assumed his position as the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army in August 2015. President Trump announced in December 2018 that Milley would serve as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In July 2019, he was confirmed in the Senate by a near-unanimous vote. He was sworn in in September 2019.
In the News…
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley said:
“George Floyd’s death amplified the pain, the frustration and the fear that so many of our fellow Americans live with day in and day out. I have many policemen in my family, and I am personally outraged by George Floyd’s brutal and senseless killing. The protests that have ensued not only speak to this injustice, but also to centuries of injustice towards Black Americans. We, as a nation and as a military, are still struggling with racism, and we have much work to do.”
The military is built around teams of service members banding together to accomplish shared missions, Milley said. “We who wear the cloth of our nation understand that cohesion is a force multiplier,” he said. “Divisiveness leads to defeat. As one of our famous presidents said, ‘a house divided does not stand.'”
“The United States military comes from the people of our nation, and we remain dedicated to the Constitution,” he said. “We will never turn our back on that document. We swore an oath of allegiance — at the cost of our lives — to an idea embedded within that document, and we will always protect it.”
