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 by the Senate. He was sworn in in September 2019.
In the News…
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, stated that the counteroffensive being engaged by Ukraine against Russia will be “very, very bloody.”
“What I had said was this is going to take six, eight, ten weeks; it’s going to be very difficult,“ he said. He lamented that progress has not been made as quickly as he had hoped. “It’s going to be very long, and it’s going to be very, very bloody. And no one had any illusions about any of that.”
“War on paper and real war are different. In real war, real people die,” said General Milley. “Real people are on those front lines and real people are in those vehicles.”
