“I think we’re playing directly into the hands of what the Chinese Communist Party wants us to do,” says former Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, author of “Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield & the Pentagon About America’s Most Dangerous Enemies.”
“They want us to spend all our money on the military. But you know, as well as I do, a totalitarian and authoritarian regime like the Chinese Communist Party fears one thing,” Miller says.
In this wide-ranging interview, we discuss his vision for major reform of the military and his reflections on Operation Warp Speed, January 6, and the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kashs-corner-how-did-the-pentagon-leaker-get-access-to-all-these-documents-multiple-secret-ccp-police-stations-in-america-exposed_5213175.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Chris Miller, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Christopher Miller: Jan, I’m nervous as a kitten right now. I had to write a book to get on your show. Then, Kash Patel, my dear friend and a great American, said, “You’re going on the show.” Thanks for having me. I’m not worthy of being an American Thought Leader. I don’t consider myself that way, but I really appreciate you having me on.
Mr. Jekielek: I find it difficult to believe that you’re nervous as a kitten here, because numerous times in the book, you describe situations that would make most people faint, and I’m not kidding. Those are the moments where you’re calm and collected and know what to do.
You’ve had a very, very interesting career. You started as a private in the infantry. That is the toughest slog, as far as I know. This is what I’ve always heard. You went into special forces and became a special operator. Ultimately, in 2018, you ended up running counter-terrorism at the NSC [National Security Council].
Mr. Miller: Right, for President Trump. Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: It was quite the trajectory to get there. You were confirmed in the Senate 99 to 0, if I recall correctly. Clearly, they were pretty confident in your abilities to do this.
Mr. Miller: I’d certainly had the repetitions in, and I knew the business from one end to the other, to be able to serve at The White House and be in charge of the entire counterterrorism enterprise, which was really, really big in the United States after September 11th, 2001.
Yes, it was surreal. In some ways, I was afforded the opportunity that never would have come to people like me, who just did it the hard way, which was; do your job, work hard and not worry about the political side of things.
Mr. Jekielek: Tell me about how you got this appointment in the first place.
Mr. Miller: I don’t know. You would have to ask President Trump. I came out of the doggone. I was a government employee. I was just a civil servant. A buddy of mine was at the National Security Council doing counterterrorism. He was leaving, and he called me and asked if I wanted to come over and interview for his job.
I always tell my children, “You always interview for any job because one, you’re going to learn something. Two, you might get it.” Jan, it was at the White House. I was like, “Sure, I’ll come over for an interview. If nothing else, I’ll have a good story to tell.”
I was a government employee loaned from the Pentagon to work at the National Security Council. We just worked hard. The president wanted to defeat ISIS, and the president did something amazing. Instead of controlling all decision-making at The White House, like the Obama administration had done, he said, “Decentralize and give authority to the people on the ground, so that they can operate more rapidly.”
It resulted in what is probably one of the greatest irregular warfare campaigns. We have conventional war, where it’s tanks and everything. But this is irregular warfare, with small groups of intelligence officers and special operators that then propped up the indigenous forces, in this case, the Kurds, who wanted to fight back and protect themselves from tyranny, which was Assad.
We were part of that change. I was part of it. Kash Patel came in. A bunch of us were part of that change. You’d have to ask the president. I’d like to think, in my internal voice, in my internal narrative, that he recognized we were serious about getting things done and supporting his agenda.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s very interesting because it did seem to be very effective, especially in comparison to the prior policy. Part of it, and this is your style, was to go to the people in the field and find out what their realities were.
Mr. Miller: That’s the way I was raised. I had been out of counterterrorism for a bit. I had been working at the Pentagon on some other things, and I wasn’t really clear on exactly where we were in the war against terror. I read through and I did my research. They call it a net assessment, where you figure out what the enemy’s doing and what we’re doing. The key thing was to go down there and listen. Not talk, but listen.
There were some people, Jan, that had been studying and had been a part of the fight against Al-Qaeda for 20 years. I listened to them because I wanted to know where Al-Qaeda was in its evolution as a terrorist organization right now. I found out that Al-Qaeda had seven senior leaders left, and the organization was basically on life support.
I asked, “What happens if we kill the final seven leaders?” Across the board, all the intelligence analysts, the people that had studied this for years said, “Al-Qaeda will be defeated. Defeated.” People would yell at me and critique me, “You can’t defeat terrorism.” I said, “I know we can’t. We can’t defeat terrorism.” Noun versus verb. “We can defeat the noun, Al-Qaeda, as a terrorist organization.”
In a crazy way, Kash and I set out on this journey to try to end the war. Maybe it was completely a crazy idea, but we thought that’s what the American people wanted. We knew that’s what President Trump wanted, to end this war. That’s the crazy story of how we ended up with President Trump executing his policy.
Mr. Jekielek: Just very briefly, what was the outcome?
Mr. Miller: The outcome was that we didn’t get all seven. Unfortunately, we had to lose in Afghanistan. Zawahri replaced bin Laden. Zawahri was bin Laden’s second in command who took over after bin Laden was killed. We couldn’t find out where he was. We thought he was in Pakistan. We didn’t have good intelligence on him.
He was killed by the Biden administration, thank goodness. The reason he was killed by the Biden administration was the collapse of Afghanistan. He somehow came under someone’s control and set up shop in downtown Kabul. His trade craft wasn’t that good, and we found him and killed him.
I thought we were very successful, but we didn’t get the job done before President Trump left the office, which is one of those bittersweet things. I’m glad for America that it worked out, but I’m pretty bitter about the way the war in Afghanistan ended.
Mr. Jekielek: A couple of things about this. When you became Secretary of Defense, you figured out that you could bring down the force from 8,000 to 800, like a 90 percent drop. On the surface, that sounds like setting up for failure. What is it that you saw, exactly?
Mr. Miller: I went into Afghanistan on the 5th of December, 2001 when, tragically, we had a friendly fire incident that killed three Americans, wounded dozens, and killed a whole bunch of Afghans. That was my first experience in Afghanistan, in 2001.
We took the country down, we defeated the Taliban, and drove off Al-Qaeda with 200 special operators and intelligence paramilitary officers. Color me stupid, but I said, “We took the country down with 200. I’m pretty confident that we can keep the Afghan National Security Forces in the fight with 200 advisors to provide air support, logistics support, intelligence support.” With the things that we had done with the Northern Alliance and the anti-Taliban forces in 2001, I felt that we could use the same model to protect the Afghan National Security Forces, and force an agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
That’s where I got that from. We did this huge war game. We didn’t bring in the bigwigs and the brass because, Jan, it was too politicized. I knew, but the army did not. The military said, “We cannot go below 8,000.” I knew we could go below 8,000. They were playing this party line with President Trump that said, “If we go below 8,000, the government will collapse. We’ll lose.” I knew the number was 800.
Mr. Jekielek: Based on this war game, basically.
Mr. Miller: Yes, based on the war game. The idea was to keep a counterterrorism force out in the desert, away from the population, where we could keep intelligence on Al-Qaeda and ISIS, so that our terrorist enemies couldn’t catch their breath. We’d keep them on the move, and also have our intelligence assets available so that we could keep track of them. That was the idea.
We could also provide some support to the Afghan National Security Forces with some contractor support, some small special operators to advise, assist, and provide them critical capabilities to keep them fighting.
Mr. Jekielek: In the end, basically President Biden saw through the plan to withdraw, which I think was the original plan of President Trump as well. Would you say that’s accurate? Then, how did things collapse so terribly?
Mr. Miller: That was two questions within one, Jan. You’re a genius at doing that. President Trump wanted to end the war and get our major military forces out of Afghanistan, and other places as well. I fully supported that. That’s one of the reasons why I was more than happy to take the job, because I agreed on this as acting Secretary of Defense.
We pay about $20 billion a year for our military special operators, who are paid, trained, equipped to be very low-key behind enemy lines. In this case, they wouldn’t have been behind enemy lines. In this case, they were in a politically sensitive environment, to make sure to protect American equities and advance our interests.
We also have a cadre of extraordinary Americans who do paramilitary work in the intelligence community. The idea was that we would maintain that force. Those are called light footprint, clandestine, low-visibility forces that could still maintain our counterterrorism presence there. That was what President Trump would’ve done.
I feel very, very comfortable and confident that’s what we would have recommended to President Trump. I’m not going to speak for President Trump, because anybody that speaks for President Trump doesn’t understand President Trump. I don’t want to put words in his mouth. He’s a negotiator and he’s a business person. The negotiations with the Taliban were not done yet.
There would have been the ability, and I think President Trump would have accepted a small, light footprint of special operators and intelligence forces, still in Afghanistan. But you asked about the Biden administration.
I have no idea. Jan, that was August 13th. Friday the 13th was the day I knew we lost the war. I had been following this very closely, and there was a number given that the Biden administration was going to keep 800 military people in Afghanistan, which we typically do for security assistance.
They work out of the embassy, defense attaches, etc. I was like, “Oh, good. They’re doing our plan. That’s exactly how I would do it.” You’d have your people look as if, “No, we’re just here, 800 people for security and whatnot.” That’s how this works.
Then, I watched the news that morning and saw that the Afghan National Security Forces had collapsed. They were literally at the intersections outside Kabul, the same intersections that I had always obsessed over when I was doing combat operations in Afghanistan.
The thought of the Taliban sitting there, massing their combat power to get enough so they could go into the city, I knew that the war was over. Because you expect that, Jan, when your enemy masses. I could just see the Toyota Hilux trucks lined up on the road as far as you can see. I could see this in my mind’s eye, with the American way of war. That’s what we’re waiting for, targets. I expected our warplanes to swoop in, our rockets to swoop in and just destroy this long column, like it happened in Iraq and at the end of Desert Storm. That didn’t happen. I knew the war was over at that point.
Mr. Jekielek: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I believe in the book you say, “No one in the military really wanted to leave Afghanistan, because everybody knew when that happened, it was going to turn really bad.” No one wanted to be responsible for that.
Mr. Miller: My issue is that it was a very conventional military way of thinking, which is tanks, aircraft carriers, exquisite fighter jets, and lots of people. My point was that thinking is not appropriate for this situation. I don’t think it was appropriate after we took down the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. At the end of the day, the strategic mistake we made was that it should have been a special operations war. We should have just kept a handful of people there, but instead we brought in lots of conventional forces.
It was just the Pentagon doing what the Pentagon does, which is every issue is a nail with a hammer. There’s no original thought required. The irregular warfare way of small footprint, using information operations, supporting those that want to protect their freedom and fight, that would have been the way to go. I don’t blame the Afghan Security Forces at all.
When we were there, we were willing to do the fighting for them. Why wouldn’t you let someone else do the fighting? That’s the genius of special operations, in particular Army Green Berets that are very small forces that train and advise larger indigenous forces in the host nation. That’s where we should have gone instead of factoring in all these huge formations.
But that’s the way the Pentagon thinks. That’s really the point of my book; we’re doing the same thing again. We make the enemy out so that our Pentagon can fight the way they want. We telegraph our punch every time.
Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to switch gears here.
Mr. Miller: That was the setup for China. Jan, that was the setup for China.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes, and I fell right into it. Of course, you were an expert in irregular warfare, which is a very different approach from the conventional warfare at the Pentagon. The CCP practices unrestricted warfare. Every possible method, and anything available to the state can be a tool of warfare, and is used as a tool of warfare.
What I’ve discovered, having had many China experts and military people on the show, is that in the U.S. this concept is still not largely understood, even to this day. Even though Chinese military colonels wrote about it a very long time ago, and explained it in quite a bit of detail.
Mr. Miller: I feel very confident that if you go into every Army Green Beret team room, a team is 12 people, you will find that book, Unrestricted Warfare somewhere on a bookshelf or on somebody’s desk. There are two colonels that wrote that. When did that come out, in the ’90s? In Patton, the movie, General Patton is in North Africa and he’s fighting Rommel. All of a sudden he goes, “I got it.” He’s reading Rommel’s, Infantry Attacks, was the book.
They have given us the book on what they’re doing, and it’s so clear. Jan. You know as well as I do that they are executing exactly along that strategic plan that is laid out, which is total unrestricted warfare. I’ll give a shout-out to President Trump. I’m not chilling here, but he recognized that the key element that could impact the Chinese Communist Party was economic warfare, not military warfare.
Still, we’re so out of balance in this country with our budget, where we put about a trillion dollars into defense. It’s actually 60 percent, but I try to be nice. I say it’s 50 percent of our discretionary spending, meaning the money that is available beyond Medicare, Medicaid, social security. This is the money for roads, national parks, and libraries, etc.
You’ve heard about DIME, it’s D-I-M-E. It’s the organizing construct for how we make strategy and how we utilize American power; diplomacy, information, military, economic, DIME. You want them all in balance. In many ways, that’s the art and science of strategy.
Right now, 50 percent is the M of the DIME, military. Information doesn’t even make it onto the chart. Diplomacy comes in, maybe five-ish percent. Economics, it’s really, really hard to even pull up the budget figures. I’m getting these from the congressional budget office. I’m not making this up, because I was interested in this.
We’re so out of balance, and that was the genius of that recognition—the thing that we need to compete with them on is economic, and I would argue, information as well. The military piece is what they want, Jan. They want us to spend all our money on the military. But you know as well as I do, a totalitarian and authoritarian regime like the Chinese Communist Party fears one thing, the instability of their population.
How do they maintain control? They have to have the other. They have to have an enemy that’s out to get them. Right now, that’s exactly what we are portraying ourselves as, when we put all this money into the military arm element of power.
Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to jump back a little bit. I’m not letting you off the hook with China yet. We’re going to come back to China, but something that’s very interesting. You have a chapter at the end of the book where you offer prescriptions. Your prescription also sounds kind of counterintuitive. You’re saying that we really need to cut military spending, and that is actually going to save a lot more lives and make the U.S. war fighting capability much more effective. Please explain that.
Mr. Miller: Thank you for actually reading my book and getting to the last chapter, which is an enormous accomplishment. No, I wrote the book to be accessible. Here’s what I learned from age 17-years-old to when I finally left government at age 55. You saw this with the Reagan administration. The only way you can force new thinking is to cut the budget. You have to reduce resources to the bureaucracy. That forces prioritization, and that forces new thinking. That’s what I’m trying to get across.
Then the next question is, “How do you do this?” I know because I’ve met these incredibly talented people that are in our Pentagon and in our National Security establishment, who are young, creative people. They see the fallacy of what we’re doing right now, which is refighting the Cold War. When you have a trillion dollars a year, there is no original thinking required. We’re playing directly into the hands of what the Chinese Communist Party wants us to do.
What I’m trying to get at by cutting the budget is that we have to have new operational and strategic concepts for dealing with the Chinese; an information, cyber, and indirect approach. There’s a huge population out there that are not fans of the Chinese Communist Party. We have the ability to influence that, and advance our goals, and also keep them from being too bellicose.
Mr. Jekielek: I can imagine the argument that you hear when you say, “Look, we’ve got to cut defense spending.” People would say, “That’s going to cost lives.” This is probably the response, correct?
Mr. Miller: You always get that anytime you try to do something new at the Pentagon. You know you’re right when they throw that red herring on the table. I was a civilian official. Civilians provide oversight of the military. That’s how our republic works. As soon as you do something that the uniformed military doesn’t want, in this case cutting force structure, cutting weapon systems, and doing something different, that’s the exact line you’re going to get.
Then, they offload all the risk onto you as a civilian. I’m good with that. I said, “I’ll take it. Put some more risk on me. That’s what I get paid for.” They always use that line, and I think it’s a bankrupt idea. You brought it up earlier, “We’re going to lose more lives if we keep doing the same old thing that everyone knows.”
Our playbook has nothing new in it, Jan. It’s just rinse and repeat, basically since World War II. It’s very easy for the Chinese Communist Party to operate against us, because they have our playbook. We have their playbook too. We have Unrestricted Warfare, but we are not attacking it that way.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s a huge question for me. You read Stealth War, General Rob Spalding’s book. The thing that came out in my discussions with him is that people at the Pentagon don’t want to think this way. Whereas, you make the case in your book that special operators are a whole division that functions very, very differently than the conventional warfare division of the U.S. military. It’s just that it’s never playing the major role, except perhaps in some of these campaigns, like early in Afghanistan in 2001.
Mr. Miller: Right. I used to get really upset with the bogeyman of the military industrial complex. It’s so easy. It just highlights what President Eisenhower was talking about. Here’s the big revelation for me. I used to get angry about it.
“How could we have a system, where we have five major defense companies that make oodles and oodles of money beyond all human understanding, and we have these small startup tech companies that have these incredible technologies and ideas that can’t break through?”
Then, I’m not angry anymore, and it’s been very helpful for me. I sleep a lot better at night now, because the defense prime contractors are doing exactly what the incentive structure is set up to do. We have to change the incentive structure. That’s why I talk about reducing spending.
There doesn’t have to be these hard choices about weapon systems, procurement, and how we do business when there’s literally trucks full of money. It’s been freeing in some ways, and I’m not so angry anymore. They’re doing exactly what they should be doing in a free market.
But it’s not a free market for military equipment. That’s my point, is we need to establish a new incentive structure to break through that. That will result in different operating concepts, different weapon systems and different ways of thinking that, in the long run, will end up saving American lives, or at least those in our armed forces.
Mr. Jekielek: Listen, I have you here in this seat.
Mr. Miller: It’s the hot seat, Jan, am I sweating?
Mr. Jekielek: People keep talking to me about the Chinese spy balloon that got shot down, and everything associated with that. Most recently, we learned that, actually this balloon was tracked from the moment it was launched in China. What happened with this whole situation? How do you explain this?
Mr. Miller: How do I explain this? I can’t, right now. I’m like the rest of America. I’m like, “What is going on here?” The president gets what’s called best military advice from the chairman, the senior ranking military officer. He’s called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His counterpart, the person that his boss is, is the Secretary of Defense. That’s the position I held. What was the best military advice they provided to the president? Either he didn’t follow it, or he did follow it.
If he did follow it, that resulted in a shoot-down after the spy balloon went all the way across America. I know what they’re going to say, “We collected all sorts of great intelligence on them.” I talk about this in the book, about the intelligence community, about how it’s become unmoored from civilian oversight and control. I really want to learn more about that, because I don’t know how to answer your question. At this point, we should be able to answer the question, I would argue.
Here’s the other one that really bugs me. You triggered me on this one. A trillion dollars, and we cannot take control of a balloon without having to send up a $100-million fighter plane and shoot a $400,000 missile. That’s the cost curve I’m talking about. That’s what the Chinese expect us to do, that we will bankrupt ourselves.
We have all these exquisite weapons systems and we have so few of them. War is changing. We’re going from exquisite, expensive stuff with very few of them. We’re going back. You’re seeing it in Ukraine right now, with unmanned aerial systems or uncrewed aerial systems and other things.
We’re going back to the cheap and plentiful, versus the expensive and few. The Chinese understand that and they love the fact that we continue to spend enormous amounts on weapon systems that aren’t going to be effective.
Mr. Jekielek: Is this Reagan’s Star Wars strategy in reverse?
Mr. Miller: That’s exactly my point. Jan, you got it. That’s exactly what I fear. You remember how he was ridiculed for Star Wars? In reality, it was part of this ongoing problem. It wasn’t actually a deception plan. He was legit. We’re still working on it. The advances, technologically, have been off the charts. But remember they made fun of him for that.
We bankrupted the Soviets because they realized they couldn’t keep up with us, and we won the Cold War. I’m concerned that the Chinese, exactly like you said, are doing the same thing to us. They’re saying, “Look over here. Look over here.” We’re responding exactly the way they project us to, which is spending more money, and spending more money.
Then, we talk about the greatest enemies. Everybody says, “Is it China? Is it Iran? Is it North Korea?” No, it’s this unbridled military spending, which could bankrupt our nation. That’s my point I’m trying to make, maybe inarticulately, but that’s the point I’m trying to make in the book.
Mr. Jekielek: In the book, you describe President Trump as a neo-isolationist. You say, “That shouldn’t be a pejorative term, either.”
Mr. Miller: It’s an established school of international thought.
Mr. Jekielek: Right. But the foreign policy establishment and the intelligence community is very much not what you would describe as internationalist. Do you feel this is the biggest schism in government during these four years?
Mr. Miller: I think that was a big schism. I also think, quite frankly, a lot of our leadership didn’t understand President Trump. They bought into this narrative that regarding foreign policy and national security, he was some sort of madman that was going to get us into a global war, and nothing could have been further from the truth. That’s what disturbed me.
If you actually read what he was saying and see what he was doing, it was a classic neo-isolationist stance, proven valid. America, until World War II, was an isolationist nation. My interpretation of his foreign policy, which would’ve been called the Trump doctrine, and he doesn’t get any credit for this, is very, very consistent. His idea was, “Bring people home. Bring our forces home. Force NATO to pay more.”
I love NATO. I love them to death. They need to pay for their own defense now. It was necessary during the Cold War. They’re laughing all the way to the bank right now. Good on them. We’re being played as the sucker. President Trump had it exactly right.
But the internationalists said, “Coalitions are important.” Yes, they are. Alliances are important, but let’s all pay our fair share. The Trump doctrine was at the right place at the right time. He called out China for the first time, and the Biden administration has not changed their policy very much towards China.
Mr. Jekielek: I encounter a lot of this type of isolationist thinking, especially with this huge commitment of funds and weaponry to the Russia-Ukraine war. I’m hearing from a lot of people, “No, America needs to look inward. We’ve got a lot of problems. They need to be fixed.” Fair enough.
The Chinese Communist Party has its long-term plan to subvert America. They have none of what we would consider to be ethics, there is none of that. There are three genocides happening right now in China, and they continue. There hasn’t really been meaningful action to stop these things from happening. If America becomes more inward-focused, and decides not to look outside, these are very real threats that aren’t going away, and it’s just going to take advantage of that. How do you deal with that?
Mr. Miller: Neo-isolationism, in my perception and understanding, means that we are strategically overcommitted right now. We have too many people out and about. The world is in the midst of a historic transformation, a transition which happens every 100 years. It’s just the nature of the beast. The best thing you can do when things are transforming and not stable, but chaotic, is to hedge your bets. Come home, reset, and rethink how we do things.
Here’s my response to your very good question. There are other ways to compete. There are other ways to impact Chinese Communist Party decision-making. It’s called the DIME; diplomacy, information, military, and economics. Militarily, I think we can support Taiwan.
Here’s my issue with Taiwan, and I’ll just go there right now. We can’t want it more than they do. That’s the lesson we learned in Afghanistan and Iraq. They were more than happy to take our money and more than happy to have us fight for them. But in the end, they didn’t want it as much as we did. The Taiwanese have to show that resolve.
Your point is, the incredible Chinese disinformation capability is, literally chipping away at that resolve. That’s what we’re talking about in many ways. It’s beyond industrial scale. It is like the next-world, science fiction scale, their ability to spread disinformation in all these systems.
When I say come home, that means to reset and retool. It doesn’t mean to give ground to the Chinese Communist Party. It’s about responding. It’s not even about responding, because as soon as we’re responding, we lose. We need to take the offensive. We can do that through information, we can do that through diplomacy, and we can do that through military tools.
Mr. Jekielek: You make a really, really good point here, and let’s look at Unrestricted Warfare. We actually have a lot of these tools at our disposal and we haven’t deployed them yet. We’ve deployed them to some extent. As you mentioned, the Biden administration has actually kept some of these economic tools in play up to now, but there’s a lot more that can be deployed. In fact, that is arguably the most effective tool for this particular engagement.
Mr. Miller: Jan, you know as well as I do. You’ve been all over the world. You’ve seen how the Chinese are taking over, economically in Latin America, in Africa, in all these other areas of the world. We have ceded that ground. I would argue, our most effective weapon system is the free market system. Why we are not very strategically deploying capital in those areas to counter the Chinese is absolutely beyond me.
These are the things we need to be talking about; how we’re going to respond in the world. Yes, I’m a neo-isolationist right now. The thing is, four days from now, if the situation dramatically changes in the world, I might become the most fervent internationalist.
My point being is, we get stuck in these schools of thought. You’re one thing or the other. No, there’s got to be a third way, which is opportunistic. I thought that’s what we’re supposed to do as strategists and policymakers. That’s what I’m trying to portray with the American public in a way that isn’t really dense and boring, like Henry…no, I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything bad about Henry Kissinger. Have you ever finished one of his books? I’m going to, one day. I’m going to finish that diplomacy book that’s pretty dense.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to something a bit earlier, which is, who dubbed you the Soldier Secretary? What does that actually mean?
Mr. Miller: It made me very uncomfortable when that came up. We had just gone out to Djibouti in Africa, and we went to Somalia, a bunch of us. Kash was there, because we wanted to get on the ground and talk to the people in the intelligence community and our diplomats, because President Trump had said, “Get out of Somalia.”
We wanted to go out there and make sure that it was executable, and would not put America at risk. We were out there, and I had this interesting moment. In the American military, at Thanksgiving, the leaders always serve the troops. Did you know that?
Mr. Jekielek: I’ve heard about that. Yes.
Mr. Miller: It’s one of the greatest traditions. We went out to serve the troops a Thanksgiving meal, which we did in four different places, and we rolled into Djibouti late at night. I had just given my talking points, and they weren’t really resonating. There were probably 200 Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines there.
Out of desperation, I just started a late night show. I started interviewing the soldiers instead of me. Not just soldiers, there were Marines there as well, and Air Force. It was magical. They came alive, and it was really transcendent for me to see.
I always knew the power of the people that serve, but it was amazing to see that excitement and see that energy. The generals were sitting in the back, and I could tell they were very dismissive because I wasn’t acting properly. You’re supposed to talk like this and not open your mouth. You always talk with your hand like this, and you’re always talking. You’re not listening.
I could tell they were pretty disturbed by this. In their minds, it was a lack of professionalism. I got back to my room that night really late, and I just sat there and I realized I could relax. I was thinking about the day, because every day you always do your after-action review. What did you do right? What did you do wrong? How do you improve your performance?
I had this moment, “Man, I did it again. I embarrassed myself.” In my mind, I embarrassed myself in front of the brass. That was a critical moment where I realized I don’t work for them. I work for those kids. I work for the soldiers in the field. That’s when some smart alec got the idea, “You’re the soldier secretary.”
I’m a humble guy. I said, “Knock that off, knock that off. It’s not about me. It’s not about me. It’s about being blessed to be put in this position to serve. It’s how I was raised. So, it’s never about me.” They came up with that name and I couldn’t argue with them because in my internal monologue, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to serve those in the armed forces, veterans and their families, and give voice to those that aren’t being heard. That’s what we did.
Mr. Jekielek: You highlight in the book how important it is for the military to have civilian oversight. You criticize the fact that General Mattis was put into that role at one point because it was too close. Then you, yourself were also military, correct?
Mr. Miller: Yes, but there’s a difference, legally, with a general officer, which I never was. I retired as a Colonel. I made the decision to leave the service. There’s a difference between being a four star general and being a colonel. You have all those rules, laws, and regulations when you’ve spent 40 years in uniform ending up as a general officer, then coming in to be the civilian head of the armed forces, the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon.
Inadvertently, if all these generals are your friends, which they are, it provides a different leadership challenge. We’ll just put it that way. I didn’t have that leadership challenge because I was a colonel, and I was dismissed as just another colonel. But that gave me energy and gave me the confidence that I didn’t have to play by their particular rules.
Mr. Jekielek: Even though you had spent 35 years in the military, you were still an outsider to this type of structure?
Mr. Miller: Exactly.
Mr. Jekielek: Then, that’s what is important.
Mr. Miller: Yes. I wasn’t the chosen one. I wasn’t the pampered prince of the senior officer corps. But there’s another part of my book concerning accountability. I say, “Holy cow. What are we doing with our education training and our promotion system when the same people that keep losing our wars end up getting promoted?” Getting back to Soldier Secretary, I realized that my obligation wasn’t to the generals, it was to those in the field.
Mr. Jekielek: You have a very interesting prescription here, and I’ve heard this prescription before. It was Vivek Ramaswamy that mentioned this in a book that he had written. He talks about some sort of mandatory service, not military service, but some kind of service for every U.S. citizen as a way to build patriotism.
Mr. Miller: I just thought, bonds of understanding. You see those World War II movies where you have the guy from New York, you have the one from the south, you have the one from Chicago, then you have your rube from Iowa, my home state. They’re put into this situation of basic training, and they bust on each other, but they realize at the end of the day, they’re all Americans.
With this Balkanization that’s happened from social media, and just the way things are developing in society, we’re losing those bonds of understanding. That’s why this show is pretty important, and other shows like this. They are effective in breaking down a lot of these barriers and misunderstandings. Because when you’re working together, you have to rely on each other.
You brought up a key point. It’s just not the military. There are nursing homes, healthcare, and education. Go overseas in a mini-Peace Corps. Work in the national parks. I don’t care, but have some sort of obligatory service. There has to be an out. I survey young people on this, and I’m at about 90 percent.
There’s always a libertarian that says that’s against the Constitution. I agree with them. I said, “You’re right. You should have an opportunity. If this is not something for you, take conscientious objector status.” It probably sounds a little sophomoric as a policy description, but I think it’s something we need to really, really wrap our heads around. They do it in Israel.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes, but in that case it’s mostly military, with some exceptions.
Mr. Miller: Across the board, there are plenty of things we can do in America. You get out of high school and you get to go take a little sabbatical for two years. At the end of it, you can get your education benefits. Maybe you can get some small business-type things, or a G.I. Bill-type thing.
Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of this historically low recruitment in the military right now?
Mr. Miller: The military said it’s because people are afraid. Have you seen that one? The military said, “We need to study this.” It was the Army that said, “What we’re finding is that young people are afraid they’re going to get hurt.” I had that same look as you. I said, “What?”
There’s more to it than that. I have to think that there’s this attitude right now about senior leadership who says, “Do as I say, not as I do.” They preach one thing up on the Hill and then they say something else when they’re back at the Pentagon or out in the field.
One thing I know from my children is that if you tell them something, they’re pretty savvy about these things. When they have bosses, and they see incongruity—that’s the word between what the boss says and what the boss does—my kids get really, really frustrated and angry.
There’s probably some of that. We’re seeing senior leadership taking on issues that are overly political, and not handling them well. Here’s my bumper sticker. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. I have yet to meet anybody that joined the military to fight the culture wars.
It’s the ultimate meritocracy. They join because they want to serve. If they work hard and they do well, they can advance and they can have success. I don’t know of a single person that said, “The reason I’m joining the military is, I want to fight the culture wars.” They actually want to prepare to fight, and if necessary, fight real wars.
Mr. Jekielek: There is an increase in the sense of entitlement, a kind of narcissism. It seems to be a societal illness that’s on the rise. I imagine that would also contribute to people. “Ask not what this country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” It has gone more towards, “Ask what this country can do for you.”
Mr. Miller: I gave this stem-winding speech when I became a battalion commander responsible for 450 people in the Special Forces Battalion. I was using my old-school tool, which was always blaming others and higher headquarters. “We have to fight them. We’re all in this together.”
It worked in the past. I’ve been out of the business for a few years, and I was just dying out there. I wasn’t getting any reaction. Eyes were dead. I’m like, “I’m not hitting it.” Finally, I just said, “Okay, see you later.” One of my buddies that I’d served with previously came up to me and said, “Sir, these kids believe your whole shtick, your post-Watergate shtick. Anybody over 30, I don’t trust.” They said that it doesn’t work with them. They joined the military to serve. They believe it’s an honorable profession.
I humbly disagree. There’s still people that want to join. The Marine Corps did a great thing the other day. The Commandant said, “We’re not given bonuses for people to join. We’re the Marines. If you don’t want to join us, we’re not going to join you.”
That’s one of the points of the book too, is we can collapse the size of our armed forces dramatically. In return, what I want to do is collapse the active duty force that shows up every day, and take those people and put them back in the communities, in the National Guard and the Reserves that serve one weekend a month, two weeks at the end of the year, or during the summer, typically. We need to reestablish those bonds of connectivity between those that serve and those they serve.
Because right now, Jan, there are only a handful of large military bases, primarily in the south. We need to return our military to the people that they serve and protect. By doing that, you’d see better familiarization, because right now we just don’t do a good job at showing what military service is all about.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re talking about moving these soldiers around the country instead of these big southern military bases. I’ve heard of similar suggestions for how to reform the FBI or other agencies, to put them more in the states and more localized, as opposed to centralizing them. Is this how you see it? Do you think that there’s too much centralization?
Mr. Miller: Exactly. I understand why we did it, but we’re at a different place in our society right now. You brought it up, about how there’s this disconnect between the young people and their understanding of service.This is what really, really concerns me, is we keep attacking those that are in public service and in the military.
Not so much the military. The military is still put on a pedestal. When we attack people that volunteer to serve, either as civil servants or as political people, and we just destroy them, what message does that send to young people that are thinking about going into government service?
“Why would I ever do that when I’m going to ruin my life and have my reputation ruined?” We’re going to end up with ineffective civil servants. That really troubles me. One of my goals in the book was to show that there’s no debility in public service, and we have to stop this character assassination of every person who decides to serve.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned that there’s this weird, I think you used the word, fetishization of the military in the eyes of society. We’re really putting them on a pedestal, like you just mentioned.
At the same time, you also describe a growing distance that you want to change by making it more localized. I want to figure out how to square those two views.
Mr. Miller: I thought they were consistent. I’ll have to think through that one. The concern is that when only 7 percent of America are veterans, and 93 percent haven’t served, that’s a great problem to have in America. I love that. We’re not an armed society.
However, what I’ve seen in my career is how we came out of the tail end of the Vietnam conflict. I joined in ’83, but you still had those remnants that just despised the military. Then the Vietnam generation, to their credit, said, “Never again.”
They took action. President Reagan was very clear, “Don’t blame the warrior. Blame the war. Don’t criticize the warrior. Criticize the war.” I thought that was the right thing to do. What I’ve seen, Jan is a slippery slope where the people that serve start thinking, and the leaders are willing to tolerate this, that somehow military service is more important and more patriotic than just paying your taxes.
That really bothers me because we don’t need a Praetorian Guard in this country. The armed forces can’t be separated from the people they serve. That’s what I’m trying to talk about. Let’s be clear, the politicians love the military until they don’t. They’ve seen political gain by loving everything about the military, and by being at football games and flyovers.
That’s potentially hazardous because the only thing that can take down our country is a misguided military. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but that’s why in the book I talk about this incredible article about the possible military coup 20 years ago. That’s my concern.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes, you’re right. There’s this hypothetical situation some 20 years ago where someone shows how this could happen. You’re right that we’re closer to that scenario today than we once were, even though we might not be that close. You don’t want that, obviously.
Mr. Miller: Right. I just think we have to reset our relationships between our military and our society as a whole. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just necessary. Somebody’s got to be the first one over the wall to say these things. Actually, Admiral Mike Mullen was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Obama administration. He highlighted that one of his most important undertakings was to help educate both sides, the military and the citizenry.
Mr. Jekielek: I want to briefly ask about Operation Warp Speed. This is very contentious. A vaccine was developed very quickly, and rolled out very quickly. A lot of people have very serious concerns about that rollout. There’s increased evidence that there are significant harms associated with them. I want to learn about it from your perspective.
Mr. Miller: Operation Warp Speed?
Mr. Jekielek: Yes.
Mr. Miller: Primarily, the military was responsible. I thought the president did the right thing, which was to use private industry to develop the vaccine. What we learned very early on was that the private industry did not have the logistics or capacity to distribute on such a large scale.
That’s where the military came into play. The one thing the military knows how to do better than Walmart and Amazon and everybody else is huge, large-scale logistics. I do not know exactly how much the military medical labs had to do with the development of the vaccine.
Sorry. I was really focused on executing the president’s guidance to make sure that when the vaccine was developed that it could be distributed nationally, and internationally as well. That was my focus.
Mr. Jekielek: I’ll just jump in and I’ll explain why I’m asking. From credible research that I’ve seen, the way that we responded to coronavirus, or the CCP virus, as we call it at Epoch Times, arriving in the U.S. appears to have been a biodefense response, not a public health response, which means that different agencies were involved. We can talk about what you were aware of, as this was all playing out.
Mr. Miller: I was aware of the controversy of using an experimental vaccine on members of the armed forces, but at the end of the day, I was responsible for the distribution and logistics of it. You talked earlier about young people not willing to, or a lot of people not interested in joining the military. We talked about leaders saying one thing and doing another.
I don’t think we have enough data, but I assume and suspect that the mandatory vaccination using an experimental drug has something to do with that break of faith, if you will, between the people that we need to enlist and join the military, and the leadership. I’m still trying to figure it out. I don’t have a good answer for you.
Mr. Jekielek: Is there something you wish you could have done during your tenure that you feel like you missed?
Mr. Miller: Yes. We went in there. Week one was; stabilize operations. Week two was; drawdown in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. We did that. Week three was; advance special operations in the Pentagon, or sit in the back of the kids’ table. We made some bureaucratic changes so that they got the respect they needed, having fought the global war on terror, carrying a huge burden. Obviously, others did too. Tons of Americans served overseas in the other services. Then, the final thing was, for the remainder of the time there, our focus was on helping people that weren’t being heard.
I wish I would’ve taken that one on much earlier. There were so many examples of people that had been accused of something, or maybe it was an award that hadn’t been properly gone through the system. Maybe it was somebody who had been forced out of the service, or had some sort of administrative problem. You just hear that again and again.
I’ll give you an example. I’m in Somalia and I said, “What problems are you having?” They’re like, “We haven’t gotten paid.” I fell off my chair. “What? You haven’t gotten paid?” They’re like, “No, the system isn’t paying us.”
I was like, “How’s that affecting your family?” They’re like, “Really, really poorly. Not a good phone call when I talk to my spouse.” Stuff like that, which most people ignore. You could say, “That’s not your role as a Secretary of Defense. You’re supposed to be at The White House doing policy, and going to big-level meetings, and always looking out for the enterprise at large.”
Again, I’m having Thanksgiving in different places. I turned to this one young kid, I always ate with him. He was a sailor. We were in Bahrain. I said, “If you were in my seat for one day, what would you do?” He said, “I’d get the part to fix my ID card making machine.”
I said, “What?” He goes, “I’m responsible for making ID cards for family members, and right now I’m missing the flux capacitor.” He goes, “If I could just have that part, I could do my job.” I said, “We’ll take care of that for you.”
That sounds silly, but the point is, we need to give voice to those that are not being heard in the armed forces, their families, and the veterans’ community. That was really powerful. I only had 73 days, so I wish I would have done more. I wish I could have done more. I could have solved a few more problems, and made lives a little bit easier. Maybe I could have reinforced faith just a little bit in some of those people that are questioning, “Should I stay in an organization that doesn’t pay me?”
I could only imagine the trauma they must be experiencing, the psychological trauma with a spouse going, “How am I going to pay the bills this month because your job isn’t paying you?” That’s the kind of stuff I really wish I would’ve done more of.
Mr. Jekielek: I have to ask about this because everyone is probably wondering. You were responsible for the DOD response on January 6th.
Mr. Miller: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: Tell me what happened. What did it look like from your vantage point?
Mr. Miller: Oh, it was a horrifying situation. When the news starts hitting that the Capitol had been overrun, that’s not a good day in the Republic’s history. My point that I’ve made again and again and again, and I’m glad you brought it up, is, your armed forces should never conduct domestic law enforcement operations, except when civil society has broken down during a natural disaster, or when a city comes undone due to rioting.
Then, people go, “What happened on Capitol Hill?” You have to remember something. You know this, Jan. Capitol Hill is owned by the legislative branch. The military is the executive branch. The executive branch sends the military to Capitol Hill without being invited.
This sounds kind of arcane, but we need to remember this. Without being invited by the legislative branch, that’s called a military coup. I was never going to be a party to a military coup. We provided every single bit of military support requested by those authorized to request that. We were asked multiple times.
At the end of the day, I have never lost a moment’s sleep on the decisions I made regarding military support on Capitol Hill that day. What’s great about your show is, you elevate the discussion beyond just the soundbites. I appreciate that. I’m so glad, in retrospect, that our armed forces didn’t have to go up there and fight protestors and demonstrators that day. That would have been a horrible, horrible day for America.
At the end of the day, that’s the police’s job. At the end of the day, they failed that day. I have complete respect for the police officers that were in the field that day, but their leadership let them down. They didn’t have the capability and the support they needed that day.
Mr. Jekielek: In the book, you put the responsibility on the police, because you say that they said, “We’re good.”
Mr. Miller: Yes, they did.
Mr. Jekielek: There were different meetings that you had, because there was intelligence that there was going to be some issues. You write that President Trump had said, “You’re going to need 10,000 people.”
Mr. Miller: He did say that.
Mr. Jekielek: In response, Mayor Bowser said 634. I can’t remember the exact number, whatever it was. “That’s all I can do.” You had your very clear red lines of what you could do, and what you couldn’t do at that time.
Mr. Miller: Yes, exactly. The president had authorized me to do whatever was necessary, to provide support to law enforcement. I gave them exactly what they requested. You have to remember that there had been previous instances in the town, where the National Guard had been misutilized. There was this whole fear. Let’s be clear, there was a fear that the military was going to be used, counter-constitutionally, and I wasn’t going to allow that. There was that perception.
Mr. Jekielek: This was a media narrative actually, ahead of January 6th.
Mr. Miller: Yes. You have to remember the tension. We’re close to the Capitol now. The tension and the fear that was in the air. The last thing I was going to do was accelerate that, or accentuate this crazy narrative that somehow the military was going to be misused.
That was coming from The Hill, and it was coming from a lot of people that should have known better. There were former secretaries of defense that took counsel of their fears, and cautioned me and others not to misuse the military. I found it horrifying that it could be so political that they would think that members of our armed forces would do something counter to their oath, and that I would, too.
Mr. Jekielek: In the end, you described the mobilization of the National Guard that did happen as the quickest in history, if I recall.
Mr. Miller: The 25,000 National Guards people up here, immediately following, because I had already moved on. In current ops, there’s nothing I can do now. The thing’s moving. We’ve mobilized the National Guard. Got the request at 2:35. I got briefed at 3:00, 3:04. Mobilized the National Guard.
I was already thinking, “We have an inauguration coming up, so now we have to lock the city down. It’s my problem now. Civilian law enforcement failed. I’m going to have to do this.” It’s what I did.
Mr. Jekielek: Yes. You described this moment, where your team gets on board, too. It’s a chapter that I hope everyone gets a chance to read when they read your book.
Mr. Miller: I hope so.
Mr. Jekielek: Chris, what’s next for you?
Mr. Miller: What’s next? I hope I can just be part of the conversation. Obviously, the policy prescriptions in the book are controversial and provocative. I did that on purpose. It would be fun if one or two of them gets a little life. I have this belief that we need to reform our Department of Defense. One of the ways we’re going to do that is through the private sector.
I’m trying to put my money where my mouth is, and I’m working for some really small, technologically interesting, autonomous warfare-type companies. Instead of just going to a major defense contractor, I felt it was really a requirement, and almost an obligation to those that I’ve worked with in the past, to try to drive that change, which is probably batting at windmills, but I’m going to give it a whirl and learn about business because I haven’t ever done that. The free enterprise system is the foundation of this country.
It’s really, really fun to be learning a completely new field. At the end of the day, I want to make tons of money so that I can give it all back to veterans groups and help people in need. That’s what I’m going to try to do.
Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish?
Mr. Miller: No. Thanks for having me. These long-form podcasts are so much better and important. It’s what we’re trying to do here, we in the fourth estate. We’re really trying to get beyond the fluff and the soundbites and the silly stuff that we see all too often on social media, and frankly on the shows now. Thanks for what you’re doing. You’ve been doing this for four years, and with the people you’ve had on, I’m really humbled to be one of them.
Mr. Jekielek: Chris Miller, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Miller: Thanks.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Chris Miller and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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