# Mark Milley Army general, Chief of Staff of the Army 2015–2019, and **20th Chairman of the [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]]** from 2019 to 2023 — the officer through whom most of the contemporary American [[Civil-Military Relations]] argument runs. **Lafayette Square, June 1, 2020.** Milley appeared in combat fatigues alongside the President in the walk through forcibly cleared protesters to St. John's Church. Ten days later he publicly apologized in a videotaped address to National Defense University: *"I should not have been there."* A sitting Chairman apologizing for the appearance of politicization has no clear precedent, and it cuts both ways in the literature — evidence that the norm was still felt strongly enough to compel the apology, and evidence that it had been breached in the first place. See [[Lafayette Square Bible Photo Op]]. **Afterward.** He became a target of sustained attack from the President he had served, who publicly suggested his conduct warranted execution. President [[Joe Biden]] issued him a preemptive pardon in January 2025. Within days of taking office, Secretary of Defense [[Pete Hegseth]] revoked Milley's security detail and security clearance and directed an Inspector General review of his conduct; portraits of Milley and [[Mark Esper]] were removed from Pentagon walls. The sequence is the reason he belongs in the vault: **the treatment of a retired officer became an instrument for signaling to serving ones.** ## See Also - [[Civil-Military Relations]] · [[Joint Chiefs of Staff]] · [[Lafayette Square Bible Photo Op]] - [[Dan Caine]] — his eventual successor [[People Hub]]