The looming handover from General Mark Milley to his successor, Air Force General Charles Quinton Brown, as America's highest-ranking military officer comes against the backdrop of the faltering Ukrainian counteroffensive, dwindling stockpiles of weapons and waning enthusiasm for funding the Kiev regime "until the last Ukrainian".
As Washington spearheaded the West’s drive to funnel assistance to fan the flames of NATO’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, Milley has been hands-on regarding most major decisions, ranging from the selection of weaponry to training for Kiev’s military.
Milley - who is known for having fraternized with Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi - and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have been outdoing themselves in rallying donors in the West to prop up the Kiev regime.
Milley’s successor, Air Force General Brown, will have his work cut out for him when he takes over at a time when both Washington and Europe are showing clear signs of “war fatigue”. Ukraine’s botched counteroffensive has made war sceptics in both the old Continent - where the cash and weapons for the conflagration have drained coffers and stockpiles - and in the US, which is doubtful about additional military support.
The political dynamics on Capitol Hill are such that a growing number of Republican lawmakers oppose sending further aid to Ukraine. The stand-off comes amid attempts to pass a stopgap measure to avoid a looming government shutdown before the 30 September deadline. GOP lawmakers have signaled that they won't include any funds for Ukraine in their stopgap bill.
Furthermore, the US Defense Department itself has been facing dwindling stockpiles of high-end munitions to Ukraine. Yet Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to haggle with the West for more advanced weapons, as his recent foray to Washington showed. The lackluster receptions in Washington and at the UN, and inability to achieve major objectives, showed, however, that his moment has passed, experts told Sputnik.
'Different Vantage Points'
Furthermore, the changing of the guard at the position of principal military advisor to POTUS, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council, comes as the State Department and the Pentagon have been described as “moving at different speeds” with respect to Ukraine.
"State is looking at opportunities, DOD is looking at threats... Folks at DOD would say they need to think about the pros and cons of each weapons decision, and that responsibility falls on them,” a senior administration official was cited as saying.
Indeed, there have been reports since the Ukraine conflict began that the Pentagon has been criticized for being too slow to greenlight some weapons deliveries for Ukraine.
“It’s been frustrating with the administration. We’ll talk about a weapons system and weeks or months later, they are delivered… Everything was going to be World War III,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) stated, in a nod at the Pentagon.
The Pentagon similarly procrastinated over sending the long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) that have been promised to the Kiev regime by the Biden administration. The debate over these systems lasted well over a year, with the Pentagon reportedly arguing that they did not have any to spare in their stockpile.
While Milley and others in the Defense Department have eagerly jumped to Kiev’s request for more military aid, they given plenty of assurances that they are seeking to avoid an “escalation”.
“One thing that was and still is, on my mind every day is escalation management… The fact of the matter is, Russia is a nuclear-armed state. That’s nothing to play with,” Milley was cited as saying.
However, as Russia has repeatedly emphasized, arming Ukraine is only serving to prolong the conflict, and will not alter the outcome on the battlefield. Furthermore, Moscow has long drawn attention to the fact that pumping the Kiev regime up with weapons "will result in their falling onto the black market and into the hands of organized crime and terrorists."