Prologue PROLOGUE Two days after the January 6, 2021, violent assault on the United States Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, General Mark Milley, the nation''s senior military officer and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed an urgent call on a top secret, back-channel line at 7:03 a.m. to his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuocheng, chief of the Joint Staff of the People''s Liberation Army. Milley knew from extensive reports that Li and the Chinese leadership were stunned and disoriented by the televised images of the unprecedented attack on the American legislature. Li fired off questions to Milley. Was the American superpower unstable? Collapsing? What was going on? Was the U.S. military going to do something? "Things may look unsteady," Milley said, trying to calm Li, whom he had known for five years.
"But that''s the nature of democracy, General Li. We are 100 percent steady. Everything''s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes." It took an hour and a half--45 minutes of substance due to the necessary use of interpreters--to try to assure him. When Milley hung up, he was convinced the situation was grave. Li remained unusually rattled, putting the two nations on the knife-edge of disaster. The Chinese already were on high alert about U.
S. intentions. On October 30, four days before the presidential election, sensitive intelligence showed that the Chinese believed the U.S. was plotting to secretly attack them. The Chinese thought that Trump in desperation would create a crisis, present himself as the savior, and use the gambit to win reelection. Milley knew the Chinese assertion that the U.S.
was planning a secret strike was preposterous. He had then called General Li on the same back channel to persuade the Chinese to cool down. He invoked their long-standing relationship and insisted the U.S. was not planning an attack. At the time, he believed he had been successful in placating Li, who would pass the message to Chinese president Xi Jinping. But now, two months later, on January 8, it was evident China''s fears had only been intensified by the insurrection. "We don''t understand the Chinese," Milley told senior staff, "and the Chinese don''t understand us.
" That was dangerous in itself. But there was more. Milley had witnessed up close how Trump was routinely impulsive and unpredictable. Making matters even more dire, Milley was certain Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies. The scenes of a screaming Trump in the Oval Office resembled Full Metal Jacket , the 1987 movie featuring a Marine gunnery sergeant who viciously rages at recruits with dehumanizing obscenities. "You never know what a president''s trigger point is," Milley told senior staff. When might events and pressures come together to cause a president to order military action? In making the president the commander in chief of the military, a tremendous concentration of power in one person, the Constitution gave the president the authority single-handedly to employ the armed forces as he chose. Milley believed that Trump did not want a war, but he certainly was willing to launch military strikes as he had done in Iran, Somalia, Yemen and Syria.
"I continually reminded him," Milley said, "depending on where and what you strike, you could find yourself in a war." While the public''s attention was on the domestic political fallout from the Capitol riot, Milley privately recognized the U.S. had been thrust into a new period of extraordinary risk internationally. It was precisely the kind of hair-trigger environment where an accident or misinterpretation could escalate catastrophically. It was all unfolding fast and out of public view, which in some ways resembled the tensions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 when the U.S. and the Soviet Union almost went to war.
Milley, 62, a former Princeton hockey player, burly and ramrod straight at 5-foot-9, did not know what China would do next. But he did know, after 39 years in the Army and many bloody combat tours, that an adversary was the most dangerous when they were frightened and believed they might be attacked. If an adversary like China ever desired, he said, "They could choose to do what''s called a ''first-move advantage'' or a ''Pearl Harbor,'' and conduct a strike." The Chinese were investing in a sweeping expansion of their military to almost superpower status. Just 16 months earlier at a stunning military parade in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, President Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, had said there is "no force that can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation forging ahead." The Chinese also revealed their latest "game changing" weapon, a hypersonic missile that could travel at five times the speed of sound. Milley told senior staff, "There are capabilities in cyber or in space where you could do some really significant damage to a large, industrial complex society like the United States and you could do that very, very quickly through some very powerful tools that are out there. China is building all of these capabilities.
" China was also aggressively staging war games and sending military planes daily toward the island of Taiwan, the independent offshore nation that China considered theirs and the U.S. had pledged to protect. The previous year, General Li had announced that China would "resolutely smash" Taiwan if necessary. Taiwan alone was a powder keg. In the South China Sea, China was on the march like never before, placing military bases on man-made islands, aggressively and, at times with breathtaking risk, challenging U.S. naval ships in important global shipping lanes.
Upcoming U.S. Navy Freedom of Navigation exercises around Taiwan and the South China Sea, and a U.S. Air Force bomber exercise, deeply worried Milley. Such simulated attacks duplicated war conditions as much as possible and were often macho, goading endeavors, with U.S. naval ships deliberately, at high speeds, challenging China''s claims on internationally recognized territorial waters.
Infuriated, Chinese captains frequently tried to push the U.S. ships off course by closely following or darting in front of them. Due to the size of the ships, any quick turns were inherently dangerous--accidents waiting to happen that could precipitate a disastrous chain reaction. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the highest-ranking military officer in the armed forces and principal military adviser to the president. By law, the chairman''s role is one of oversight and adviser. The chairman is not in the chain of command. But in practice, the post is one of enormous power and influence held by some of the most iconic figures in military history, including Generals Omar Bradley, Maxwell Taylor and Colin Powell.
Shortly after speaking with General Li on January 8, Milley called Admiral Philip Davidson, the U.S. commander of the Indo-Pacific Command that oversees China, on a secure line. Phil, Milley said, reminding him that as chairman he was not a commander. "I can''t tell you what to do. But you might reconsider those exercises right now. Given what''s going on in the United States, that could be considered provocative by the Chinese." Davidson immediately postponed the exercises.
The planned operations potentially had echoes of a similar 1980s incident when leaders in the then-Soviet Union believed the U.S. and the United Kingdom were going to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. A NATO military exercise called ABLE ARCHER greatly magnified those Soviet suspicions. Robert Gates, later the CIA director and defense secretary, said, "the most terrifying thing about ABLE ARCHER was that we may have been at the brink of nuclear war." It was that brink that worried Milley. He was living in it. China was, by far, the most sensitive and dangerous relationship in American foreign policy.
But U.S. intelligence showed the January 6 riot had not only stirred up China but caused Russia, Iran, as well as other nations to go on high alert to monitor the American military and political events in the United States. "Half the world was friggin nervous," Milley said. Many countries were ramping up their military operating tempo and cueing spy satellites. The Chinese already had their Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) satellites looking intently to see if the U.S. was doing anything erratic or unusual or preparing to conduct any kind of military operation.
Milley was now on full alert every waking moment, monitoring space, cyber operations, missile firings, ship, air and ground movements, and intelligence operations. He had secure phones in nearly every room of Quarters 6, the chairman''s residence at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Virginia, that would connect him instantly to the Pentagon war room, the White House, or combatant commanders throughout the world. Milley told his service chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines--the Joint Chiefs--to watch everything "all the time.".