The top US military officer told lawmakers Tuesday that the world is becoming more unstable and the “potential for significant international conflict is increasing, not decreasing.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appeared before the House Armed Services Committee in their first testimony before Congress since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The two Pentagon leaders said the threats from both Russia and China remain significant, while they defended the US approach to the war and the flow of arms the US is sending to Ukraine. Milley said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is “the greatest threat to peace and security of Europe and perhaps the world” in his 42 years serving in the US military, but added it was “heartening” to see the world rally around Ukraine. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine is threatening to undermine not only European peace and stability but global peace and stability that my parents and a generation of Americans fought so hard to defend,” Milley said.
“We are now facing two global powers: China and Russia, each with significant military capabilities both who intend to fundamentally change the rules based current global order,” Milley added. “We are entering a world that is becoming more unstable and the potential for significant international conflict is increasing, not decreasing.”
Lawmakers in both parties focused at the hearing on the weapons that were being provided to Ukraine, asking whether more could be done as Ukraine has continued to ask for additional capabilities. “One of the biggest questions we’re going to have in this committee is, ‘How can we do more?'” House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith, a Washington state Democrat, said at the top of the hearing. “How can we make sure we’re doing absolutely everything we can to help them?” Austin said that NATO was still discussing how it should bolster its permanent presence in eastern Europe. “If NATO deems that it’s appropriate to change its footprint, then certainly we’ll be a part of that,” Austin said. “Candidly, short of the commitment of US military forces into Ukraine proper, I’m not sure he was deterrable. This has been a long-term objective of his that goes back years,” Milley said. “I think the idea of deterring Putin from invading Ukraine, deterring him by the United States, would have required the commitment of US military forces, and I think that would have risked armed conflict with Russia, which I certainly wouldn’t have advised.”
Milley noted that sanctions “have a very poor track record of deterring aggression,” but said they have succeeded in imposing significant costs to Russia for its aggression.
“The objective of the sanctions is to impose significant costs if he invaded, those significant costs, the sanctions in combination with the export controls, are breaking the back of the Russian economy as we speak,” he said. Gaetz charged that the Pentagon “got it wrong” by predicting that Russia would overrun Ukraine within days and that the Taliban would not take control of Afghanistan last year. “You totally blew those calls and maybe we would be better at them if the National Defense University actually worked a little more on strategy and a little less on wokeism,” Gaetz said. NN: Putin never had any intention of overrunning the Ukraine. He just wants to strike fear and terror in the populations of all former Soviet states. He is going to bomb the Ukraine into the dark ages and leave Europe to clean up the mess.