WASHINGTON
\nGen. Mark Milley stepped down on Friday after a tumultuous term as the top US military officer that saw him face repeated crises abroad and on the home front, where he served through the chaotic final months of the Trump presidency.
\nThe Pentagon put on an elaborate farewell ceremony at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, attended by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and President Joe Biden.
\nHe was to be replaced as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by Air Force General Charles \u201cCQ\u201d Brown \u2014 the second African American to hold the top military job.
\nA barrel-chested army veteran of countless foreign deployments and high-level command posts, Milley served in uniform for four decades.
\nBut he faced his highest-stakes challenge when Donald Trump appointed him in 2019 to the career pinnacle as senior officer reporting directly to the White House.
\nDuring a four-year term \u2014 continuing under Biden from 2021 \u2014 Milley managed the harrowing exit of US troops from Afghanistan, special forces operations in Syria, and the enormous program to assist Ukraine\u2019s desperate fight against Russian onslaught.
\nAs chairman, \u201cit was one crisis right after another,\u201d said Milley last month.
\nMilley\u2019s years at the top, however, also saw the military dragged into the center of increasingly raucous cultural battles on the domestic political front.
\nWhile the Biden administration has pressed for changes including renaming bases named after Confederate leaders in the Civil War, senior Republicans have repeatedly lashed out at what they claim are \u201cwoke\u201d leftist policies in the ranks.
\nAnd that was nothing compared to the precarious situation Milley found himself in during the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2020 presidential election \u2014 in which Trump, in an unprecedented political nightmare for the United States, refused to accept defeat.
\nAt the height of tensions after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Milley secretly called his Chinese counterpart to reassure Beijing that the United States remained \u201cstable\u201d and had no intention to attack China, according to the book \u201cPeril,\u201d by Bob Woodward.
\nThat revelation has caused lasting fury for Trump, who just this month wrote on his social media network that \u201cin times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!\u201d for Milley.
\nThe barely veiled threat from Trump \u2014 the clear frontrunner to be the Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election -\u2014 prompted Milley to take \u201cappropriate measures\u201d for his safety, he told CBS News.
\nBiden lashed out on Thursday during a speech at Trump\u2019s \u201cheinous statements\u201d and attacked the \u201cdeafening\u201d silence from Trump\u2019s fellow Republicans on the threat.
\nMilley\u2019s replacement, chosen by Biden, will become the second Black top Joint Chiefs officer after Colin Powell. Austin, meanwhile, is the country\u2019s first Black secretary of defense. Brown \u2014 who officially takes the reins from Milley at midnight (0400 GMT) on Saturday \u2014 was commissioned as a US Air Force officer in 1984 and is an experienced pilot with more than 3,000 flight hours, 130 of them in combat.
\nBrown, known to most as \u201cCQ,\u201d even once survived ejecting from an F-16 during training over Florida.
\nHe has commanded a fighter squadron and two fighter wings, as well as US air forces under the Central Command and Indo-Pacific Command, and served as chief of staff of the Air Force.
\nFollowing the 2020 murder of Black man George Floyd by a white police officer in Minnesota, Brown recorded an emotional video about his personal experiences, including with discrimination in the American military.
\nHe said he felt pressure to \u201cperform error-free,\u201d and worked \u201ctwice as hard\u201d to prove wrong those who expected less of him because of his race.
\nBrown\u2019s nomination was one of more than 300 stalled by a dispute over Pentagon policies that assist troops who must travel to receive reproductive health care that is unavailable where they are stationed.
\nA single Republican senator who opposes those efforts has been preventing lawmakers from quickly approving senior military nominees in groups, and Brown was only confirmed in time through an individual vote on his nomination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON Gen. Mark Milley stepped down on Friday after a tumultuous term as the top US military officer that saw him face repeated crises abroad and on the home front, where he served through the chaotic final months of the Trump presidency. The Pentagon put on an elaborate farewell ceremony at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359219,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-359203","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n