With a parting shot at his former boss Donald Trump, General Mark Milley resigned as the top US military official on Friday. He said that no soldier had ever taken an oath to serve a "wannabe dictator."

On his final day as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley delivered a shocking reprimand that perfectly exemplified how the US military has been drawn into the increasingly combustible political landscape since the Trump administration.

Milley did not specifically mention Trump during a lavish military ceremony for his leaving, but it was clear who he was criticizing. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and President Joe Biden were both present.

Milley remarked of American soldiers "We don't take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant, or a dictator." And we don't swear an oath to a would-be autocrat.

Air Force General Charles "CQ" Brown, the second African American to hold the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will take Milley's place.

Milley, a barrel-chested army veteran with four decades of service, has held numerous high-level leadership positions and numerous foreign deployments.

But he had his most difficult task when Trump gave him the career apex position of senior military advisor to the president in 2019.

Milley oversaw the daunting withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, special operations in Syria, and a sizable program to support Ukraine in its valiant struggle against Russian invasion during a four-year term that will continue under Biden starting in 2021.

Crisis after crisis

Milley told AFP last month that during his tenure as chairman, "it was one crisis after another."

However, under Milley's tenure at the head, the military became embroiled in an unusually high number of politicized incidents.

Senior Republicans have regularly attacked what they allege are "woke" leftist practices inside the ranks, even as the Biden administration has pushed for measures such as renaming bases named after Confederate generals in the Civil War.

And even that was not as dangerous as the delicate predicament Milley was in before and after the 2020 presidential election, when Trump, in a first-ever political nightmare for the United States, refused to concede loss.

According to the book "Peril" by Bob Woodward, at the height of the crisis following the invasion of the US Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021, Milley discreetly called his Chinese counterpart to reassure Beijing that the US was "stable" and had no intention of attacking China.

With AFP