5 Distinct Qualities of an American Soldier
Chris Miller has spent his adult life in the crosshairs of America’s most dangerous enemies and emerged as one of the leading national security minds of his generation. Needless to say, he has some incredibly harrowing stories of missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he shares in his book Soldier Secretary. Here are a few of his own reflections on what makes up the quintessential American soldier.
1. Agency & Individualism
Generations of military leaders have created a culture that embraces the free will of the individual soldier. It is uniformly the attribute that has enabled our tactical battlefield successes over the centuries. When everything is going wrong and the day seems lost, individual soldiers, without prompting, step forward and get the job done.
2. Emotional Complexities
Combat is the most visceral and unambiguous of human activities and, as such, is driven by the vagaries of human emotion—fear, anger, hate, compassion, unpredictability. No computer or algorithm can model it or decide its outcomes. Artificial intelligence is incapable of replicating the vicissitudes and complexity of the human heart and brain.
3. Awareness & Leadership
You have to know where you are, where you are going, and the state of everyone on the team. And above all, you have to keep them moving. You become the enemy within, the one forcing everyone to continue on what they increasingly believe is a death march.
4. Toughness & Grit
In the military, stress becomes hardwired into your cerebral cortex. It’s always there, and you either learn to live with it, or you don’t live. And you sure as hell don’t run away when you’ve got a job to do.
5. Innovation & Strategy
Our nation was founded by fighting irregularly. We turned the British Army’s strengths—disciplined, large military forces with the latest technology and dominance of the sea—against them. Innovation, deception, wiliness, and flexibility of thought and action, undergirded by a physical and mental toughness, were our competitive advantages and created America.
President Trump’s last secretary of defense shares harrowing stories of missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, gives an “important” insider look at the tumultuous final days of the administration, and issues a stark warning about the readiness of the military under President Biden (Sean Hannity).
If you know one thing about Chris Miller, it’s that he was President Donald Trump’s final Secretary of Defense, elevated to that position in the days after the 2020 election. If you know a second thing about Chris Miller, it’s that he oversaw the U.S. Armed Forces during one of the most controversial and tumultuous periods the military has experienced in decades, culminating in the shocking events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Yet Chris Miller is no political partisan. On the contrary, Miller has spent his adult life in the crosshairs of America’s most dangerous enemies–from Middle Eastern deserts to the bowels of U.S. intelligence agencies–and emerged as one of the leading national security minds of his generation.Needless to say, Chris Miller has stories to tell. In Soldier Secretary, he reveals for the first time everything he saw–in a book that is candid, thought-provoking, and like that of no Secretary of Defense before him. This book is not just the inside story of what happened during the Trump administration–it’s the inside story of what happened to America, its military, and its institutions during the two decades after September 11, 2001.
Part badass, part iconoclast, Miller is an irreverent, heterodox, and always-fascinating thinker whose personal journey through war and the White House has led him to some shocking conclusions about the state of American power in 2021. With a perspective that will surprise and interest both Republicans and Democrats, Miller argues for a radical rethinking of U.S. national security strategy unlike anything since the creation of the joint armed forces in the 1980s. He offers a roadmap for how the United States can win in the era of unrestricted warfare by shedding the bloated defense bureaucracy, bringing American forces home from endless conflicts, renewing our national unity, and beating China at its own game.
Miller is a true American warrior whose incredible journey from Iowa to Afghanistan to Iraq to the White House endeared him to the troops, prepared him for the unprecedented crisis of January 6, and left him deeply concerned about the future of our military and the future of our nation.