Fact Check: NOT Accurate That Joint Chiefs Of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley 'Never Served In Combat' -- Pentagon Provides Proof

Fact Check

  • by: Kaiyah Clarke
Fact Check: NOT Accurate That Joint Chiefs Of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley 'Never Served In Combat' -- Pentagon Provides Proof Pentagon Bio

Has U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "never served in combat"? No, that's not true: A publicly available profile of Milley lists his numerous operational deployments over the past several decades.

The claim appeared in a post on Instagram on February 8, 2023. The caption read:

Anyone??

The text above a photo of Milley in uniform asked:

Can someone explain to me how a man who never served in combat and never won a war has THIS many medals on his uniform?

This is how the post looked on Instagram at the time of writing:

Mark Milley no service combat image .png

(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Thur Feb 9 20:08:25 2023 UTC)

The claim is from the account @truenorthpolitics, whose posts Lead Stories has previously debunked.

In an email to Lead Stories on February 8, 2023, a duty officer from the Pentagon press office shared Milley's biography from the U.S. Department of Defense website. It lists his many operational deployments as well as his educational background in international relations and national security:

General Milley's operational deployments include the Multi-National Force and Observers, Sinai, Egypt; Operation Just Cause, Panama; Operation Uphold Democracy, Haiti; Operation Joint Endeavor, Bosnia-Herzegovina; Operation Iraqi Freedom, Iraq; and three tours during Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan. He also deployed to Somalia and Colombia.

In addition to his bachelor's degree in political science from Princeton University, General Milley has a master's degree in international relations from Columbia University and one from the U.S. Naval War College in national security and strategic studies. He is also a graduate of the MIT Seminar XXI National Security Studies Program.

His profile on the Association of the United States Army website also includes an in-depth list of his deployments as well as his awards and decorations.

U.S. armed services members receive awards according to "a specific time frame to recognize a past or ongoing conflict" and the location of that conflict, according to an April 22, 2021, National Archives article titled "Recognizing Service: How to Determine Entitlement to Medals." Foreign awards also may be authorized.

Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning the True North Politics Instagram account and Milley can be found here and here.

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Kaiyah Clarke

Kaiyah Clarke is a fact-checker at Lead Stories. She is a graduate of Florida A&M University with a B.S. in Broadcast Journalism and is currently pursuing an M.S. in Journalism. When she is not fact-checking or researching counter-narratives in society, she is often found reading a book on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Read more about or contact Kaiyah Clarke

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion