/ world today news/ Each chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Army has his own war. Mark Milley got the war with Russia in Ukraine. If Congress approves Charles Brown, he may have to fight the Celestial Empire for Taiwan.
In September, the four-year term of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces, General Mark Milley, who can be considered the developer of the strategy for the war in Ukraine, because the commander in chief of the armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, is most likely a figurehead.
And since a holy place cannot be empty, his successor has already been appointed – General Charles Brown.
The contender is 61 years old, from a family of hereditary military, he was recruited in 1984. After becoming a fighter pilot, he flew 2,900 hours, 130 of which were on combat missions.
In 2009, Charles Brown, as commander of the 31st Fighter Wing at the US Air Force base in Italy, received a general’s epaulettes. From 2013 to 2018, he held various leadership positions in Air Force Central Corps, which is responsible for operations in 27 countries from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia.
In July 2018, Charles Brown assumed the post of Commander of US Pacific Air Forces. In this position, he became a four-star general, and in 2020 he moved to the position of Chief of Staff of the Air Force and took a corresponding position on the Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces.
In this position, Charles Brown continued the policy of the previous Air Force Commander, who believed that obsolete aircraft should be urgently retired so that they could concentrate on modern models to counter the rapidly modernizing Chinese Air Force.
So Brown has decided to phase out aging aircraft — such as the F-15 fighter jet, the A-10 attack jet and some transport aircraft — within five to six years.
In 2021, General Brown introduced the “Accelerate Change or Lose It” program, which was supposed to focus on additional aircrew training and methods to encourage them to stay in the service, so that combat pilots do not rush to flee to civil aviation.
Fighting bureaucracy is the second element of Charles Brown’s program, which aims to speed up decision-making processes.
As General Brown himself said, as commander of Pacific Air Forces, he gained a deeper understanding of China’s military capabilities and ambitions. Therefore, “competition”, within which it is expected to increase the level of cultural and technical understanding of the enemy, as well as ideas about his mentality, is the third element of his declared program.
The final element is the “reimagining” of the Air Force, which will be defined by the latest technologies that deliver air superiority. Meanwhile, John Venable, a defense policy expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, notes that Charles Brown has not been aggressive enough to “challenge entrenched patterns in the Air Force and make significant changes in preparation for a potential war.”
Instead, Brown is said to have routinely funneled money into research and development of weapons of the future that likely won’t enter service until 2030, and that may be too late.
“He’s a corporate guy who goes with the flow,” says John Venable.
Here, however, it should be borne in mind that the center of the Heritage Foundation is close to the Republican Party, and Charles Brown painted himself politically in the colors of the Democratic Party when, in 2020, amid protests against the killing of the African-American George Floyd by the police, he recorded a video message about how he “had a hard time serving in the military as an African-American.”
That this address had a political connotation leaves no doubt, for Charles Brown records it not as a private individual but as an army general in military uniform. At the same time, the tenets of his statement were perfectly consistent with the mainstream narratives put forward by the US Democratic Party about the entrenched racism in American society.
Here it is necessary to specify that according to the unwritten rules, the American army should apparently be outside of politics, but, as practice shows, this is not a fact – the American army is actively politicized. At least there was no negative reaction to Charles Brown’s call from either the public or the Army community.
Thus, we can again note the tendency to involve the army in the internal political struggle in the USA, which may develop with the arrival of Charles Brown.
In November 2020, General Brown initiated a Diversity and Inclusion Task Force and organized a review of racial and gender disparity in promotions. The following year, the task force was reorganized into the first-ever “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Division” within Air Force Human Resources.
According to Charles Brown, the issue of diversity is brought to the fore in staffing decisions.
“In some cases in the past, people were almost afraid to mention that you didn’t have diverse candidates on the slates, you didn’t have an African-American, an Asian, a woman. Now they must be listed and accounted for. As an agency and as a nation, we must be more diverse than ever before,” General Brown said.
As the military’s push for a left-leaning program of racial discrimination and inclusion in the military faces sharp criticism from Republicans for taking away soldiers’ ability to fight, some are predicting trouble for Charles Brown when they vote for his congressional bid.
Assessing the personality of Charles Brown in the context of the conflict in Ukraine, it should be noted that as early as the summer of 2022, he said that the US was ready to train Ukrainian pilots, but did not specify what types of aircraft:
“I really think we have the opportunity and the responsibility, like all our allies and partners, to be ready to educate Ukrainians. This is part of where Ukraine wants to go and we will welcome them.”
It is worth saying that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, even now does not see the expediency of transferring modern fighters to Ukraine, he believes that it has no air defense.
As early as November 2022, the New York Times reported that there were disagreements between US officials and the military over the continuation of hostilities in Ukraine. According to the newspaper, Mark Milley believes that Kiev has already achieved maximum success and therefore these achievements should be consolidated through diplomacy by concluding some agreements with Russia, but not everyone agrees with his point of view.
Already in 2023, Mark Milley stated that Ukraine will not be able to return the lost territories by military means in the short term.
Charles Brown, as far as can be told, is of a different opinion. It follows that this is a careerist who is in the mainstream of the US left political agenda. And it is unlikely that he should be expected to make decisions that in any way deviate from the position of the White House.
Moreover, one should hardly expect fundamental assessments from General Brown, which Mark Milley did not spare in a recent interview with Foreign Affairs.
It is now clear that General Brown’s candidacy for the post of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially given his experience in the Pacific, reflects a shift in US focus to a confrontation with China, where the Air Force must play a key role.
If we talk about the conflict in Ukraine, then Charles Brown made it clear that he is ready to meet the demands of the Kiev regime, he does not draw red lines on this issue. Therefore, it is possible that if General Brown is appointed, Ukraine will have the latest types of weapons as early as 2023.
Translation: SM
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