Gen. Mark Milley has made headlines during his tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for unplanned remarks that sometimes place him at odds with the Biden administration. But with Milley set to retire later this year, President Biden is expected to nominate a successor — Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown — who, according to reporting, is unlikely to follow in those footsteps, while being a good steward of the Pentagon's ongoing pursuit of great power competition.
Although Brown, according to a Politico report last month, “is someone who is not known for making news, and typically sticks closely to the talking points during public appearances and press engagements,” he has made occasional statements over the last few years that offer indications of how he will approach important issues.
Brown’s expected nomination comes at a time when the United States is confronting numerous geopolitical challenges, and the current Air Force chief of staff has military experience in a number of foreign theaters that will likely be highly relevant to his new job, if he is nominated and confirmed.
Prior to assuming his current position in August 2020, Brown served as commander of the Pacific Air Forces, giving him experience in China, which an unnamed U.S. government official told the New York Times was a “key factor” in Biden’s decision at a time when many in Washington are concerned about Beijing’s rise and the potential for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
He also has experience in the Middle East as the deputy director of CENTCOM, and in Europe, where he served as director of operations for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.
To date, Brown’s most public remarks and testimony in front of Congress have been restricted to questions concerning the Air Force, and he has not been very vocal about his broader policy views. He has, however, consistently embraced the organizing principle of great power competition, following the lead of both the Trump and Biden Pentagons.
In both his written testimony and at a hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services committee before assuming his current position, Brown repeatedly emphasized his commitment to the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the Trump-era document that officially stated that competition with Russia and China, and not counterterrorism, was the primary national security concern.
In his 2020 booklet laying out his plans as Air Force Chief of Staff, titled “Accelerate Change or Lose,” Brown argued that the U.S. position as an unrivaled air power can no longer be taken for granted.
“Competitors, especially China, have made and continue aggressive efforts to negate long-enduring U.S. warfighting advantages and challenge the United States’ interests and geopolitical position," he wrote. "While the Nation was focused on countering violent extremist organizations, our competitors focused on defeating us."
In a CNN interview last July, Brown said that concentrating on the Middle East over the last 30 years has come at expense of strategic competition with China, saying that if the U.S. is not able to respond to evolving challenges quickly, his “concern is, we will wake up one day and be in a position where we're not in the position we want to be in, and there is potential to lose. And that's a real possibility.”
Brown has nonetheless emphasized the importance of maintaining close ties with allies and partners in the Middle East, recently traveling to Qatar, the UAE, and Jordan. And, like many in Washington, he has spoken about engagement elsewhere in the world — including the Middle East, South America, Africa, and the Arctic — through the lens of competition with Moscow and Beijing.
Brown compared today's competition with Beijing to the Cold War during a podcast interview last month. “The more we understand not only the threat itself but how they operate, how they make their decisions, that is a value in understanding how you might do deterrence,” he said.
“Having started my career during the Cold War, when we really understood the Soviet Union, we gotta get to that same level of thought process,” added. In an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2021, Brown declared: “Preparing our airmen to understand what it means to compete against China, our pacing challenge, is now an Air Force imperative and the culture change we seek.”
In 2021, Mark Perry reported in Responsible Statecraft that Brown was already in line to replace Milley. At the time, a civilian Pentagon observer remarked “he’s an Asia-Pacific guy who served there as commander of the U.S. Pacific Air Force. His appointment will calm down the China hawks.”
But more recently, Brown notably disagreed with comments from Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan, who said that he expected China to invade Taiwan in 2025. Brown complained that those kinds of remarks were “not necessarily helpful” and “takes away from what we're really trying to get to do,” since ultimately a war should not be viewed as inevitable and a goal for U.S. policy should be to avoid it.
In terms of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Brown has remained mostly tight-lipped, though he did make headlines last summer for comments suggesting that the U.S. Air Force could train their Ukrainian counterparts and naming the types of aircraft Ukraine might eventually receive.
During the July interview with CNN, Brown said that the ideal, long-term solution in Ukraine would be “cessation of hostilities,” though he did not elaborate on the best path to getting there, and said that based on his experience, it would be more of an intermediate “waypoint” than an end game.
When it comes to defense spending, Brown has similarly hewed to the Biden administration’s line. In recent congressional hearings, he has assured lawmakers that Biden’s proposed defense budget — with a topline of $842 billion — is well designed to support the Air Force’s goals in preparing for a potential conflict with China.
During his tenure as Air Force chief of staff, Brown’s mantra of “accelerate change or lose” has largely meant investing in the next generation of planes while getting rid of older platforms, all in the name of competing with China and Russia. He’s been a big booster of the controversial F-35 program and the Next Generation Air Dominance program, which aims to design the F-35’s sixth-generation successor.
In a recent Brookings Institution talk, he urged Congress to pass a defense budget on time in order to ensure no gap in funding for cutting-edge projects currently in development. “I would really not like to see a continuing resolution, particularly a yearlong continuing resolution, because all we do is give our adversaries a year to move forward,” Brown said.
When asked about potential cuts to defense spending, he dodged the question but noted that, regardless of the top-line spending, “we've got tough decisions to make” on what programs to invest in. (It’s worth noting that, as Michael Klare recently wrote in TomDispatch, Biden’s proposed budget sets aside $145 billion for future weapons development, which is more than nearly any other country’s total military budget and would amount to half of China’s total defense outlays.)
Brown’s innovation-focused approach has made him friends among defense-focused leaders in Silicon Valley, which he has visited multiple times since taking over as the top uniformed leader in the Air Force. But some say that a 'move fast and break things' mentality could do more harm than good when applied to the military.
Take the A-10 Warthog. Brown has been a forceful advocate for retiring the 1970s-era plane, which has long served as the Air Force’s primary workhorse in close air support for ground forces. But some experts worry that the Pentagon has yet to come up with a credible successor for the Warthog, creating a potential gap in U.S. capabilities.
“It's concerning to see the Air Force kind of wiggle its way out of a capability that's a crucial component of the joint force,” Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight told Responsible Statecraft. “It makes me question his commitment to providing capabilities for the total force.”
While Brown and his allies contend that the F-35 could take over this role, Grazier says there is no evidence that the cutting-edge plane would be more effective. He also noted that F-35 pilots are not being trained for close air support, making it more difficult for them to take on the complex fighting role.
A 2018 Air Force test was supposed to settle the debate over which plane would be more effective in close air support, but the service has shown little interest in releasing the results. (Citing conversations with “people directly involved in the tests,” Grazier said the A-10 proved to be “vastly more effective” than the F-35.)
It is unclear when exactly Biden will officially announce the nomination. Milley’s four-year term as chairman will expire in September. After Trump announced his plan to nominate Milley months earlier than expected, Biden has indicated that he wants to return to a more “normal” timeline. Milley’s predecessor, Joseph Dunford, was nominated on May 15, 2015.
