In the context of recent events in the Middle East, Milley said that he saw support from his counterparts at the meeting for NATO to be more involved in the region. He spoke about the importance of the Military Committee to provide ballistic missile defense support, given that “there are NATO-allied troops at these various camps [in the Middle East] that just took Iranian ballistic missiles.”
“Right now, the NATO mission in Iraq is somewhere around 500 guys,” Milley said. “It’s a noncombat train, advise, assist role ... building [Iraqi] capacity to secure themselves. The United States still thinks, and NATO still thinks that’s a valid mission and will continue that mission. We have no intention of not continuing that mission.”
In the fight against international terrorism, NATO currently conducts training missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a member of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. NATO scaled up its training and advising efforts in Iraq at the Iraqi government’s request after ISIS was largely stamped out of the country in late 2017.NATO Mission Iraq (NMI) was later established in October 2018, after three years of war against ISIS. NMI is a non-combat “train-and-advise” and capacity-building mission that seeks to strengthen Iraqi security forces and Iraqi military training institutions so that Iraqi forces can independently prevent the return of the ISIS terrorist group and help to stabilize the country. NMI includes up to several hundred trainers, advisers, and support staff from the 29 allied nations as well as non-NATO partners such as Australia, Sweden, and Finland.
Milley pointed out that NATO was put in place at the end of World War II to prevent another great power war and maintain peace. However, he noted that it appears that Russia wants to divide and weaken NATO.
“That would be to their advantage,” he said. “It’s to the disadvantage of Europe and the United States if NATO would just collapse and fall apart.”
