Gen. Michael A. Minihan, lauded by hawks in Congress, has disturbed some in the Pentagon with his fiery prognostications of a looming conflict with China.
Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan speaks to a journalist at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on July 9, 2023.
This profile of Minihan, 56, is based on interviews with the general and 11 others, including members of his staff and Pentagon officials. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer frank assessments of how Minihan’s candor has affected views of him.At his headquarters in Illinois, Minihan said he “wasn’t being cutesy” with his bellicose memo but stressed that it was meant for an internal Air Force audience, not public consumption.
The general took charge of Air Mobility Command two months after the haphazard U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan, in which the Air Force’s fleet of C-17 jets and the airmen who flew them were pushed to the brink of exhaustion. While they saved 124,000 people from Taliban subjugation, 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghans were killed in a suicide bombing just outside the international airport in Kabul. Bearing witness to the carnage and desperation left some of his airmen struggling, he said.
“When you are put in situations where you are facing the realities of the gap of what you have versus what you wish you had, that gap is filled with courage and tenacity,” Minihan said in the interview. “And preparing our team to fill that gap on enormous scale is critically important.”It is this mind-set that appears to have influenced the general’s grab-you-by-the-lapels style.
“If this comes across as harsh, good,” Minihan wrote. “We are not looking for blue skies or smooth air. We are looking to deliver.”Weeks later, Minihan’s memo predicting war within China drew international attention. He ordered airmen to get their personal affairs in order and to “fire a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.
Minihan’s approach has had impact within an organization that spent the last 20 years flying cargo planes to and from war zones where the airspace was largely uncontested, the general’s staff said. Minihan often makes the point that in any conflict with China, which has developed a sophisticated arsenal of missiles, those lumbering planes would be at much greater risk of coming under attack.
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