General Mark Milley in combat fatigues walking the streets of Washington

General Mark Milley who is a very serious sort of bloke and a tough cookie as chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff has made a big mistake. He was photographed wandering around the streets of Washington yesterday dressed in combat fatigues. Well he is a general, so why not? The answer is obvious: everything right now is so political in Washington you can smell it in the air, and to see the top military man in combat fatigues out in public for all to see sends only one message and that is - the president's general is in combat mode, like his boss, and wearing his combat gear underlines the point that the capital of the United States is currently under siege and the military is the answer to everything. Thus, a unit from the 82nd Airborne Division's immediate responsive force is sent to the outskirts of Washington ready to be rushed into the capital. That was confirmed by the Pentagon yesterday evening The walkabout by General Milley thus looked like a recce from the top man. I suspect he will live to regret that. And of course it was made even worse when both General Milley and Mark Esper, the US defence secretary, were caught up in the Trump special manoeuvre on Tuesday evening, clearing the front of the White House of protestors with armed National Guard troops and unbelievably armed Secret Servicemen with giant sniper rifles so that the president could carry out a Bible-holding photo opportunity outside nearby St John's Episcopal church which had been damaged in the violent protests. Milley and Esper were there as it happened. Disastrous public relations for the Pentagon, the military and in particular the army. Milley made it clear he didn't know what was happening when it was happening, implying he would have avoided it like the plague if he had known in advance what Trump was planning to do. Esper, rather pathetically, said in an NBC TV interview that no one told him where they were all going in the company of the president. He had thought he was going to see troops and the damage caused by protesters. "I didn't know where I was going," Esper said. Oh dear, that didn't sound good. Trump's insistence on calling in active-duty troops to be ready for service in the capital was wholly political and as a result both Esper and Milley have been swallowed up in the political furore that has followed the president's decision. The desperate backtracking by Esper and Milley hasn't really helped and certainly won't have pleased Trump. Only the day before Esper had been calling on governors to "dominate the battlespace" in America's cities, and I can't believe that went down well inside the Pentagon. The Pentagon is supposed to be an apolitical department, and the military chiefs are supposed to keep well clear of political issues. Something went seriously wrong this week.