Leaderboard

Soooo, the Chinese flu literally almost killed me earlier this summer. I didn't think I was especially at risk as, although I'm in my late 50s, I wasn't overweight, didn't have any known complicating factors, etc., etc. Was not vaccinated because A) I remember the anthrax fiasco from before and B) wanted a fully approved FDA vaccine in place before getting the shot(s). Although I retired last year, I actually started work again as a GS again because I was bored and a buddy asked me to apply. Was only in the saddle for a month when I got sick after going TDY. Two weeks of hospitalization included two periods of the question on whether I would continue to breathe or not. Turns out that the pneumonia I had 25 years ago doesn't go away, it just nurses its' drink in the corner of my lungs until the friendly Chinese hooker named Covid shows up and wants to party and things got out of control... I never understood the part when terminally ill patients just give up - we are trained in the "will to survive" thing at SERE and as part of being alive. Now I do. I have never been that utterly exhausted/tired/just wanted it to stop and hope to never again. I was fine if the light turned out permanently. 13L/min of O2. Essentially pressure breathing in order for enough oxygen to get in me to keep me alive. I recount the melodrama above because after I got out of the hospital, ol' Joe decides he's king and says I got to get vaccinated. Even though the vaccine doesn't prevent the virus, has noted/documented side-effects, and, this is the important part, I ALREADY HAD THE VIRUS AND RECOVERED. My body is swimming in antibodies. My lung specialist says not to get said vaccine for at least a year as I am likely to have a severe reaction and my lungs, already now f'd because of this, wouldn't take kindly to another CCP orgy. But that's not good enough. So I thoroughly enjoyed quitting. F' the Man. Fortunately, I'm in a position to do so. Please note that nothing written has been put out by the President so legal challenges are difficult, although some are underway. Federal departments, like DoD, have put out their own directives. Those also are under challenges. But the sneaky part is Biden having corporate America do his bidding without said Presidential direction. Get a jab or lose your job. Seems a bit Stalinist-like to me. Not to mention, the President does not have that power under our system of government. No law has been passed. Yet many people are happy, even eager to comply. Want the vaccine? Great, go get it. Don't want it? Don't especially since the virus shrugs off the vaccine anyway. It's all fun and games until the President and the bureaucracy decide what the limits of your freedom are. Without you getting a say so. Comply or else. For your own good, of course. It's great to be the one deciding, ain't it?

I thought a lot about your question last night and to be honest I don't have a good answer or even know if there is one. I've said it before but I personally felt that Milley and McKenzie should've resigned for the way the Afghan withdrawal was conducted. That isn't really an answer to your question though, because they just happened to be the guys in charge when everything came crashing down; tough to blame them for at least 18+ years of official fallacies we (both State and DoD) were telling ourselves and the American public about how the war in Afghanistan was going. My thoughts in no particular order. 1. Part of this is cultural, both in our military and in our political leadership. We (in the officer ranks) all should bear some responsibility for this. On the military side, we rarely (almost never) want to or will actually say "no". It's in our DNA that if we're given a task or mission, we'll figure out a way to get it done. And nobody gets promoted for saying they can't accomplish something (see the Navy's destroyer mishaps as the latest example of severe consequences of this mentality). We've grown and groomed our leadership this way. Almost no one from the top generals/SESs down to probably the at least the FGO level wanted to admit that things weren't going well and that the goal of an independent, democratic Afghanistan free from most Taliban/VEO interference (if that was the goal) wasn't attainable (at least not in any reasonable timeframe). 2. We (talking the royal we, USA at large) tend to have a belief that the US is capable of accomplishing anything if we set our minds to it. And in the late 90s-early 2000s we were still coming off of the rapid, smashing success of Desert Storm. The American public was willing to keep things going so long as the casualties were relatively low and they didn't have to personally pay anything for it. Our public is also as separated from the military as it's ever been and our political class hasn't voted for "military action since the AUMF back in '01. A lot of us also mistakenly hold the belief that everyone in the world wants our version of democracy. 3. "Sometimes you have to let things fail". Don't know how many times I've heard senior leaders say this one in my career but I've rarely seen it actually utilized. I get that "failure" with something as large as the entire Afghan campaign is orders of magnitude different than some new process at the squadron level but it feeds back to point #1. Nobody in our senior leadership wanted to be the guys holding the bag when things ended in the Stan. They would have rather kept the war going indefinitely than admit our ever shifting goals were unattainable. Honesty was less acceptable than the static quo because no one could admit that we were going to fail. 4. Tactical success vs. Operational/Strategic failure. This one goes without saying. If our Operational/Strategic goals were unattainable from the get go, 20 years of killing people and spending money was never going to translate into a win. To answer your original question about who to hold accountable, I honestly think it's probably the bulk of the DoD and State leadership chain for the last 18 years (from at least O-6s all the way to the top, maybe lower). I don't believe the US military was able to be honest with either itself or our civilian leadership about the war. I understand that's probably not a popular opinion. I know a lot of vets were having trouble (a lot probably still are) processing what happened two months ago. The bulk of the rhetoric/messaging has been aimed at us doing our duty, no more attacks on the homeland, etc. That's all well and good, and probably appropriate for the time, but we lost, and I think we need to figure out how to avoid these sort of mistakes/failures going forward. I don't think anyone is going to get fired over this, so to your question over accountability, it'll probably be hashed out in the history books versus public hearings, resignations, some GO/FO or retired GO/FO actually saying "I'm responsible". Not a very satisfying answer I'm afraid.

In my opinion, it extended much further down than just the top level GO/FO leadership. Long but interesting anecdotal story. When I was a young staff officer I was assigned to be my command's GSOS lead (Global Special Operations Synchronization, it's how SOCOM is supposed to prioritize where it puts SOF, feeds into the GFM process). BLUF is its a multi-phase process with a lot of data collection/processing and in person PPTs to a board. During my second year doing doing this, SOJTF-A J35 was presenting their Campaign Plan for the conference (presented to a board of 6 O-6s from SOCOM), SOJTF-A team was made up of an O-6 and several O-5s and civilians. The SOJTF-A team VTCs in and has this very bright, optimistic "this is the year we turn it all around, X years to stem the tide, XX years to seize the initiative, we're gonna take it to them with this new strategy, etc, etc, etc). I think they even used the word "defeat" in some of their presentation. The O-6 board receives the presentation, asks a few minor questions, then says great job, go get'em, we really appreciate you", or something to that effect and starts to move on. That would've been the end of it except for 1 O-5 Army Strategist (extremely intelligent guy who was about as cynical as they come) in the audience. He stands up in this room full of 50 people with god knows how many others in VTC land and politely asks what's different about this year compared to all the other years in the Stan (this conference was in early 2018). When SOJTF-A says they don't understand his question, he expands by saying what they've presented looks remarkably similar to his 2005 experience, which also mirrored the time he was there in 2009, while not differing all that much from the strategic plan in 2011, seemed shockingly similar to his deployment in 2013, and he didn't see all that much change from 2015-2017. He then asked how on god's green earth they were going to seriously degrade or possibly defeat the enemy with a fraction of the resources previously available and an ANA that wasn't that much more capable and suffering a record high number of casualties. The crazy/really eye opening moment to this whole thing was that the SOJTF-A guys just sat there dumbstruck, like they couldn't believe anyone wouldn't believe in or would dare question their plan. They literally had no answer. I seriously think several of them honestly believed the nonsense they were presenting. The O-6 board quietly ruffled through their notes or stared at their hands. The O-5 strategist shook his head and sat down. Will always be one those random moments in my career I'll never forget and the moment I knew we could've been in the Stan for another 20 years and it wouldn't have changed the ultimate outcome one bit.

This is not an intelligence failure...if our leaders thought they'd be good, they were delusional. I left there thinking the ANA would be lucky to last a few weeks after we left. Anyone who thought otherwise was lying to themselves.

The satisfaction of leaving on my terms. I already formally retired last year and am drawing a retirement check for a 12 year GS career. Although I liked the folks I was working with, including management, which is a rarity, doing government work was just not for me anymore.

Oh, the old tape over the static ports trick!

Large medical job market for most of the TNANG based, especially Nashville and Knoxville. Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

Good post above by Dirk. So in the end, who takes responsibility for the failures? And I don’t mean Bush, Obama, Trump, or Biden…they’re politicians, not military strategists, and unless they were the ones feeding the American citizens lies, then they were just doing what most other politicians would have done in their shoes at the given time. I mean who (that does this for a living) in the DoD takes the public hit that they either manipulated the data (ie lied about the the capabilities of the Afghans) to make it look like what we were doing was working or who takes the public hit that they (DoD officials, military or civilian) were so incompetent they truly believed the Afghans were capable when we were going to leave? Or is just a complete failure at all levels of our DoD from the lowly CGO/NCO all the way up the top? That’s the problem—there’s no public accountability for this huge failure and we are left with people shrugging their shoulders. And our country is so politically divided that Biden and/or the Dems in Congress don’t truly want to get to the bottom of it because it’s making Biden look bad to keep it in the light (I’m sure the same could be said if Trump/the GOP were in charge). So in the end, no one is publicly held accountable, strategically our military’s ability to achieve it’s future goals is decreased, and American citizens lose even more faith in the integrity/capabilities of our military. Yeah…if I’m China, I’m definitely invading Taiwan if they believe it’s in their best interest to do so. The US isn’t going to stop them.

It is not surprising in the least that we deluded ourselves regarding the ANA's capabilities. The modern US military is driven by shoe clerks with slide shows and the most important thing in the world is that the slides are green. Generals' and Colonels' next promotions depend on slides being green, not honesty or lethality. We are just as delusional about our own capabilities, if not more so.

Ahh yes. Definitely no ambush. Because that's how normal people conduct interviews.. by sneaking up on someone walking with headphones on their own personal time. Yeah.. come to think of it that's where most tv interviews I see take place.. on quiet neighborhood sidewalks... As super interesting as it is to debate public/personal boundaries with you, turns out there's a difference between the limits of what is legal, and what is professionally acceptable. I'm not all that surprised you think this is okay because, again, it's a person you don't like being subjected to indecent behavior. Reference my above comment about partisan hackery. And the fact you think she's running away because "tHe pEoPle" are catching on and not because a crew of strange dudes with cameras are accosting her in her private life, is the icing on the stupid cake.

So If you disagree with someone enough, it's now okay to go to their house and fuck with them on their personal time? Is this not exactly the logic the left uses?

To track down someones home address and confront them by surprise while they're walking, and film them without permission? Yes, that is professionally inappropriate. It's wrong when protesters accost republicans in DC restaurants and this is wrong too. Respect for public and private life boundaries should exist for people you agree and disagree with. Here's a crazy idea. Go to the Pfizer offices and get a statement from the company. I'm sure they have an attentive and very well staffed PR department.

Weird, it's almost like people don't enjoy being ambushed by the press at their home.

Not at all. The entire point of an airline career is to work little and get paid a lot...it isn't about the passion or enjoyment of flying. An airline career gives you both the time and finances to enjoy life outside of work, rather than simply cramming your families, hobbies, and other passions into the little crevasses around that supermajority chunk of your time and emotional energy that a military career demands. Manage that money correctly, and you'll be able to retire early and *really* do whatever it is you would do if you had financial freedom (like fly cool shit for fun!)

Also from the Fighter Pilot Songbook... (as taught to me back in WW-OIF by a bunch of drunk RAF pilots!) OLD KING COLE Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he He called for his kites in the middle of the night And he called for his [crew position] three Now, every [crew position] was a very fine chap And a very fine chap was heee-eeeee ... "I don't give two f*cks" said the Pilot Merry merry men are we There's none so fair as can compare To the boys of the RFC So how's your father...all right! How's your sister...she's tight! When was your last time...last night! When's your next time...to-night! Rule Britannia, with Marmalade and jam, Five Chinese crackers up your arsehole, Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. (repeat, adding crew positions and removing 'bang's every verse) "15 miles off course" said the Navigator "15 pounds more boost" said the Engineer "Dah-di-di-dah-di-di-dah" said the Wireless-Operator "Jesus Christ it's cold" said the Tail-Gunner "Left, steady, left, steady, left" said the Bombardier [ 10. January 2006, 04:42: Message edited by: Hacker ]

https://patch.com/pennsylvania/horsham/horsham-military-pilot-injured-daughter-killed-plane-crash I’ve know Deane for a long time. I first got to know him when he was flying F-16s in the Fort Smith, AR guard. Terrible news to say the least. Many thoughts and prayers go out to him and his family for the loss of their daughter.