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As the current 380 AEW/CC said..."We all hoped for a different outcome, but here we are. Right now, Airmen are working 24/7 to bring this to as successful a conclusion as we can manage. Right now, every warfighter in the 380th is putting everything they have into the task at hand. This moment puts a fine point on what I feel every single day: I’m incredibly proud to serve alongside these great Americans, there’s nowhere on Earth I’d rather be." God bless and protect these heroes...every single one of them.

Speaking as a fellow enlisted aviator with years of OGV experience, I can say I’m glad I don’t work in a OGV section that would require me to write up the CDD Form 8 on a SQ/CC. My boss would handle that one. The AF can do all the investigating they want on that C-17 crew. They were put in a terrible situation and did the best they could with the information they had. They made heartbreaking decisions that they will live with for the rest of their lives. They will not be found at fault, nor should they, with all of the international attention on the incident. Commanders know what will happen next if they hit that button. It involves Congress and the media. I’ll tell you who is more scared than the crew. The commanders that put them there. A basic rule I learned as a young instructor and then evaluator some 16 years ago was to always ask yourself what the follow on training is if you hook someone. What is the follow on training for this? Are you going to take them out to the airplane to perform a exterior inspection or stowaway check???? They know their jobs and they did it well. They got the jet home without injuring another American. Let the decorations start rolling in. They deserve it.

No crew member has been Q3'd nor is there plans to Q3 them.

Long, but worth a read. Posted at Instapundit.com I ask that you not use my name. I am a currently serving General Officer and what I have to say is highly critical of our current military leadership. But it must be said. I don’t blame President Biden for the catastrophe in Afghanistan. It was the right decision to leave, the proof of which is how quickly the country collapsed without US support. Twenty years of training and equipping the Afghan army and all that they were capable of was a few hours of delay in a country the size of Texas. As for his predecessor, the only blame I place on President Trump was that he didn’t withdraw sooner. We should blame President Bush, not for the decision to attack into Afghanistan following 9-11, but for his decision to “shift the goalposts” and attempt to reform Afghanistan society. That was a fool’s errand any student of history would have recognized. And yes, we should place blame on President Obama for his decision to double down on failure when he “surged” in Afghanistan, rather than to withdraw. However, most of the blame belongs to the leadership of the US military, and the Army in particular. The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” detailed years of US officials failing to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” That report was two years ago, and the stories within it began more than a decade before that. Afghanistan was, and always will be, “unwinnable”. Of course, I blame President Biden for the disastrous retrograde operation still unfolding. But let us not allow that to deflect us from heaping even more blame on military leaders. They stonewalled President Trump rather than beginning deliberate preparations to exit the country when he told them to. They thought that they could outlast him and then talk sense to his successor. Then after the inauguration, they pressed the new president to reverse course. He wisely chose withdrawal. Then and only then did the generals begin their preparations in earnest. But it was too late to do it well. The war in Afghanistan lasted more than twice as long as the Vietnam War. Although the cost in terms of American blood was thankfully far smaller, the mistakes are the same: America got involved in a long land war in Asia, in a peripheral region, in order to prop up a floundering and unreliable government, and at a time when there was a much bigger looming threat. In fact, Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in that at least the Vietnam War was tangentially related to the effort to stop the global spread of communism during the Cold War. Afghanistan was worse than Vietnam in another respect: the military’s leaders of the Vietnam era had no precedent to dissuade them from a disastrous path. Today’s military leadership has the precedent of not just Vietnam, but also Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. That much obtuseness must be punished and removed from the system. General Milley must resign. Not only is he the Chairman of the Joint Staff, prior to that he was the Chief of Staff of the Army. While all services share the blame, the Army is the land domain proponent. The 20 years of failure in Afghanistan is an Army failure. Scores of other generals also deserve a thorough evaluation; many of them are complicit in the lies to protect a decades-long failed strategy. Secretary of Defense Austin also must be fired. The recently retired Army general and former CENTCOM commander was, and still is, part of the culture that is impervious to the fact that 20 years of trying it their way did not work. Just as it did after Vietnam, the military, and especially the Army, must conduct a comprehensive review of why it exists. The purpose of the Army is to visit profound violence on our nation’s enemies; it is not to rebuild failed states. We have decades of experience: counter-insurgencies and nation-building does not work for America. We do not have the stomach for long wars of occupation—and that is a good thing. We are a nation of commerce, not conflict. A constellation of retired stars will tell you that the two can coexist. They are wrong. Retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Jack Keane said only two months ago that because Afghanistan consumes just a small portion of the force, America “can afford the cost of fighting” there. What he does not see is that for 20 years, that “small portion” was the most important portion of the military. Everything else necessarily is subservient to the portion of the force in conflict. It has altered who the Army is and how it thinks. There exists only a handful of officers below the general officer ranks who served during the Cold War and who have lived through an era of great power conflict. From private through brigade commander, virtually every Army Soldier serving today has experienced little other than counterinsurgencies or nation-building while operating out of secure FOBs. Large scale combat operations and insurgencies require different cultures and mindsets. In a resource constrained environment, the same service cannot do both well. The Army today could not win a major war. Yet, winning a major war, is the number one reason why an Army exists. It will take a generation to break bad habits, to think in terms of closing with and destroying the enemy versus winning hearts and minds. Keane sees raw numbers (and ignores the stark evidence that there was no progress over 20 years) and thinks that America’s Army can sustain that level of commitment. It cannot, and the opportunity cost to the culture of the force is much too great. Ignore him. Ignore Petraeus, McMaster, Stavridis, and the rest of their ilk. Concurrent with its review of purpose, the Army must reevaluate its size and how it is organized. The active component is much too large. That makes it too eager to get involved in irrelevant theaters where failure is likely or even preordained. It should be very difficult for an American president to deploy the Army without the National Guard performing most combat operations. You argue that that takes time? Yes, that’s the point: it should take time to make the case to the American people that war is worth it. The Marine Corps must provide the nation’s rapid response forces. It is a self-contained deployable multi-domain force. Some would argue that the service has both insufficient combat power and staying power. However, that is a feature, and not a flaw, as it forces the nation to rely on its Army—and hence its reserve components—before engaging in heavy combat or lengthy operations. The current Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Berger, already seems to recognize his service’s role—hence his decision to eliminate armor from the Corps. Congress must reevaluate the authorities contained within Sections 12301 through 12304 of Title X. The president has too much latitude to, on his own authority, mobilize tens or even hundreds of thousands of Guardsmen and Reservists without congressional approval. It must be the policy of the United States that we do not place our service members in harm’s way without first making the case to the American people. This also means ending the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force as well as strengthening Congress’ role in the War Powers Act such that, absent an actual declaration of war, there can be no war. Some would argue that such a constraint would limit the nation’s ability to respond to a Russian incursion in the Baltics or a Chinese attack on Taiwan. However, recent open-source studies conclude that the US military already is unable to defend against either attack. Pretending otherwise while not having the means to back up our assurances unnecessarily emboldens our partners and allies, making such an attack more likely. We lose nothing by making the law match the reality. Let us not forget the intelligence agencies. They reported that Kabul was at risk of falling in as little as 90 days. That report was from last Thursday! The capital fell in less than 90 hours. Failure must be punished. And punishment in a bureaucracy means mass firings and a smaller budget—not more money so that they might be better the next time. Congress must consolidate and collapse our intelligence agencies. And when its reorganization is done, if the overall size of the nation’s intelligence apparatus is a quarter of what it is now, that still is too large. And while we are on the topic of “too large,” DoD must be halved. There are too many flag officers, too many agencies, departments, and directorates. It is the only secretariat with independent but supposedly subordinate secretaries. There are too many Geographic Component Commands—each led by a 4-star virtual proconsul whose budget dwarfs what the Department of State spends in their regions. The result is a foreign policy that is overly military and underly diplomatic, informational, and economic. Congress must revisit the 1947 National Security Act and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Both were good for their times, but after decades of experience, there clearly are new reforms necessary. Unreformed, DoD is an inscrutable labyrinth which invites fraud, waste, and abuse. The excess attracts unscrupulous camp followers. Amazon did not choose Crystal City to locate its new headquarters because of low rents and ease of transportation access for its 25,000 employees. It chose the Arlington, Virginia neighborhood because it is two blocks from the Pentagon. That building controls the distribution of three-quarters of a trillion dollars every year. Most of it is wasted. The excess is apparent in the scores of class-A high rises housing defense contractors just blocks from the Pentagon. To end that waste, nothing so concentrates the senses as austerity. Let me conclude with one last thought: the generals, the intelligence analysts, the defense contractors, and the pundits all leveraged America’s rarest resource: the American serviceman and woman. They are the ones who fought, and sweat, and bled, and died for what is now clearly a failed strategy and a doomed mission. Even after its failure was apparent to their leaders, they continued to enlist and reenlist, largely because their superiors—the experts—assured them that success was possible. It was not. It never was. Absent American support, Afghanistan collapsed over the length of a long weekend. That is proof enough that the last 20 years were in vain, and proof enough that the system is broken from within.

Yeah, smuckless to write youre a GO and then go anonymous. If you wanted to be great this should have been your fall on your sword moment. This post will do nothing. A GO resigning to his boss because he's "lost trust and confidence" in his bosses ability to lead, that's newsworthy.

Ah yes, they are going to review the takeoff decision when the crew landed and were overrun. i also hope the AFCENT commander is being investigated for allowing a strat asset go to an overrun airfield.

Might as well laugh at this point.

I mostly agree, but I do think the pentagon needs to come to terms that it shares some of the blame here. We’ve rotated so much leadership through the AOR over the years it’s no wonder that continuity of purpose has been virtually non existent. I can remember the expeditionary WG/CC on my first deployment giving a hung-ho pep talk to us about how we were the tip of the spear & truly making a difference. Over the years, I deployed to the same location, listened to the same speech given by new leadership, stayed in the same Qs, ate the same food, flew the same jets in the same airspace against the same enemy. A decade later, several WG/CCs had cycled through, we called the enemy by a different name even though we were fighting the same people, and that pep talk had barely changed. It was clear that everybody just wanted to get through their deployment and back to life. Progress didn’t matter. We were running in place. Biding our time. Nothing was ever going to change appreciably. Senior military leadership failed to internalize the lesson of Vietnam. In their own careerist pursuits, they yielded to clueless civilian leadership that insisted on committing troops without a clearly defined end goal/exit strategy. I hope our military can take a hard internal look after this debacle. Twice now we have suffered the pain and humiliation of walking away from hugely costly conflicts with little to nothing to show for it except broken human beings. The small number of patriots who volunteer to serve this country should have the assurance that their toil and sacrifice will not be wasted. The responsibility for that assurance lies with senior pentagon leaders & they failed spectacularly this time around.

Because none of those PAX could have had cell phones on them, right? I don't buy that it was necessarily a crew member.

Dude, don’t do it to yourself. Just ignore it, most everyone else here does, helps keep the threads more on point.

Well, there's this one, there's Gen Milley wearing make-up, there's the convoluted one about the Fed, there's the one from Robert E Lee...it's just starting to add up.

So much of our military and government fall back on “officialness” as the pinnacle of existence. Even in the face of heroism during adversity and literal death, the military machine will want to investigate it, analyze it, and section it into a hundred pieces to assign politically-massaged causes and blame.

I recently read a scientific journal that said while the niche (alleged)delta variant is extremely lethal, the ranger variant is equally deadly due to its ability to spawn many more replications at high rate of movement. Unfortunately, the hearts and minds of the local fighters got in the way of widespread death.

since this is AMC, you need to put safety privilege in quotes as well.

Only cash loses if you stay on the sidelines during an inflationary time like we've seen since March 2020. "Time IN the market beats timING the market." 2008 levels were reached late 2013-early 2014 and, if you stayed in the market and kept adding capital, you made out handsomely and solidly beat inflation with one of the greatest bull markets in history. If you cashed out at the wrong time, it really hurt. For March 2020, we were back above those levels within a few months. I'm not saying you're wrong when the downturn comes that cash is great, or that it's that easy to ride through a downturn. Hell, I'm guilty of not heeding my own advice some, too, because I thought I KNEW it was the correction. It's not easy to watch your money evaporate. But, it's certainly not much easier to watch markets continue up double digit %s while you're sitting in cash earning nothing/next to nothing. If you're not trying to retire tomorrow or in the next 5 years, you're likely better off just to keep plugging away and not trying to time it. If it does crash, you're getting discounted securities to stuff all that airline retirement money into. If it doesn't, you'll feel awesome that you made all those gains while others sat in cash waiting for the shoe to drop. Then again, if it crashes tomorrow and you would have gone to cash but decided not to after this post, I don't want folks hating me. So, the BL is: do what you're most comfortable living with. But, try to not let emotion run your decision making. If the markets really fall off a cliff and everything tanks, we've all likely got bigger problems than worrying about our retirement accounts.

I was stationed at Altus when the -17 FTU Sq/CC crushed a -135 ice shield with a SOC student. The instructor boom was Q-3d and the -135 FTU Sq/CC said he’d pull the Q-3 of the safety report came back and exonerated the instructor boom. The safety report came back and said the instructor boom wasn’t at fault, it was the -17 Sq/CC’s fault for climbing into the tanker during the breakaway. The -135 FTU Sq/CC went to remove the Q-3 and the OG/CC, a -17 driver, told him that he would put a Q-3 Form 8 with his name on it if the original one was removed. How do I know? I was in Stan Eval at the time and begrudgingly typed up the original Q-3 for the -135 Sq/CC to sign, fully knowing this was political bullshit. Nothing surprises me about the idiots that run the MAF.

I mean, there's no real investigation needed for the decision to takeoff. Either leave a strategic asset in a hostile environment, or have the Ravens start shooting to get people off the jet (which also would've played terribly in the media). Civilian casualties were unfortunate, but given the situation unavoidable. As for the videos, what do you think you'd get with a bunch of passengers on board?

The same thing was said about Vietnam shortly afterwards but we didn't learn our lessons apparently. Racking my brain, I can't think of single counterinsurgency that was successful against insurgents who had a sanctuary in a neighboring country.

It won't be like ours. Our experience was handicapped by a restrictive ROE built on the Western concept of morality as well as a false-notion that these people want to be like us, which led to us attempting to nation build. China holds no such illusions and therefore won't be constrained by any self-imposed rules. They'll crush whoever stands in their way and won't think twice.

If you needed 20 years to figure out that you could hit an asshole riding on a dirtbike without taking down a building by firing a laser guided rocket from a high-end fighter…sure… but we used 20 years times 36-69 constant caps of our high end assets on the range that are now tired and have no service life left with no viable replacement. Yuuuuge. Net. Loss. Edit: unless you’re a defense contractor [emoji385]

I know CENTCOM CC met with Taliban in Doha and I sincerely hope he said that if there’s one hostage or any kind of attack on Americans that we will be launching so many attacks on their gains that Curtis LeMay will be doing back flips from beyond the grave.

C’mon, man! The fall of Kabul was 4-5 days ago. Why are we still talking about this?

And one strategic E-4 or Taliban fighter with an itchy trigger finger away from a free-for-all that neither side will be able to control.

Why am I getting the feeling that, regarding American humiliation, the next few weeks are going to be worse than 9/11, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and Saigon '75 combined? x10?

I think I’ll be in a minority who disagrees with most of his points and find them hypocritical at times. 1. The military “sold” winning comm because all metrics were cherry-picked to meet the talking points of the administrations. Ask your average O-3 on the battlefield what the gameplan and military objective in AFG should be…probably the best strategy and would have yielded appropriate military successes. 2. Scaling down our forces while also saying we’d lose a near-peer fight…brilliant! We’ll just wait until shit hits the fan to activate our woke Army so they can sling words of affirmation and inclusion at the bayonet-fixed Chinese. 3. I’ve heard SEVERAL intelligent Marines (yes, they do exist…) say that Berger has irreparably damaged The Corps. Going to take their word and not dive deeper into this matter right now. 4. Letting our guys close with and kill the enemy requires you to trust the battlefield commanders…don’t handcuff them with bullshit ROE.

One point that hasn't been mentioned about the videos from Kabul is how utterly incompetent they make our civilian and military leadership look. They don't like to be embarrassed and will certainly find a scapegoat at some point.

A lot I agree with but some I don't but still written by someone who benefited from the system and will likely retire with a GO pension.

On one hand, we have American military shoot and kill two threats inside the Kabul airport during the massive crowd rush. Situation controlled, it's a combat zone, move on. On the other hand, four people die from their own actions that put a $300,000,000 military/national asset at significant risk... and we have flag officers, their staff, "safety" offices and OSI all spending time and taxpayer dollars trying to figure out what happened?

The Soviets lacked the technology and were also fighting us, albeit through a three-letter. Could they have won had they not been facing Stinger missiles? Maybe. It sure made it more difficult for them to make any headway, though. Maybe China is a clown show. Time will tell. I don't think they hold any illusions about civilizing AFG, though - like we did. Bottom line - "victory" depends on how you define it. China's definition of victory, and therefore their objectives, won't be like ours.

This checks with the info received inside AMC HQ. AMC has a reputation for Q3 shenanigans, well earned. So when OSI got involved (for the reasons above noted by 18AF), the crewdog rumor mill went into hyperactive and made a slew of assumptions. I don’t think there’s any headhunting (not yet anyway), but there’s a ton of video out there…This situation was absolutely unprecedented - and AMC leadership has already engaged AFCENT and CENTCOM with let’s call it “terse comms” on the matter. I’ll leave it at that. Chuck

I'm conflicted. I get where you are coming from, but at the same time...I'm mightily tired of public being sanitized from this war. The video/imagery should be available for every citizen to see what poorly executed war, and especially a poorly planned withdrawal, results in.

The Soviets faced an enemy being funded and equipped by a Super Power. They were actually doing very decently at establishing Area security until we started pouring billions in aid and weapons via Pakistan and other illicit avenues. It was “order from underneath a boot,” no doubt, but that’s not an unusual place to be for a Communist country. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

They won't be the first to think that way, and they likely won't be the last. Again...I wish them all the success we had there. I don't see them "conquering" Afghanistan short of killing every man, woman, and child in the country and moving Chinese citizens in.

"In the meantime, American citizens will separate into their usual camps and identify all of the obvious causes and culprits except for one: themselves." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/afghanistan-your-fault/619769/ Of all the things the American public and our elected leaders in Congress regularly pontificate about, the discussion about one of our most fundamental and somber duties, the ability to wage war, is rarely debated. In the past week its now on the forefront of the American mind, as if the Afghanistan conflict suddenly arose out of thin air. The American public argues about mundane and irrelevant issues, and expects a Congressional inquiry into everything from steroids in the MLB (2004's hotbutton issue which had more time on the House floor than GWOT) to who can use what bathroom. If only we maintained some semblance of "limited but well defined" in our federal government we'd have the attention span to discuss the more important issues while leaving irrelevant ones to individuals, or at least to the state gov's. I usually hate the idea of raising taxes to fund central govt, but the concept of a wartime tax, as an additional line item on every tax paying American's weekly pay deduction (to include Social Security and welfare benefits) might possibly be enough to remind them there is a conflict being waged somewhere on their behalf. Ideally people would engage with their elected leaders and hold them to their Constitutional duties to declare war (Art 1 Sec-8 ) while holding the executive accountable (War Powers Act) but that might be asking a bit much. Maybe a 1% War Tax as a fiscal constraint, would translate into moral inquiry or social responsibility. As was said ~15 years ago, "America is not at war, America is at the mall" (exception to those serving or having a loved one in the military). That quote remains true today, although Id update to reflect the decline of shopping malls in favor of online shopping... The growth of the Executive Branch and an impotent Legislature, combined with an indifferent public is not only bad for National Security policy but governance in general. That, and the Fed's ability to print money/buy up debts doesnt help.

Given that news, it makes PERFECT sense now. If I was a C-17 pilot, I too would be reluctant to put my gear down because the possibility of having to subsequently raise it and entrap some coward running away from his country may get trapped in it. Too soon?

The Soviets sure as shit didn’t have any restrictive ROE and they couldn’t civilize that place. The Chinese, in my experience, are a clown show & I can’t see them doing much better.

I should have typed my OP in sarcasm font, that’s my b.

So the VA reaching out to veterans who may be distressed over current events is a joke to you? If you’ve been around for a while, I’d be willing to bet you’ve lost at least one or two squadron mates to suicide. If you’re new and you haven’t, steel yourself because you very likely will. Personally, I’ve seen my fair share, including a couple of friends for whom I never would’ve thought that would be an option. I’m all for ANYONE who reaches out & promotes veterans’ mental health.

NFW! I'm as cynical/jaded as anyone out there, but I can't believe this is true. I'm going to believe that it's just a normal investigation to get the facts of the issue. If it is true...I hope every pilot/load throws their wings on the bosses desk.

Investigating the heroes who went deep into the shit on the inverse of “Night 1” would be like not offering a bonus to a bunch of AF wide body, multi-engine jet pilots during a pre-emergent airline hiring boom who already probably leaning out the door. Wait, shit…

The US needs to retake the narrative here. We didn't let Afghanistan down. Afghanistan let us down by taking 20 years of commitment and throwing it down the toilet. Repaint this. Taiwan knows they can get our support for 20 years even if they half ass their job as a partner. That's a pretty solid commitment.

I would wager that they have the capacity. They lack the will.

Previous admin set the deadline of 1 May I believe, so even being there today is an extension of several months on top of that. I’m theory we wanted to keep the embassy open and etc. but if the entire Ghani government and all allied militias just give up the fight well then that obviously changes the plan. I’m sure the evac planning for all western nations didn’t include the entire ANA/ANP/Ghani government collapsing in 96 hours and the Taliban conquering territory at the speed of a Hilux. Enemy gets a vote unfortunately. It’s still a god damned mess and I can only imagine the heroism of the airlift crews making runs to Kabul right now as well as the army folks & SOF going in to help secure the exfil. Hopefully we can continue to hold the airport, get military ATC up and running and start a reverse Berlin airlift out for anyone who wants to go. Plenty of blame to go around, starting in about 2003, and I’m very hesitant to cast the first stone after spending significant time there myself and buying in to what we were trying to accomplish. I said it before and I’ll say it again: the best time to leave was 15 years ago and the second best time is right now.

The State Department and Department of Defense said in a statement Sunday that there are “thousands” of Americans stranded in Afghanistan after the Taliban declared victory over the U.S.-backed government earlier in the day. At least we don't have any more mean tweets.

Let's be honest. This end-state for AFG was inevitable and was/is/has been a foregone conclusion. The notion that we were going to install a democracy there was absurd from day one. Period. Root cause = we defined success to be an unachievable goal from "go" - hence failure. It really is that simple. It's not Biden's fault we lost. It's not Trump's fault we lost. It's not Obama's fault we lost. It is Biden's fault we are losing in such an embarrassingly avoidable manner, however. That *is* his fault. We should be losing more gracefully.

The 2312 number is contentious. It doesn't include contractors or combat related suicides (which are almost 10 times the number of casualties), but for the sake of argument we'll go with 2312. I could be convinced that those numbers of casualties are worth it, if that was it. But in addition to those deaths, do you also think it was worth the $2,260,000,000,000 dollars and twenty lost years of military modernization in reference to actual peer power competitors i.e. China/Russia? https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/killed https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/oct/27/donald-trump/did-us-spend-6-trillion-middle-east-wars/ The PLA alone has already caught up, in unclassified reports, in Ships, Missiles, and Air Defenses, among more. In many Rand studies, we have lost significant ground in dozens of areas that we had a significant advantage in only 20 years ago. https://www.rand.org/paf/projects/us-china-scorecard.html https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB9800/RB9858z1/RAND_RB9858z1.pdf For reference, with $2.26T, we could have bought an entire new additional fighter platform fleet analogous to the F-35 from cradle to grave, lasting until 2070 (including development/test/operations/sustainment). https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2021-06-01/The-F-35-Joint-Strike-Fighter-the-costliest-weapon-system-in-US-military-history-now-faces-pushback-in-Congress-1618847.html You could have bought over 17 entire carrier battle groups + air wings + personnel and operated them literally every day for 50 years. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA575866.pdf You could have modernized to actually fight against the IADS, the J-20, chinese satellites, the cyber threats, anti-ship missiles, etc. We could have technologies that are relevant to peer competition. We could have replaced the E-3, the A-10, the B-52, the F-16, the EC-130, the RC-135, the AC-130, the MQ-9, the B-1, etc. The army could have upgraded the patriot. The marines and army could have developed modernized fires systems. You could have modernized our outdated nuclear triad. We could have developed hypersonics on parity with our competitors. https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-hypersonic-missiles-methods-and-motives/ But instead we decided to try to wipe out an ideology that killed 3000 American civilians. And it didn't just stop with Afghanistan - it brought us to Iraq and Syria. I have to admit, some of those sorties seemed deeply satisfying to me, at first. It felt like I was making a difference. But every year that I was there, I realized more and more that we were getting nothing done. One poignant example was fencing in to fight a faction that, only a few years ago, I was defending. That wasn't just a single event, either. If that's not an operational/strategic miscalculation, I don't know what is. I can agree with some folks on here that want to point out that we were successful tactically and operationally. Some really smart tacticians/operations commanders did a good job of fighting a conventional war against an unconventional combatant. But to say we had any clear strategic or grand strategy victories in the middle east is a huge stretch. FFS, we let Russia invade Crimea, and we pretended like it didn't happen. In the end in the middle east, we didn't just give away the 7000+ uniformed deaths, the 8000+ contractor deaths, and the 30000+ military suicides after coming back home. We gave away an unfathomable amount of money, our advantage in the future fight, and a huge portion of our strategic influence. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/killed

And now Biden is blaming Trump…suggesting that he couldn’t change the policy that was laid out by Trump before Biden took office. But yet Biden has reversed Trump’s policies on everything from the border, to immigration, to the pipeline, to transgenders serving in the military…on and on. Full disclosure: I’m glad we’re out, and it’s long overdue, so I’m not blaming Biden per se. But if Biden truly believed that Afghanistan’s military was going to be effective then he’s more incompetent than I thought (or a liar) and/or needs to replace his most senior advisors who are incompetent and giving Biden bad info. And for all the progressives and neocons arguing that nationalism and “America First” is wrong or somehow racist, this is what happens when you put the well being of other countries above your own citizenry. It sucks that the Taliban will go back to treating women so poorly and commit other atrocities, but it’s not our responsibility to fix it.

amen to that. total disgrace. also i never want to hear "hearts and minds" again or "nation building". as a country we should only commit military force to totally fucking smash the enemy and get out. it makes me sick remembering how we had to operate under some of the most bull shit ROE i've seen. and having to listen to karzi on his high fucking horse criticizing US forces. the afghans had 20 years to decide if they wanted freedom. it's sad they decided it wasn't worth it.

Every WO returning from WIC