DirkDiggler

Fail

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.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/10/21/partner_capacity_building_needs_a_serious_re-examination_799956.html Decent article on the failure of BPC/DIB/SFA in Afghanistan and some recommendations going forward, worth a read.

If you get a chance, read The Fighters by CJ Chivers. Its a great book, just a collection of stories from line guys who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its a very tough read at times and doesn't have an overall point or agenda but definitely worth the read. One of the stories centers around a young infantry private serving in the Korengal; he and his buddies summed up the reason for their year long deployment as "we're here because we're here". Basically how I felt about my last tour in the 'Stan.

I've never heard of anyone getting one, and I haven't had to get one for the Pacific, European, Middle Eastern, or South American theaters. Honestly didn't know there was a vaccine for cholera.

I was immunized against smallpox in 2005 by the military, got the scar to prove it and it's annotated in my immunization record.

M2 wasn't referring to the ethnic slur in the COVID thread.

The PLAN is not currently capable of enforcing a naval blockade of Taiwan (though they're definitely striving for increased capabilities across the board). If we catch wind that the PRC is going to execute your above scenario, maybe we should give the ROCs their own nuclear weapons capability. Reverse order of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm only half joking, nuclear weapons being the ultimate guarantee of a country's security and all that.

Lol I'm getting old but not that old. I had to get mine when I showed at my first ops unit back in 2005. As a funny anecdote, on my deployment last year, NONE of the guys I was deployed with had seen the movie from which your screen quote is from. Literally hurt my insides.

Short answer is yes. There are other vaccines that have/had a mandatory DNIF period after receiving the vaccine. As an example, the Japanese Encephalitis Vaccine (JEV) used to be a 3 shot series when I had to get it back in 2010. I was DNIF for 2/3/2 days after each injection if I remember correctly. As an aside, I think the DoD has finally upgraded to the 2 shot JEV, don't know if that one has any DNIFing actions following the injections.

There’s a book on this topic worth reading if you have some spare time. It’s called War Without Mercy by John W. Dower. I don’t agree with everything he posits in the book and it’s kinda dryly written but Dower does a good job of showing how large a part racism played a factor on both sides in the Pacific theater. I’d apologize for the thread derailment but IMO this thread ran way off the tracks about 24 pages ago.

I’ll be PCSing out your way beginning of next year, if I’m able to coordinate said visit I’ll definitely reach out.

I'll definitely keep this in mind, thanks for the insights.

Would try to avoid this route if you can. Could lead to a General Discharge under Honorable Conditions, not a straight Honorable. If this was posted in jest I'll pre-emptively call myself out for sarcasm detector inop.

Thanks for sharing, did not know that. Wonder how much Lockmart wants for the data? I get having it isn't a "must" but sure would be nice to have. Apologies for the minor thread derail.

I sympathize with the TOLD; about 10 years ago our planes got carbon brakes, best mod the Bobs had put on the airplane in a long time. Trouble was, they didn't want to pay for the testing to redo the TOLD so all our numbers were still based on the old steel brakes. I could kinda understand that since at the time I was in legacy MCs and we had an upcoming (though moved several times) retirement date. I assumed that the newer MC-J would have revised TOLD since the aircraft is gonna be around for 30+ years. Wrong. TOLD is still based on the old brakes even though all the aircraft have been modd'd with the new ones. So our portions of our TOLD is "more better" but you don't know how much better and still have to use the old numbers.

Will the new engines give the BUFF a substantial increase in thrust/payload capability or is it more reliable/ease of MX/sustained supply chain? Understood if you can't get into specifics on this forum. I'm currently going through MC-J transition and the upgrade to newer engine technology feels like going from a rotary to cell phone.

My point is right at the top of this forum’s section it says “keep it civil, don’t abuse this forum”. Are you cool with dudes/dudettes going after people’s spouses/kids on here?

I get that you vehemently disagree with his positions on the vaccine and vaccine mandates but why go questioning his ability to raise his kids? It does nothing to advance the conversation/discourse.

Even if your first statement is true (I guarantee the first thing Scheuller's CC did before issuing that order is consult with a JAG), that won't be what causes him issues under the UCMJ. https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Docs/2021USMCSocialMediaHanbook.pdf Specifically see pages 17-18 and then reference Scheuller's last FB statement. If you strip away the emotion and politics from this he's making it really easy for the prosecutor on his courts martial.

Will be pretty cool to see a ~68 year old BUFF with a modern glass cockpit

You keeping the analog engine stack or is glass part of the upgrade?

It’s called the D.E.N.N.I.S system:

The Wu always has the answer…