Posts
First some links.
In a responsible military situation, the entire brass would be out on their asses after a level of mismanagement this dire. The insulation from consequences is absurd. Whatever happened to resigning in failure? Nowadays people are only expected to resign in protest - that is, for other people’s mistakes, but never for their own. Is it time for a BRAC for generals?
Whoever Biden doesn’t fire, their performance Biden believes is acceptable. If this is acceptable, how can the American people possibly trust the NSA, CIA, or the Pentagon? Even their most recent predictions were completely off. Once again, intel community and expert class totally failed us, predicting this would take months and the Afghan army would fight - now they're "revising" their predictions on terrorist formation according to Milley today. Why should we believe anything they say?
Indeed, what difference would it make if [the U.S.] closed down its military? Obviously, it would present a few mid-life challenges for its corrupt Pentagon bureaucracy, since that many generals on the market for defense lobbyist gigs and board directorships all at once would likely depress the going rate. But, other than that, a military that accounts for 40 per cent of the planet's military spending can't perform either of the functions for which one has an army: it can't defeat overseas enemies, and it's not permitted to defend the country, as we see on the Rio Grande. So what's the point?
. . . America is not "too big to fail": It's failing by almost every metric right now. The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we're Weimar with smartphones.
"Hobbes" at Scragged:
[Any] decent administration would summarily sack the Pentagon leadership that executed such a disastrous "plan", if it even deserves that word. Once again, neither are even being discussed, thus demonstrating what we've been quickly coming to fear - our entire institutional infrastructure is utterly corrupt and rotten down as far as we can see. The serving soldiers at the bottom may well be the lions they've always been, but they're led by jackasses if not something worse.
If we ever again are blessed with a reformist administration that actually loves this country, a Day 1 job must be the immediate sacking and forcible retirement of every single military officer of three or more stars or the equivalent, and a deep-dive investigation into the rest of the military leadership with an emphasis on successful field-command experience, with desk-jockey and political years being a powerful negative.
J.D. Vance for Senate!
But this is not merely the consequence of seven months of disastrous Biden policy, it is the failure of the entire American regime. Every major institution in our country revealed itself as a farce.
Let’s start with U.S. generals. Over 20 years, we have spent $1 trillion and lost nearly 3,000 Americans. Our leaders told the American people that Afghanistan was slowly becoming a more peaceful, stable country. In June, Mark Milley, our nation’s highest-ranking military officer, warned of “white rage” in the U.S. military. In July, he assured our nation that Afghan security forces had the “capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country."
In reality, it turned out that the Afghan national army couldn’t withstand four weeks of Taliban assault. Why was Milley focused on fake problems like white rage as he failed to do the job we pay him for? And why won’t Milley face an ounce of consequence for so clearly failing at the job he was given?
For a bit of history:
"The Afghan army is increasingly effective," Gen. James Mattis told Congress in July 2010 at his confirmation hearing when he was nominated for commander of U.S. Central Command. He added that the Afghan military – alongside U.S. forces – were "the worst nightmare for the Taliban."
In December of that year, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters that Afghan troops were "responsible for security in Kabul," "performing well" and would "continue to improve."
Cut to 2012, and Gen. John Allen, then the Commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, told the House Armed Services Committee, "We remain on track to ensure that Afghanistan will no longer be a safe haven for Al Qaida and will no longer be terrorized by the Taliban."
Allen went on to say that "as the potential unifying influence in Afghanistan, the Afghan forces are better than we thought they were, and they're better than they thought they were when tried in combat."
In November 2014, Gen. John Campbell told NPR, when asked if Afghan forces could fight with assistance, that "whenever the [Afghan security forces] get involved with the Taliban, the Taliban cannot hold ground, they can't hold terrain."
"I'm telling you what I've seen," Campbell continued, "the change from a couple of years ago to today. They do have the capability to protect themselves. They are the strongest institution in Afghanistan."
That same month, Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson touted the success and capability of the Afghan military.
"The Afghan National Security forces are winning, and this is a hugely capable fighting force who have been holding their ground against the enemy," he said during a press briefing.
It's not all just hindsight. Here is WaPo in 2019 on the "Afghanistan Papers".
I will follow this up with my own thoughts in a subsequent post.
2 comments:
So long as the military is subject to civilian control (which I am in favor of for the record), the military will do what the civilians in charge want them to do, both in and out of combat operations. The only solution is for the American people to reject this woke nonsense and elect politicians who will direct the military on a long term corrective course. But as we see, without the full backing of the people, so little changes no matter who is in power. PDT was better than Biden but a disappointment overall because he refused to press Congress to implement his agenda (assuming he really knew what his agenda was); he refused to fire people in the Executive and Military who were in the way or obstructive (to be fair he did seem to hire some good people who promptly imploded); and he refused to tone down his "mean tweets" when it became clear that they weren't productive. We could have had so much more with eight years of a leader with his attitude towards the status quo and the establishment who was disciplined enough to have made actual changes.
Afghanistan, of course, it but one example. He had four years to sit down with the parties in the country and figure out a way to negotiate at least something that would have allowed us to significantly scale back combat operations with the goal of leaving, even to the point of saying "we don't really want to be here, you don't want us here, give us a plan that allows us to leave that doesn't involve you immediately having a civil war". Instead he waited until the last minute and then, as you pointed out, set a timeline for after his term (again to be fair he may have thought he would still be President).
Over the long term, yes, the military we see today is the product of decades of perverse incentives. Changing the military means creating counter incentives, to which end I recommend cashiering most of the senior officers en masse. Doing that would seem to require that Red America disabuse itself of its love affair with the military as it exists today. The quotes above are a step in that direction.
PDT is somewhat beyond the scope this post, but I want to point out the structural problem with populist outsiders: their hearts might be in the right place, but they face a very steep learning curve as to where the levers of power actually are. This was Trump's challenge, and it took him most of his term to accomplish anything. (Insiders know exactly where the levers are, which is how Biden managed to create an immigration crisis in his first month in office.)
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