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Dereliction of Duty: U.S. military leaders refused to plan
In a gross dereliction of duty, senior American military officers refused to plan for an orderly, complete exit. There is no other construction that can reasonably be put on what we have watched unfold in Afghanistan. Continuous planning for contingencies is at the heart of U.S. military staff training. Senior staffs have dedicated future operations or planning cells, focused on the future while other staff members help the commander exercise command and control in the present. At latest, planning for an orderly withdrawal should have started the moment President Trump was elected in 2016, having campaigned on ending U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan.
American senior staffs, like their counterparts around the world, have long generated plans for all manner of likely and unlikely eventualities. We even had a “Plan Red” in the early 1900s, when color codes indicated different potential opponents around the world. Joint Basic Plan Red, coordinated between the Army and Navy, was our plan for a war with the British Empire. No, we did not have a faction itching for a war with the leading naval power. Rather, the War Department and Department of the Navy used the Joint Planning Board to generate plans useful for exercises, at least.
President Biden gave a clear directive in March 2021 that U.S. forces would fully withdraw from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021. He then made the deadline slightly earlier for political optics. The generals came in with their objections and warnings about leaving Afghanistan, and were told there would be no more extensions. From that moment, the joint staffs, from Afghanistan to the Pentagon, had a professional obligation to generate at least one viable option to realize the Commander-in-Chief’s intent.
Our military has long experience, plenty of examples and lessons learned, with both military and noncombatant evacuation operations (NEO).
Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (NEO) is the ordered (mandatory) or authorized (voluntary) departure of civilian noncombatants and nonessential military personnel from danger in an overseas country to a designated safe haven, typically within the continental United States. Overseas evacuations could occur under a variety of circumstances, including civil unrest, military uprisings, environmental concerns, and natural disasters. The Department of State (DOS) recommends an evacuation, and the Department of the Army—as the Department of Defense (DOD) Executive Agent for repatriation (RE-PAT) planning and operations—coordinates the execution of NEO.
News reports communicated chaos in the final evacuation of U.S. personnel and designated at-risk Vietnamese from Saigon. The American public’s view was of a UH-1 Huey helicopter on the embassy roof, with civilians covering the roof below and a ladder up to the aircraft’s skids. We also saw a helicopter being pushed off the side of an aircraft carrier deck, the deck covered with refugees.
In truth, there was a carefully designed and rehearsed plan, Operation Urgent Wind, that was executed aggressively. A naval armada floated in helicopter range of Saigon, and a massive assembly of helicopters prepared to swarm over the coast. Island way stations were planned and prepared behind this front line, allowing slack in onward movement to the United States mainland. Marines at Camp Pendleton, Calif. even had male and female volunteers role play, helping rehearse in-processing waves of refugees.
When our military slipped out of Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, that piece of our withdrawal had to have been war-gamed, with some staff raising the obvious risks of danger to our noncombatants, and to accelerated Taliban advances. The current cluster fumble features thousands of military personnel flown in after things went poorly, musical command chairs the top Army general leaving last week, and the shocking claim that we really do not know how many American civilians are in Afghanistan. Taken together, the situation shouts willful failure.
The situation smacks of arrogant senior officers throwing a fit at not being allowed to continue their permanent contingency operations. They expect to avoid any punishment, any loss of prestige and opportunity, while weakening the Commander-in-Chief’s hold over their bureaucracies. Bill Clinton got blamed for Mogadishu, not the generals, so why not weaken the current president? This is not about Republicans or Democrats. Rather, it is about accountable elected leadership versus an unelected, apparently unaccountable expert class.
Just as Camp Pendleton and other bases received Vietnamese and other Southwest Asian refugees in 1975, so Fort Lee, Va. has already received a first wave of refugees, with Fort McCoy, Wis. and Fort Bliss, Texas alerted to receive up to 22,000 refugees. The reception and temporary housing of refugees is well developed. Exit of military forces from a theater of operations, even with hostile forces in close contact, is a matter of long-established doctrine. NEO is not new.
The notion that the massive military staffs, from the Beltway to Afghanistan, never managed to generate a plan to safely evacuate U.S. personnel and designated refugees, and to then self-extract in an orderly manner is unbelievable. No one, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the commanding generals in Afghanistan, should still have their stars today. Retire them all tomorrow, at the last rank where they demonstrated competence and faithful service.
Published in Foreign Policy
The goat-herding Taliban terrorists have just told the most powerful country on the planet that the August 31st deadline to get people out is final and America will face consequences if it exceeds that deadline. Any bets on how fast the Idiot Biden agrees?
I confess that I did not watch it. I love me some Levin (THERE I SAID IT!) but the graf of Kemp and Levin with that salacious headline and the Fox News logo was enough for me. “Court-Martial for Biden” is so insultingly stupid — it’s the sort of thing that I see in the Sears-Catalogue length mailers I got ever since once making the poor decision to donate to Cruz. That’s what got me in the cross-hairs of the most sustained, unstoppable, amorphous harassment campaign I have ever seen.
Retarded and abusive — that’s our PR machine.
Probably wouldn’t hurt to watch five minutes of the video just to see if it might grab you. It would have taken less time than your comment.
I believe there is no significant chance that Biden is pushed out or declares himself unable to discharge his duties before February 1, 2023, getting Harris safely inside the terms of both the 22nd and 25th Amendments.
And a wildly inflated sense of self-importance.
Except Mark Levin knows what Kemp rolled out was completely unconstitutional nonsense: there is no “court-martial” authority over the freakin’ CIVILIAN leadership that is SUPREME over the uniformed military, thankfully.
Kemp said a lot of stuff. The court martial thing was off base.