Springer

I beg to differ but someone once told me any "fighter" that you can pee into the cockpit from outside isn't worth flying.

Most OA-37/OV-10 squadrons back then were made up of 1st assignment UPT grads with a guarantee of a fighter as their follow on. Not a bad deal. Hondurans went from F-86's to imported A-37's in '84.

The Most Anti-American Man in America By: Judd Garrett October 26, 2021 As we saw on display during his “town-hall” meeting on CNN this Thursday, Joe Biden is completely incapable as a President, and as a human being. If Joe Biden were not President, he would need 24/7 in-home care. He is incapable of taking care of the necessities of his own day-to-day life, much less running a country of 330 million, with the largest economy and the most powerful army. So, if he is not running the country, who is? It clearly is not Kamala Harris. She has been shipped to political Siberia. She is rarely seen and barely heard other than the grating echoes of her cackles. What we are witnessing on the big stage of American politics is “Weekend at Bernie’s” with a fluttering heartbeat. Joe Biden is making no decisions. He is doing nothing by himself. He is the stooge. This is not a defense of Biden for all the horrible decisions that “his” administration has made so far, but cognitively Biden is not capable of running this country. Someone behind the scenes is calling the shots. So, if it is not Joe Biden, who is running this country? Who decided to open the borders to millions of illegal immigrants? Who signed off on the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal? Who is bringing in tens of thousands of unvetted, non-ally Afghans into America? Who is printing so much money that we’re on the verge of “hyperinflation”? Who shut down so many parts of our energy sector that we are no longer energy independent, and are back to relying on OPEC for energy? Who is pushing this divisive racial agenda which is tearing our country apart? Who is labeling concerned parents domestic terrorists? Who has weaponized the FBI against everyday citizens based on their political beliefs? Who? The person orchestrating all of this owns a mansion in the shadows of the White House. He is a power-hungry narcissist who is only concerned with implementing the far-left agenda. His name is Barack Hussein Obama. He lives within walking distance of the White House, and the vast majority of Joe Biden’s staff were in his administration. Who do you think those people are listening to, someone who they think is the next coming of the messiah or a cognitively impaired elderly man who doesn’t know what day it is, and just wants to be left alone to have his ice cream cone? America is not supposed to have a shadow government. Transparency of its leaders is a core principle. But Obama does not believe that principle should apply to him. In an interview reflecting on his time in the White House, Obama said his ideal setup as President would be, a “third-term… where I had a stand-in, a frontman, or frontwoman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats, looking through the stuff, and I could, sort of, deliver the lines, and someone else was doing all the talking, and the ceremony. I’d be fine with that.” Not only is that is a brief glimpse of what is happening in real-time, it exposed what an extreme narcissist he is, and how not only does he not understand the fundamental concept of our system of government, but he is hostile toward it. Obama’s vision of his ideal “third term” is him as an unaccountable king or a czar, someone who can’t be bothered to answer to the lowly people whose money he is spending, and whose lives he is controlling. He simply wants the people to shut up and comply with his dictates. Obama recently told Virginia voters who are concerned about teaching their kids Critical Race Theory, and the dangers of the radical gender ideology which caused a 14-year-old girl to be raped in Loudoun County, Virginia; “We don’t have time to be wasting on these phony, trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage that right-wing media pedals… we should be doing more to support people who are educating our kids and keeping our neighborhoods safe.” That is a perfect illustration of what Obama does. He pushes an agenda that harmed a young girl and then blamed the people who objected to his agenda. He sets the building on fire and then criticizes the firefighters for flooding the building to put out the fire he started. Obama said nothing about keeping our neighborhoods and kids safe during the 5 months of riots in our communities in 2020, or when Democrat lawmakers were defunding the police. He didn’t care about educating our kids when he repealed school choice legislation as President. Does anyone remember back in 2006 or even 2007, before Obama, when black and white people actually got along? The time before every white person was characterized as a “racist” for simply being born white, and every black person was labeled a victim when people were people regardless of their skin color? What our country is transforming into is directly aligned with Obama’s Marxist vision for the world. Obama’s father was a Marxist politician in Kenya, and in his book, Dreams of My Father, President Obama wrote, “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout. I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists.” This is a very revealing passage about the man. Not only is he acknowledging his Marxist’s leanings, but he admitted that he embraced those radical ideologies, not on intellectual or rational grounds, but because he did not want to be viewed as a “sell-out”. His need to be accepted by other black people because of his father’s abandonment of him steered him to his radical Marxist ideology and is also the reason why he uses race and false accusations of racism into bullying people into compliance to the Marxist ideology because, as he admitted, that is what happened to him. And in alignment with his Marxist beliefs, Obama, when he was running for President, promised to “fundamentally transform” America. For someone who chooses his words as carefully and artfully as Obama, this was not a misstatement or an overstatement. It was exactly what he did while President, and is continuing to do in the shadows - “fundamentally transform” America. That should scare the hell out of every American. He didn’t say “restore America’s values” or “return America to its founding principles”. No, he said, “fundamentally transform.” He was not arguing that America lost its way over the last 200 years, and must rediscover the ideals of its founding; life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equality, individual rights, constrained government. No, “fundamentally transform” was a direct assault on the fundamental values of America which are in direct opposition to Marxist ideology, and why Obama has to “fundamentally transform” America. What made Martin Luther King Jr so powerful, so effective, and so great for America is that he embraced the American founding principles, and used them as a mirror to show America where it had gone wrong. In many of his speeches, Dr. King repeated the words of our Constitution or Declaration of Independence back to his fellow Americans, to expose to America where we have failed to live up to our founding principles when it came to the black community. And he was absolutely right. He saw our founding principles as right and necessary for his cause of equal rights and freedom for black Americans. Dr. King believed the fact that we had failed to live up to those principles, meant it was the people, not the principles, who needed to change. Obama believes the exact opposite. He believes because America has failed to live up to its founding principles, it is the principles and the foundation of the country that must change. That is why these harmful policies that he has been orchestrating over the last 9 months are designed to tear America down to its studs, so he can “fundamentally transform” America, and rebuild it in his own image. Not only is Obama the most un-American man in America, but he may also be the most dangerous man on the planet. The record of history is very clear and very consistent. An unaccountable narcissist who controls the levers of power of one of the most powerful countries on the planet always ends up in major atrocities. And that is exactly what is going on behind the scenes at the White House.

Not sure about Delta but he and I were among the "570" that were hired by UAL in '85 to cross the picket line should (and did) the UAL pilots go on strike. No one cross and UAL eventually hired the 570 and I believe he was one of them. I went elsewhere, which in the long term was the correct decision for me. Don't get me wrong, Kit and his previous partner, Louis Smith, are the good guys that were at the fore front in helping all of us be better prepared for the airline hiring process. Louis Smith - Chairman and President of FAPA.aero | FAPA.aero | Meet the Team What Huggy described in so few words, is what so many of us went through: furloughs, pay cuts, reduced or no pension (no defined contribution plans back then), mergers and BK's. 2008 seems to have been the turning point for the airlines.

You really limit your options with SWA vs DAL. I tried international for 2 years, ie 4 ocean crossings in 6 days with no augmentation (old days) and could never get enough sleep. Others loved it and I probably would have too if I got a 2 hr rest break. As for narrow body pay, how hard do want to work? I have stated it elsewhere, my bro-in-law retired last Jan from DAL as a 320CA and worked the system (green slips). In his last 3 yrs made $500K, $500K, $602K.

Gees, I see Kit Darby's name in the line up. He's been in that business since '78 I believe when he founded FAPA (Future Airline Pilot Association).

Speaking from someone who was single his entire airline career, no need to commute from the Philippines when you work in a target rich (not slighting you Hacker) environment.

Well west of there but we headquarters out of Wengen. Discovered the Lauterbrunnen Valley area (below) when stationed in Germany. Has changed little in the last 40 yrs unlike the rest of the world. Airline job allowed us to retire <60 and visit it often. I plan to die there.

During my entire airline career I always bid Sept off and was easy to get no matter my seniority. I had no squids to consider. Best time to travel, no crowds, and cooler in Europe.

Care to explain? I am the last one to complain: Willie-->Zweibrucken-->Bergstrom-->DM.

Fox News' Jennifer Griffin (whom I respect) is reporting Woodward's book is not accurate according to her sources.

The 2020 Trump-Taliban "Peace Agreement"—Time to End the War on Terror | Nebraska Law Review | Nebraska (unl.edu)

Restaurants, stadiums, and stores across the nation are reserving areas to honor the 13 U.S. troops who were killed in Afghanistan last week after suicide bombers in Kabul blew up at least 170 people.

This. We owners got wacked last year for a $100K/each assessment by our condo association for repairs.

Fogleman came to DM AFB as the Air Division CC (O-7) just as I was exiting the AF for the airlines. With that he brought Crud tournaments to the dying O'Club. The previous CC relished hauling in officers to Stand Up for minor infractions. The one that I witnessed, he was totally out of line. Fogleman was a welcome relief and the morale of the base changed overnight. Great dude! Buddy of mine was his investigative officer on the Khobar Tower bombing and repercussions to the CC.

1994 Black Hawk shootdown incident - Wikipedia My UPT roommate presided over the Tinker hearing and is the one that recommended court-martial for Capt Wang. Very sick comment.

Why would you expect that? The dumbest thing he did was shut down Bagram and left our military totally exposed at the Kabul Airport. I am hearing the count of 10 killed is expected to go higher.

Good gig for a Metroliner guy. Heck, I have Beech 99/Shorts 330 time...should have thrown my hat in the ring.

Thinking I lived a charmed life in UPT by going to Willie and living in Sin City (Tempe).

Beechtalk.com It is not just about Bonanzas, many sub categories including Babbletalk. Successful people including, lawyers, doctors, business owners, airline, ex military.

Sorry but the below site is pay blocked so I posted the whole thing. I'll delete it if you want. No American Military Leader Should Ever Say What Lloyd Austin Said | National Review Dan McLaughlin August 19, 2021 1:16 PM Can you imagine Norman Schwarzkopf — to say nothing of Dwight Eisenhower or Douglas MacArthur — making this statement? There are an estimated 10,000–15,000 Americans in Afghanistan now who need to be evacuated as the Taliban seize control of the country. Anyone left behind could find themselves reliving the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis or the hostage crisis in Lebanon shortly thereafter. The Taliban are undoubtedly well aware of the leverage they could obtain by holding Americans hostage. Evacuation is therefore not just a pressing humanitarian matter; it is essential to preventing a bunch of Stone Age barbarians from dictating terms to the United States of America. The Biden administration has not exactly exuded confidence in the face of this threat. On Tuesday, the State Department sent a cable to thousands of Americans in the country telling them to make their way to Kabul’s soon-to-be-renamed Hamid Karzai Airport (we already abandoned Bagram Airfield) but warning them, “Please Be Advised That The United States Cannot Guarantee Your Security As You Make This Trip.” Then, in a briefing this morning, Defense Department spokesman John Kirby admitted that the administration not only does not know how many Americans are trapped in Afghanistan, they do not even know how many have been evacuated: Worst of all, at a Pentagon briefing Wednesday, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was asked about the U.S. military’s capability to get its citizens out of Afghanistan, his answer was jaw-dropping: “We don’t have the capability to go out and collect large numbers of people.” You have to watch Austin deliver this line to grasp its full air of defeatism about a place where our military has moved about with some impunity for two decades, while General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a fellow Army lifer, stood by looking as if someone had just shot his dog: The best Austin could offer was a promise to try, at least for a while: “We’re gonna get everyone that we can possibly evacuate evacuated, and I’ll do that as long as we possibly can, until the clock runs out, or we run out of capability. . . . I don’t have the capability to go out and extend operations currently into Kabul.” This is unacceptable. This is un-American. This is not what our Army is about. Can you imagine, say, Norman Schwarzkopf — to say nothing of Dwight Eisenhower or Douglas MacArthur — giving that answer? What is wrong with these men? What have they been doing with the $700 billion we spend on national defense? What do they think that money is for, if not to protect Americans in danger, be they at home or abroad, civilians or military? Hardly anything is more central to the ethos of our Army than the credo, “Leave no man behind.” When we evacuate or retreat — and even the best armies must expect do these things from time to time — no stone is unturned, no risk unrun to make certain that we leave nobody behind. That is drilled into every soldier from the very start of their training. Secretary Austin and General Milley have, between them, nearly 80 years of service in the Army behind them, a good part of that in combat. How can they have become so immersed in the culture of bureaucracy that they have forgotten who they are and where they came from? Austin and Milley should be sacked immediately and replaced with people who know what their job is. Abraham Lincoln would have demanded their resignations, as he did repeatedly to generals who wouldn’t fight. He sacked his first secretary of war and exiled him to Russia. Joe Biden could take a lesson. It doesn’t matter how hard the job is, or how strained the military’s capacity is right now. It doesn’t even matter if you expect from experience that the mission will fall short of its goals. You do not say out loud that we cannot guarantee the safe evacuation of Americans from the clutches of the Taliban. You do not even allow yourself to think it so long as you have tools at your disposal to prevent it. The lives of over 10,000 Americans and the credibility of the nation’s promise to protect them are at stake. The only acceptable answers in this situation are twofold, and they should be declared long and loud so that the entire world can hear them: One, we will move heaven and earth to get every last American home safely. Two, if even a hair on their heads should be harmed, we will paint the streets with Taliban blood on our way out the door in retribution. Recall the speech that Vito Corleone gives to the heads of the other Mafia families in The Godfather about ensuring Michael’s safety upon his return from Sicily: In hours of crisis, nations and armies survive on a can-do spirit and a determination to overcome every obstacle. When the British Expeditionary Force was stranded at Dunkirk, Winston Churchill didn’t say, “Well, we don’t have the capability.” When the Royal Navy was short of that capacity, he put out a call for volunteers and sent civilian fishing boats — some of them even with civilian sailors — across the English Channel into a war zone under the threat of bombardment by the Luftwaffe. When the Soviets blockaded West Berlin in 1948, Harry Truman launched the Berlin Airlift; American and British relief planes flew 250,000 missions to keep West Berlin supplied, collectively flying almost the distance from the earth to the Sun. In 1942, when the USS Yorktownreturned to Hawaii from the Battle of the Coral Sea needing months’ worth of repair, Admiral Chester Nimitz did not say, “Sorry, we do not have the capability.” He met the ship at the docks with 1,400 workmen who labored around the clock and put the carrier back to sea in less than three days, changing the course of the Battle of Midway. In 1914, when Paris was threatened, General Joseph Gallieni pressed thousands of taxis into service to ensure that every soldier he could find was able to get to the Marne to stop the German advance. In the fall of 1863, when the Union garrison at Chattanooga was nearly surrounded and starving, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton did not say, “We do not have the capability.” He summoned the presidents of all the railroads to his office, worked through the night commandeering and personally rerouting their schedules, and had men on the move within 40 hours. Within less than two weeks, 20,000 men had reached Chattanooga with all their artillery, horses, and baggage. And Joe Biden? He went back to his vacation. Even amidst the collapse and national war-weariness at the end of the Vietnam War, Gerald Ford did not accept that Americans should be left behind and held hostage. When the merchant vessel the SS Mayaguez was captured by the Khmer Rouge and its crew held hostage, Ford sent in the Marines. When some of his Electronic Data Systems employees were taken by the Iranians in 1979, Ross Perot did not throw his hands up and say, “We’re a computer company, not an army.” He hired a private commando force, including military veterans working for EDS, and had his men rescued. Even Jimmy Carter at least attempted the same thing. It was once a point of pride for great nations, from the Roman Empire to the British Empire, that they would protect their citizens anywhere in the world, and woe betide those who brought them harm. The most famous invocation of this principle came in 1850, after an anti-Semitic mob in Greece had sacked the house of David Pacifico. Don Pacifico, as he was known, was a Spanish Jew doubling as Portuguese consul in Athens, but he had been born in Gibraltar and claimed British citizenship. Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary, sent a squadron of the Royal Navy to blockade Greek ports and demand compensation, even risking war with France and Russia on the principle. When called in the House of Commons to defend this, he gave a memorable speech that carried the country with him, saying that what was at stake in the Don Pacifico affair was “whether, as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum [I am a Roman citizen]; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England, will protect him against injustice and wrong.” That was the same spirit in which Thomas Jefferson sent the Marines all the way to Tripoli to stop the Barbary Pirates, or that Theodore Roosevelt responded to the kidnapping of an American businessman, Ion Perdicaris, by a Moroccan leader named Raisuli by having his secretary of state declare, “This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.” It was not so long ago that even such a redoubt of liberal opinion as The West Wing still venerated that idea: What happened to the can-do-what-we-must-do determination of Edwin Stanton or Chester Nimitz? If you know anybody who has served in the ranks of the U.S. military over the past two decades, you know that the problem is not the men and women in uniform. If Joe Biden’s generals have lost that sense of their mission, he should find some generals who remember it.

It makes us sick but have to say they are pretty clever (if it isn't photo shopped) with their "Take that America (Biden)!"

That's not what Gen Petraeus thinks: David Petraeus Reflects on the Afghan Debacle He offers unsparing words about Trump and Biden, a defense of nation-building, and he says U.S. soldiers may have to re-enter Kabul in force to rescue Americans. By Tunku Varadarajan Aug. 20, 2021 6:18 pm ET As Americans despair over the Afghanistan catastrophe, few have more cause to take it personally than retired Gen. David Petraeus. Not only was he commander of U.S. and allied forces there for 13 months in 2010-11; his son and daughter-in-law both served there in the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade. That involved an additional measure of personal sacrifice: During his command, he didn’t see his son to avoid making a target of the young man’s unit. In a Zoom interview, I ask Mr. Petraeus, 68, what effect the ignominious withdrawal will have on military morale. He chooses his words carefully without masking his indignation. “I think—particularly for those who served there—that it is very sad,” he says. “It is heartbreaking. It is tragic. And I think it is disastrous.” He asks: “Is American national security better now than it was four months ago?” Then he answers indirectly: “It’s a tough answer to arrive at if folks have given 20 years of service and sacrifice.” The general hastens to add, however, that “this is not the post-Vietnam military; there is no hollow Army.” He says what every American fighting man is inclined to say, “that this is best-equipped, best-trained, most combat-experienced military by far in the world.” It isn’t the Army he joined “as a very young lieutenant” in 1974. “That was a very different Army. That was an undisciplined Army.” He was “very fortunate” to go to an airborne battalion combat team in Italy that was “very elite, and everybody else wanted to go to.” But when he and his fellow officers would “go up to Germany at that time, the indiscipline was just stunning.” And “the racial issues were draining.” Mr. Petraeus sounds pained when comparing “the reality we had” before the pullout to the new status quo. He valued—even cherished—the fallen Afghan government. “However imperfect that government was, however flawed, however many its maddening shortcomings and corrupt activities,” he says, its leaders were “great partners” in ensuring that al Qaeda, Islamic State and other terrorist groups couldn’t re-establish the kind of sanctuary that al Qaeda had under the Taliban before 9/11. Yet he suggests the Taliban are so constrained that they may end up being less difficult to deal with than many Americans fear. Minutes before our interview, he says, he told Tony Blair : “The Taliban may discover that just like a political party, sometimes it’s easier to be an opposition than it is to actually govern.” The former British prime minister “just chuckled,” Mr. Petraeus says, declining to elaborate on Mr. Blair’s reaction. “I’m a loyal man,” he says. “Blair was my wartime prime minister.” An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. citizens remained in Afghanistan at the time of the pullout, and the most urgent priority is to ensure the evacuation of all who wish to leave, as well as the safe passage of the 18,000 Afghan battlefield interpreters—“we call them ‘terps’ ”—and their families, who face mortal peril from the Taliban. The latter “is a very big deal, a real moral obligation which we have not met in three consecutive administrations.” The U.S. has to “continue to pressure the Taliban to enable these individuals to move to Kabul airport right now.” He is certain that the U.S. military is “examining various possible courses of action, where you go into the city—very visibly, and with very substantial capacity—and you may have to go get some of these people.” “Does the U.S. have leverage with the Taliban?” he asks. “It has enormous leverage, and the Taliban is very familiar with it.” They’ve been “on the receiving end of our leverage. That’s our military power.” We don’t want to use it, Mr. Petraeus emphasizes. “But I don’t think they want to provoke us into a position of having to use our military power against them, given that they have experienced this on innumerable occasions, most of which have ended very badly for them.” Thus, he thinks the Taliban won’t want to jeopardize their control of the country by taking hostages. “They’ve achieved what they set out to accomplish,” he says. “They control probably more of the country now than they did prior to 9/11.” As for the challenges of governing, “I assume they have to be painfully aware that they face an enormous budget deficit.” Not only have Afghan assets been frozen and Western aid withdrawn, but the “big-spending Western organizations, nonprofits, and embassies that were really a part of the ecosystem of Kabul and the major cities around Afghanistan, are gone too,” as are many Afghan entrepreneurs. The Afghan government budget is “roughly $18 billion a year,” Mr. Petraeus says. The government “might generate $2 billion in customs duties, some taxes, and so forth,” he says—and that’s “in a good year—a really good year.” They’ll supplement that with drug money, he says, but that won’t be enough. The economy is “clearly going to tank for a period of time.” The Taliban will have to pay salaries, import fuel to keep generators going, provide basic services, and repair damaged infrastructure. That’s “a pretty tall order” in itself, Mr. Petraeus says, “and they’re about to get acquainted with the reality of governing a country that generates at most one-tenth of what it needs to meet its fiscal obligations.” What happens “when they just flat run out of money and the lights go out?” Perhaps a bailout from Beijing, which has appeared to embrace the new regime in Kabul and is on the verge formally recognizing it? Mr. Petraeus says that he is “fully cognizant of the possibility that China is standing ready to try to exploit the $2 trillion or so in mineral wealth in Afghanistan,” including copper, iron, lithium and rare-earth metals. The Chinese may have an easier time than they’ve had, since they won’t have the Taliban shooting at them as happened at the Mes Aynak copper deposits, 25 miles southeast of Kabul, where the Afghan government awarded a concession to two Chinese state-owned companies in 2008. The Taliban “was shooting rockets and mortars” at Chinese operations, which eventually shut down. After the Taliban retook power, the China Metallurgical Group Corp. said it would resume mining. Besides, there are limits to what the Chinese can—and will—do. Beijing will invest in Afghanistan, says Gen. Petraeus, and “that’ll help. But keep in mind that the normal way that China goes in and does this is to bring in Chinese workers, Chinese construction materials, Chinese design . . . even Chinese food!” In any case, he adds, it will take a long time to establish the extractive industries from which the Taliban could derive revenue. On Monday President Biden blamed Afghans for the Taliban’s quick victory. “The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight,” the president said. “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.” Mr. Petraeus bridles at such criticism. “Their soldiers fought and died in very substantial numbers,” he says with the protective indignation of a fellow soldier who fought alongside them. “It’s way over 60,000 dead. Roughly 27 times as many Afghans died fighting for their country as did Americans.” He points out that it’s been 18 months since the last U.S. combat death in the country. He’s critical of Mr. Biden’s predecessor as well, calling the Trump administration’s negotiations with the Taliban “disastrous.” The U.S. “conveyed that we wanted to leave, and we thought we could get something from the Taliban in return for our leaving—which, of course, didn’t work out.” The agreement that was struck, “negotiated without the democratically elected government of Afghanistan at the table,” provided that the government would release more than 5,000 Taliban-affiliated detainees. Most went back to the battlefield. He rejects the view that—as he sums it up—“it all went wrong when we started to nation-build.” He notes that the U.S. and its allies had 150,000 troops in the country at the height of the war, a figure that had dwindled to a few thousand “until about four months ago.” That was accomplished by “transitioning security tasks” to the Afghans. Doing so required efforts of the sort that critics deride as nation-building. Unlike in Iraq, where literacy levels are high, the coalition in Afghanistan had to teach remedial skills “before we could do basic training for the future Afghan soldiers and police. Because if you can’t read numbers, how do you get someone to be on the lookout for license plates on cars? If you can’t read an instruction manual, if you can’t add and subtract, you’ve got serious problems.” If you don’t do nation-building, “to whom do you hand off tasks that you’re performing when you topple a government and are in charge of the country?” At the same time, Pakistan was a major headache for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. Mr. Petraeus recalls a September 2005 briefing with Donald Rumsfeld, in which Gen. Petraeus stressed to the defense secretary that “Afghanistan does not equal Iraq.” In Afghanistan, “the enemy’s headquarters were outside the country and beyond our reach.” Only occasionally was the U.S. able to strike in Pakistan, such as the 2011 raid against Osama bin Laden and the 2016 killing of Mullah Akhtar Mansour, Mullah Omar’s successor as head of the Taliban, who was targeted by a drone in Balochistan. Efforts to press Islamabad were complicated: “Pakistan could shut down the ground lines of communication, and we were conscious of that,” Mr. Petraeus says. “We needed them to allow that to continue, for us to go to and from Afghanistan.” Afghanistan is landlocked, with Iran to its west, and “you can’t fly everything in and out of a country when you’ve got 150,000 troops on the ground.” Mr. Petraeus is adamant that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan was “sustainable,” and he expresses consternation that Mr. Biden felt compelled to follow through on a pullout to which Mr. Trump agreed. “Why did we just get so impatient that we didn’t appreciate that you can’t take a country from the seventh century—which is where it was under Taliban rule, when we toppled them—to the 21st century, in 20 years or less?” He observes that the new administration quickly reversed Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords. “There has seemed to be no compulsion to continue all that Trump had decided to do, but here, in Afghanistan, we followed through.” What lessons should friends and foes draw from the Great American Pullout? “I don’t think you can dispute that the outcome here is a blow in some fashion to our reputation and credibility,” Mr. Petraeus says. “I think you have to be forthright and acknowledge that.” The U.S. has to “begin immediately to shore up that credibility and that reputation.” Should someone in government be compelled to resign over the Afghan debacle? Again Mr. Petraeus chooses his words with care: “Without knowing who said what to whom and when, it’s impossible to answer that question. What I will say is, there is a long history in Washington and other national capitals of describing an undesirable policy outcome as intelligence failure, and we have to be keenly aware of that at present, clearly.” When I ask Mr. Petraeus—who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency after retiring from the military in 2011—to elaborate, he says: “I think it’s very clear what I just said.” Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute. WSJ:

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.

Any one of those unhappy senior military leaders could have pulled a "Ron Foggleman" and exited.