The Afghan Papers

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Kriegsspiel
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kriegsspiel » Mon Aug 16, 2021 6:20 pm

pp4me wrote:
Mon Aug 16, 2021 4:34 pm
Kriegsspiel is our resident expert on Pentagon thinking so maybe he can enlighten us on what they think about military conscription nowadays.

My guess is that after Vietnam they decided never again unless it becomes absolutely necessary.
I think you're confusing me with kbg, I'm not a Pentagon guy.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kbg » Mon Aug 16, 2021 6:53 pm

I like Mark's idea...but no, stick them in the military. Close enough to being a hostage. :-)

The professional military likes the all-volunteer force. More disciplined, less likely to have problems with the troops who want to be there vs. those that are forced to be there, longer commitments, less turnover, more career length folks. From a military standpoint, it is a no-brainer. and I agree it is militarily a no-brainer. The main downside is it is a lot more expensive in terms of personnel costs.

Yeah, Vietnam was not a pleasant experience.

I think a lot of people have some long-term ingrained perceptions of what people in the military are like that came out of the 60s and remain the standard media caricature.

At least personally, I'm anti-war and pro draft. I happen to think the latter ups the odds of not having the former but it's not a guarantee of no wars by any means. It's alt-history so no way of knowing, but I'll bet if we had a draftee force there would have been a lot harder questions asked a lot earlier in both Afghanistan and Iraq and that we would have exited both a lot earlier than we ended up doing.

Bottom line: It's a lot easier not to care if it's not your kid.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by vnatale » Mon Aug 16, 2021 7:46 pm

pp4me wrote:
Mon Aug 16, 2021 2:58 pm

vnatale wrote:
Sun Aug 15, 2021 7:17 pm

I am remembering correctly that you were in the Vietnam War?

I know that at least two others here were also in military.

I assume you volunteered while those two enlisted.



Yes, you remember correctly but I don't know what the difference is between volunteering and enlisting (or did you mean to say "drafted" instead of volunteering).

I "volunteered" in the same sense that others like GWB volunteered for the National Guard. I joined the Navy because I expected to be drafted after I dropped out of college and lost my deferment. Only years later did I find out my number would have never come up. Most of us who joined the Navy or Air Force did so to avoid being drafted and ending up in the Army where the odds of ending up as a grunt fighting in the jungle were much higher.



Yes, definitely meant "drafted" rather than "volunteered". Poor, poor proofreading on my part.

In 1971 I was assigned #8, which was not going to be missed in a town of 70,000 if one was 1A. Later that year I became 1A after losing my 2S student deferment. In November I went for my draft physical. I was never inducted. The full story for another day.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by vnatale » Wed Aug 18, 2021 8:34 pm

Does this article partially answer Pugchief's question as to why the United States could not win in Afghanistan?

Vinny

Billions Spent on Afghan Army Ultimately Benefited Taliban

https://www.military.com/daily-news/202 ... liban.html
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by pp4me » Sun Aug 22, 2021 9:20 pm

Saw this on a website today. Should be captioned as "What's wrong with this picture"...

Imagefree picture hosting
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Mark Leavy » Sun Aug 22, 2021 10:50 pm

chart.jpg
chart.jpg (56.61 KiB) Viewed 4773 times
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Hal » Fri Aug 27, 2021 9:06 pm

Well, at least one officer is not happy with the status-quo..
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-d ... afghan-war
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kbg » Sat Aug 28, 2021 4:09 pm

Completely over the line for a serving military officer.

It will be interesting to see if he does get court martialed and booted out. I hope he didn’t do it on the spur of the moment and talked to his wife about the potential consequences in advance. If he does get kicked out his pension is gone.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sun Aug 29, 2021 1:22 pm

A State Department spokesman said Saturday that approximately 250 Americans are still seeking evacuation.

“Our team on the ground continues to coordinate assistance around the clock for this group, while taking the current security situation into account,” the spokesman said.

“Additionally, we have been in regular contact with a group of roughly 280 individuals who have self-identified as Americans in Afghanistan but who remain undecided about whether to leave the country or who have told us they do not intend to depart,” the spokesman added. link
Does this sound shady as fuck to anyone else? What is "self-identifying" as American? What Americans have their families in Afghanistan? And they don't intend to depart??? Are they just calling Afghans and their families "Americans" at this point?
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kbg » Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:05 pm

I have a much simpler theory and I’ll bet more accurate…there are 250-280 Americans just that stupid.

On a human level, what a tough decision; try to make it to Kabul or hunker down and hope everything works out.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by pp4me » Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:19 pm

In Vietnam a lot of American citizens refused to leave unless they could take their Vietnamese families with them. Eventually they were allowed to bring them (Nguyen is now the 38th most common surname in the U.S.A.,BTW). Might be something similar going on.

Also, some could be naturalized American citizens originally born in Afghanistan who decided to return and want to stay.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kbg » Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:45 pm

Definitely a possibility. Hopefully everything works out well for them. I kinda see at the top of the TB it being in their interest to let everyone out who wants to go with press stories from returning Americans saying how helpful they were. Everything to gain, nothing to lose. Flip side, local 40 YO TB who thinks and acts like someone from centuries ago.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:49 pm

Kbg wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:05 pm
I have a much simpler theory and I’ll bet more accurate…there are 250-280 Americans just that stupid.
You think it's simpler and more accurate that there are 280 stupid Americans, who brought their families with them to Afghanistan, and they haven't decided if they want to stay or leave? That could be the case, but I think the simpler explanation is that (at least a majority of them) they are families of Afghans who someone has conferred US citizenship on at some point and they haven't "come home" because they are home, in Afghanistan.
On a human level, what a tough decision; try to make it to Kabul or hunker down and hope everything works out.
Yea definitely. IMO they shouldn't have gone there in the first place. Just an awful predicament in an awful place.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:54 pm

pp4me wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:19 pm
In Vietnam a lot of American citizens refused to leave unless they could take their Vietnamese families with them. Eventually they were allowed to bring them (Nguyen is now the 38th most common surname in the U.S.A.,BTW). Might be something similar going on.

It would be beyond shocking to find even one example of an American starting a family with an Afghan.
Also, some could be naturalized American citizens originally born in Afghanistan who decided to return and want to stay.
True. So they don't need "rescued" then.
Last edited by Kriegsspiel on Sun Aug 29, 2021 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kriegsspiel » Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:59 pm

Kbg wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:45 pm
Definitely a possibility. Hopefully everything works out well for them. I kinda see at the top of the TB it being in their interest to let everyone out who wants to go with press stories from returning Americans saying how helpful they were. Everything to gain, nothing to lose. Flip side, local 40 YO TB who thinks and acts like someone from centuries ago.
Yea, that's something I've been mulling over the past couple days. If these civilians are scattered around, trying to get TO Kabul, then they've been living in de facto Taliban-controlled areas for years now. The Talibans been watching them this whole time and haven't snatched them up yet? It sounds like they are under orders not to, probably to your point. Needless to say, rogue elements might disregard those orders if they felt like they could get away with keeping a war prize or two.

I had to laugh at "40 year old Taliban" though. I don't think I saw many 40+ year olds there period, much less fighters.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Xan » Sun Aug 29, 2021 4:42 pm

MangoMan wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 4:36 pm
pp4me wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:19 pm
In Vietnam a lot of American citizens refused to leave unless they could take their Vietnamese families with them. Eventually they were allowed to bring them (Nguyen is now the 38th most common surname in the U.S.A.,BTW). Might be something similar going on.

Also, some could be naturalized American citizens originally born in Afghanistan who decided to return and want to stay.
I don't doubt this statistic, but don't see how it relates to your explanation in the prior sentence. Almost all of the US soldiers in Viet Nam were men, so even if they married there and brought their wives and kids back, unless they took their wives' names it wouldn't explain how all those Nguyens got here as a result.
Pug, these women are not beholden to their husbands. They kept their maiden names and made sure that their kids had those names too. As glenn has told us, only the Taliban hold to such antiquated patriarchal ideas as yours.

Fortunately with today's modern military in Afghanistan, you have women in combat who can marry Afghan men, men who can marry Afghan men, you name it. It's a free for all.

Oh hell now I've turned into tom...
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by glennds » Mon Aug 30, 2021 9:50 am

MangoMan wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 4:36 pm
pp4me wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:19 pm
In Vietnam a lot of American citizens refused to leave unless they could take their Vietnamese families with them. Eventually they were allowed to bring them (Nguyen is now the 38th most common surname in the U.S.A.,BTW). Might be something similar going on.

Also, some could be naturalized American citizens originally born in Afghanistan who decided to return and want to stay.
I don't doubt this statistic, but don't see how it relates to your explanation in the prior sentence. Almost all of the US soldiers in Viet Nam were men, so even if they married there and brought their wives and kids back, unless they took their wives' names it wouldn't explain how all those Nguyens got here as a result.
A PP investor would appreciate this story.
The larger influx of people resettling in the US from Vietnam happened 3 years after the war ended, mostly 1978-1979. The term "boat people" was used for the exodus.
The Vietnamese government was not letting people leave for free, and their currency had collapsed, so they came up with an "exit fee" which most people paid in gold coins or bars. If you had access to gold, you could buy your way out. The boat people were mostly resettled from refugee camps in other Asian countries to the US, Canada, France, UK and a few other places (400,000 to the US alone).
A friend of mine married a Vietnamese girl (named Nguyen) in the 1980's whose family had gotten out because Dad had buried a coffee can of silver in the backyard which was enough to buy their exit papers.
Some boats carried people who did not pay and thus had no exit papers, and many of those boats were attacked by "pirates" so paying was the safer thing to do.

*not satire or parody*
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by pp4me » Mon Aug 30, 2021 5:26 pm

MangoMan wrote:
Mon Aug 30, 2021 11:15 am
glennds wrote:
Mon Aug 30, 2021 9:50 am
MangoMan wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 4:36 pm
pp4me wrote:
Sun Aug 29, 2021 2:19 pm
In Vietnam a lot of American citizens refused to leave unless they could take their Vietnamese families with them. Eventually they were allowed to bring them (Nguyen is now the 38th most common surname in the U.S.A.,BTW). Might be something similar going on.

Also, some could be naturalized American citizens originally born in Afghanistan who decided to return and want to stay.
I don't doubt this statistic, but don't see how it relates to your explanation in the prior sentence. Almost all of the US soldiers in Viet Nam were men, so even if they married there and brought their wives and kids back, unless they took their wives' names it wouldn't explain how all those Nguyens got here as a result.
A PP investor would appreciate this story.
The larger influx of people resettling in the US from Vietnam happened 3 years after the war ended, mostly 1978-1979. The term "boat people" was used for the exodus.
The Vietnamese government was not letting people leave for free, and their currency had collapsed, so they came up with an "exit fee" which most people paid in gold coins or bars. If you had access to gold, you could buy your way out. The boat people were mostly resettled from refugee camps in other Asian countries to the US, Canada, France, UK and a few other places (400,000 to the US alone).
A friend of mine married a Vietnamese girl (named Nguyen) in the 1980's whose family had gotten out because Dad had buried a coffee can of silver in the backyard which was enough to buy their exit papers.
Some boats carried people who did not pay and thus had no exit papers, and many of those boats were attacked by "pirates" so paying was the safer thing to do.

*not satire or parody*
Well that makes more sense. My confusion came from the assertion in PP4me's post that the name resulted from US soldiers bringing families home.
I didn't intend to make any such assertion so I'm sorry you took it that way. It was actually a parenthetical addition to my original post that I thought people might find interesting.

I believe I read somewhere that 70% of the people in Vietnam share the surname of Nguyen so regardless of how they got here that would have been the obvious outcome.

In-laws, nieces and nephews of American servicemen with Vietnamese wives would also share the same surname. How many of them got here as the original boat people on their own or with the help of the wives and other family members of American servicemen during the evacuation or in the subsequent years would be hard to determine.

Stories about the Vietnamese people acquiring gold before having to exit the country and start a new life was one of the reasons I now have a good stash of my own.

Also, I looked up the most common surname in Afghanistan and it is Mohammad. Not nearly as prominent as Nguyen though.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Hal » Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:43 am

Kbg wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 4:09 pm
Completely over the line for a serving military officer.

It will be interesting to see if he does get court martialed and booted out. I hope he didn’t do it on the spur of the moment and talked to his wife about the potential consequences in advance. If he does get kicked out his pension is gone.
Should have retired/resigned first in my opinion....
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by vnatale » Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:15 pm

Seems to describe it all quite well...

Vinny

Joe Biden Finally Ended America’s Abominable ‘Forever Wars’

https://www.thedailybeast.com/joe-biden ... itter_page


Nonetheless, moments after the speech was over, his seriousness in addressing the issues was met by commentary on network after network by analysts who were more interested in defending the narratives they had been peddling for the past few weeks. Some seemed offended that Biden did not focus on their special issues of concern or that he did not simply repudiate his own decisions, throw up his hands and say, “You know, Mr. Talking Head, you were right all along.”

Of course, often they were not right. By and large, he was and is. And if what he has done deserves debate and analysis, many of the public platforms we have for such debate have become too politicized to permit it, too dominated by reporters and pundits as concerned with their brands as they are with the facts.

At a moment like this, the end of a war, we have an urgent need to have just the kind of substantive discussion that the president’s remarks should have triggered, a discussion at the level of detail and insight offered by the president. But that is nearly impossible in this hyper-partisan era of toxic politics—and that should worry us all greatly. Because in many ways it is symptomatic of some of the key reasons we ended up with the deeply unsatisfactory outcome we have had in Afghanistan.

In the months and years ahead, we need to do a deep accounting of the flaws in our system, our politics and our society that led us to make mistakes on the scale of the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War and the "War on Terror."

While the war in Afghanistan began with a natural impulse to seek justice in the wake of 9/11, the policy process guiding it quickly was hijacked by opportunists with personal agendas that were ideological or industry-driven. Lies, often supported by partisan media machinery, became the foundations for a massive national endeavor.

Those lies were not effectively challenged. The Iraq War was an indecent and indefensible distraction from the mission to get Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, but the majority of the foreign policy establishment supported it and accepted many lies without questioning them. Herd mentality dominated.

We violated our most deeply held principles. We accepted torture, rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, violation of other nations' sovereignty and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.


Within the system, too few people stood up and spoke truth to power and challenged the Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon leviathan. The mission into which we drifted at their behest in Afghanistan became an impossible one in a country that had defied such efforts for centuries.

A nation hobbled by grief blindly accepted the idea of a "war on terror" as if such a thing was right or even possible. The idea that a few hundred or thousand terrorists living in caves and on the run possibly could pose a real existential threat to the world's greatest support was blindly accepted.

It was a ludicrous notion but in the wake of the Cold War, seemingly adrift without an enemy, we used the provocation of 9/11 to spin a narrative that was unsupported by facts or analysis but happened to suit the agenda of a political clique and our military-industrial complex.

The discussion became so overheated that we violated our most deeply held principles. We accepted torture, rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, violation of other nations' sovereignty and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

Today we hear arguments that ending this era of war weakens us with our allies and diminishes our standing, but nothing could have done those things more than the way we conducted these wars. That is not to say that our soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, intelligence community, diplomats, contractors, NGOs and others did not often display great courage while embracing sacrifice, advancing our values and making the lives of those with whom they came in contact better. They often did. Biden was very specific in noting this. But we conflated their goodness with policy rightness and the results were devastating.

Demagogues suggested that it would be an insult to the lives lost on 9/11 and after to question our leaders, particularly our military leaders. But time and again, those military leaders made errors. Some misrepresented what was achievable. Others just played the Washington game, seeking to work their way up the greasy pole, saluting and saying "yessir" when they should have called for a different course. They failed to admit our errors, the costs of those errors and how elusive our goals were becoming.

Politicians with a few notable exceptions were the most cowardly of all, hostage to a toxic environment in which to admit a mistake was a political death sentence. They issued authorizations to go to war to our presidents that were essentially a license to battle on indefinitely, results and costs be damned.

We just kept writing blank checks to presidents who kept failing to live up to the responsibilities of their offices—until now.

One trillion dollars. Two trillion dollars. Three trillion dollars. All the way up to a debt burden including interest of $6.5 trillion according to one estimate as America mortgaged our futures on goals that could never be achieved. That fortune represents a generation of schools not built, teachers not hired, roads and bridges not restored, investments in research and development not made, defenses against next generation threats not undertaken, steps to address urgent needs like combatting the climate crisis not taken.

We just kept writing blank checks to presidents who kept failing to live up to the responsibilities of their offices. By 2010 there were 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan although the year before many including Biden had argued we should be drawing down our forces.

Bush and then Obama and then Trump could see we were faltering but none , until Biden, had the courage to actually end this era of cascading policy failures, failures of judgment, and failures of character.

They got away with those failures in part because many in the media failed as well. Sometimes they failed by accepting the jingoism of leaders without question. Sometimes it was because a twisted sense of "objectivity" led to both-sides-isms that gave credence to ideas without merit and defenses of the indefensible.

Others simply stopped covering the stories at all, letting them fade from public view as wars raged on and costs were piled ever higher. And the public too bought into a political discourse that divided America itself into warring tribes and replaced debate with reflexive name-calling.

Common interests were scoffed at. Serious exchanges of ideas among respectful opposing views were seen as weak, as betraying higher partisan causes. Those who wanted to rethink our approaches were castigated as traitors, un-American, un-patriotic.

We knew it was going wrong. 20 years later there are more terrorists in the world many times over than there were when our "war on terror began." Iraq was never really part of that war—until we drew the terrorists there and inspired the birth of ISIS.

While we sought to ensure Afghanistan could not be a haven for terrorists, it never stopped being one and all the while terrorist cells spread throughout the world, in part inspired by our abuses, our failures, the targets we presented.

For all those we helped, there were others we let down terribly. There were the deaths and there were the wounded, there was the suffering and the destruction. And we justified it and we enabled it to go on and on. And that, in the end, is on all of us.

So as we mark the end of this period, we owe it to ourselves to reflect and then, with seriousness of purpose commensurate with that demonstrated by the president and every member of his senior team, compile our lessons learned and then apply them with great urgency. This was one of the darkest periods in the history of U.S. foreign policy. We stumbled as a nation. It is time to lift ourselves up.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by vnatale » Tue Aug 31, 2021 11:50 pm

Published today:

https://www.amazon.com/Afghanistan-Pape ... 982159006/

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War Hardcover – August 31, 2021
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by I Shrugged » Thu Sep 02, 2021 6:42 pm

I'm suspicious of Biden's motives, but so far I have to strongly applaud his stated explanations for getting us out of there, and his disdain for remaking nations in our image. And of course Lindsay Graham is very angry.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by vnatale » Thu Sep 02, 2021 7:26 pm

Simonjester wrote:
I Shrugged wrote:
Thu Sep 02, 2021 6:42 pm

I'm suspicious of Biden's motives, but so far I have to strongly applaud his stated explanations for getting us out of there, and his disdain for remaking nations in our image. And of course Lindsay Graham is very angry.

https://babylonbee.com/news/republican- ... tan-crisis


Of course I like this one! Thanks...
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kriegsspiel » Fri Sep 03, 2021 5:52 pm

Hal wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:43 am
Kbg wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 4:09 pm
Completely over the line for a serving military officer.

It will be interesting to see if he does get court martialed and booted out. I hope he didn’t do it on the spur of the moment and talked to his wife about the potential consequences in advance. If he does get kicked out his pension is gone.
Should have retired/resigned first in my opinion....
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I agree with both of you. Sadly, IMO, the senior officers in the planetarium (the guys who should be resigning) are currently shitbags, so maybe the field grade officers are feeling mounting pressure.
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Re: The Afghan Papers

Post by Kbg » Tue Sep 14, 2021 11:52 am

Kriegsspiel wrote:
Fri Sep 03, 2021 5:52 pm
Hal wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:43 am
Kbg wrote:
Sat Aug 28, 2021 4:09 pm
Completely over the line for a serving military officer.

It will be interesting to see if he does get court martialed and booted out. I hope he didn’t do it on the spur of the moment and talked to his wife about the potential consequences in advance. If he does get kicked out his pension is gone.
Should have retired/resigned first in my opinion....
https://flagofficers4america.com/read-a ... bf2eec4e5b
I agree with both of you. Sadly, IMO, the senior officers in the planetarium (the guys who should be resigning) are currently shitbags, so maybe the field grade officers are feeling mounting pressure.
Most GOs I know are good folks and try to do the right thing. One notable exception is if they were promoted multiple years early and are in over their heads. I don't think people realize at the very senior levels where civilians are the ones giving the orders the same dynamic exists as between a Sergeant and a Private. "Thank you for your input, shut up and color. Am I clear?" Said more eloquently of course but the bottom line is the same. There is always the cry "they should have resigned" if they didn't agree with something. I pose the metaphorical, why, if it wasn't illegal, unethical or immoral? Biden was/is clearly within his prerogative/constitutional power as the President to wrap up any conflict he feels like. The US military is bought and paid for to execute political policy, full stop no exceptions (illegal, immoral, unethical excepted).

We as US citizens have the right to vote for someone else in the next election.
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