Bagram Versus Kabul
Nobody with experience in military planning understands how the Biden Afghanistan evacuation plans ever saw the light of day.
Common sense apparently isn't a qualifier for service in the White House or the Joint Chiefs. It is impossible for me to believe that any military planner with any amount of experience in Afghanistan would have chosen the indefensible Hamid Karzai International Airport, a commercial airport with one runway, over Bagram AFB, a hardened, defensible military air base with two runways.
Bagram is an hour and 30 minutes by convoy north of Kabul or a 30 minute helo ride. It is in a defensible valley, making it virtually impossible for the Taliban to surround. It has two runways and facilities to mange twice the number of rotary and fixed wing aircraft as Hamid Karzai International. It had advanced countermeasures installed to detect and neutralize attacks from the surrounding area, and the area around the base was controlled by our forces.
If Kabul and the American Embassy was a focus, America could have created multiple defensible LZ's around Kabul and lifted people out to Bagram - we could have used the C-17's and C-5's to get people from HKIA to Bagram where the environment could be controlled and managed efficiently.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Bagram was abandoned. I know some former combat leaders and mission planners and they were completely baffled when Milley told Congress “Bagram is not necessary tactically operationally for what we’re gonna try to do here with Afghanistan – consolidate on Kabul, in support of their government. “
The only possible scenario my contacts can come up with is Milley and Austin placed sucking up to the President over the mission.
It is also very curious that the 2022 appropriation for Afghanistan operations was INCREASED to 3.3 billion dollars from 3.0 billion as if the planning and expectation was that we would still be operating at the same level as 2021. A 1.5 billion upgrade to the Embassy in Kabul had just been completed. It appears as if there was no panic at the time.
So why the rush?
Why do this in a haphazard way from an airport you can’t control?
The operational planners tell me that you always plan for the worst and hope for the best, that the old saying is true: that even the best battle plans rarely survive first contact because the enemy gets a say in what you do. One of the first scenarios they would have gamed out was the complete takeover of Kabul and a retreat to the airport.
To a person, they tell me that the fall of Kabul would have meant a concentration of force at Bagram, because even with a evac from HKIA, Bagram would have been a safe zone that made a fall back possible.
This smacks of an idiotic decision made by the morons at the White House, including President Moron himself, and the military "leaders" simply didn't have the balls to say "no" to putting their soldiers directly in harm's way to satisfy the imbecilic political calculations of Biden and his gang.
If that is true, the entire senior level of our military leadership is rotten to the core and needs to go.
We (America) were in the driver's seat with the ability to dictate the terms of our exit and Biden's Top Men simply gave that power and control away, losing global credibility and billions of dollars of equipment in the process and jump starting the global terror machine - and even more importantly, costing the lives of American soldiers.
This was a cluster f*ck of galactic proportions. From top to bottom, when presented with a good choice and a bad choice, the latter was chosen every single time.
This is a self-inflicted wound that never should have happened. Biden, his entire national security team, Austin and Milley need to go.
Now.
“Top Men” indeed! One might have thunk the Top Man would have fired a few of the Top Men to deflect blame and try to save his own skin. But, no! Now we face the not-too-remote possibility of President Pelosi. Heaven help us all!
I cannot believe the addled Cic is calling any of the shots. His entire *dministration is made up of Soetero wunderkind. They'll gladly offer him up as a staked goat, if it keeps prying eyes from lifting the curtain of Oz.