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Seems like a good portion of ex-marines etc are saying exactly this (that the execution was a failure) publicly.

jacobolus 5y ago
After being directly involved with an organization that has systematically failed for 20 years, why do they have more credibility in this conversation than anyone else? You might as well ask petroleum engineers about climate change and the transition to renewable energy. You’d get much better insight from asking historians or the like.
- trident5000 5y ago
  Why do mouth breathing nerds on HN get any say? I think an ex-marine understands mission failure more than most people on this forum including yourself or myself. And to assume the mistakes of top end planners means on the ground professionals cant identify operational blunders is asinine.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    Skip the insults, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html * * * It’s fine and dandy to ask ex-marines for their opinions, but there are plenty of credible experts who don’t have a direct stake in the same way, and those I have read have mostly suggested that a broadly similar result was predictable and inevitable at whatever point the US decided to withdraw, whether now or a decade later. Unfortunately, few if any of them have been given much air time by US media in the past few weeks, which has instead been dominated by self-serving claptrap from people who created and perpetuated this mess, and are now rushing to blame Biden for their own failures. * * * To be more concrete: maybe you can point to an example that demonstrates what you or miscellaneous Marines would consider a well executed withdrawal of a hostile occupying army from a country after decades of unsuccessful occupation? It’s pretty easy to say “this didn’t go perfectly as planned”, but quite a lot harder to predict which counterfactual alternative plans would have led to a better result.
    - nate_meurer 5y ago
      I can't exactly meet your challenge, but I think it's obvious that they should have kept Bagram and used it to stage the final retreat. I have yet to hear an argument of any kind to support abandoning it. Biden simply said it didn't add any value, but he didn't support that assertion in any way, and no one else has tried as far as I know. There are undoubtedly a hundred other things that a competent leadership would have done differently, but I suspect Bagram will be recorded as the biggest blunder. Tyler Rogoway expounds on this much better than I can: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42128/what-the-u-s-militarys-options-look-like-for-extending-evacuations-from-afghanistan https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42128/what-the-u-s-mil...
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > I can't exactly meet your challenge, but I think it's obvious that they should have kept Bagram and used it to stage the final retreat. The largest concentration of civilians that needed withdrawn were in Kabul. The biggest problem with the evacuation hasn’t been security at the evacuation site, but the problems with people who need evacuation getting to the evacuation site because of the absence of freedom/safety of Staging the evacuation out of Bagram would have made a secondary problem easier while exacerbating the primary problem.
        nate_meurer 5y ago
        Nobody is suggesting they should have kept Bagram instead of Kabul. That would have been just as stupid. The facilities are very different, and they needed both. Here's Tyler Rogoway in the War Zone article I linked: "Beyond shuttling people from Hamid Karzai International, helicopters could be used to pick up evacuees all over the country at unpredictable locales and they could then be flown out of Bagram." Gen. Milley suggested that the only reason they gave up Bagram is lack of personnel. Biden apparently didn't want to send any extra troops, even temporarily. (Note that they were forced to send extra troops anyway after things went to shit).
    - trident5000 5y ago

After being directly involved with an organization that has systematically failed for 20 years, why do they have more credibility in this conversation than anyone else? You might as well ask petroleum engineers about climate change and the transition to renewable energy. You’d get much better insight from asking historians or the like.

trident5000 5y ago
Why do mouth breathing nerds on HN get any say? I think an ex-marine understands mission failure more than most people on this forum including yourself or myself. And to assume the mistakes of top end planners means on the ground professionals cant identify operational blunders is asinine.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Skip the insults, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html * * * It’s fine and dandy to ask ex-marines for their opinions, but there are plenty of credible experts who don’t have a direct stake in the same way, and those I have read have mostly suggested that a broadly similar result was predictable and inevitable at whatever point the US decided to withdraw, whether now or a decade later. Unfortunately, few if any of them have been given much air time by US media in the past few weeks, which has instead been dominated by self-serving claptrap from people who created and perpetuated this mess, and are now rushing to blame Biden for their own failures. * * * To be more concrete: maybe you can point to an example that demonstrates what you or miscellaneous Marines would consider a well executed withdrawal of a hostile occupying army from a country after decades of unsuccessful occupation? It’s pretty easy to say “this didn’t go perfectly as planned”, but quite a lot harder to predict which counterfactual alternative plans would have led to a better result.
  - nate_meurer 5y ago
    I can't exactly meet your challenge, but I think it's obvious that they should have kept Bagram and used it to stage the final retreat. I have yet to hear an argument of any kind to support abandoning it. Biden simply said it didn't add any value, but he didn't support that assertion in any way, and no one else has tried as far as I know. There are undoubtedly a hundred other things that a competent leadership would have done differently, but I suspect Bagram will be recorded as the biggest blunder. Tyler Rogoway expounds on this much better than I can: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42128/what-the-u-s-militarys-options-look-like-for-extending-evacuations-from-afghanistan https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42128/what-the-u-s-mil...
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > I can't exactly meet your challenge, but I think it's obvious that they should have kept Bagram and used it to stage the final retreat. The largest concentration of civilians that needed withdrawn were in Kabul. The biggest problem with the evacuation hasn’t been security at the evacuation site, but the problems with people who need evacuation getting to the evacuation site because of the absence of freedom/safety of Staging the evacuation out of Bagram would have made a secondary problem easier while exacerbating the primary problem.
      - nate_meurer 5y ago
        Nobody is suggesting they should have kept Bagram instead of Kabul. That would have been just as stupid. The facilities are very different, and they needed both. Here's Tyler Rogoway in the War Zone article I linked: "Beyond shuttling people from Hamid Karzai International, helicopters could be used to pick up evacuees all over the country at unpredictable locales and they could then be flown out of Bagram." Gen. Milley suggested that the only reason they gave up Bagram is lack of personnel. Biden apparently didn't want to send any extra troops, even temporarily. (Note that they were forced to send extra troops anyway after things went to shit).
  - trident5000 5y ago