I accepted the position of Senior Advisor to the DoD Under Secretary in personnel and readiness. The military’s people and readiness are my passion. The SecDef will outline a focus on culture, structure, posture, and equipping across the force, but I am sure the national security situation left by the incompetence of the last administration will monopolize his time. Concurrently, service leadership will focus on prioritizing realignment of resources and priorities within their respective services.
LTC Scheller became a cause célèbre early in Biden’s reign of clownishness when he was relieved of his command for criticizing military leadership during the horribly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the failure of the military to demand accountability of itself for the failure; see This Marine Battalion Commander Probably Burned Down His Career to Demand Accountability for Chain-of-Command Failures in Afghanistan – RedState.
If an O-5 battalion commander has the simplest live fire incident, EO complaint. Boom. Fired. But we have a secretary of defense that testified to Congress in May that the Afghan National Security Forces could withstand the Taliban advance. We have Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs — who the commandant is a member of that — who’s supposed to advise on military policy. We have a Marine combatant commander. All of these people are supposed to advise.
And I’m not saying we’ve got to be in Afghanistan forever, but I am saying: Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, “Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone.” Did anyone do that? And when you didn’t think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, “We completely messed this up?”