https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/09/11/a-modest-proposal-fire-the-generals/
“Today in our series 9/11 at 20: A week of reflection, we hear from Andrew Bacevich, who suggests failure must have consequences, and there is no better time than now.”

Anniversaries offer opportunities for reflection. The 20th anniversary of 9/11 should elicit second thoughts galore.

The rollercoaster of history finds Americans today more than a little confused. To put it mildly, things weren’t supposed to turn out this way. The great crusade launched with considerable fanfare in September 2001 has stalled. That 20 years after 9/11, the Taliban have once more seized power in Kabul must surely rate as one of the preeminent ironies of the past century.
…
Allow me to suggest that senior U.S. military officers cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for the disappointments, disasters, and frustrations that have marked the ensuing two decades of our national life. The point is not to let civilian officials, beginning with the commander-in-chief, but also including the Congress, off the hook. It is rather to suggest that the nation’s mood and outlook might be rosier if the wars of choice that we inaugurated after 9/11 had ended in victory.

Our generals were expected to deliver those victories. As the abysmal outcome of the Afghanistan War reminds us, they came up short.

Allow me to suggest a corrective action: a purge. Oblige all active duty three- and four-star generals (and admirals) to retire forthwith. Rebuild the ranks of the senior officer corps with members of a younger generation willing and able to acknowledge the shortcomings of recent American military leadership at the top.

After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, the top U.S. commanders in Hawaii — Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short — were summarily relieved of their posts, reduced in rank, and retired. The action might not have been altogether fair, but it was necessary. Unless failure has consequences, further failures are all but guaranteed — a dictum as true in war as in business or sports or any other competitive enterprise. Firing Kimmel and Short laid down a marker: henceforth, failure was not to be tolerated.

Granted, purges tend to sweep up the nominally innocent along with the definitively guilty. But we need not shed tears for any senior officers given their walking papers. They will receive generous pensions, lifelong healthcare, and opportunities to monetize their active duty experience, whether within the military-industrial complex or elsewhere. They’ll do just fine.

As a practical matter, however, getting rid of the deadwood is likely to be the easy part. Identifying a new cohort willing to acknowledge the subpar U.S. military performance of the recent past and possessing the creative imagination needed to undertake substantive reform may prove challenging.

I would suggest the following approach: The secretary of defense — not the current incumbent; as a former four-star he too should be purged — should personally interview one- and two-star officers deemed to possess particular promise. The interview need not be long. Indeed, it should consist of a single question: “On a scale of one-to-ten, where one is lousy, ten excellent, and five mediocre, how would you rate U.S. military performance over the past 20 years?”

Those replying with a number above five should be immediately excused and denied consideration for further promotion. Those replying with a number of five or below should be invited into an adjacent room and given two hours to write an essay that addresses the following topic: “What is the problem and how do we fix it?”

Those essays should provide the basis for selecting and assigning the next generation of senior leaders. Oh, and if none of the one- and two-stars find fault with U.S. military performance since 9/11, then it will become necessary to expand the search into more junior ranks. It has long been my impression that officers wearing bars or oak leaves are more open to critical thinking and original ideas than those who wear stars.

Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick,” published in 1729, suggested that the impoverished Irish might improve their condition by selling their children to be “stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled” and served on the tables of well-to-do English gentry. My own modest proposal envisions nothing quite so drastic.

But whereas Swift’s “Modest Proposal” was intended as a satire, mine is not. Absent serious efforts to reform the senior officer corps, we can expect more Afghanistans to come. Listen to General Mark Milley, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, who expected Afghan forces to hang on “from weeks to months and even years following our departure” and tell me I’m wrong.

I have never heard of the author (no surprise) so here is his bio.
I’ve been looking closer to the credits / merits of our punditocracy these days, and am leaning toward those whose careers have not been exclusively in punditing, and have had at least a vague connection to the subject on which they opine.

Andrew J. Bacevich is the President of the Quincy Institute. He grew up in Indiana, graduated from West Point and Princeton, served in the army, became an academic, and is now a writer. He is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books, among them: The New America Militarism (2005), The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008), Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010), America’s War for the Greater Middle East (2016), and The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (January 2020). He is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University and has held fellowships at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin.

Take off the sarc tag.
J. E. Dyer thinks you are correct.
Ignore some of the speculations about “maybe it’s not true” because we now know that Milley did exactly what Woodward claimed (although for all the right reasons, as when the Democrats fortified the election).

https://libertyunyielding.com/2021/09/15/general-milleys-excellent-adventure/

This [post] would become impossibly long if I discussed all the problems with the Milley tale. I will close it out instead with a final point that keeps leaping out at me, but I suspect is being overlooked by many observers who are understandably absorbed in the ethical problem of Milley’s alleged behavior (like our old friend Alexander Vindman).*

It’s this. From 2001 until today, there has been nothing as remarkable, and frankly ill-accounted for, as America’s tenacity in keeping a decisive footprint in Afghanistan. By decisive, I don’t mean our presence was procuring a decisive end-state. I mean our continued presence, while it never made real progress toward a “better peace,” was just enough to weight the scale toward stasis in Afghanistan – for little apparent strategic or pragmatic benefit to us – for almost exactly 20 years. (We invaded Afghanistan on 7 October 2001.)

Then, suddenly, in the summer of 2021, it seemed to be time to bug out – so quickly and thoroughly that we left billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry and military equipment behind, and abandoned Bagram air base to whoever is the best equipped to take over and operate it (and that isn’t either the Afghan National Army or the Taliban). Not to mention, of course, the appalling human cost of leaving Americans and Afghan allies behind.

President Biden speaks now, as he did in councils with Obama and the generals in 2009, of seeing Afghanistan solely as a potential base for terrorist enterprises, and of maintaining a capability to hunt terror cells in the country without trying to pacify territory there. This is his “over the horizon” patter, and in 2021 he’s invoking it as the only real national security obligation we have vis-à-vis Afghanistan. In mid-2009, he made the case for keeping just enough of a footprint in-country to enable that line of operations.

In September 2021, he’s now all for doing it from neighboring countries. But that represents a really rapid shift, by the narrative of the “national security state.” If the Milley tale is to be believed, we went from desperately needing to keep a light-footprint contingent in Afghanistan – the urgent premise in January 2021, which Trump was on the wrong side of – to being fine without a footprint inside the country by July 2021, as long as we can hunt terrorists from across someone’s border.

If it’s fine by July 2021 to plink terrorists from outside Afghanistan, there’s no argument that that could not have been foreseen, by Trump and his officials, in January – or December 2020, or November. Apparently it would have been Trump, not Milley, who had the percipient foresight – if Biden is on the right course now.

Rather than the U.S. truly needing to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan past January 2021, it’s as if we were holding Afghanistan for someone else’s purposes for nearly 20 years, but now no longer need to do so.

That, at least, is the likeliest story thread you’d reconstruct if you went by the arguments, including the Milley tale, offered by the media and “national security state” stalwarts.

What changed between January and July 2021? The conundrum here can’t be solved by an abstract hand-wave at the “military-industrial complex.” This isn’t about money or defense contracts. It looks like a territorial imperative – for someone. It’s just not the United States.

Three guesses who she’s talking about, and the first two don’t count.
The purpose: a staging location flanking India, with which China is this close to starting a shooting war. One of Dyer’s commenters, D4x, does a deep dive into the regional situation.

*
“If this is true GEN Milley must resign. He usurped civilian authority, broke Chain of Command, and violated the sacrosanct principle of civilian control over the military. It’s an extremely dangerous precedent. You can’t simply walk away from that.”
Vindman’s indictment of Milley is correct, but he seems oblivious to the fact that he is describing himself as well.
And he too should have been fired and court-martialed.

Amendment XXV (1967)
Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Certainly not Mad Dog Mattis he’d been off the scene, but tossing frags into the Oval Office, before these phone calls were made.

Generalized White Rage and reader of the Communist Manifesto can take that marine’s handle now, “Mad Mark Milley.”

Might one wonder who Goldberg’s “sources” were for that piece of crap? (That is, if he didn’t fabricate the thing from whole cloth, which I’d imagine is entirely possible for Obama’s Hagiographer-In-Chief.)

Gee, maybe it’s time for Goldberg to invent something along the lines of how much the U.S. Military loves/appreciates/respects “Biden”?

(Come to think of it, it looks at this point as though substantial parts of the military leadership ARE, in fact, “Biden”…)

Glenn Reynolds asks, “Why is the White House leaking this?”

And, of course, we don’t know if this is true.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/473822/