Congressman Jake Ellzey, an Afghanistan war veteran, weighed in on why the Biden administration closed down Bagram Air Base before the withdrawal happened, saying it makes no sense whatsoever:
Ellzey makes a great point about doing the evacuations from Bagram instead of the airport in Kabul:
It’s a question that everybody’s asking and it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever from a force protection standpoint. You know, the people who drove that VBIED [Vehicle Borne IED] into that gate yesterday, that means that’s a 170 dead because they had a very short pathway to go from wherever they built it in to the gate and kill 170 people, 15 American service members.
So if you had that in Bagram, it is a remote area and you’ve had a very good force protection capability with a great road leading from Kabul to Bagram…
A couple of weeks ago we posted something similar from Bill Roggio who essentially talked about how absurd and irresponsible it was for the military to use the airport in Kabul as the primary evacuation airstrip:
I mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating. You do not put your primary evacuation airstrip at an airport inside a city with 4.5 million people and an untold number of refugees. The U.S. military agreed to do this, and it owns what is now happening in Kabul.
— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) August 18, 2021
Ellzey says we need to hold the military leadership responsible for all of this.
He also wants to know where in the heck are the decision makers and why haven’t we heard from them in a while, saying this disaster is what happens when you have academics running a war:
And I want to point this out. When you have academics running a war, this is the direct result of that. We have seen that the decision makers are nowhere to be found. Remember in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, the generals were out in front every day. It’s been how long since we’ve seen anything from Secretary Blinken, Secretary Austin, General Milley – where are they and why are we hearing from John Kirby? I don’t want to hear another word from John Kirby, I want to hear from a decision maker about why this stuff is going on and why we’re still not extending our deadline to get all Americans out. That mission is not over until they are all out.
Ellzey makes greata points and one has to wonder why we don’t have smarter, more responsible people running the show. Perhaps he’s right, they are just academics.