Defense Secretary Hegseth announced a comprehensive review into our generation’s Fall of Saigon: the Afghanistan withdrawal. The timing of the announcement, just before the Memorial Day holiday weekend, underscores the need for an investigation: US troops died needlessly in an ambush enabled by a bizarre, “women and children last” departure protocol. Blood is on Joe Biden’s – or someone’s – hands. Secretary Hegseth has accepted an enormous mission from President Trump: to identify and punish the guilty parties, or deplete his own credibility with a cynical populace if he fails.
Secretary Hegseth’s memo mentioned only “accountability,” but an outcome resembling justice is imperative. The American public is still waiting on Epstein files, Covid retribution (domestically or internationally), and more distantly yet for Russia hoax/January 6th/July 13th answers. We’ve all but given up on Biden-era concerns like Hunter Biden’s influence peddling grift or Victoria Nuland’s provoking and prolonging Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For the sake of American sentiment as well as for the aggrieved families, this Afghanistan post-mortem must result in names and punishments. (RELATED: VANESSA BATTAGLIA: Will Navy Secretary Phelan Create A Belt-Tightening Playbook For The DOD)
But the key military leaders involved in the withdrawal – Mark Milley (former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Kenneth MacKenzie (former CENTCOM Commander) – are already retired. Milley also received a pre-pardon from the autopen. Hegseth’s team will need to exercise all available options: courts-martial, rather than Congressional testimonies which go nowhere.
The opportunities for investigation are myriad. There was the decision to abandon Bagram Air Base before the civilians were evacuated. MacKenzie has blamed the rushed schedule and not having enough personnel to keep it running. But how is it better to force civilians through the dangerous bottleneck of Karzai Airport?
And there was the decision to leave the $85B in equipment there – “it was cheaper to leave it,” Milley reportedly said. But that outrageous claim doesn’t explain why Milley failed to have the equipment rendered inoperable – to prevent enemies from usefully taking possession of it, as the Taliban demonstrated in flying our Blackhawks around in a “Liberation Day” anniversary parade last August. Obviously, this means they, or the highest bidder, could use these assets against us in the future.
In prior testimony, the generals placed broad blame with the State Department and the White House for waiting too long. But none of this should have been a judgment call or surprise; a phased withdrawal was ordered by the Doha Accord, signed in February 2020 with a completion date of May 2021 and many troops withdrawn on schedule by the time President Trump left office in January 2021. The chaotic August 2021 withdrawal was – regardless of any further consequences – overdue and non-compliant with the joint schedule planned out during President Trump’s first term. Biden at one point ordered a new withdrawal deadline “by September 11th“; was this meant to be a macabre anniversary date (reminiscent of the Benghazi attack)? Whose idea was that?
Will Secretary Hegseth’s team be able to find these answers, with the muscle to administer the commensurate justice? Will they be able to accomplish this on a timeline that matters? Hegseth has already noted that the review will likely go into 2026. Preferably, it gets wrapped up sooner than that.
In seeking to carry out President Trump’s direction, Secretary Hegseth intends to do what no other Cabinet member has done so far: hold high-ranking officials responsible for one of Biden’s major policy disasters. But he must. Vice President Vance noted in his Memorial Day speech that we should “[e]xpect from our leaders to treat the lives of our troops as the most precious resource.” As such, those leaders who lost 13 of these lives on August 26, 2021 through malfeasance or worse, in a totally preventable situation, must be punished accordingly.
Vanessa Battaglia is a defense engineer with 14 years’ experience designing software, hardware, and airborne systems for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, Special Operations Command, and the Federal Aviation Administration. She spent most of her time in the defense world at Raytheon, and lately writes for The Federalist and Human Events as well.
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