Somewhat lost in the outrage over Joe Biden’s unforgivable Afghanistan withdrawal was Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller Jr., who put his career on the line in late August 2021, when he called out his chain of command over the disastrous efforts to evacuate the war-torn country.
Lt. Col. Scheller received a court-martial and was eventually released.
In an opinion piece published at Human Events on Thursday, Scheller absolutely told it like it is, blasting the Armed Forces of the United States, as decimated by their “commander” in chief Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the proverbial Three Stooges hellbent on crippling America’s fighting forces with more emphasis on so-called “critical race theory,” gender self-identification, pronouns, and LGBTQIA+ (LMNOP) rights than maintaining combat readiness.
The bottom line, declared Scheller: “The American military is promoting cowardice.”
His imprisonment was the beginning of Scheller’s journey.
Following the Afghanistan evacuation, I was imprisoned for publicly challenging military leadership. Nearly a year later, Americans still don’t appreciate the dire implications emanating from foundational issues in the U.S. military. During critical moments when military leaders should be standing for American values, we instead find impressively dressed old men nodding “yes.”
When that unconditional obedience leads to disaster – as it did in Afghanistan and Benghazi – military leaders focus on managing political narratives to save their own careers. In doing so, they miss timely assessments of failure, and inadvertently squander the sacrifices of selfless young servicemembers.
Austin and Milley — the “wokest” of the “woke” were shamelessly unavailable for comment. Speaking of woke generals, Scheller took a different tack — and blasted the lack of moral courage.
Some blame the problem on “woke generals.” But that’s a catch-all term misdiagnosing the root problem: the American military is currently led by senior general officers lacking moral courage. Most Americans don’t understand how this quality is actively filtered out by the military promotion system.
Officers can be easily persuaded and focus on pleasing their superiors in order to get high marks on subjective evaluations. When senior military leaders focus on pleasing their bosses for forty years (the time required to make four-star general) it’s not surprising they consistently acquiesce to political whims at the expense of building effective combat power.
They tolerate and even encourage silence in the face of military failures. Thus, it’s not surprising that General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and General Kenneth McKenzie, the theater commander, remain entrenched in their position that the Afghanistan evacuation was a success. Their careers would be overturned, and worse still, their lucrative posts within the government contractor oligopoly could be threatened.
Incidentally, as many of us observed at the time, Biden’s Afghanistan debacle was never about LeaveAfghanistan, it was approximately How he had left it.This included leaving untold numbers of American civilians behind lines of the most vicious terrorist group on the planet.
Also, Scheller took some well-aimed shots of Gen. James Mattis as well as the mentioned Lloyd Austin.
General James Mattis went from General Dynamics to Secretary of Defense and then back to General Dynamics, impervious to scrutiny due to the supposed greatness of his military policies – which contained many failures.
Similar path was followed by Secretary Lloyd Austin: four-star, board member Raytheon and Secretary of Defense. This is why the media, who are enslaved to corporate interests, cover it all. They often ignore the real issues and only scratch the surface.
An increasing number of patriotic Americans recognize, to different degrees, the shortcomings of the military in Austin, Biden and Milley. the questionHow can it be fixed? How can it be fixed? Refocus — from the top down — America’s energies OnFirst and foremost, combat readiness Away from the continuing metastasizing of the left’s woke, crock-of-crap, nonsense?
As Scheller sees it, not top-down — the stringent M.O. of the U.S. military and the federal government alike — but bottom-up.
The system must be reformed from the bottom up. Simply replacing “woke generals” doesn’t correct the system producing hollow military leaders. America is blessed with two decades of combat soldiers, young talents and top-notch training facilities.
This next generation could break the vicious cycle of trying to impress their bosses. Officers should be encouraged to compete in combative warfighting competitions, rather than pleasing their bosses and being neo-promotive.
But these reforms won’t get anywhere if the military is not held accountable to itself and to the public. America did not hold any person accountable for the Afghanistan evacuation.
Accountability forces acknowledge that, in order to please superiors and win wars successfully, military commanders must also be pleasing. The demoralizing failures won’t stop if nobody insists on effective warfighting.
At the end of the day, it’s still all about “real leadership,” Scheller admonished:
The cracks in our military foundation will continue to widen without real leadership. It is unacceptable that the obvious issues cannot be ignored without putting Americans at great risk. America needs courageous leaders who are willing to face and fix our broken systems.
Make sure you have the right leaders and culture in place, so that all the other problems will disappear. American forces are in crisis of command.
Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley weren’t available for comment.
Wouldn’t you be,If you could be one of them,
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