Today, 28 September Sec Def Austin and JCS Chairman Gen Milley appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The subject was the retrograde from Afghanistan.
To be clear, I did not watch the entire proceeding; but I did hear them explain “The Plan.” I paraphrase, The Plan, locked in last spring, was to 1) scale down combat operations, 2) recover excess military equipment and 3) withdraw U.S. military forces, in that order.
When asked about the part of The Plan that covered evacuation of U.S. noncombatants, they admitted it was not part of their plan. The Plan, they said, was properly executed as written.
Here is where I begin to criticize The Plan:
When putting together a plan of this complexity planners never have a completely factual base of information with which to work. In the absence of facts, they are compelled to make some assumptions in order to have a complete picture of the proposed operation. Assumptions are dangerous critters and every military planner above the grade of 2nd Lieutenant knows that.
Time sequencing the planning process conducted by the Central Command (the Combatant Command encompassing the Middle East area of operations) should have looked about like this:
First is the list of facts (e.g., how much stuff to haul out of country, how many military personnel are there, what is the time-line, how many cargo aircraft required, how many air tankers will it take, where will everything and everyone go, you get the picture). Easy stuff.
While the first step is underway, in the back of ever planners mind are the assumptions. At this point they may not necessarily even be written down. But when the first draft of The Plan gets briefed up the chain of command, the assumptions will begin to get aired. It goes like this: The Colonel taking the briefing says to the briefer, “As we begin to withdraw U.S. forces the Taliban will undoubtedly want to fill that void. Will the ANA (Afghan National Army) be able to hold their ground?” That is an example of a series of question that would be raised and have to get answered before the briefing can go any further up the chain of command.
The planning staff goes back to the drawing board and now begins to put together, in writing, a set of assumptions that fill in the big picture in the absence of facts.
During that process, these three huge assumptions would undoubtedly have surfaced: 1) It is assumed that the ANA will, generally speaking, be capable of holding the ground currently in their possession. 2) It is assumed that the current fully-functioning Afghan Government will continue to exist following the withdrawal. And 3) the U.S. Embassy will remain in place for the foreseeable future and, by extension, U.S. citizens spread about the country will continue with their work.
Continuing with the briefing process: The briefer, now addressing a more senior officer, will begin by saying, “In the absence of facts to the contrary, this plan is based on the following assumptions…..” There will be a lot of them, but let’s just focus on the big three: the ANA, Afghan Government and the U.S. Embassy.
From the testimony today by Austin and Milley, it is now obvious that they believed the answer to the big-three assumptions was yes, the ANA will fight, yes, the Afghan government will continue to function and yes, the U.S. Embassy is there for the long-haul. In retrospect that was an enormous mistake and failure of current intelligence, or misread of current intelligence or simply not listening to experts on the ground. For example, in July 23 U.S. Embassy officials sent cables to Washington telling the Biden administration that the Taliban would likely re-take control if the U.S. military departed. It now appears that the powers-that-be just rolled ahead with The Plan hoping it would all be OK. But, as the saying goes, hope is not a process.
At this point in the months-long planning process, those three critical assumptions should have been discussed, investigated and would have fallen into the category of Center-of-Gravity issues. Definition: A Center-of-Gravity can be a person, place, thing or circumstance that, in and of itself, is central to success of the plan. Or, stated another way can cause partial or complete failure of a plan.
Once planners understand the critical nature of an assumption, they should then move on to the next step in the planning process; development of contingency plans. A contingency is simply the answer to the question, what if. What if the ANA folds under fire? What if the Afghan President exits stage-left in the middle of the night and the government ceases to function? What if the total U.S. Embassy has to be evacuated under duress?
At that point, the briefing is a complete product. The key to success is that the contingency planning becomes an integral part of The Plan. When that happens the contingency plans get resourced before the fact so that The Plan is prepared to deal with all known and imagined issues that unfold during the heat of battle. For example, the contingency plan for evacuation of all U.S noncombatants would have included a tasker to the State Dept to determine and report, before the fact, the exact number to be evacuated, their exact locations and their ability or inability to get to Bagram Air Base in an emergency.
If these contingency plans had been in place during the withdrawal fiasco last month, the Center of Gravity for each contingency would have been for the U.S. to retain complete control of Bagram Air Base right up to the last flight out of country.
At this point, many of you may be thinking, OK Covault, this is all Monday-morning-quarterbacking, anyone could have come up with this critique a month after the withdrawal. I disagree because what I have described above is what U.S. Army (I will speak only for my Service) officers are taught to do. They spend an entire year at the Command and General Staff College as majors studying, learning and doing this type of planning with every factor I have laid out above. More senior officers spend another year at the Army War College thinking through this exact type of planning problem involving Joint U.S. forces, other government agencies (CIA, State Dept, etc.), the United Nations and combined operations with other nations’ armed forces. I didn’t just dream this up the above planning scenario, this is what we do and how we are taught to think.
A word about the National Security Council. Deputies and staff work full time in the NSC, but during critical issues the NSC “principals” meet; i.e., the President, VP, Department heads, CIA, Chairman JCS, etc. If The Plan as I have outlined it above was presented to the NSC Principals by Sec Def Austin and Chairman JCS Milley and then disregarded by President Biden, my conclusion is that they did about all they could do.
But, if The Plan they briefed did not lay out the assumptions and contingencies, in my opinion they failed the President and the country. And when military leaders as that level fail, people needlessly die. And they did die.
The future ramifications of the Afghan withdrawal fiasco are yet to come to fruition, but It appears certain that Afghanistan could again become a focal point for intensified global terrorism with the United States as a specific target. Additionally, it is becoming clearer every day that our allies have lost confidence in the U.S. and our enemies have lost respect for our capabilities. Summed up, that equals increased vulnerability and that means a less secure America.
Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.