School of War - Ep 139: Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. on CENTCOM

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

General Kenneth F. McKenzie, USMC, retired as the fourteenth commander of U.S. Central Command in 2022 and is the author of The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century (https://a.co/d/a2RmIDK). He joins the show to talk about the strategic significance of the Middle East. ▪️ Times      •      01:16 Introduction      •      01:38 The Citadel     •      04:15 The humanities     •      10:00 Central Command        •      13:43 Thinking globally     •      17:53 Iran pushes back     •      23:05 Pursuing peace     •      26:15 Afghanistan     •      32:01 Collapse     •      37:58 A regional war Follow along on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

The raid that got Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, the fall of Kabul. These operations ultimately fell under the command of General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., United States Marine Corps. Today, he joins School of War to discuss these incidents and much more. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to be joined today by General Kenneth. Frank McKenzie, Jr., United States Marine Corps retired. He's the former commander, United States Central Command. He's also the author of The Melting Point, High Command in War in the 21st Century. General McKenzie, thank you so much for joining the show.

Aaron, I'm delighted to be with you here today. So I'd like to talk a bit about your career. Obviously, we'll spend most of your time on what you write about in the book and about your time with Centcom before you retired. But let's start at the start of your career. You went to the Citadel. you graduated class of 79. How did you end up going Marines?

What was your education like? You write in the book about a guy named Bill Gordon who had a big impact on you. Just talk about the Citadel. Sure. So I went to the Citadel because I wanted to go to a military school. And I knew from my high school days, I wanted to major in English. I wanted to be an English major. I wasn't particularly interested in a Federal Service Academy, didn't apply to them.

But joined the Civil Air Patrol in Birmingham, Alabama, where I went to high school. and an effective cadet recruiter from the Citadel visited a summer encamp at Maxwell Air Force Base in the summer of 1974. And he sort of sold me on the school. And then that's the path that led me to the Citadel. I sort of knew that was what I wanted to do. And I also knew I wanted to be a Marine. There's no particular military tradition in my family. My father was served honorably in the Korean War as a sergeant.

My grandfather guarded Puget Sound during World War I as a private soldier in the U.S. Army. and my great-grandfather on my paternal side was a private soldier for four years in the 16th Alabama during the war between the States. So no particular military history in my family, but something about the Marine Corps always interested me. It was the fact that they offered a challenge, and I always was interested in being an infantry officer. I knew I was not going to fly because my eyes were bad, and so I knew I wasn't going to be a pilot, so I never entertained that possibility.

But I knew that as an infantry officer, you get to come. demand and lead people, a lot of people at a very young age. And that intrigued me. And as did the Marine Corps, sort of those things came together. And it was a goal that really never wavered the whole four years I was at Citadel. I never thought about doing anything else. And, you know, so very strange. I mean, I didn't entertain other things. I wanted to be an English major. I was an English major. I wanted to go in the Marine Corps. I went in the Marine Corps. And those things were pretty constant with me. But what I learned really in high school and then was sort of brought out in college was that I could write. I was a good writer. I can write fast. I can write efficiently,

and I can write under time pressure, and that was helpful to me academically. I was an indifferent student at the Citadel. When I graduated in May of 1979, we commissioned about 40 men into the Marine Corps. Nobody, nobody would have thought I was going to be a four-star general, including me. Or the other four-star general in my class, Glenn Walters, who's now president of the Citadel. Nobody thought he'd be around either. And so it's just very strange and talks about the uniqueness of the human experience that you don't know. You just don't know what chain leads you or where you end up. But I did know when I went in that I wanted to, I wanted to be a Marine, I wanted to be an infantry officer. I wanted to deploy and I wanted to do those things.

So, I mean, I feel like I have to ask this as a former English instructor at a Federal Service Academy myself, what is it about your ability to write your interest in reading, your studies in the humanities. How did how did that help you over the course of your career? Sure. So, you know, first of all, I had a solid liberal arts education in the Citadel. Had a good math experience, a good physics experience. So I had a grounding in the sciences. I took a year of programming, you know, but I wasn't a math major and I wasn't hit into the math, into the end of the hard and the quantitative side of it. But I was comfortable dealing with the outputs of the quantitative side. On the other hand, the qualitative side allows you to, I think, explore why history happens,

you know, why things happen, why people do the things they do. And that was what always fascinated me. Look, I was an English major, but I took a lot of history courses. And while I was an English major, I had the opportunity to study under a guy who's not in the book, and I probably should have put him in the book. I got him and Professor Tony Redd. And I studied under him. I started Irish literature. We did this in my senior year. We started what I'd call the literature. suffering, Irish literature, Sicilian literature, and Southern literature. And it was really an opportunity to write. He was a great, demanding instructor. You had to write, you had to write well for him. And I find if I have to write something that organizes my thoughts, it lets me sort of, because your

logic's naked and clear and replicable, and it has to stand on its own merits. So the ability for me, if I have a tough problem, I'm going to write it out. I'm going to make notes about it. I'm going to doodle with the language. And I learned over time that I could. do that fast. I can do it quickly. And then another, the other guy who was very important to me, it is in the book, Bill Gordon at the Citadel. He taught me how to think about, I would say, institutions. Think beyond the battlefield experience. Think beyond campaigns. Think about how institutions impact what happens on the battlefield. And that's very important because that ultimately is what gains expression on the battlefield is that. And he told me how to think systemically

about that as part of the, you know, as part of the problem that you need to consider. So it was really from me, it was eye-opening. And I, again, I wasn't a great student at the Citadel. I did very well in the courses I was interested in. The courses I wasn't interested in, I didn't poorly in. I graduated with a GPA in the low two-o range. And, you know, but the stuff I like, I was pretty good at. And then I would just, but I would say I wasn't intensely competitive, but somewhere around my fourth or fifth year of service in the Marine Corps, and I can't tell you why, Aaron, I did become intensely, ferociously competitive. And I wish I could tell you maybe I matured late. I don't know. My service first assignments as a Marine were fine. I did great. But there was

nothing in those assignments that would lead you to believe I was going to be the commander sent con later on. About the time they sent me to the armor officer advanced course, which is the first sort of big school you go to as a captain. Somehow it lit the competitive urge in me. And I graduated with honors from that course, then with honors from everything I ever did in the Marine Corps after that in terms of academics. and but it just sort of maybe it's when I got married. My wife would tell you that's probably the case because there is a congruance in time. There are those two factors.

But I just became different. And that stayed with me for the rest of my career. One last preliminary question before we get to Santcom. And I have to say I'm a little shocked that this didn't earn a chapter or two in your book. But talk a bit about your time commanding the Marine Corps finest battalion, First Battalion, Six Marines. Well, First Battalion Six Marines, as you well know, is the Marine Corps finest battalion. served well in the First World War, you have the opportunity to wear the Forger, which, as you know, many people probably don't know that we're talking to here.

The Marine Corps is not big on uniform decorations. And to put on the green yellow gold loop of the Forreger, the French Forregerger, to wear it on your service out for uniform is a tremendous experience. And I enjoy putting it on. When I took it off leaving the battalion for the last time in May 1999, it was a very hard thing for me to do. And I still got a couple of foragers around here that I look at occasionally and remind myself of, you know, of their significance to me. It was a good unit. Look, there are a lot of good units in the Marine Corps.

My son came into the Marine Corps after me and served in Third Battalion Eight Marines. And I was a company commander at Third Battalion, Eight Marines. So I know all about three eight. It's a good battalion, not as good as one six. I give him grief all the time about the high number of battalions. But it was a, the battalion is the smallest unit. Well, correction. The battalion is the largest unit in the Marine Corps where the battalion commander can reasonably be expected, not to know everybody in the battalion, but sort of one removed, know everybody in the battalion.

It's about 1,000 men, a little bigger when your task organized as a battalion landing team, but you lead it. And you go to the next level, which is a Marine Expeditionary unit. Now you're leading lieutenant colonels. And that's every step above that, you are further removed from the men and women who are actually doing the work on the ground. And so that's the last level you can do it, one of the great experiences of my life. So let's talk about Central Command as an entity. I mean, you're obviously more familiar with it than almost anyone else alive. Those of us who've served in the Middle East or followed these things are familiar with it.

But if you step back for a second, it may seem odd that the United States of America, which is over here on the continent of North America, has this structure that exists to superintend military operations halfway around the world in a region that a lot of people seem to seem to believe, and it's a pretty strong case you can make for it, is at least secondary, if not tertiary, and its importance to the United States overseas. What is Central Command? Why do we have it? How did it come into being? So we've always had military forces in the Middle East, but until the early 1980s, when Senton was founded, they were comprised of either European Command or Pacific Command.

So there's a famous saying in the British Army that the British Army fights all its battles at the junction for map sheets and usually up the hill and in the right. So you don't be a major area that's going to be contentious, you don't want to have divided responsibility. And responsibility in the Middle East was divided between Indo-Pacific, generally west of Eden, east of Eden, and then, you know, European command to the west. Now, the reason we were interested in the Middle East was oil. oil in Saudi Arabia, oil, and Iran, oil, and other nations there. This is, you know, the 50, 60, 70s, 80s. There was a very good chance that Russia, Soviets would move south, perhaps occupy that region. So CENTCOM was born to defend a movement against the Russians south.

At the time, Iran was an ally, a significant ally of the United States. In the 70s, it was. That ended in 1979. And then after the regime change, after the Shah was deposed and the Revolutionary regime came to power in Iran, they were still a threat to our oil. So Central Command for a lot of reasons, but really energy dependence of the United States, not only for us, but also for our friends and allies, many of them who get their oil out of there as well. So if you look at the reasons for CENTCOM to be there, that's where you start. Now, those reasons have changed over time.

Our objectives have changed. We don't get the majority of our oil or very little oil now from the Middle East, actually. But we still have an injurious. interest in preventing conflict in the region and protecting Israel and ensuring that the violent extremist organizations don't take over and attack our nation from there. The headquarters that was formed there was to allow a single commander and his staff to deal with those problems rather than have Ucom who's focused on Russia and PECOM, who's now focused on China, to have to deal with what we would call off-axis threats. And you know, you're right, the Middle East is not actually necessarily an existential problem for the United States as Russia is and China is increasingly

becoming. But nonetheless, it is an important reason for us. And in fact, much of our competition with China and Russia is played out in that region. So you can't just think regionally when you think about confronting Russia and China. You also have to think about that ancient cockpit of commerce, conflict, and influence the Middle East. And we compete with those with those nations, every day in this region, but CENTCOM is focused on the region to a degree that the other combatant commands could not be. That is not to say that CENTCOM has had an easy birth, and even today, the CENTCOM commander has to struggle for resources. But that's simply because it's a technical issue, but forces aren't permanently assigned to CENTCOM. You have to request them, they come in and they

leave. And so it's just a small thing that most people don't need to understand it, actually. But it has very strong importance in the U.S. system, where your forces come from, how long you get to keep them, what they do while they're with you. So you write in the book about the national defense strategy, I guess it's the 2018 NDS that you're talking about, though I suspect you could say the same thing about the 2022 version, that there's a mismatch between the way in which that strategy treated the Middle East and Centcom by extension and the world as it is, that just these are not your words, but just to put it in my own way that, you know, We may want out of the Middle East on some level, but the Middle East doesn't seem to want very much to be out of us.

Talk a bit about that. Talk about this perennial tension, which the resource consideration points to, but it's broader and deeper than that. This constant desire, you know, for what, you know, the last decade plus for the United States to have less to do with the Middle East, but the continuing way in which we seem to find ourselves there. Sure. So, look, the pacing threat that we face as a nation is China. We need to be prepared to, coexist, compete with, and if necessary, fight China. No argument for me on that. And that means that Indo-Pacom has got to have the lion's share of the resources. As they do now, as they have had before, a significant amount of the resources of the nation have always been at Indo-Pacom. So no argument for me on that. However, if you're going to look at China and confront China, you're not just going to confront China Sea. You need to be able to confront them globally. So that means you don't have the luxury

of a narrow regional approach to the problem. As a global power, you need to think about the global issues that are in effect. And that means that when you talk about putting additional resources in an opaque com, which we need to do, I agree. That doesn't mean in the next breath you need to say, and by the way, we're going to strip the Middle East. Because what that does when you use language like that, and we have used language like that,

then it gives courage to your potential opponents in that region. it disheartens your friends. And it makes everyone uncertain about what American guarantees and American friendship actually means practically. And that's an important consideration. So the National Defense Strategy of 2018 was actually focused on China. The problem was the National Defense Strategy

is a Department of Defense document. It's not an interagency document. And as you're aware, Aaron, in 2018, 2019, our president was focused on Iran. and we had what we call the maximum pressure campaign of diplomatic and economic pressure going on against Iran. There was no uniquely military component to that plan, but there was in that you wanted to prevent Iran from being able to act out against you to break the deadlock or the stranglehold that they were under economically, politically, and in other ways. So as the struggle, the tension then becomes you have a written document that the services look to for guidance. and you'd have what's actually happen in that we need more forces in Central Command.

That produces a profound dilemma. And there are not many people that can solve that dilemma. It's really the president and secretary. And we never got it completely solved during that period of time. There was always tension. I was always arguing for more. The Joint Chiefs were always pushing back. They wanted to fight the long battle against China.

They wanted to move their South to the Pacific. The president was still, however, interested in Iran and interested in the region. So you have a disconnect there between what was actually. actually happening in what our strategy said we were going to do. And that's what I mean when I talk about the disconnect. It was a profound tension in our in our approach to the problem. Yeah. There is some complexity here, though, and you write about it in your book. And I will say, because we've talked about your writing, I really do recommend the melting point to those listening. There is, as you're well aware, you know, there's a genre of Washington or military memoir that gives

you maybe some information. It's largely self-justifying. You would probably not read most of these books for the pleasure of reading them. That's not, none of that is true of your book. I learned a lot from reading it and I enjoyed reading it. And in it, one of the main themes is what you're talking about right now, Iran, and in particular, the cycle of escalation that runs from what, the spring of 2019 through Soleimani in early, right at the start of 2020, which I was, I was watching these events for my purchase as a Senate staffer for a, for a senator who was who was paying close attention all this. He had me researching the Tanker Wars that summer. And in, I, I, the, the president certainly was interested in Iran, but as these Iranian provocations started happening that

spring, you know, frogmen off the coast of the UAE, and then we have a drone get shot down and all these incidents that you document in the book. You know, at first our response is, I'll just put it my own words, not particularly aggressive. Tell a story of that cycle of escalation. How did it keep building? Why did we end up at the point where we did? We had an American dead, an American contractor dead and others wounded in December 29. Sure. It's so. it built up because Iran in the spring of 2019 made a decision they were going to push back. And they entertained different ways to do it, ranging from strikes on tankers, which were small scale, to major attacks on our bases in the region, which would have been significant.

And they did that because they'd observe our language, which said, we're finished, we're leaving, and they'd observed our drawdown of forces, which meant we had no aircraft carry in the region, would have drawn a significant amount of combat power. And we were actually very vocal about that, patting ourselves. in the back for doing it. Look at us. We're making changes. Well, you know, maybe we're a little too glib in doing that. And the Iranians drew a lesson from it that they could, they could act with greater, with greater audacity in the region. And they did. And we had a couple of opportunities to stop them. One was when they shot down our RQ4 drone in July, 2019. We were prepared to strike

them at the last minute. We chose not to do that. I don't blame the president for that decision because the president got bad information from his advisors. I think President Trump, given the information he had, which was that there would be a high level of collateral damage if we did the strike was right to stop it. The fact of the matter is, though, there was no evidence for that, and they spoke without reference to the physical facts of the situation. Not the Department of Defense, others gave that advice to the president.

So he made the right decision with what he had. He just had bad scoop. The fact, though, was the Iranians learned they could continue to press on us and we would not react. against, you know, they struck the Saudi oil fields in September. And we did not respond aggressively to that. And that we should not have, it wasn't an attack on the U.S. that Saudis chose not to respond.

We beefed up our defenses in the region significantly as a result of that. But still, it was another unanswered attack, which led us in the further spiral that, you know, that led us in November, December. Soleimani is now very aggressively involved in this planning. And Kassim Soleimani is a central figure in Iranian malign behavior. over the last several decades, very aggressive, very charismatic. He could fly into Iraq, knock heads, make people see their way to do it. And so he's a very effective commander.

And in early January 2020, there was compelling evidence that he was flying into Baghdad to assist in an attack on our embassy in Baghdad and, in fact, other U.S. positions across the region. That evidence was very compelling. The president made a decision to strike him. I supported that decision. I was concerned about it, but I supported the decision because as you look at it, you weigh the risk of inaction against the risk of action. I felt that if we did not take him off the battlefield, more Americans and more international

citizens to citizens of different nations would die than if we took the action. So we took the action, we struck him. And as a result of that, the Iranians hit back at us about a week later with a calibrated attack that was designed to kill Americans, but not a whole bunch of. bunch of Americans. But they weren't the kill Americans. We saved them for themselves by being better than them and maneuvering so their punch landed largely on air. I'm not diminishing the fact that we had, you know, a number of soldiers who had mild-M-TBI traumatic brain injury as a result of that. I'm not diminishing that at all. I'm simply saying nobody died as a result of that attack,

which is a good thing probably certainly for us, certainly for those people on the ground, and certainly for the Iranians. But nonetheless, it was a marker that we laid down that the Iranians know and understand. They know and understand the use of force. We used force very directly against something that was very important to them. And they had to recalculate what the United States was willing to do to maintain deterrence against their actions. That's a very important event. The echoes of that event, you know, echo to this day in the region. So I remember well when it happened that there was an explosion of concern in Washington, in the media that this, the Soleimani strike specifically, was reckless, ill-considered,

was going to lead to a regional war. Of course, that didn't happen. What happened was exactly as you just described. And I just want to draw out of principle here, and I think it would be very useful for you to speak to this at more of a level of principle. You encounter a lot of people in Washington and elsewhere who, you know, like any sane person, want peace. They want to avoid war. They want to avoid certainly regional, large scale war. And their view seems to be that if you want to not escalate, well, you shouldn't escalate.

You should seek peace. You should try to cool things down. You should be aware that every step you take in an escalatory direction increases the risk that something terrible is going to happen. You're going to find yourself in maybe a fight that you didn't want to find yourself in. And here in the series of incidents that you've just described, actually something like the reverse seems to be true. The less we did, the more the bad guys did.

And when we finally hit him hard right in the nose, they did indeed respond once. They didn't kill an American in doing so. and then things got real quiet for a really long time. They're not quiet anymore, but they did get quiet for a while. Why shouldn't we, if we want peace, why shouldn't we just pursue peace? Why shouldn't we just keep things cool and de-escalate? Well, if you go into the Middle East as a peacemaker, you'll be overrun.

Well, it might be nice and sitting around a seminar table to talk about it. The bloody fact of the matter is this, particularly in the Middle East, but not exclusively in the Middle East, nations respect and understand the use of force. you know and so i i don't seek war either but i do believe that deterrence what deterrence is in the mind of the opponent the belief that he is not going to be able to a either achieve his objectives because you will prevent him or be punished by achieving those objectives to such a degree that it's not worth it deterrence by denial deterrence by punishment in the middle east typically because we don't necessarily have the ability to deny

that first strike is deterrence by punishment. And so there you have to have a cognitive space of the opponent, the belief that he's going to hurt me so badly if I do this that it's not worth it. And that requires two things. It requires, in the mind of the opponent, an understanding of your capabilities and an understanding of your will. The Iranians have never doubted our capabilities. They are good at looking at correlation of forces, as the Russians would say. They know and understand the balance. They know what we can do to them. They know what Israel can do to them. What they doubt is our will. And so therefore, in order to establish that you're willing, you're willing to employ your capability, the first goal of your foreign policy cannot be de-escalation. If the first goal of your

policy is de-escalation, then the natural logical end of it should be leaving the region, because then there'll be no chance of escalation. You know, to say, to begin every sentence was, well, we want to de-escalate is in the region, in the Middle East in particular, where I know a little bit about it, you are preaching weakness and everyone consent weakness. So we go back to will, we go back to capability. You can have the greatest capability in the world, but if they think that you're not going to use it, then the capability is irrelevant to the discussion that you're having.

You have to balance the two. And so again, I continue to emphasize the point. You have to be willing to escalate. It doesn't mean that you want to escalate. It doesn't mean that the steps that you take shouldn't be very carefully calibrated. But the Iranians know and understand this, perhaps better than we do. And other nations in the region know and understand this. Again, perhaps better than we do.

I don't know if it's the Wilsonian edge to American diplomacy, the belief in American exceptionalism or American arrogance, take your pick. But we seem to think that the laws of history and logic and war don't operate against us when, in fact, they operate against this republic just as surely and infinitely powerfully as they do against anybody else. So I want to talk about Afghanistan. And this is personal for you at so many levels. Obviously, you were commander of Central Command when we left. That's about three years ago, almost of the day. But then you were in the Pentagon on 9-11. You write in the book about how your son served twice in Afghanistan as an infantry officer. Before we get to 2021, talk a bit about your own experiences with Afghanistan, maybe what your own attitudes were to the war there as you came into the job as a central commander and how your experiences had formed that view. Sure.

So, Aaron, as you said, I was in the Pentagon on 9-11. I was never in the plainest bit of personal danger. I was on the other side of the building. But I was there for the attack, stayed with my boss, who was the operations deputy of the Marine Corps, the guy, the ops officer of the Marine Corps. stayed with him until we had to leave because smoke was filling the building, made a very powerful impression on me, watched for the next three months as his executive assistant while we prepared to go into Afghanistan. I had the opportunity to lead Marines into Afghanistan in 2004, down south

in Erusgan province, getting ready for the presidential vote that fall, and the Taliban fought in larger formations, and it was heavy fighting up in Tarrant-in-cout, mountainous terrain, out really, really way, way deep into Afghanistan, where we were able to display the unique capabilities of the Marine Air Ground Task Force and had some great success there with a very good Marine Infantry Battalion, 1-6, and a very good Army after a battalion, 2-5 infantry, did the work on the ground for us.

So had that experience, came to CENTCOM in 2000, I take that back. Then my next time in Afghanistan, 2009, I went out and was on General with Crystal Staff. and worked in the stability shop at ICAF headquarters for a year for first a Dutch three-star and then an Italian three-star, both great officers, but in a great experience for me, because I saw the other side of military operations, had the opportunity to work extensively with the embassy, to watch the civil mail interaction that occurred or didn't occur between the military headquarters and

U.S. civilian leadership in the country. From there, I went to Central Command, where one of the first things General Mattis asked me to do after I became his J-5, director's strategy, plans and policy was to go back into Afghanistan and prepare an eyes-only report for him of what how how's it going. John Petraeus was already down there then, so I went and spent a month in Afghanistan traveling around with a very good team of people and came back and handed a single copy of the report to General Mattis. So I had an opportunity to look at Afghanistan, study it.

And then in the years after that, you know, I went up to, you know, I eventually became the Marine Forces Central Command Commander, head forces in Afghanistan. So I looked at it then. Then became the big J5 on the joint staff and a lot of interest in. And then, of course, all of that, Afghanistan, if not front and center, was certainly on stage with every other issue that we looked at. And, you know, so my takeaway, when out by the time I went to CENTCOM was, you know, and I talked a little bit about this in the book, of course, is we had made a lot of bad choices

at the beginning of the campaign about organization that haunted us to this day, the former government we chose selected, the fact that we, could have either crushed the Taliban genuinely in 0-2, 03, or brought them into the government. We didn't take either course of action. The fact that we went into Iraq, which I view as a major strategic error by the United States, took focus off Afghanistan. A lot of things led to where we were. Perhaps the biggest, though, was the fact that in our doctrine, we say,

you can't fight a counterinsurgency if there's a haven for the insurgent to go. And we never worked out a solution with Pakistan. to not be the offshore island of Haven, if you will, for the Taliban. We never solved that problem, and we never solved that problem because the Pakistanis believed we were going to leave one day. And, of course, the Pakistanis were right. We left. Now, they may have contributed to that, but they never believed that we were all in.

And, of course, they were actually with a very narrow, but perhaps more strategic focus on this single issue, righter than we were. So all those things were in my head. You know, as I came into CENTCOM in 2019, we had one of the great commanders in the U.S. Army, General Scott Miller, four-star general, actually on the ground in Afghanistan, the commander. And we worked very closely together for the whole time I was there. Well, there's a lot there.

And I want to unpack this a little bit further. Let me just ask a very big picture question about 2021 and what happened in the pace at which it happened. Because obviously this is tremendously controversial, and there are all sorts of things that happen specifically, Abby Gate most prominently. But just big picture, if you had asked me, I was there in 9 and 10 with 1-6, if you had asked me, and I would go as far as to say that if you had asked virtually anyone, any other officer serving at my level at that time, it's probably not universally true,

but it's pretty nearly universally true. You pose the question to us, we're going to pull troops out at some point in the future. We're going to pull Americans out, and we're going to cut off a lot of the money to these provinces because Marines aren't going to be handed out anymore, you know, what do you think is going to happen? And I think to a man, we would have answered something like, this thing's going to fall apart pretty quickly,

and by quickly, like weeks and months, not months and years. And yet, when that's basically what happened in 2021, you saw what at least played in the media as a lot of surprise. You saw, you know, it was reported that the president, senior government officials, et cetera, maybe some senior military officials were surprised

at the pace of collapse. And that struck me as very jarring and odd, given not just my personal experiences, but the experiences of so many of us, of you at various levels, again, I don't think that's going to be the universal belief that the pace would have been so fast, but none of us, having spent a lot of time there, thought that this thing was particularly sustainable, absent ongoing American involvement. And if you had that, well, you know, this could be as indefinite as politics would allow. So just if you would comment on that. Sure. So my opinion, which I put in writing a number of times was Afghanistan was survivable with a commitment of 2,500 or so U.S. troops, 4,500 or so NATO forces, and continued financial and fire support for the

government. It was not survivable at all if we took that away, and we took that away. And I said the collapse was going to happen pretty quickly. I did not, you know, I'm right, first time I opined on this in 2020, I thought it would be a matter of months, not weeks, but I thought the collapse of the Afghans was inevitable. That was my opinion from the beginning, not greatly different from the opinion you had as a company-grade officer down in 1-6. And it was pretty clear to me that's what would happen.

So General Miller, me and General Millie were consistent in our position that if you leave a relatively small investment in forces, look, it's not going to be pretty. But remember, from my perspective, we were there to attack ISIS and al-Qaeda. I wasn't there for any other. other reason. That's why I was there. I wasn't there to make sure that everybody got to walk to school. That wasn't my objective. My objective was to prevent violent extremist groups from

operating in the hinterlands of Afghanistan developing plans to attack the U.S. heartland. And so we felt with that shell, our partners, our other government partners, could operate against al-Qaeda. We could operate against ISIS. It wouldn't be pretty. You know, and over the course of a couple of three years, it might go bad for Afghanistan. But it wouldn't be. go bad overnight and it wouldn't go bad in a matter of months. Now, there is a countervailing opinion that we'll never know because it's counterfactual that, you know, well, you couldn't have done it with 2,500. You'd had that the Taliban were to turn down it, you were to have had to fight. I don't know the answer to that question. You know, I don't know the answer to that question.

If you go to zero, because we see it play out, that's what happened. And it's total unmitigated disaster. So, look, we left in August of 21 because two American presidents is unlike as any two in American political history warned out of Afghanistan. They agreed on nothing else in the world except they wanted out regardless of consequences. We got out as a result of that. And I would argue more specifically,

the tragedy of August was because when we act, when President Biden actually made the decision to go to effectively zero in April, we did not at that time make a similar decision to bring our embassy, our at-risk, our American citizens, and our at-risk Afghans out. Remember, that decision to come

that was made in April. By July, we were out. The military power was out. We had an embassy of still well over 1,000 people. All our citizens and all are at-risk Afghans, left in Afghanistan, had 700 forces more or less on the ground to defend the embassy and the airfield, H. Kaya, Hamad Karzai, International Airfield there in Kabul, and nothing else. But all these people were still there. The non-combatant evacuation operation was declared on 15 August. That should give you a pause if you want to think about it. It wasn't because the evidence wasn't there. These guys are collapsing. The evidence was very clear

of these guys are collapsing. But we waited and waited and waited until the very end. We had to put back in considerable combat power and just allowed a droll to take place. And that's what happened at the very end. So in the midst of this disaster, as you term it, and it's hard to see it any other way. You know, you do end up getting a lot of people

out. Some terrible things happen. We lose Marines. What are, what do you walk way with in terms of reflections and lessons specifically from that final phase of the operation? I go back to a point I've made before. The laws of history operate even against the United States. You can't lose a war and expect to impose your will. You've got to be willing to, you've got to be willing to expend the political will necessary if you want to influence events on the ground. We wanted to have everything. Typical American exceptionalism. We wanted

they have it all. We wanted to leave and we wanted to be effortless and frictionless, well, it's not. As you reduce power in the real world, not in the academic world, but in the real world, your ability to apply leverage on your opponent lessons until it comes to zero, which is where it was in Afghanistan in August 2020. What do you think the consequences are broadly of the collapse in us not being there? Well, I think from several levels. I think Putin's invasion of Ukraine was directly driven by this. I think the Chinese were emboldened as a result of it. I think that more operationally, I think ISIS K flourishes now in Afghanistan. The attack in Moscow just a few months ago is who meets a sign of things to come.

Our ability to actually look into Afghanistan, understand what goes on in Afghanistan is such a small percentage of what it used to be that is effectively zero. So all, you know, we predicted these things will happen. These things are happening. Our ability to, again, apply leverage here is quite limited. So let me ask you about Iran today as we come down to the last few minutes of our of our conversation. Obviously, we are back in a period of peak tension. I mean, as we speak, I'll say we're recording this on Friday, August the 16th, because you never know what's going to happen when we stop recording here.

But the Israelis and the Iranians have been going back and forth. The Israelis did a couple of strikes to include, seems one in Tehran, killing the head of Hamas, and everyone has been waiting for some time now on an Iranian response. And again, just my words, my editorializing. But again, it seems to me like consistent American efforts to de-escalate and to keep things calm instead, the consequence of keeping everything at a fever pitch. We're constantly on the edge. We sort of worry about a regional war more than it seems to me we would if we had taken stronger action early. What do you think is likely to happen between Israel and Iran?

what would a regional war look like if that's what we get to? So what would the shape of that be? Today, August the 6th and what we need to look at is what is Lebanese Hezbollah going to do? Of course, there are the Lebanese Isbala is a violent, a militant sect, largest non-state military entity in the world, a parasit of the government and people of Lebanon. They have tens and tens and tens of thousands of highly accurate missiles and rockets that can reign into Israel on very short notice. Much more than Hamas, much more than anybody else, much more than the Iranian. for that much more.

So that's what we want to watch. LH, though, is led by a guy named Hassan Nizraela. He can inflict great pain on Israel. Israel can inflict probably greater pain on him. He knows that. So we've seen tip for tab across the border. You know, they struck border towns. Like, I want to, again, I don't want to minimize the casualties.

I don't want to minimize the fact that 80,000 Israeli citizens have been displaced as a result of this. But it's nothing like what it could be if LH came in heavily. And Iran's problem is, look, their 13 April attack was a disaster. It was a failure. So anybody who says different simply doesn't know what they're talking about. And the Israeli response, which was quite limited, I would argue brilliant, has befuddled the Iranians.

They don't know exactly what happened, except the Israelis came in, flew a lot of stuff in the Tehran-Karter, struck some targets as if to indicate they could have struck a lot worse. And they did it in a way that didn't push their Arab neighbors away because Israel needs their Arab neighbors to defend against their attack from Iran. So pretty light-footed strategic thinking by Israel. And as you know, Aaron, they don't always exhibit that behavior. So very smart, very judicious.

So now we're at a hinge moment. The degree to which this will go into a theater war is the degree to which LH comes in. And that's what we should watch. Time now has a way of calming things down. You know, and so let's see what's going on now with a halalai. negotiations. Hamas, look, Amos doesn't want this conflict to end. It's not, look, I understand the issues with the Prime Minister of Israel. I'm tracking all that, very cognizant of that. But the real recalcitrant partner here is Hamas, who doesn't want to give up the hostages, and they don't

want the conflict to end. And so I don't think much is going to come out of this. I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. This negotiation is going on right now. But the final thing I would say is this. Iran's problem with Israel has nothing to do with Hamas and Gaza. It has everything to do with the existence of the state of Israel. LH's problem with Israel has nothing to do ultimately with Hamas. It has to do with the existence of the state of Israel itself. This dynamic existed before 7 October. It would exist long after this problem in Gaza is solved because the problem is the existence of the state of Israel with these two entities.

One being a nation, Iran, the other being. and non-state entity LH. General Kenneth Frank McKenzie, Jr., author of The Melting Point, High Command and War in the 21st Century. It's been a really interesting conversation. Thank you, sir, for joining the show. Aaron, it's been a pleasure to join you. Always great to talk to another Marine from the First Battalion, Six Marines.

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