2055

Well, the active-camouflage starfield-passthrough space suits are on back order. Something about COVID and crypto-mining.

2056

So Space Sweepers is a documentary?

2057

I think they’ll start being more serious about tracking all potential satellite collisions and not just ones that are threatening to military, and civilian ones if they notice. An ATC for space is becoming more important as SpaceX launches become more frequent.

2058

Other branches could transfer in , but it’s largely repurposed USAF. For my AFSC, the space weather stuff got carved out, which would just mean for my old job I’d be getting the slide from a slightly different site so no one would pay attention to it.

A good proper space force would have jumpsuits- just repurpose what the Coasties use?

2059

Apparently already relieved of command

2060

What an appalling lack of discipline. Deserves to be cashiered for this.

2061

I don’t disagree with anything he said, but social media isn’t the proper forum for any military member, especially any type of Colonel or General to express their frustration. Surely he could have found a recently retired guy to say the same things and plenty have.

On the other hand, he is obviously not a stupid guy,and he knew the consequences of speaking out so he has my respect.

2062

He knew exactly what he was doing, and reading his other post I’m guessing it was the first step in a planned transition to running for office. He’s complaining about his superiors not doing anything when he, a BN Co, has no fucking clue what the chiefs did or didn’t do. It’s not like there won’t be accountability for what happened, or an endless parade of lessons learned sessions. Hell, they probably still go on about task force Smith.

2063

Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what he said. I watched that yesterday on LinkedIn and my reaction was you’re blowing up your career with this incoherent message? The few specific things he mentions, e.g. keeping Bagram airbase, seem to be just wrong militarily and logistically. All I really get is that he wants some senior leadership to fall on their swords for that decision, of maybe for being wrong about the Afghan military, and he wants them to do that while they’re still managing the evacuation.

I mean, that’s a really not a very smart expectation. He must believe quite strongly to have done this, but people who believe strongly are often, well, wrong. If I were going to blow up my own career, I think I would articulate why a bit more clearly than this.

Ah, that makes a kind of crazy sense. Though if he ends up tossing his retirement benefit eligibility for that, that’s…bold.

2064

The whole trying to latch onto the Trump train was obvious.

I know officers who disagreed with shit- and they knew how to soak it in bullshit so you knew exactly what they meant but they had deniability. I don’t think you make it above Captain without an ability to do this. (or even make E-8 if you’re enlisted)

2065

Why do you think he was part of the Trump train. I reviewed his Facebook feed not a single political post in a dozen years. There are clearly lots of military failures in Afghanistan, separate from the political failures. Now we all know that “success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan”. So it is sort of naive to think that you are going to see a bunch of generals raise their hands and say me bad.

Despite the narrative that American people were lied to, I don’t really think that’s true. The basic narrative for the last 15 years from the military has been “we are making progress in Afghanistan, but we aren’t close to victory”. We’ve not heard the grandiose claims of “the war will be won by Xmas” of so many past wars. As the Robert Kagan piece, I posted. documents, Americans have also never been optimistic about our likelihood of success.

Long-term the military needs to figure out why after 20 years of trying we failed so badly of building a Afghanistan army that was capable of defending itself against the very unpopular Taliban. In the short term we need to understand why our intelligence services didn’t know that huge numbers of the Afghanistan army had already been bribed by the Taliban.

2066

Yep, that would be one of the lies there. Every year of “progress” we made in Afghanistan allowed our occupation government to last an additional ~12 hours once we’d pulled out. Or look at the troop reports over the years, claiming “we’ve trained 80K security forces”, then “we’ve trained 150K security forces” then “we’ve trained 300K security forces”, followed by “oh wow it turns out most of those formations existed on paper but not as actual combat effective forces”.

I don’t know about Scheller’s political affiliations, but he’s not wrong to want to see accountability. Until we can get rid of these bad decision making nodes they will just continue to make bad decisions.

2067

Totally agree. One of the areas that needs to be investigated is the military “can-do attitude” When the President say do X, they salute and say yes sir. If it is really bad idea, they’ll figure out how to slow-walked or sabotage it. Take Trump’s desire for military parade in Washington DC. The correct response is No Mr. President, this is the US not China, Russia, or a banana Republic we don’t have military parades, the closest we get is airshows. Instead Mattis and team convince him that M1 Tanks would break Washington DC streets.

2068

A new video from the ltc:

2069

Trumpist or insane? And honestly, what’s the difference?

2070

Filipkowski’s thread has more from him. Dude is going to end up in trouble. Hopefully no one gets hurt before that happens.

2071

He doesn’t seem well. And it sounds like his wife wasn’t told in advance / on board with this whole thing. He sounds like someone who might be in need of some mental health services. Too bad that’s not something we’re great at doing in this country.

2072

3 years from being eligible for retirement, yeah I imagine she would be a tad pissed that he didn’t talk to her about it.

2073

Considering he’s still in uniform, this seems a level of stupid that is hard to fathom.

“I lost my command. Time to double down and add some sedition.”

I’m not a military justice guy, but I feel like this could end really badly for him.

2074

Apparently he resigned his commission today, but not sure on the logistics of how that works (immediate separation or if there is an ETS-like process.