Everyone in the United States is upset, disappointed, and disturbed by the images coming out of Kabul following the collapse of the Afghan government and the return to power of the Taliban. But even as efforts to establish some degree of order to a (so far) disorderly exit continue, some are already heavily engaged in the blame game and eagerly looking to distribute it. One noted national commentator even called for President Joseph Biden’s entire national security staff to be dismissed arguing that they were all “educated but not experienced.”
That assertion is absurd. Biden’s full national security team (stretching far beyond the NSC staff) is both well-educated and highly experienced. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was a former staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and previously served four years as a Deputy Secretary of State. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is a retired four-star general and has previously commanded all US forces in Iraq and then was commander of the US Central Command that oversees all operations in the Middle East — including Afghanistan. And Biden himself is no stranger to foreign policy, national security policy, and the nation’s long involvements in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Claiming the Biden team is in any way inexperienced is simply unhelpful background noise.
But even highly qualified and experienced teams can make mistakes, and the mistake the Biden team made is quite easy to see. It can be summed up in one word — “Time.”
From the moment a military officer is commissioned there is one acronym they have all seen so often that it frequently appears in large font in their sleep — METT-T. What does that stand for? When one is planning a military operation, you must carefully consider five elements: Mission, Enemy Forces, Terrain, Troops available and Time available. There it is. Clear, easy, concise, and memorable — METT-T.
For many years the acronym was simply METT, but in later times — particularly after the advent of the highly sophisticated training centers established by the Army and Marine Corps — “time” was added as a major consideration. There is no reason to attempt the organization of a sophisticated, in-depth defense complete with barriers and obstacles if you don’t have sufficient time to emplace them before the expected enemy attack.
In an exercise I was once participating in, the infantry commander established an elegant defense position along a ridgeline, one that was planned around a series of connected fighting positions for his soldiers. However, because of the lack of engineering equipment and the hardness of the ground — which was largely rock, the engineer battalion supporting the effort did not have enough time to dig the fighting positions. The enemy, in this case the Army’s OPFOR (the “opposing force”), attacked sooner than expected and well before the engineering work was done. And they prevailed.
As Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley has stated, although there were widely varying intelligence estimates on how quickly the Taliban might be able to defeat the US-trained Afghan National Army, no one was predicting only eleven days. Accordingly, the planning assumptions for the American withdrawal, and the removal of the Afghans who had supported the US effort, allowed considerably more time than what proved to be the case. In short, the time estimate — that last “T” in METT-T, was wrong. Terribly wrong. And not just slightly wrong, but wrong by several multiples. Finding out why is something that we need to examine in the coming months.
The US intelligence community is very likely the best in the world. It provides intelligence, assessments, and predictions on a wide array of issues from technological development, to force deployments and capabilities, to foreign leaders’ behavioral tendencies. But often things develop in a different way or at a much quicker pace than expected. I was in Germany at a major conference in 1989 two weeks before the Berlin Wall came down. Everyone could see the cracks developing, and it was obvious dramatic things were happening in eastern Europe — on a scale that was not fully understood, but no one thought the wall would become a thing of the past in two more weeks. The failure to predict time in that case worked in our favor — although obviously not for East German leader Erich Honecker; but the opposite has been the case regarding the current condition in Afghanistan.
In addition, there are two other old pieces of military guidance at play here. First is the well-worn adage that no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. This is almost always the case, although a major exception was 1991’s operation Desert Storm, a highly successful operation that went almost perfectly as planned and in less time, and in some ways established an unrealistic expectation by the American public for future operations. Some adjustments to the Desert Storm plan were necessitated — and made, but in that case it was largely because the enemy proved even less capable than many had imagined.
Second, and closely related to the first, is the recognition that in any operation the “enemy gets a vote.” The enemy reaction may be different than expected, or it may come in an unexpected direction, or it may take a different form. One reason the German defense of Europe failed in 1944 was that General Dwight Eisenhower and his subordinates sufficiently convinced the German commanders that the invasion would come in a different location and in better weather. Eisenhower cast his “vote” quite well.
So where does that leave us in Afghanistan? Obviously, the time available for withdrawing all those we want to evacuate has been substantially compressed. Certain decisions made earlier, using different assumptions regarding time, have proven to be incorrect. Abandoning the sprawling Bagram air base with its important runways is an obvious one. No doubt the pentagon planners would like to have that one, and several others, back. Instead, they’ll have to adjust given their new METT-T circumstances.
But one thing that is not reasonable is firing the entire Biden national security team. They are educated and experienced, and they now know intimately well the cards left in their hand, which are certainly not the ones they expected to be playing. But these players, especially Secretary Austin and General Milley — but also the NSC staff, fully understand that. They know that the METT-T calculus has changed, and they’ll have to adjust accordingly.
Winston Churchill noted after Dunkirk that wars are not won by evacuations. Improvising and conducting one in haste is not a pretty sight. And the one underway in Kabul has already met the bar of low expectations. Even an evacuation well done is not likely to be done well — especially if an erroneous time calculation is a key piece of the story.
But there are still cards to be played. Unlike Dunkirk we still have capable forces we can selectively deploy; we have numerous and highly capable transportation assets; we still have some leverage with the Taliban — although admittedly not much. We must push forward and do as much as we can while fully understanding we won’t be able to do as much as we’d like. Nonetheless, to dredge up one last aging adage, this is certainly no time “to change horses in the middle of the stream.”
