 to Community Matters here on Think Tech, the three o'clock clock on a given Monday. And we're talking about failure, solution, and fallout. We're from here. I'm by two veterans. But we're talking about a commentary they wrote, namely Vic Kraft and John Reese. Welcome to the show, you guys. Thank you. So we got that commentary. I thought it was very interesting. And important that you wrote it. And we posted it on our Think Tech blog, and we thought we'd have a show about it too. And I think this is very valuable to discuss your views and where you get that from. So the first thing you do, Vic, is tell us a little about your background in life. Hold it down to six hours, wouldn't you? Okay. Let me stop the start while I share it. Okay. Take it from the brief bio that I sent you guys and what you know of me from years past. John and I were both in the Air Force at Station Williams Air Force Base many, many moons ago. I raised Jim from a second lieutenant. And as me as a staff sergeant at the time, I was interested in meteorology and wanted to do it as a hobby. And I got some master sergeant pushing him on me. And we've known each other now for almost 50 years. So you decided to collaborate on this piece. What brought you to collaborate on the piece? We've been writing together for a long time. We wrote a book together a long time ago called Pacific Cauldron. It was about what would happen to Hawaii should there no longer be a United States. And we've done some other things together as far as writing. We've been practicing this for years, writing about defense issues, space, the environment, various other issues around. Well, how important is this piece? I guess it's like maybe 1500 or 2000 words. And it goes into pretty lofty thoughts and concerns about the future of the country. But what brought you to do this? And how important is this for you guys? For me, when I saw the Afghanis running along the side of the aircraft, trying to grab ahold of it, thinking that they were going to be blown away to safety, it kind of motivated me to think about giving service and also what you're willing to commit. These guys just wanted to get the heck out of there. They didn't want to do anything. It seemed as though they didn't want to commit anything other than their own safety. And I thought of the sacrifice that we had made in the 20-some hundred lives of American Armed Forces people in Afghanistan. And what was it all for? And how did we get there? This has made me ask the questions. Okay, we'll go into the piece in a minute. But, John, how much of what Vick said you agree with? You're coming from the same place? Well, we're both operating out of a sense of frustration more than anything else because we're both futureists. We both have an abiding interest in science fiction and looking at the future or whatever. And we both know how good things could be. And we're frustrated at the fact that despite all of our technical sophistication and economic power and everything else that we still seem to both basically shoot ourselves in the foot as Americans or whatever. Americans have a great, great talent for writing a really sophisticated, tightly knit plot for a one-hour show or a two-hour movie. And it's like, why can't we do that? Why can't we do at least some of that in real life? I mean, plus, you know, we have all this history behind us. We've done things right in the past, World War II. I mean, not only did we contribute to winning that war, but we had a plan afterwards called the Marshall Plan. And all that's on the shelf. It's there. It's not some corporate proprietary information that's available to use. So it's frustrating for us to see us go into a situation like Afghanistan. And we have all these ready-made friends sitting on the shelf or whatever. And nobody seems willing to make the effort or make the effort to put them into practice. What's the lens that you see this from? I mean, both of you guys had long careers in and around the military. So I guess maybe this is hard for you to answer. But what's the lens? From what point of view do you look at these issues? I mean, the 30,000-foot level or? No, personally. Personally? Personally. Yeah. Well, you know, Vic was an actual combat veteran in Vietnam. And I listed in 73. You know, Vietnam was still going on. I didn't happen to end up in Vietnam. My background was in and when I entered the Air Force, I already had my bachelor's degree in applied mathematics. And the Air Force wanted to make use of that. They decided I should be a computer programmer. But still, you know, my career went from 73 to 93. So I went from Vietnam to Desert Storm. Well, a lot of people in the service who have been in the service, maybe I'm thinking of recent years, they treat themselves as apolitical. And some of them treat themselves as, you know, kind of conservative. Yeah. A lot of them support Trump right now, today. Yes, I mean, very troubling, troubling to my generation anyway. But it's very true. It's very troubling to me, too. I have to think of myself as apolitical, you know, but, you know, I've been through the Carter years, I've been through the Reagan years, I've been through the Clinton years and everything else. But the idea is that, well, it's good to be found, it's good and bad to be found in both sides. So, you know, to this day, you know, I consider myself an independent voter. And Trump is anathema. I mean, he is the worst example of American politics in my book. And I can find virtually zero worthwhile in him in particular and his enablers within the Republican Party. That's not to say that I'm a fully committed Democrat, you know, because I think they have their issues also. But let me come to his defense in this regard. I think both of us we view ourselves as Americans first in terms of what we raised our right hand for in terms of supporting the Constitution. That's, I mean, the principles and ideals that were set up in the Constitution and what that's what we we put a uniform on for. And when I see people storming the Capitol, and I see people trying to grab onto an airplane to get their freedom, recognizing that they're both giving up. The people who stormed the Capitol gave up on the processes in the system. They were willing to abandon the law and take the law into their own hand. The people in Kabul who were trying to get on board these aircraft had abandoned whatever they were they were living in for fear of losing their freedoms or whatever. We fought for those freedoms. 22 or 2400 people died for those freedoms. And thousands upon thousands of Afghani soldiers also died. And these guys are thinking, I'm going to grab onto an airplane or I'm going to crawl over these other people to get my freedom and get away from them. I have no sympathy for them. And I have no sympathy for the people on January the 6th who gave up on America. They should be looking at themselves as being Americans and not just Trumpers or anything. I hate labels in that regard. Okay, well let's go to your piece, your commentary. It covers three things, which is why we fashioned the name of the show as failure, solution, and fallout. So you spend a bit of time writing about the failures. And I guess it's driven, Vic, it's driven off the Afghanistan experience. But can you summarize what you're saying about the failures in your paper? I think John said it earlier, it's kind of like a proper pre-planning prevents this poor performance. If you're going to go invade somebody, you've got a plan. And if you're going to have a plan, you're going to have some means of what defines what your goals are. I don't think we really had any goals in Afghanistan. It was interesting, one of my mentors called me up the day after 9-11 occurred. And he was an army intelligence officer. And he said, you know what, we're going to do something stupid. We're going to go down the military industrial path to try to fight these people in Afghanistan and in Iraq. No, no, the way to do this was to follow the money. It was also to be clandestine and fighting this thing. And we did not take any kind of lesson out of Vietnam in that we were going to put boots on the ground and this is how we're going to solve the problem. It doesn't. And that's one of the things that we wrote about in the piece is our foreign policy has been driven by defense and paranoia as opposed to the other way around in that our foreign policy should be driving defense policy. I constantly hear the business of American interests. What are those interests? Protecting American interests. What are they? And delineated where? And you read the defense posture plan that comes out about every five years for the decennial report. And you think, okay, why don't we have all this military? We have the largest armed forces in the world in terms of carriers, other weaponry before. What are we using? Are we concerned about banana republics invading the United States? Okay, so these are failures. What would you add to that, John, in terms of the treatment by your joint paper here about these profound failures? Failures about which you and Vic are concerned? Well, it's, you know, Vic summed it up pretty well. It's the lack of setting clear objectives that, you know, okay, ostensibly, we went into Afghanistan because the Taliban government that was in place at the time was sheltering Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda launched the 9-11 attack. So we wanted to not only eliminate Al Qaeda, we wanted to eliminate the group that was supporting them. But we accomplished that. We chased Al Qaeda, you know, Al Qaeda out of, out of Afghanistan. It took us several more years to finally track down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. But, you know, we accomplished the first, first goal. And we, we knocked the Taliban, you know, out of, out of government there or whatever. But we essentially went in with no plan of what to replace it with. And not only that, we went in with no plan for an Afghan government. We went in basically with wishful thinking that once we eliminated the Taliban, the Afghans would rise up and embrace the principles stated in the U.S. Constitution and set up a, you know, set up their own republic, you know, or democracy in the shape of the United States government. Well, they have no experience with doing that. We needed, we needed to set up a, you know, we needed a plan to set up an Afghan government, not a copy of the U.S. government. Because they had, you know, they had different structures there. They had, you know, village chiefs. They had, you know, various other, you know, ethnic minorities and things that we just ignored. And it's like, you know, we went in with a plan across your fingers and hope that they form a government after we, after we take care of the Taliban. And we finished the first two girls with a matter of one or two years. And then what, what did we spend the remaining 18 years doing? Trying to prop up a government that wasn't working. Yeah. Jake, there was some accommodation of failures there. Yes. Let me say something, Jake. This is something that has troubled me for the last 60 years. A guy by the name of William Letter wrote very interesting books back in the 50s. One was All the Ships at Sea, Nation of Sheep. He was also co-author of The Ugly American. And he pointed out the failures at that time of the American diplomatic policy in Asia. And I stopped to think about this. When we went into Afghanistan, I'm sure that there were people who were sitting on the desk with the specialists, the least subject matter experts within the State Department, who were probably feeding memos to their management saying, this is a bad idea. And it got distorted. Okay. So, yeah, it is say no, no proper pre-planning to go in there. And I had a conversation with a friend of mine who was a retired diplomat. And I said, he had been to Kabul and been talking with Hamid Karzai several times. And I asked him, I said, just exactly what is Afghanistan? Considering that it has had a history of a lot of warlords, you got a lot of drug use or drug production going on over there, how do they make a living? And I said, Afghanistan seems to me to be about a 60 mile radius around Kabul. And he said, oddly enough, Hamid Karzai had turned to him and said, yes, his writ does not extend beyond the city limits. So, exactly, we did not know what the heck to do. And didn't do our homework, went in there. That's a huge failure right there. We're going to. So, who's responsible? Is it the military? Is it the State Department? Is it Congress? What do you mean by us? Are you and I and John recharged with knowing all these things? We didn't have any authority to do anything. So, clearly, the people with the authority to do something, who made the mistakes? We're a Democratic Republic. We are a Democratic form of government. We are supposed to have our representatives represent our views. Given the feeling of the American populace today and its lack of advocacy in its own institutions, that sounds pretty far. I follow you, but it's the idea is that people are frustrated and they don't trust in their own system. How did we get out of Vietnam? It was the pressure of the public on its representatives. It took a while to do it, but at least it was a matter of numbers. And once the numbers grew and people or the representatives recognized their constituents were not happy, guess what? Things started to change. Okay, well, I suppose that people around the country were not fully aware of what was going on in Afghanistan and maybe they should have been out in the streets protesting and writing letters to Congress, which they didn't do. Most people went along with it. And let's assume for this discussion that there were huge failures, failures by all the government agencies involved, including presidents, the intelligence agencies, the military who never really learned how to speak the language, and of course the State Department and the coordination of all of them for 20 years. But let's go to the second area of your discussion. John, you talked about solutions. You and Vic came up with three or four solutions. This is really important because we're on a constructive track here. We want to find answers so that these failures are not repeated. What are your solutions, John? Well, first and foremost is, if we admit the fact that the failures occurred due to what amounts to poor leadership, the first solution is we need better leadership. It's easy to state, but then how do you go about doing that? And quite frankly, in today's current political environment, they talk about polarization. Well, that's a very apt description. It's divided between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans and the definitions have been distorted to the point where a conservative from 50 years ago wouldn't recognize the conservatives, the contemporary conservatives. That be that as it may, our failure seems to be stemming from, quite frankly, our two-party system. Our election. Every election night, they talk about the swing voters, the independent voters, that each party has its own base that seems to be locked in, but the final decisions seem to be made by the swing voters, and yet the swing voters don't have any representation. Okay, so to me, as a mathematician, the solution seems to be we need a third party. Now, we need a third party to completely take over, dominate the politics. No. There's already been talk in the Republican party of Republicans dissatisfied with the Trump supporters. And there was some talk a few months ago, apparently not too serious, but some spoken speculation that maybe we ought to break off and farm our own party, which I was going to say yes, for the trigger. Good. Because if these more moderate Republicans separated from the Trumpists, okay, Trumplings, whatever you want to call them, that would immediately eliminate them as, you know, they wouldn't have their majority anymore. You know, they wouldn't have a threat of a majority in either house of Congress, you know, in either chamber of Congress. What about the other possible solutions that you included in the paper? Oh, we talked about national service. Vic and I, as members of the military, and oh, by the way, as an retired Air Force officer, retirement is not a discharge. I am still officially a member of the US Air Force, okay? My status is retired. When I retired, I did not receive a discharge. I wasn't separated from the service. I'm still part of it. And the thing is, and Vic has the same, his technical, his legal status might be, you know, not the same as mine, but his mental status and in his heart, it still is, okay? We recognize the value of national service. And we have other examples on the planet. Vic is always bringing up Switzerland, okay? Everybody in Switzerland ends up doing some national service at some point in their life. And whether that's in the military or some other function, you know, in the United States, we have the Peace Corps, we have, you know, other things like that. We could make up things like that. But, you know, you've got to get involved. You got to, as we put it in our paper, you got to get some skin in the game. You got to have some investment. Too many people nowadays, you know, they're sitting, you know, comfortably, you know, with their big screen TVs and, you know, Sunday afternoon sports and whatnot. And, you know, the whole idea after Vietnam, we formed this all volunteer force. Well, that more or less gave Congress and the President, you know, the executive branch, cart launch, you know, do whatever you feel like, because, you know, we've got these volunteers that have agreed to, you know, follow our orders or whatever. And, you know, there's no investment, you know, there's no protest from the moms and dads, or a few moms and dads or whatever, but not a voting block. Let me add to that, because this is one of the things Jay, I think that's important as far as the skin in the game aspect of this thing, how much debate has gone on since we left Afghanistan. I haven't seen anything in the press. People aren't talking about it. I don't know whether they're ashamed or what happened there, but there doesn't seem to be anything other than reprimanations against the current administration. That's all their fault. Now, we as a country are responsible for this. We are a Democratic Republic. We elect our representatives to go to Congress that are supposed to speak for us, or at least they are to speak to their district. And if their district is against a particular issue, then they need to raise that. And that's where the leadership comes in. Now, John mentioned the Republicans having some difficulties in keeping everybody in line. Democrats are having the same problem in Congress right now. And perhaps maybe we will get some leadership out of this. I don't know, but it's a matter of what you're willing to accept. One of the professional delegates to Washington from Hawaii has shown that kind of leadership. And bucking the system and saying, no, I don't want to do it your way. There is a better way. Vic, if I could jump in here, if 10% of the Republicans left the Republican Party and 10% of the Democrats joined them, forming a block, 20% of the current representation or whatever, that would have a moderating effect on the other two remaining parties. Because each party, with their 40% share, their plurality, whatever, would be trying to get that 20% swing vote or whatever enlisted in their various causes, which would cause them to moderate their policies to try and attract that middle 20% block. Well, I want to get to Jay's question regarding the getting to the how. And we started that at the beginning of the program. How do we go about doing this? Peter Adler wrote a very interesting piece in Civil Beat last week. He called it Gorilla Bridge Building. And basically, we know that Peter is a mediator. That's his specialty. But I recommend that you go read the article. It's very good. And basically, brings about the idea that we work at these things a little bit at a time, and we don't take issue with the other people as far as putting labels on it. You find collaboration. And that's what we need to do is find collaboration. How we go about doing it? I don't know, one step at a time, Jay. I don't know what else to do. But it's a matter of I've invested my life in the Constitution and the ideals of this country. I'm not willing to give it up. Hey, we're almost out of time, guys. So, John, let me ask you for a minute of closing remarks of how you want to leave this with our viewing audience. What would you like them to remember from this discussion? Well, we have to encourage the idea that collaboration and cooperation are not dirty words. That both sides of an issue can have some constructive thoughts. And compromise doesn't have to be a process of whittling away until the only thing that's left is mutually abhorrent to both parties. Compromise should be surveying the points of both sides and picking out the good things from both sides and then synthesizing those together to produce something greater than the original whole. Okay? Compromise should be a building effort, not a destructive effort. Hey, we've got to leave it there. What would you like to leave with our audience? The former Hawaiian legislature said to me one time, because politicians have such a bad reputation with the public, he said politics is the art of compromise. And that is one of the things that we need to work on. And the problem, as we've pointed out in our article and also in this interview, is the lack of people wanting to compromise. And that's why I get back to Peter Adler's business of derelict collaboration. There's got to be some people that are going to be willing to stand up and say, I'm not going to follow the dog. And I think of John and Kennedy and profiles and courage and the people that he wrote about and what they stood for. And there is no, as Kennedy said, no Republican answer or Democrat answer, just the right answer. That's what we need to look for. Big craft veteran, efforts veteran, and John Reece, another efforts veteran, been around the block and we're writing together for years and been thinking about our situation, both through patriots. Thank you very much, Vic. Thank you, John. Hello. Thank you, Jay.