 I'm Dan Leif. I go by Fig. And this is Figments on Reality, season one episode eight. And again, we're going to talk about matters with regard to the terrible withdrawal from Afghanistan. I want to talk about military accountability, because it's so important that we hold our leaders accountable and that we address failure in the armed forces. It seems of late we've focused on personal failure, not mission failure. But we need to address mission failure. And when somebody fails in their mission, they need to be held accountable. The usual preface for relief of somebody from command is having lost confidence in so-and-so. They're fired. Well, I have not seen anything confidence inspiring about recent weeks with regard to Afghanistan. So clearly the table has been set. But I want to take a historical look from my own experience and from history at military accountability and talk about how easy it is to do and why we should do it, how we should do it. My own introduction to accountability for mission failure came 40 years ago. I was a young captain here at Headquartered Specific Air Forces in Honolulu, Pickham Air Force Base at the time. And as a member of the standardization and evaluation team for the command, I attended mishap briefings, the out brief of a mishap investigation after an aircraft crashed. And I went to one of those and sat in the cheap seats as a young captain while the three-star got the briefing on what had happened and why. And it was fortunately not a fatal accident, but it happened to be the third accident in the same squadron at the same base within, I think, a year. So within the tenure of the end squadron commander. In this case, I don't remember who was a maintenance error or a pilot error, but there was really no culpability for the commander. It just happened. And at the end of the briefing, the three-star commander of Pacific Air Forces said to the colonel head of the accident board, okay, thanks. And Lieutenant Colonel So-and-So, the squadron commander is effectively relieved. He's fired. And the board president, who apparently knew this guy, protested and said, but wait, sir, it's not his fault. And the general lost three airplanes in a year. And the colonel said, yeah, but he's a good guy. He's just unlucky. And the three-star said, I don't care if he's unlucky or good. I don't have time to find out. He is relieved, effective immediately. And so he wasn't culpable for this, but the mission had failed. Losing three airplanes is a mission failure. And like I said, doesn't have to be fair. So he was relieved. That has stuck with me in all of my time as a commander at various levels. I've held that as the right way to look at it. If you fail at the mission, you have to be held accountable. And I'll tell more about that in a bit. But firing a military leader is not rare. And there are some high-profile cases, like General Douglas MacArthur was fired by President Truman in April of 1991. April of 1951. Thank you. Look at the statement here. With deep regret, I have concluded that General of the Army, Douglas MacArthur, is unable to give his wholehearted support to the policies of the U.S. government. And certainly, there were policy disagreements and disconnects between President Truman and General MacArthur. So he was fired. Why wasn't he fired six months earlier is my question. When he failed at the mission, we see here Marines in the chosen reservoir and MacArthur's failure to recognize and respond to, in a timely manner, the massive intervention of Chinese troops in Korea led to, first of all, a very significant defeat in the U.S. forces being pushed back south of Seoul and thousands of casualties. Okay, mission failure. And you can argue that MacArthur didn't know that his intelligence people botched the assessment, that they hid information from him. I don't care. He failed at the mission. You're fired. But that's not what happened. And I feel strongly enough about that, that one time in my own career, I applied it to myself. I wasn't yet in command, but on the same day that I was notified in March of 1990, that I would be given command of a fighter squadron, the triple nickel fighter squadron, Luke Air Force Base. I was an operations officer, the number two in command of another fighter squadron there. And an hour or so later after my wing commander gave me the good news that I'd be a squadron commander, one of our aircraft crashed. The pilot had entered an unrecoverable skit spin condition. He ejected, fortunately, he was safe and uninjured, the jet, of course, a total loss. While they appointed an interim colonel to begin the investigation, they always do that and then bring in a permanent board that takes a month or more to fully examine the cause of accidents. And the interim board president jumped to a hasty conclusion that this pilot had done something unauthorized with his flight controls, and he was at fault. This was hours into the investigation. So my wing commander called me, not such a pleasant phone call this time and said, oh, you know, it looks like he did this and that. And I said, sir, the wing commander alluded to the fact that my opportunity to command a squadron was at risk. He said, I said, sir, first of all, I am responsible for the operations. I'm the operations officer. I'm confident that we are running a good operation and that the pilot mishap pilot was acting in accordance with regulations. And if I'm wrong, then I don't deserve to be a squadron commander. And I really felt that way. I was pretty confident that we were doing things right. But if we weren't and I was unaware, that's mission failure. So shame on me and find another squadron commander. As it turned out, he was operating in accordance with regulations. And a couple months later, I took command of the triple nickel and moved on as you can tell. But I did need to be held responsible. And I was fine with that. Now, let's ask ourselves, what do we punish these days in the military? Punish it might not be the right word. What do we relieve commanding officers for? You know, if you run your ship around, that's there's a pretty good chance you'll be relieved. It's so high profile and such high risk that the Navy is quick to punish that if you will. But generally, the big high profile cases of relief of command is related more to indiscretions or abusive behavior or disagreements with those above you, not mission failure. And I'd say a couple of examples. Navy Captain Brent Crozier was relieved of his carrier command for raising issues about COVID and the mission risk of that. He was concerned about mission risk, raised it and was relieved. Now, you can argue that he didn't raise it in proper channels, maybe. But in any case, his concern was the mission, rightly so. And he raised his concerns and got the hook. For what he said, not what he thought or what he was trying to do. There's a very high profile situation that's similar to this. Thanks, Facebook, for sharing this with the world, where a US Marine Lieutenant Colonel named Scheller was publicizing his views on Afghanistan and they were not positive. He asked a pretty good question about what's being done and how leaders are reacting. I'll read it because this is his question. I'm not saying that we've got to be in Afghanistan forever. But I am saying, did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, hey, it's a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic air base, before we evacuate everyone? Did anyone do that? And when you didn't think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, we completely messed this up? That's a fair question, I think. It doesn't take much hindsight to look back and say, that's a fair question. What is the answer? We'll get to that question later when I talk about who to relieve. And a reminder that figments on reality is non-political. And I try not to get vitriol. And I'm not going to suggest individuals who should be fired. I'm going to talk about where the responsibility should be assessed and addressed. We've been at war in Afghanistan for 20 years, 20 years. And necessarily, we haven't succeeded. You might say we succeeded early on in negating the Al Qaeda threat. But overall, we have not succeeded. Who's been fired for that mission failure? Nobody I know. There have been some disagreements, some public disagreements that got people moved on, but not, hey, you didn't do the job. And it doesn't matter that they were given a difficult job. They took it. They accepted the responsibility. Life's not fair. In fact, when I interviewed to be a squadron commander, after the incident I spoke of earlier, I had to go have a personal interview in the office of the three-star numbered Air Force commander. It was a very interesting interview. And one of the things, fortunately, I knew about it beforehand, in a little psychological warfare, the three-star pointed to a place on his wall, a blank space, and said, what does that sign say? And I knew the answer, thank heavens. I had a little intel from my friends who were squadron commanders, said, sir, it says life's not fair. Okay, it isn't fair. You took the responsibility for whatever reason you failed. Sorry, dude, or do that. Move on. The question isn't just what and how we punish, but it's also what we reward. And we reward darn near everything these days. And much of what we reward is not mission-related. And that annoys me, and I'm going to cite myself as a personal example. I've got this lovely picture, my last picture on active duty official photo. Look at me. I'm highly decorated. Okay, I guess I am highly decorated. But the truth is that more than half of those ribbons on my chest are about just being there or being part of a group. Fewer than half are my individual accomplishment. Okay, I think I should have a lot less ribbons. I don't think I should get a participation ribbon. And by the way, the ribbons on my chest, some are for operations in combat by me. But there's no V device, which signifies valor. I did my job. I think I did my job pretty well. But this over-recognition and the interest of incentivization is ridiculous. And we should do it less. Commanders are responsible for the mission and mission failure. And when you try to assess it and say, okay, who gets called on the carpet, who gets relieved, it isn't simple. I'll grant you that. There's always a web of culpability generally above and below the commander. And maybe a subordinate screwed up, as in this, that F4 accident case that I said at the start of this show. Maybe they got bad or unachievable guidance from above. Fine. But they are the commander. They're uniquely responsible. And thus must be held uniquely accountable. Now, the two things have complicated it further. And I think one is the information age, Facebook, social media, everything is in the public. It's very difficult to do things quietly. And it all has a political tone. As I look at Facebook and Instagram and everything else about the situation in Afghanistan, I find that we're asking ourselves the wrong questions. We're talking about the wrong things and we're attributing political blame, not mission failure blame. And that makes it hard to hold people accountable, but it doesn't make it impossible. And in the, along the lines of the, it isn't fair rule of thumb, people often get into, leaders often get into the people versus mission debate. What's more important than people are the mission. And frankly, I believe that because of sensitivity within sensitivity is good when used in small doses, that we tend to default to people first. And as a military leader and as a senior defense department of defense civilian here in Hawaii, I always said, that's baloney. That's not always how I said it, but it's baloney. People don't come first. The mission does all of these. That doesn't mean that you mistreat your people or use them up like Dixie cups and throw them away, because that will impact the mission. You treat them well and you do incentivize them. You meet their needs, personal and professional, mostly professional, but when push comes to shove, it's the mission. And the sensitivity to people's feelings or, well, this will look bad on Joe or Jane's records. I don't care. I'm lucky. And I've fired people as a commander for mission failure. I didn't like doing it, but I didn't hate doing it either because it was necessary because the mission came first. And I'd always sit down directly and say to them, and there are probably five significant cases where I relieved a combat commander or second in command and moved them on to something else. I would always sit down with them and say, first of all, this is my decision. And if you want to be mad at somebody, I'm the guy. But as the group or wing commander, this is my assessment. I care more about the mission so you are no longer in whatever job they were in. And frankly, most of them, the majority of those guys, those people, all guys as it happens, didn't hate me and weren't mad because they knew they weren't succeeding. And nobody likes failure. Well, I don't think anybody likes failure. One guy held a grudge to the very end. Fine. Fine. It's the mission, not his feelings. And you have to do it quickly. As I spoke to leadership audiences in sometimes in universities or military schools to commander training programs in the Air Force, I would always say if it ever enters your mind that somebody needs to be fired, relieved, moved on, then do it right now. Because if you get that firing your thought process, you have a problem. It's a mission problem. And your job is the mission. So address it. Now, I also encourage them to do an assessment about why they were failing before they reached that conclusion. Did they have the tools? Did they have the guidance? Did they have the right people, the right resources? And if they didn't help them out, you know, don't hold them only accountable. They have to have the tools to be able to achieve the mission. You can't expect people to make something out of an error. So that's my view. If somebody fails at the mission and can't succeed, move them out. And if you don't do that, you pollute the culture of the organization you're in. And if we don't do it with regard to Afghanistan, we're going to poison the culture in our military. And that's very dangerous. And I'll talk about that again a bit more. So who should be fired? You know, I'm not going to talk about politicians. That's not my intent today. But as I said in part two of the shows I've done on Afghanistan, it's not a failure of intelligence or politics or military. It's just a failure. And there is certainly addressable, there are addressable military elements of that failure. So somebody ought to be fired in the military. And it should be based on mission failure. And not just based on mission failure. Explain that way by whomever above them makes the decision to release. Georgian is a good guy, served their country honorably. I appreciate that service. But in this case, they failed. So they're gone. Because we can't tolerate failure. We can't wish away failure. They ought not be made a scapegoat. And they ought not ought not be used to shift blame from others who made mistakes. At the political level, in the civilian leadership, clearly there's a need for accountability. That has to be addressed, too. But here I'm talking about military accountability. And I think there are three key mistakes where given the authority, the time and resources, I could find out who ought to hit the bricks. And the three key mistakes are the date certain withdrawal. Now that probably wasn't said by someone in uniform. But someone in uniform had to have said we can do that. Okay, we couldn't do it. We failed. Whomever assured the secretary of defense, the president, or anybody else that we could do what was not doable, fired. The one addressed by the Marine Lieutenant Colonel, who by the way was relieved, but not for mission failure, but for disagreeing in public. And that was expected and probably appropriate. You can't just do that. Is the closure by grammar based prematurely. Whomever at the highest levels said that's a good idea was clearly wrong. Clearly wrong and should be relieved. And sorry, you failed. I need somebody who's not going to fail. And how can I have trust and confidence in you for subsequent decisions in times that are likely to only get more difficult. So you're fired. Not with personal animosity. At whatever job above them, they have to have people they can count on and they can't tolerate failure. And the final clear error that has to be addressed, clear failure, is the security of U.S. furnished military equipment. Now this one blows my mind. Even more than the other two. You don't have to go far on the worldwide web to find how much stuff we've left at risk to Taliban capture transfer perhaps. He says whatever and use against our own forces or use against those Afghans at risk because they worked with us. It had to be somebody's job to make sure that that stuff was secured and if it security broke down was destroyed. I'm not aware of any reports that that has been done. Whose job was it to do that? Find out and fire them immediately. That's a long-term failure that's going to keep on giving. And it should be addressed. Now ideally those who are responsible to these failures would own up as Lieutenant Colonel Scheller suggested, raise their hand and say, you know what? I fail. I screwed up. And I'm going to step down because of it because this is too important. It's more important than I am. It's more important than my career is. We need that kind of selfless service right now. Confession is good for the soul. It's very good for the country. It would be extremely refreshing to have that at this time. And they need to provide an exemplar for people in uniform. Our folks act like their leaders act. And if people don't step up and own the blame, that will be repeated at other levels. And we can't afford that. This is really scary because of what I remember from the aftermath of the Vietnam war. Now Vietnam and Afghanistan are different in many, many ways. But the withdrawal from Vietnam and the Vietnam experience had a profound effect on the U.S. military. And I would say it was mostly good. It was mostly, well, we'll never do that again. And we did it again in terms of a long commitment without an end, without a conclusion, without a victory in Afghanistan. But that came after those who endured failure in Vietnam at the strategic level, not at the tactical level, used their lessons and applied them as the future leaders of the armed forces. They all had stepped aside by the time we got mired in Afghanistan by a march. Okay. So let's stop trying to explain, to excuse, to distract, find some accountability. Hold them, hold the responsible individuals accountable in a respectful and human way, but accountable. So we've got to focus on the big stuff. We have been focused on the small stuff for far too long. And this is big and we'll have future impact. So what would I do in addition to that? We're here at the what would fig do part of pigments on reality? First of all, I would make a concerted effort if I were a service chief or a senior leader in any of the branches of the armed forces to put emphasis, greater emphasis on mission accomplishment in performance reports and what we give ribbons for in everything. It's the mission first and the community service, the innovative ideas that help the military do better. They're all good. Not saying they're not good. I'm saying it's the mission first, foremost, always. And if we don't make that change, we won't learn our lessons here. And we'll continue to stumble forward. The world doesn't want us to stumble forward. Absent may be a couple players in the world. They want US leadership and security matters and our people do too. Now, if you're frustrated with my non political approach, make sure you're registered to vote. Share your opinion in writing online, whatever. That's not my purpose here. Doesn't mean it's not important, but that's not my purpose. And let me close out another personal story that that is how I think leaders should approach their responsibility and their accountability. During the air war over Serbia, Operation Allied Force, I had a disagreement with, I was a one star wing commander flying F-16 combat missions. And there was an Air Force two star who I didn't work directly for, but he was in the command and control mix. And he called me at Aviano air base where I stationed about something that occurred and something that we were doing that I thought was the right way to do things. And he directed me, which he couldn't do something. And I said, I'm not doing that. He got very blustered and said, probably there was probably profanity in that phone call and an attempt to bully me into doing it. I said, listen, sir, if you want the wing commander Daviano to make this change to our operations, get in your car, drive Daviano and get it and install a new wing commander. And not to give myself too much credit, but that's how I felt. The war effort was too important for me to think that my personal survival and advancement on a professional basis had anything of value over the mission. It was the mission. And if I was wrong, I should have been relieved. It worked out okay. I didn't make the change. And there you have it. But we need military leaders who think that way. I'm not perfect. I just grew up remembering the squadron command or the pack of commanders saying, I don't care if he's unlucky or I'm good, he's gone. That's the way we need to be. It's a tough business in a tough world. Our military leaders must be held accountable for mission failure. Those are my thoughts. Please share your thoughts with the think tech or on the YouTube or at info at phase minus one dot or info at phase minus one dot at four. And I hope you'll join me for the next pigments, the power of imagination. There's a date change because of the Labor Day holiday. It'll be on Wednesday the eighth at 9am. I've got a friend, friend of a friend actually who served 11 deployments, not long deployments, but as a special operations warrior in Iraq and Afghanistan, he's going to imagine his friends and what they're facing at this point. So please join me then. As always, I thank think tech Hawaii, a wonderful nonprofit organization that gives citizen journalists like me our voice. And hopefully it provides you with some thought for folk and content. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time on figments on reality. Aloha.