The D Brief: Scenes from an exit; Marines doubt amphibious edge; Work-from-home extended; Japanese WWII bomb found in Missouri; And a bit more...
By Bradley Peniston
Deputy Editor
May 4, 2021
Scenes from the Afghanistan pullout. At Kandahar Airfield, once the sprawling, bustling hub of the war effort in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. military is dismantling, destroying, or hauling off materiel that took two decades to build up. “The scenes over the weekend were almost as if a multitrillion-dollar effort had morphed into a garage sale,” reported the New York Times’ Thomas Gibbons-Neff.
“The American withdrawal, almost quiet, and with a veneer of orderliness, belies the desperate circumstances just beyond the base’s wall. On one end of Kandahar Airfield that day, Maj. Mohammed Bashir Zahid, an officer in charge of a small Afghan air command center, sat in his office, a phone to each ear and a third in his hands as he typed messages on WhatsApp, trying to get air support for Afghan security forces on the ground and in nearby outposts threatened by Taliban fighters,” Gibbons-Neff wrote.
Over the weekend, small “harrassing” attacks by the Taliban. “Kandahar Airfield received ineffective indirect fire this afternoon; no injury to personnel or damage to equipment,” U.S. Forces Afghanistan spokesperson Col. Sonny Leggett tweeted.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/05/the-d-brief-may-04-2021/173791/
