The Briefing Room
General Category => Military/Defense News => Topic started by: famousdayandyear on January 07, 2013, 09:55:37 pm
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Gen. Stanley McChrystal: I Never Thought I’d Be Accused of ‘Disloyalty or Disrespect’
By Melanie Hunter
January 7, 2013
(CNSNews.com) – Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was forced to resign as U.S. commander in Afghanistan in 2010 after his top aides made anonymous comments to Rolling Stones magazine disparaging Obama administration officials, told CBS News on Sunday that he never thought he would ever be “accused of anything approaching disloyalty or disrespect.”
"My whole life, I'd expected that I could get killed in war," McChrystal said. "In my wildest dreams I never once thought I could be accused of anything approaching disloyalty or disrespect."
McChrystal was called to Washington to meet with Obama face-to-face. McChrystal told the president that he would support his “any decision he made – if he wanted me to go back or if he wanted to accept my resignation, which I carried with me.” The president accepted McChrystal’s resignation.
“I’d been a soldier, an officer, for more than 34 years. And now at 55, in an instant, all of that has changed. I’m not a soldier. And everything that I think I am and everything that I had tried to be is at least in question,” McChrystal said.
McChrystal wrote about the ordeal in his book, “My Share of the Task,” which comes out Monday, saying he takes responsibility for the Rolling Stone article.
"Regardless of how I judged the story for fairness or accuracy, responsibility was mine," he wrote.
McChrystal was replaced by Gen. David Petraeus, who was later tapped to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, only to resign last year after news surfaced of his extramarital affair.
(McChrystal Interview @ Link)
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/gen-stanley-mcchrystal-i-never-thought-i-d-be-accused-disloyalty-or-disrespect-0 (http://cnsnews.com/news/article/gen-stanley-mcchrystal-i-never-thought-i-d-be-accused-disloyalty-or-disrespect-0)
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They destroyed this man...so sad....
btw he is on Hannity's radio show right now
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They destroyed this man...so sad....
btw he is on Hannity's radio show right now
I saw an ad on Fox he is going to be on Hannity tonight
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McChrystal tied our troops hands with restrictive ROE's. I have no pity for him.
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McChrystal tied our troops hands with restrictive ROE's. I have no pity for him.
Thought Petraeus was the architect of COIN (and attending terrible ROEs). For sure, Petraeus wrote the Field Manual--and was not McChrystal under his command at the time?
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Thought Petraeus was the architect of COIN (and attending terrible ROEs). For sure, Petraeus wrote the Field Manual--and was not McChrystal under his command at the time?
In his first tactical directive since assuming command of international forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus doubled down on the orders imposed by his predecessor that put a premium on protecting civilians first to win their support. For months those rules of engagement, formulated by General Stanley McChrystal, have led to rank-and-file grumblings by U.S. soldiers. The servicemen say that the strict rules put them in greater danger, even as they aim to avoid civilian casualties. The grumbling is unlikely to diminish with the new directives that Petraeus issued on Wednesday.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2008863,00.html (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2008863,00.html)
Petraeus wasn't any better, IMO. Too much effort went in to pleasing the Afghans and our troops suffered for it.
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Petraeus wasn't any better, IMO. Too much effort went in to pleasing the Afghans and our troops suffered for it.
That is how I see it. Seems we have not had the belly to fight a war to win since WWII
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That is how I see it. Seems we have not had the belly to fight a war to win since WWII
We were winning in A-stan back in 2003-2004. I was working on Bagram, and making weekly trips to Kabul. We rarely had an escort, and the only problem we had was a mechanical breakdown. It was actually safe. I wouldn't try that today.
The SOF forces were dealing with the locals and the regular military hadn't contaminated the area yet.
As soon as the regular Army stepped in to the picture, the Afghans started becoming hostile. SOF would walk in with a bunch of big weapons and actually talk with and work with the locals. Big Army would waltz in with big armor, run over livestock, damage homes, point weapons at civilians, and expect everything to be OK. To the local Afghans, this brought back memories of the Russian occupation.
In another instance, a local Afghan was collecting firewood in an uncleared area, and stepped on a mine. His family loaded him into the community wheelbarrow and wheeled him out to the main road in an effort to get one of the many military vehicles to stop and transport the guy to the hospital on Bagram Air Base.
No military vehicle would stop, even on the base. Not one bothered to radio in for Medevac to pick the guy up. They just didn't care. The family wheeled this guy over 3 kilometers to Bagram Air Base, and I got the call from co-workers to pick the guy up and transport him to the military hospital. He lost his leg above the knee, but it could have been worse.
Little things like humanitarian action would have reaped big rewards. Instead, the military p*ssed it away.
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OTOH, look at some of the puppets that DoS has put in as head of state: Diem in S. Vietnam, Karzai, they even supported Maliki in Iraq and that's falling apart. There is another big problem in DoS.
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Little things like humanitarian action would have reaped big rewards. Instead, the military p*ssed it away
I respect all you have done. So, let us know if you feel that the "hearts and minds" strategy of COIN is effective? Thanks. Based on your comments, I concluded we are not sympathetic enough to the Afghan people from your personal experience.
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I respect all you have done. So, let us know if you feel that the "hearts and minds" strategy of COIN is effective? Thanks. Based on your comments, I concluded we are not sympathetic enough to the Afghan people from your personal experience.
I feel that it was effective. We initially had a small footprint and were helping them. Quite a few Afghani's in the area around Bagram and Kabul did not like the Taliban and were genuinely happy that we pushed them out. Then, "Big Army" arrived, the footprint increased exponentially, and many of the older Afghani's remembered the Russian occupation. In such a situation, we really need to tread lightly, but not to the point of endangering our own.
COIN needs to be locally administered to be effective. That is difficult, especially when Big Army tries to do everything the same way. The Big Army actually has a way of making a soup sandwich out of the simplest things. This is where SOF comes in. They are the guys who are trained in the local cultures and can interface with the locals. Trying to have main force units do COIN is just like pulling the pin on a grenade. Yeah, as force-on-force units go, ours are the best, but they haven't been trained to do COIN.
"Not sympathetic enough"? That would depend on the issue at hand. As I mentioned upthread, if a military vehicle would have stopped to render first aid or transported the old guy to the hospital, it would have done wonders for rapport building. As it was, the locals' opinion was that the military was there to joy ride, take pictures, and give a lot of money to the warlords.
Please note that the early days were relatively safe for us, and since the incident occurred very close to Bagram Air Base, it wouldn't have been a security issue. While I was there, we had only 1 rocket attack, and I don't know how it happened, but the rocket flew over the base, from one end to another, and completely missed the base.