Will Milley Lose His Job Over the Afghanistan Cluster?

GEN. MARK MILLEY: The intelligence clearly indicated multiple scenarios were possible! One of those was an outer Taliban takeover following a rapid collapse of the Afghan security forces in the government. Another was a civil war. And a third was a negotiated settlement. However, the time frame of a rapid collapse, that was widely estimated. It ranged from weeks to months and even years following our departure. There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. That was yesterday chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley, and I understand that there’s really no good answer you’re going to get from people at this level of the Pentagon and the Biden administration at this point because here’s what he’s saying:

“Nobody knew this was going to be happen.” Essentially, “We didn’t lie to you when a month ago the president himself was saying that this is a 300,000-person-plus strong army and that they’re gonna fight and we think this is all gonna go smoothly.” They weren’t lying. They were just catastrophically wrong. But, Clay, what I find so interesting here is, isn’t being catastrophically wrong when you’re the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff its own problem?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Isn’t a resignation something you should probably consider when you are this stunningly incorrect about a matter of critical U.S. national security?

CLAY: When I see the quotes, “There was nothing I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.” Well, that doesn’t make me feel better as an American. We were so bad at forecasting… He laid out all. It’s not like they had one forecast. He said, “We had three different ideas of what we thought might happen.” We were so catastrophically wrong that none of us were even close.” It’s not something where it’s, “Oh, they were so bad, they didn’t see it coming.”

BUCK: This isn’t a small thing, by the way. It isn’t like they blew up one plane and it’s a terrorist cell.

CLAY: I’m saying if your kid came home… This is dad life, right? If my son comes home and says, “I had a spelling bee.” “Okay. How’d it go?” He says, “Well, I thought I had studied enough I was getting an A. I thought, worst-case scenario, I was gonna get a B, and I thought if everything we want completely wrong, I’d get a C.” I said, “Okay, what happened?”

“Well, I missed every single word on the spelling bee test,” that’s a catastrophic failure. That’s like you’re not just gonna excuse it. People have to lose their jobs over this, really. The buck should stop at Joe Biden, right? But he’s not gonna resign. Do we really want him to resign? Kamala may be worse. Who knows? But the top echelon of the military, somebody has to fall on the sword here.

BUCK: Nooo. No, no. No one except for Cuomo for politically incorrect and creepy comments to women resigns. He’s the only person.

CLAY: Shouldn’t Biden be demanding somebody’s head right now? I mean, if he were —

BUCK: No, because then he’d have to admit it’s a catastrophe. He’s trying to tell everybody that it’s not, because it’s so bad, if people actually figure out how bad it is, it actually blows back to the commander-in-chief. He’s gotta wait.

CLAY: I don’t see any way possible where there aren’t people getting fired over this. Now, the answer may well be it’s such a cluster right now that firing somebody at the top is only going to make things worse right now and we may be a couple of weeks ahead of somebody falling on the sword, so to speak, and taking responsibility here. But I don’t understand how it’s possible to be this incompetent and for you not to have to remove some of the leadership that allows this incompetence to flourish.

BUCK: Think about what the defense has turned into here for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense. It’s basically, “We are so incompetent and missed this by such a mile that you can’t even hold us accountable because, man! We had no idea what the hell was going on in Afghanistan.” That’s basically what they’re telling you.