Podcast: an interview with General (Ret) Frank McKenzie, USMC, about high command and war in the 21st Century
It isn’t often when you get to hear directly from one of America’s foremost military leaders of the 21st century, but today you can listen to my exclusive interview with General (Ret) Frank McKenzie, USMC, the former commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). While we did talk about his amazing new book, The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century, this extended discussion addresses a wide range of topics, including conversation on issues beyond those covered in the book.
You can listen to (and watch) the interview here.
You’ll hear the views and perspectives from the commander who was at the center of several of the most well-known military operations of recent years: the raid that killed Islamic State leader Abu-Bakr-al-Baghdadi; the airstrike that took out Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassen Soleimani; and the evacuation of 124,000 people from Kabul that ended America’s more than two-decade involvement in Afghanistan.
Here are just a few highlights from this fascinating conversation:
Gen. McKenzie began by explaining how the geographic combatant commands like CENTCOM fit into the U.S. defense structure. About the role of the combatant commander he points out:
[A]s a combatant commander, you work for two people in the world. You work for the president of the United States, and you work for the secretary of defense. That’s a unique thing, because not only, then, are you in the position of executing orders– [coming from] a civilian authority– you also have the opportunity to give advice to that authority.
Now, you’re a junior partner in that dialogue. And you should be a junior partner in that dialogue. But you have the opportunity to give advice. Then you have the responsibility for execution. And that’s unique to the nation’s 11 combatant commanders.
With respect to CENTCOM, he sees Iran as the “principle threat to security in the region” and cautions that a conflict with Iran “would be a high-intensity war” and “not a counterinsurgency campaign.”
He recognizes China as the “long terms pacing threat” to the U.S. so attention needs to be paid to the Western Pacific. However, he says “that doesn’t meant you can afford to stop thinking about the Middle East.”
CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. Source: CENTCOM
Further, Gen. McKenzie observes: “China gets a lot of their hydrocarbons in the Middle East. If we were to have to fight China, might we not want to influence that, say, at the Strait of Hormuz rather in the Straits of Malacca or East? Chinese power will have significant problems projecting into the Middle East, where we will find it much easier to project our power.” He also contends:
We had been very maladroit in our messaging about the primacy of the shift to China. We had given messages of fleeing, leaving, [the Middle East] that tended to give courage and heart to our potential enemies and to make our friends in the region very worried about long-term US intentions. And we match that with drawdowns of forces that were not messaged correctly and were, perhaps, too precipitate for the actual situation that evolved with Iran.
Regarding the current U.S. presence int he Middle East, he notes that the U.S. has about 1,000 people in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq. He then says:
[T]that number possibly could get smaller in the future in Iraq. But here’s a key point. You can’t stay in Syria unless you’re in Iraq because that’s the platform that supports your Syria base. So if you make a decision to come out of Iraq, which I would not recommend, you’re going to come out of Syria, too. There will be inevitable consequences there, because if you come out, ISIS is going to resurge.
Baghdadi Operation
I asked him about the raid that killed Baghdadi, the ISIS leader. He described him this way:
BaghdadiSource: Wikipedia
He was not a fight-to-the-death guy; he was happy for other people to do it. He aspired to live on. He fled, went out to western Syria, took with him, we think– well, took with him a couple of his wives, a couple of male supporters, and then 14 children. And the children were important for two reasons– first, as sexual slaves; second, to complicate the targeting problem. He knew that if he was surrounded by children all the time, it would be hard for us to strike.
He also explained how steps were taken to ensure neither the Russians nor the Syrians could interfere with the mission. He said:
So no one affected us. The raid force gets on the ground. We call [Baghdadi] out, didn’t come out. A couple of guys come out fighting from the building inside. The women come out fighting. We’re able to get 12 children out, which I consider a victory. And Baghdadi crawled into a small hole in the ground, blew himself up with two of the children, which is tragic, but a lot better than if we had not been able to get the other 12 children out.
I pressed him about whether keeping the children with him was a deliberate strategy on Baghdadi’s part. Gen. McKenzie’s response was unequivocal:
Beyond a shadow of a doubt. There’s absolutely no doubt of that at all. He took them from– he took them out there with him. He knew the way we look at these targets. He wanted to make it hard. Plus, I go back to sexual subjugation. It was a key element of his lifestyle. So that was a factor. But that’s probably– that was just an opportunity for him. The reason he had them there was to make it very hard for us to get after him. There’s no doubt of that. I mean, the evidence is compelling.
Interestingly, he addressed this raid in the context of the ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict:
When I tell this story, people say, well, what about the Israelis and what they’re doing? And my answer is this.
I had unique circumstances for that raid. It was in the middle of the desert. There were no collateral– there were no secondary collateral issues there. If I had put that raid force into an urban area, there would have been significant US casualties and significant civilian casualties almost certainly, just as you saw when the Israelis executed their hostage raid of two months ago now. Back in June, I believe, that that raid went down.
So to say that, well, this is the way we do it all the time– and it is. When we do it, we want to take proportionality into account. I think it’s very hard to compare that directly to other things that are going on in Gaza at this time because of the complex nature of that battlefield, and in this particular circumstance, the very simple nature of the battlefield that we confronted.
Soleimani strike
Artist rendering of the Soleimani strike.Source: Shutterstock
Gen. McKenzie spoke in some detail about the operation that struck Soleimani. He said:
[T]here was no doubt in my mind in December 2019, January 2020, he was going there to be a big part of killing Americans and others. And nothing since then to now has caused me to change that opinion.
I asked Gen. McKenzie about the contention some people propound that killing a leader like Soleimani has little impact. He said “I think that’s nonsense. In this particular case, it’s demonstrable nonsense.”
He then referenced a New York Times article discussing a leaked recording of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wherein Zarif said that “by assassinating [Soleimani] in Iraq, the United States delivered a major blow to Iran, more damaging than if it had wiped out an entire city in an attack.”
Gen. McKenzie also pointed out that Soleimani’s replacement is “a guy named Esmail Qaani, who is demonstrably less effective in the job.” Qaani’s Arabic “is not good” and he “has not been effective at bringing it together.”
Afghanistan withdrawal
We discussed the Afghanistan withdrawal in some detail, so you’ll get the inside perspective on this historic operation. Gen. McKenzie and other military leaders had recommended leaving a force of about 2,500 troops in order to prevent the collapse of the Afghan government, but the decision was made to limit the remaining force to around 700 troops. With that small a force–barely enough to secure the embassy–it was inevitable that Bagram, the major U.S. military airbase in the country that would have had a great utility in getting people out of the country, would have to be abandoned. He added:
“When you go to zero, you got nobody to put at Bagram. So this was a decision that was explicitly addressed. By zero, I mean actually 700 or so US forces at the embassy and at Kabul Airport. You cannot hold Bagram under that plan. That was a presidential decision.
He added:
Here’s a key point that I think is lost on many people. When we made the decision to leave and bring all our combat power out, we did not make a decision to bring out our embassy, at that time, 4,000 people. We did not make a decision to bring out the tens of thousands of US citizens and their families that were still in Afghanistan. And we did not make a decision to bring out what we would call the at-risk Afghans, those Afghans who fought alongside us, were our interpreters, our assistance in every way during the decades-long war, multi-decade war that continued.
So we did not do that. And that was a fatal flaw in the decision that led directly to the events of August 2021. Had we made a decision in April to, we’re going to go to zero, and that zero is going to include our embassy, it’s going to include all our people, it’s going to include those Afghans that want to get out, things would have been very different in August.
He reiterated:
The decision to execute the withdrawal of the US embassy and the withdrawal of our citizens and the withdrawal of at-risk Afghans was made on the 14th of August. So many people aren’t aware of just how late we waited to make that decision….But that is a State Department decision. That is not a Department of Defense decision. And so the ambassador and the secretary of state get the final vote on that.
Gen. McKenzie later said:
An Afghan man hands his child to a British paratrooper assigned to 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment, while a member of 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division conducts security at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 26, 2021. Source: DoD
The fact of the matter is, we could have stayed another 60 days and kept bringing people out had we done that, because everybody wanted to leave. We got out 124,000 people, we and our allies.
If you put the Venn diagram up of who got out, who we wanted to get out, they don’t overlap completely. They overlap partially. But a lot of people came out that we didn’t need to bring out. And a lot of people didn’t get out that I bitterly regret we didn’t get out. Of course, I also, most of all, regret the loss of US life that occurred there, 13 brave souls who lost their lives at Abbey Gate. They joined the over 2,400 other US service members who lost their lives in this long campaign. I think about it every day.
Abbey Gate
I asked him whether, with the benefit of hindsight, there was anything he would do differently in light of the tragedy at Abbey Gate. He said:
I think about it a lot, too. And no, I don’t know that there’s anything we could have done differently, not if you’re going to continue to process people in to let them fly out. Now, you can shut everything down. Although, let’s remember, the attacker actually wasn’t inside the compound. He was outside the compound. I don’t know that we could have done anything to prevent that from happening, given the mission that we were undertaking.
What is interesting, though, and I think doesn’t get enough attention is there was only one of those attacks. We were able to prevent a number of other attacks from occurring. And while– again, I bitterly regret this attack– there could have been more. And the actions of forces on the ground, the ability of our teams to actually respond to those prevented those from happening.
29 August tragedy
Concerning the 29 August drone strike that mistakenly killed ten Afghan civilians, Gen, McKenzie insisted:
So it’s important to understand that the 29 August strike, which is a tragedy, bore no relation as a response to Abbey Gate. It had no relation. People say, well, that was our response. It was not. It was a self-defense strike. We, through an error, made the mistaken identification of the driver of this vehicle as someone who was probably going to drive that vehicle up against the base, up against our installation, and attack it. There were flaws in the analysis that underwent that.
However, this was not a pre-planned attack like the Soleimani attack. This was a self-defense attack. And under conditions of self-defense, you push that authority pretty low for tactical commanders to take actions they think are necessary. But I can tell you with just 100% certainty that there was no– this wasn’t an attempt to get back at anybody. The thinking never even entered anybody’s mind. This was an imminent– what we identified as an imminent threat.
I asked him about the decision not to take disciplinary action against those involved in the errant strike. (Then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said “What we saw here was a breakdown in process, and execution in procedural events, not the result of negligence, not the result of misconduct, not the result of poor leadership.’) Gen. McKenzie observed:
I think if you begin to criminalize decisions that commanders make in the heat of battle to defend themselves, more Americans will certainly die because there are going to be people that are going to be more hesitant to make those decisions. I am responsible for that strike. I’m the senior military officer. I accept responsibility for it. It concerns me to a great deal. I think about it a lot.
Again, we went back. We looked at it. We investigated it very, very thoroughly, came up with measures that we think would make it less likely in the future. But the fact of the matter of this is if you’re going to fight, innocent people are, unfortunately, certainly going to die. And you can’t get away from that fact in warfare, particularly if your opponent is someone who chooses to hide in the population and use them as an effective cloaking technique for their plans, preparations to attack you.
JAGs
Of course, I also asked him about the military lawyers (judge advocates or JAGs):
First of all, I found that military lawyers are broad, deep, well-versed people who understand the law of war and other issues as well. And I want their counsel. I want to get as much information as I can. And I found my JAGs, they could reach out to the JAGNET, which you’re probably very familiar with. They could tap a deep reservoir of military advice and bring it to me. And I wanted that.
And also, my guidance to them was– I’d tell every one as they came in, just one on one, I said, keep me legal. I’m depending on you to do that. But in order to do that, you can’t suddenly become a frothing monster when they give you advice you don’t want to hear. You’ve got to listen to it. And I think I did just about in every case. I’ve been well served from back when I was a colonel and a new commander with a single JAG. I had a wonderful judge advocate general then. And I’ve had them very good ever since.
I had the opportunity, actually, when I was the director of the Joint Staff, to chair the board that picked the chairman’s lawyer. And that was a great opportunity, to just sit in a board and look at the files and records of some just brilliant lawyers from across all the services. And that was a wonderful opportunity for me when I did that, just to see the breadth and depth of knowledge.
But I’m a fan. And again– but here’s the thing. They’ve got to know that you mean it when you say, come to me. And my lawyer is one of the guys I’d say, you can walk in on me at any time. If you need to see me, I trust your judgment. I’ll stop what I’m doing to talk to you. But you’ve got to really do it. I’m a fan. So that’s about all I can say about it.
Believe me, this is just a very small sampling of the topics we covered. You’ll want to hear Gen. McKenzie’s views on civil-military relations, leadership, and much, much more and it is all found here.
I’m also delighted to tell you that Gen. McKenzie has agreed to deliver the leadership speech at our 30th Annual National Security Law conference!
Remember what we like to say on Lawfire®: gather the facts, examine the law, evaluate the arguments – and then decide for yourself!
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