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Washington, D.C. – Today, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul questioned witnesses Colonel (Ret.) Seth Krummrich and Command Sergeant Major Jacob Smith at the Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability hearing on the administration’s failure to plan for the unconditional U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

WATCH HERE.

– Questions and Answers as delivered – 

CHAIRMAN McCAUL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me first again, acknowledge the gold star families here. And I want to thank the three witnesses for your moral courage and clarity in your testimony here today.

You know, there’s an old adage, “if you fail to plan you’re planning to fail,” -Benjamin Franklin. [He was] the first chairman of this committee, Continental Congress, he was right. There was no plan. And if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. We have uncovered that there was a request that came from the State Department, to the Defense Department for an evacuation plan.

However, that came on August 17, two days after the fall of Afghanistan, the fall of Kabul. Four days after our embassy was evacuated. And yet, the President says we were planned for all contingencies. I think Colonel Krummrich, you eloquently talked about how he recklessly disregarded his own National Security Council, his own generals, and the intelligence community, that we were being briefed at the same time.

While we sell this rosy narrative by State, and yet this dire warning by the rest, the DoD, and the intelligence community. And the result was this complete debacle and failure. So, Colonel Krummrich, my first question is to you. Was there a plan? Did you ever see an evacuation plan?

COLONEL KRUMMRICH:  Thank you for the question. Chairman, the way the process works for planning is, we’ll get an initial guidance that we need to come up with courses of action. So CENTCOM built a number of courses of action that were very different. They were very unique and each, you know, characteristics of each one, it could be timeline, it could be conditions, troop levels, and then the senior military… commanders then will pick one and give them a recommendation and explain why that is. Now, feeding into this is also the intelligence community. So this is part operations, part intelligence, and they will lay out – hey, this is the plan we think we should take.

And in this case, General Milley, General Miller, General McKenzie, all recommended we should not do the withdrawal until conditions are met because violence had risen in Afghanistan. And their concern was the timing was wrong, this isn’t going to give our allies a chance to be able to react accordingly to the Taliban offensive.

CHAIRMAN McCAUL: So in the two minutes, I just want to drill this down, because-

COLONEL KRUMMRICH: Sure.

CHAIRMAN McCAUL: Yeah, there was a recommendation. And you talked about the failure to meet the Doha Agreement, but the President disregarded that, ignored that. They disregard the advice of his DoD, and IC, and National Security Council. Was there ever an evacuation plan? Did you see – I know there’s discussions. Did you ever see an evacuation plan?

COLONEL KRUMMRICH:  I did not. The discussions were going on at this high level. The problem was those that would need to actually plan and rehearse it, were extremely busy. I think Sergeant Major captured it eloquently of how busy, and how few service members we had on the ground. They were not in a position to be able to plan and rehearse-

CHAIRMAN McCAUL: Now, we’ve issued several subpoenas- I have not seen an evacuation plan. If they had it, I think they would have produced it to this committee. And this led to the chaos. Who was in charge? You know, we heard Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews testify that he had the suicide bomber in his sights.

But they didn’t know what the rules of engagement were for God’s sakes. I mean, there’s no plan. The rules of engagement are confusing at best. They don’t know what they are. Did you know what the rules of engagement were?

COLONEL KRUMMRICH: I was not in the ground, so I can’t speak to the specific rules of engagement. I know the military had a clear leadership position of who was in charge on the ground. What was lacking from my perspective, was a Department of State leadership on the ground.

CHAIRMAN McCAUL: When I asked who was in charge, you know, if you have an evacuation plan, State takes over the evacuation. Correct? Prior to that the DoD is in charge, but nobody knows who’s really in charge because there’s no plan in place. And guess what, the Taliban takes over.

My last question. The rules of engagement are, you know, confusing, at best. You had mentioned a defensive strike would be a rule of engagement. If you saw a description of the suicide bomber, along with your sniper team who confirmed this is the suicide bomber, would the rules of engagement provide that you could take out the threat as a defensive strike?

COLONEL KRUMMRICH: If I saw the suicide bomber, and I saw the threat, I would absolutely kill that suicide bomber.

CHAIRMAN McCAUL: And yet, when he contacted his commanding officer who we’re going to interview, he says, I don’t have that authority. And they asked, who does have that authority? He goes, I don’t know. I’ll have to get back to you. And in the interim time, guess what? The bomb goes off killing 13 servicemen and women, 160 Afghans, injuring 45 additional US servicemen and women.

Massive, because one man says you don’t have permission to engage. We’re going to follow up on that chain. But I think it all results – because there’s confusion on the ground. Nobody knows what the plan is and nobody knows who is in charge. 

COLONEL KOLENDA: Sir, if I could just build on that. I think the point that you’re making that there’s nobody in charge, is exactly right. There’s nobody functionally in charge of our wars on the ground in theater. So, what happens – if I could just draw a quick, quick picture. Is we deploy to combat zones in bureaucratic silos.

So you’ve got the you’ve got the president, and then National Security Council beneath them, of course. And then you’ve got these different bureaucratic silos. So it could be DoD, State, AID, the IC with their different silos, and there’s nobody in charge of this group on the ground. And had there been somebody in charge of this group on the ground, then what you would have seen is a plan that not only synchronize the military withdrawal, but also the evacuation.

So, until we get this problem fixed, we actually have somebody in charge on the ground of our wars, we’re going to continue to have high risk of these kinds of disasters.

CHAIRMAN McCAUL: I agree. And by law, they’re required to come up with a plan and they did not and that’s the point the Chairman’s made over and over. And I thank you for indulging me.

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