Pete Hegseth

And that is exactly what played out over 10 years.

And that's exactly what our Pentagon commanders knew.

But they were always in a race to green.

You know what the race to green is?

Race to green is you've got red, amber, green, and you've got to show that your Afghan National Army unit is at green status, ready to go, whether they're at green status, ready to go or not.

And so we had a shell of an army incapable of actually defending the country, and Milley and all these folks should have known, McKenzie, all of them, and they probably did at some level, but they knew they had to say it's A-OK.

And so you get that collapse.

I mean...

You saw how it affected vets when what happened in Afghanistan happened.

It actually affected me a lot more when the rise of ISIS happened in Iraq, when that black flag flew over Fallujah and Samarra and Tikrit and all these other towns that we'd fought so hard for.

And you realize, what the hell?

All those guys, all this time, all that effort, and this is, what we got was worse?

And then in retrospect, you're like, you know, Saddam Hussein, what a good guy.

But it turns out those dictators actually keep the lid on things fairly well over there.

And they really don't like Islamists because they try to kill them.

Maybe that would have been a better idea than overturning the whole apricot and welcoming Iran into Iraq.

And I heard people making those arguments, some of which I didn't like.

People I didn't like.

And I just had to dismiss it at the time because I was a believer in the mission that was in front of us at the time.

But in retrospect, I mean, we have burned two decades of money, our best and brightest, our goodwill, military capabilities, strategic drift in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now...