800 people evacuated on one C-17 flight

Not to make this political, but am I the only one drawing a parallel to this and the scenes of "how many people can you fit in a Huey and let it lift off" about 50 years ago? In terms of aviation response to evacuation of a collapse of government.
 
Albany Tom said:
Not to make this political, but am I the only one drawing a parallel to this and the scenes of "how many people can you fit in a Huey and let it lift off" about 50 years ago? In terms of aviation response to evacuation of a collapse of government.
Click to expand...

Well since I’ve seen the CH-46 (Saigon) / CH-47 (Kabul) meme on FB like a hundred times already, I’d say no.
 
Albany Tom said:
The things I miss by not being on social media...
Click to expand...
Wasn‘t just social media. The Sunday talk shows also referred to the Viet Nam exit. But somehow, I don’t think Kabul/Afganistan will become a tourist destination in 30-40 years the way Viet Nam has.
 
Last edited:
While the end result of the pull out was predicable, I actually thought there’d be way more resistance. I always said, the only thing keeping Afghanistan from tumbling into chaos would be the Afghan Commandos standing in Tali way. ANA and ANP are absolutely useless but I at least thought they’d be heavy fighting with the Commandos. Their SEAL / SF advisors right now have got to be shrugging their shoulders thinking, well, what a waste of time that was. But, they probably knew that anyway.
 
Velocity173 said:
While the end result of the pull out was predicable, I actually thought there’d be way more resistance. I always said, the only thing keeping Afghanistan from tumbling into chaos would be the Afghan Comnandos standing in Tali way. ANA and ANP are absolutely useless but I at least thought they’d be heavy fighting with the Comnandos. Their SEAL / SF advisors right now have got to be shrugging their shoulders thinking, well, what a waste of time that was. But, they probably knew that anyway.
Click to expand...


You can train skills, but not willingness.
 
Last edited:
The past couple of days have left me feeling sick to my stomach. I cannot imagine the terror and desperation someone must feel that would drive them to cling to the landing gear of a C-17 as it takes off. From videos I’ve seen a handful stayed on through takeoff only to fall to their death when the gear was retracted. I also can’t imagine being the pilot and having to push the throttles up knowing there were likely people going to be killed by your action trying to save those you’d managed to cram on. I sincerely hope they know they did their best in an impossible situation and commend them for saving the ones they were able to.

I’m praying for our aircrew conducting the evacuation and the troops securing the airfield. And hopefully those that helped our cause in Afghanistan and their families are able to find their way safely out of the country.
 
Confirmed 640 people

RyanAir is taking notes :)IMG_1314.JPG
 
Velocity173 said:
While the end result of the pull out was predicable, I actually thought there’d be way more resistance. I always said, the only thing keeping Afghanistan from tumbling into chaos would be the Afghan Commandos standing in Tali way. ANA and ANP are absolutely useless but I at least thought they’d be heavy fighting with the Commandos. Their SEAL / SF advisors right now have got to be shrugging their shoulders thinking, well, what a waste of time that was. But, they probably knew that anyway.
Click to expand...

Pretty much that.
 
Velocity173 said:
While the end result of the pull out was predicable, I actually thought there’d be way more resistance.
Click to expand...

This is the part I don't understand. 300K trained soldiers, some highly trained, and they apparently just...disappeared into the mist.
 
Plus all the equipment left behind. I was surprised the US didn't put a missile into the empty embassy.
 
PeterNSteinmetz said:
I think there is a lot we don’t understand about Afghanistan and how it works over there makes little sense to us.
Click to expand...

It’s tribal, just like Yemen (where I have spent some time). There is little sense of an Afghan nation the way there is of Japan or Spain. It makes complete sense to me that trying to build an “Afghan” army is not going to work. If we get involved in Yemen (now that our guys need something to do) it will be the same.
 
kyleb said:
This is the part I don't understand. 300K trained soldiers, some highly trained, and they apparently just...disappeared into the mist.
Click to expand...
Some reports say that when the previous administration opened negotiations with the Taliban and announced troop withdrawals, local Afghan leaders saw the writing on the wall opened their OWN negotiations with the Taliban. To save their own necks and fortunes.

Does explain what was a practically bloodless coup.

Ron Wanttaja
 
We were busy during the Katrina evacuation. We had a bunch of KC-135s on the ramp bringing in water and supplies to NAS New Orleans. We were told we were going to take 500 people from there to Houston. I had to look it up in our manuals. 150 was the emergency limit to floor-load passengers in an evacuation. You'd strap them down with cargo straps.

Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and we didn't have to do that. But we were ready.
 
Last edited:
PeterNSteinmetz said:
I think there is a lot we don’t understand about Afghanistan and how it works over there makes little sense to us.
Click to expand...

Well that is the problem. "We" understood a lot about Afghanistan, and a large part of that was assessing the Soviet Union's failure. We could control them, we could curb the Taliban (something that the Soviets could not, partially because we supplied the Taliban during the Soviet occupation), but we refused to accept the reality that if we wanted to maintain the status quo we had in the 2010's, we had to remain for eternity.

Vietnam is not even a close parallel. The Vietnamese, even the North Vietnamese, believed in fundamentally the same way of life as we do. They, the Afghanis, operate on a different level, and one we cannot reconcile with the West.

Ultimately, it will be up to them. Period. They will have to figure out how to get out from under the stranglehold of AC and the Taliban, and will have to have the will and drive to do it on their own. They haven't shown that so far.
 
Sac Arrow said:
…we could curb the Taliban (something that the Soviets could not, partially because we supplied the Taliban during the Soviet occupation)…
Click to expand...

Though some warlords fought the Soviets aligned as mujahideen and then fought the US aligned with the Taliban, the Taliban did not exist prior to 1994 and did not come in to power until during the Afghan Civil War until 1996.

Needless to say, it’s complicated over there.
 
The military is designed to hurt people, not build democratic institutions. It was a fools errand from the get-go. Four administrations and our own institutional hubris share the blame. We had to get out. We didn't have to make a hash out of getting out. Hopefully, that can still be turned around and we can get everyone out that needs to get out.
 
TCABM said:
Though some warlords fought the Soviets aligned as mujahideen and then fought the US aligned with the Taliban, the Taliban did not exist prior to 1994 and did not come in to power until during the Afghan Civil War until 1996.

Needless to say, it’s complicated over there.
Click to expand...

Understatement of the year. But their predecessors were basically what we term them today.
 
kyleb said:
This is the part I don't understand. 300K trained soldiers, some highly trained, and they apparently just...disappeared into the mist.
Click to expand...

Well, like @Half Fast stated above, doesn’t matter if they have the tools to get the job done. Their unwillingness to defend their own country is telling.

I’d also dispute them being “trained.” When I was there, Stars and Stripes used to publish articles on the challenges dealing with the Afghan National Army. Due to the low literacy rate, plenty of ANA soldiers couldn’t understand the basics of soldiering. Imagine taking a bunch of first graders in America and trying to teach them to soldier. That’s the reality we had there. Combine that with a lack of desire and you get a completely dysfunctional army. Many cases of desertion. Cases of theft. Cases of running away from a fire fight. I was part of a major op where the convoy below us stopped during the middle of a fire fight to have tea! You also couldn’t trust them because of the many cases of insider “green on blue” killings. I had a LTC come up to me one day almost in tears pretty much begging for a ride back to his FOB. Four of his soldiers were just murdered by an Afghan interpreter the day prior. You can’t trust those people.

Like I said, the only group that actually had any desire or fighting spirit were their Commandos. I flew a bunch of them one day from their special ops base in Kabul to Bagram for their graduation. One of the SEAL advisor / trainers was in the back of the aircraft and was telling me how proud he was of these guys. Over the years I’ve kept an eye on their progress against the Taliban and thought wow, they’re actually kicking butt over there. I began to think these might be the saviors of Afghanistan and its people might well end up owing their lives to these “few.” I was wrong.
 
Last edited:
Velocity173 said:
Well, like @Half Fast stated above, doesn’t matter if they have the tools to get the job done. Their unwillingness to defend their own country is telling.

No doubt.

I’d also dispute them being “trained.” When I was there, Stars and Stripes used to publish articles on the challenges dealing with the Afghan National Army. Due to the low literacy rate, plenty of ANA soldiers couldn’t understand the basics of soldiering. Imagine taking a bunch of first graders in America and trying to teach them to soldier. That’s the reality we had there.
Click to expand...

After years of training, you'd think the illiterate good guys would be better trained/more capable than the illiterate bad guys, who, (presumably) had far less training.

But it goes back to the first point, which is around motivation.
 
Velocity173 said:
Well, like @Half Fast stated above, doesn’t matter if they have the tools to get the job done. Their unwillingness to defend their own country is telling. I’d also dispute them being “trained.” When I was there, Stars and Stripes used to publish articles on the challenges dealing with the Afghan National Army. .
Click to expand...

You hit the nail on the head. I remember working with them back around 2004/2005 or so and chatting with their SF handlers. They (SF) weren't impressed and neither were we when trying to train them to fast-rope out of our Chinooks. The SF guys would tell us they'd not show up for a couple weeks, and equipment was always going missing. The constant fear of me or my guys getting hit by a negligent discharge was not unfounded.

My last deployment in 2012, we were doing some training with some other group of Afghan SOF. This was a week after a blue on green incident, and my pilot pulled me aside after the crew brief and says "Sarge, when they board this aircraft, you make sure you and your crew chiefs have one in the chamber, and if you see a muzzle pointed the wrong way, you deal with it."

Watching all of this makes me sad.
 
Kristin said:
The military is designed to hurt people, not build democratic institutions. It was a fools errand from the get-go. Four administrations and our own institutional hubris share the blame. We had to get out. We didn't have to make a hash out of getting out. Hopefully, that can still be turned around and we can get everyone out that needs to get out.
Click to expand...

This. The only rational purpose of the invasion in the first place was to establish a base to go after what's his name, and when that mission was completed the only reasonable thing to do was exit. We're nowhere near violent or ruthless enough to fix that country, haven't been since probably the 1860's...and that's probably a good thing. "Nation building" as an outsider is as much an idiotic concept as going to Yellowstone and going outside to pet the animals.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top