The Patriot Post® · We Gave Up the Ship

As you climb the wide, well-worn steps to the U.S. Naval Academy’s magnificent Memorial Hall, the first thing you see is Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s famous battle flag emblazoned with the words “Don’t give up the ship.” Under that flag, Perry led a fleet of U.S. Navy warships to victory over a powerful British naval squadron in Lake Erie, a battle that turned the tide in the War of 1812.

It’s more than a flag. That simple mandate — Don’t give up the ship! — was the final command of Captain James Lawrence, mortally wounded in an earlier battle. It has become a revered piece of U.S. Navy tradition and a core war-fighting principle for all U.S. military services. We don’t give up.

But maybe now we do. On July 1, following orders from above, U.S. forces abandoned the Bagram Airbase near Kabul, even though it was still needed to support ongoing American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Bagram was once our largest military base in Afghanistan — a large and secure facility with two high-capacity runways, vast stores of military equipment, a control tower, hangars, vehicles, communications systems, and even an adjacent prison for dangerous terrorists.

We walked away from Bagram in the middle of the night, leaving behind a treasure trove of supplies, weapons, and irreplaceable in-theater tactical capability. Just six weeks later, the imprisoned terrorists are back on the street, and Taliban fighters are driving about in American Humvees and brandishing American weapons.

Shortly after the Taliban takeover of Kabul, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin were asked why we’d abandoned Bagram. General Milley’s answer was simple and remarkably candid: We didn’t have enough troops on the ground to protect both Bagram and the U.S. embassy, so we had to give up one of them.

The explanation is logical enough, but at the same time deeply troubling. It purports to justify acquiescence by the world’s most powerful nation to the dictates of a third-world terrorist organization.

I know of no other episode in U.S. military history in which our armed forces ceded to an enemy, without so much as a skirmish, the ownership of a key tactical facility. On the other hand, there are many legendary examples of fierce, resolute American forces’ resistance to overwhelming odds — the U.S. Army holding Bastogne in WWII, and the U.S. Marines at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea and Khe San in Vietnam, to mention just a few.

To be clear, the Afghanistan situation was very different. The president had already committed to withdrawing all forces from Afghanistan — in effect, he’d already given up the ship — so we should not have expected commanders on the ground to sacrifice American lives to hold onto it for a bit longer. Moreover, we were handing Bagram to the Afghan Army, not to the Taliban. But Bagram’s ultimate landlord was never in doubt. By mid-August, it was theirs.

Nevertheless, we now know the tragic consequences.

The unavailability of Bagram left our undermanned forces with only one airfield — Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, a civilian facility with minimal security and located in a densely populated area — at which to handle the flood of Americans and Afghans attempting to leave Afghanistan and to coordinate all incoming and outgoing air traffic.

Their mission was made even more dangerous by the president’s stubborn unwillingness to extend the arbitrary deadline for completion of American withdrawal, resulting in even larger, more frenzied crowds of people trying to flee Afghanistan in the two short weeks available.

The first indicator of impending disaster was the grim spectacle of desperate Afghans clinging to a USAF C-17 transport aircraft in takeoff and plunging to their deaths. One week later, the perfect storm of missteps became gruesomely clear to all when an ISIS suicide bomb, detonated at the chaotic airport entry, claimed nearly 200 lives, including 13 American armed forces personnel.

It didn’t have to happen that way.

Did Secretary Austin demand — or even request — additional forces to hold Bagram long enough to support the orderly and safe extraction of our citizens and Afghan allies? We have no idea.

Did President Biden agree to the abandonment of Bagram? Did he direct it? Did he even know about it? We don’t know.

What we do know is that the decision to give up Bagram was one of several tragic miscalculations by the president and his advisors that led directly to the traumatic events that followed, including the irreplaceable loss of 13 valiant young American warriors.

Is “give up the ship” the new default posture for our armed forces and a weakened America? We sure hope not.