Of Course Not

In news that should surprise no one, no discipline will be taken against US troops who killed 10 civilians in Kabul as following the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport.

My guess is that they could not figure out a way to limit the investigation to enlisted men and junior officers, because it went all the way up the chain of command. 

Someone's career, at least a full bird colonel, should have had their career ended:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has accepted recommendations that no U.S. military personel be disciplined for an errant drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including an Afghan employee of an American aid organization and seven children, as the war in Afghanistan came to a chaotic end this summer, the Pentagon said Monday.

Military officials had said previously that the attack on Aug. 29 was not the result of criminal negligence. In November, the Air Force inspector general who led an independent investigation of the incident said that while the strike did not violate laws of war, the evidence suggested that mistakes were made as a result of what he called confirmation bias on the part of the analysts and commanders involved.

That review did not recommend any disciplinary action either, despite Pentagon leaders’ admission that the strike was a “tragic mistake.”

The recommendations Austin approved were offered to him last month by the commander of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., and the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, Gen. Richard D. Clarke. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters during a news briefing Monday that “there was no recommendation by either of them about accountability.”

Instead, the recommendations they made were primarily concerned with “how intelligence is gathered, analyzed, shared, assessed and developed” into targeting recommendations as well as how such information is communicated, Kirby said. He declined to offer further detail, saying the recommendations were classified.

Even if prosecutions were not justified, and I would not cede this point, incompetence of the sort displayed here justifies the termination of multiple military careers.

To quote Groucho Marx, "Military justice is to justice as military music is to music."