during this process, the views of all of the joint chiefs of staff, all of us, the centcom commander, general mckenzie, general miller, and myself were all given serious consideration by the administration. we provided a broad range of options and our assessment of their potential outcomes. we couched that in cost, benefit, risk-to-force, risk-to-mission. all of that was evaluated against the national security objectives of the united states. on 14 april, the president of the united states, president biden, announced his decision, and the u.s. military received a change of mission, to retrograde all u.s. military forces, maintain a small contingency force of 6 to 700 to protect the embassy in kabul, until the department of state could coordinate contractor security support, and also to assist turkey to maintain the hamid karzai international airport and to transition the u.s. mission to over the horizon
i look forward to your questions. general mckenzie. chairman smith, ranking member rogers and members of the committee thanks for the opportunity to testify about recent events in afghanistan. as a theater commander i will confine my opening remarks to those matter under my direct operational control. specifically the withdrawal of u.s. forces and the non-combatant evacuation. these were two distinct combat missions both conducted in contact with the enemy. we had a plan for each of them and we executed those plans and thanks to the valor and dedication of thousands of men and women in harm s way we completed both missions. fulfilling the president s order to withdrawal u.s. forces and evacuating over 124,000 non-combatants from afghanistan. i last appeared before this body only dailies after president biden announced his decision to pull foerlss from the company and my testimony regarding that decision is a matter of pub politic record.
advocate we should have stayed in afghanistan longer so more service members. the only way to advocate that is to imagine a scenario where we could have stayed in a chaotic war zone, not had soldiers get killed and not made my mistakes. how you cannot make mistakes in that environment i don t know. every member has been in those environments in one way or another. you don t have the luxury of waving a wand and making the problems go away and making a decision where nothing goes wrong. it is frustrating to here people advocate we should stay and still decry what happened. do you think fighting in a war zone there wouldn t be similar mistakes if we had stayed for 5 or 10 years more. more u.s. service members dead in exactly the same way we just saw? sorry, that s very frustrating. could you talk to us a little bit about the 2500 soldiers
april was to plan for a diplomatic security force of no more than 650 service members. it was not feasible to preserve the u.s. embassy in kabul, hold and defend the international airport, embassy s key link to the outside world and defend bagram airfield with 650 soldiers and marines. this is important. the bagram option went away when we were ordered to reduce our presence to the 650 personnel in kabul. i would like to ift briefly to the neo, it was a completely different operation than a withdrawal. they were separate. the withdrawal began in april following the president s direction. the decision to conduct a neo rested with the department of state and they made that decision on 14 august. in our neo planning central command assumed there was a large number of people. we did not regard a taliban takeover as inevitable but
troop-to-task analysis, with the task being to go to zero. but you also have to defend the embassy. i m thinking about the chain of command. somebody s making decisions about troop levels and my understanding the it was not the dod. it was the state department. or the white house. i want to know who said, we re going to go to 650. it was a military analysis that 6 to 700 could adequately defend the embassy and that was approved through the highest levels. who made the decision? i would say that decision was made in a national security consultative process, by the highest levels of our government. general mckenzie, did you receive advice from general