been left there and how you approach that decision and what exactly your advice was to the president for what i said earlier, but how you approach that decision and how you attempt to deal with that while advising the president. first of all, chairman, let me be clear that i support the president s decision to end the war in afghanistan. i did not support staying in afghanistan forever and let me also say that we talked about the process that we use to provide input to the president. i think that process was a very inclusive policy process. and the recommendations of the commanders were taken into consideration, discussed and deliberated upon throughout that process. as you indicated, i will typically, i will always keep my
really a state department call. we provided input, as i said in my opening statement, to the state department. their concerns, rightfully, were that, number one, they were being cautioned by the ghani administration, that if they went through american citizens and siv applicants at a pace that was too fast, it would cause a collapse of the government that we were trying to prevent. and so, i think that went into the calculus. and when you add also into the calculus that the siv process was very slow, deliberate, and not very responsive, with your help, we were able to curtail the time that it took to work through that process. but a number of things kind of came together to cause what happened to happen. but again, we provided our
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
weapons. the presidential directive and secdef directors is part of this process to ensure that the president is fully informed when determining the use of the world s deadliest weapons. by law, i am not in the chain of command and i know that. however, by presidential directive and department of defense instruction, signed by the president and secretaries of defense, i am in the chain of communicate to fulfill my legal, statutory role as the president s primary military adviser. after the speaker pelosi call, i convened a short meeting in my office with key members of my staff to refresh all of us on these procedures, which we practice three times a day at the action officer level. additionally, i immediately informed acting secretary of defense miller of her call. at no time was i attempting to change or influence the process, usurp authority, or insert
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