Alright everyone, I am out. Twitter, or X, as I'll refer to it for the first time because that is what it is now, isn't a place I want to be, or one that I think is healthy for the United States. I'll explain. But if you aren't interested, awesome, I urge you to stop reading now. First off, I have been around a while. More than a decade. I have seen the arc of twitter, had the old verified badge, and have seen it go from nominal public square where I saw things I disagreed with, to actively corrosive to discourse and civil society.

I’m not going to dig into the politics of the Afghan withdrawal. There are no American parties free of sin in that, but I do want to address one narrative that continues to perpetuate: “The Afghans didn’t fight”. If you’re espousing this I’m going to assume you didn’t get Within 1000ft of an Afghan in the ANSDF. The Afghans paid with more than 50,000 dead. For context, the U.S. lost 2,459 dead in Afghanistan, 1,922 of which were to combat. In the year I was lucky enough to fly alongside Afghan pilots and crew chiefs in Kandahar and Helmand I saw