by Ski Ingram
I have been glued to my TV set for the past few weeks watching the debacle in Afghanistan unfold. Full discloser, I had no faith, whatsoever, in the leadership ability of Joe Biden. In fact, I fail to understand how anyone could vote for him as president much less as our Commander-in-Chief, but that is a topic for another time.
I served in the Army from 1969 until 1982. I am a Viet Nam combat veteran. I have received a lot of training on how to do that job. I served in Viet Nam as an Infantryman and an Airborne Ranger. I have worked as an officer on a Green Beret “A” team, a Drill Sergeant, an Infantry Platoon Leader, an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point and as a Range Safety Officer on a NATO training area in West Germany. I have received countless hours of training and have received many awards while in the military and as a police officer.
What I want to address here is the leadership or lack of leadership we are witnessing on the news, in real time. An Army officer receives tons of leadership training. When I was in Officer Candidate School (OCS) in 1979 I was given a card with a list of leadership traits printed on it. I did my best to develop and follow those traits during my career in the Army and as a Police Officer. The good officers worked hard to learn and adhere to these traits. The bad officers, and you could tell who they were, ignored them.
When I was in the service, I would have gone into the gates of hell with any good leader, a leader who lived by the leadership traits he learned in training and developed while serving the men under his charge. My son, David, learned these things as an Army Infantryman serving in Iraq. He wrote about what he learned titled “12 Rules for Infantry, an Antidote is Chaos.” I will reference 4 of his 12 rules later.
There are twelve leadership traits every officer and non-commissioned officer learns and swears to live by. I will be listing only eight of these traits. These eight leadership traits point out the failures I am seeing from the President, members of his administration and our military leaders.
(1) Bearing: Creating a favorable impression in courage, appearance and personal conduct at all times. Biden has shown no courage. He went on vacation before the fight and stayed on vacation while everything began to fall apart. He looks and acts frail and uninformed as to what is happening around him.
(2) Courage (physical and moral): A mental quality which recognizes fear and danger or criticism but enables the individual to meet danger or opposition with calmness and firmness. We can all see that Biden does not have the mental capacity to recognize the danger he has put our troops and our Afghan allies in. He is destroying the peace and security of the Afghan people who must now live under a terrorist regime. He doesn’t seem to realize the danger he has put our NATO allies in nor understand the criticism he is receiving from them. Biden lacks the courage to correct his mistakes. He is unwilling to send in the best trained soldiers in the world to vanquish the evil we are all witnessing.
(4) Endurance: Mental and physical stamina measured by the ability to stand pain, fatigue, distress and hardship. Biden is demonstrating that he does not have the physical stamina for the job of president by remaining on vacation during this debacle. When he does have a news conference, he stumbles over his words and sometimes appears to not have a grasp of the situation he has placed the entire free world in. He is giving out false information as we watch the truth playing out on TV.
(7) Integrity: Uprightness of character and soundness of moral principle: the quality of absolute truthfulness and honesty. Biden continues to lie to the American people daily. He will tell us one thing then just an hour later his State Department and his military leaders will say the exact opposite.
(8) Judgment: Weighing facts and possible solutions on which to base sound decisions. Biden has shown poor judgment by pulling out of Afghanistan without a viable plan in place. He continues to say that he trusts the Taiban, a terrorist organization, to protect our military, our NATO allies and our Afghan allies who have worked with us and supported us for 20 years.
(9) Knowledge: Acquired information including professional knowledge and an understanding of your subordinates. We are seeing that Biden ignored a great deal of the intelligence available to him before deciding to pull our military out of the country before having a plan to protect our American citizens and others who have supported us.
(10) Loyalty: Faithfulness to country, the Army, your unit, and your subordinates. Biden has shown little or no loyalty to our fighting men in Afghanistan or its people. He is abandoning those Afghans who worked with our military for two decades. Biden made a statement during the 2020 election that tells us a lot about his loyalty to America. During the presidential campaign, while hiding in his basement, he said there “is nothing special about being an American.” This sounds like something we’d hear from the “woke” not someone who is the president of America and the supposed leader of the free world.
(12) Unselfishness: The avoidance of providing for one’s own comfort and personal advancement at the expense of others. He went on vacation, need I say more?
My son, David, wrote “12 Rules for Infantry, an Antidote is Chaos” a few years after returning from Iraq. In my opinion, Biden has violated at least four of these rules. I have listed them below. They are:
Leaders Eat Last. Every good leader knows how important this is. It’s so important to good leadership that it has been listed first. Soldiers need to know that their leaders are thinking of their welfare before their own and will do anything they can to protect them in battle. This past week we have seen President Biden plan a major military operation and then go on vacation. He returned for a few hours after the operation began to fall apart. He then immediately went back on vacation. He is the type of leader that will eat first without caring if his soldiers eat at all.
Stupid games win stupid prizes. We can all see the many examples throughout history when Biden has played a stupid game. Bob Gates, the Secretary of Defense during the Obama Administration, stated that “Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy question.” This Afghanistan withdrawal shows just how right Bob Gates was. Biden didn’t have a plan. He has told us many times that he trusts our enemy, the Taliban, when they say they will not hurt our citizens and that they can get to the airport and be evacuated without trouble. President Biden is telling us the exact opposite of what we are seeing on the TV with our own eyes.
Always have a contingency plan. If Biden has a contingency plan, he hasn’t executed it yet, which leads me to believe he doesn’t have one. It is so bad that he will not allow our soldiers in Afghanistan to leave the safety of the airport to rescue those who are in harm’s way.
Don’t hang out with the sh*tbags. Your mother told you as a youth, “lay down with the dogs, and you’ll get up with fleas.” It was true then, it’s true today. President Biden has surrounded himself with incompetent people. If they were competent, there would be no debacle in Afghanistan, we would not be having problems at our southern border, nor with the escalating crime in our street. We would not be having problems convincing people to get a Covid vaccination. They would also have a plan to deal with the rising inflation rate that is looming in our future. If his cabinet and military leaders were competent, they would have been able to convince Biden to have a practical plan for this withdrawal or they would have resigned a long time before now.
If you wish to read all 12 rules, you can find it at www.Skiingram.com/12rules/
You get what you wish for in life, but only if you are willing to work for it. That means you must educate yourself on the best options, study the trends and enlist those who can help you achieve your goal. I believe that most Americans who voted for Joe Biden in the last election did not vote for Joe, they voted against President Trump. We are all paying the price of the “woke” and the uninformed voters who didn’t take the time to vet this man. We are paying the price for a dishonest media who protected Biden as he hid in his basement during the election of 2020. We know there are people who hate this country. There are people who want to “fundamentally change” it. Well, the haters must be happy because they appear to be succeeding in their goal.
America may be on the precipice of losing its freedom, but we haven’t fallen over the edge yet. We may be hanging on by our fingernails, but we have not fallen. If you want this country to survive it’s time everyone to save us from the fall. The debacle in Afghanistan is proof that without America’s influence in the world tyranny will win the day, then freedom around the world will be lost.
It’s time for everyone to stand up and join the fight to save our nation. You can start by voicing your opinion to your friends, neighbors and political leaders. Spend time studying the issues, band together with likeminded citizens who love freedom more than tyranny. It’s important that we all vote for those who love America, not to fundamentally change it. America’s future is in our hands, not those of the “woke.”
