WASHINGTON: A Marine Corps battalion commander said he was relieved of his duties after he posted a video demanding “accountability” from senior leaders for failures in Afghanistan.
Lt Col Stuart Scheller went viral on Thursday after he posted a four-minute, 45-second video to Facebook in which he appeared in uniform and ripped into military leadership following the devastating suicide bombing at Kabul airport, which killed 13 US service members and at least 169 Afghans.
“People are upset because their senior leaders let them down, and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up,’” he said.
“I’m not saying we’ve got to be in Afghanistan forever,” Scheller added, “but I am saying: Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, ‘Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone’? Did anyone do that? And when you didn’t think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, ‘We completely messed this up?’”
The video, a rare public expression of discontent from an enlisted officer, took off in military circles on social media. It had been shared on Facebook more than 35,000 times as of Friday night.
On Friday, Scheller wrote on Facebook that he had been “relieved for cause based on a lack of trust and confidence as of 14:30 today.”
“My chain of command is doing exactly what I would do … if I were in their shoes,” said Scheller.
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