On May 9, 2022, I sat before the Special Committee on Afghanistan and testified with some emotion about my pride in our personnel for what they had accomplished during that mission.
I will continue in English, given all the technical terms.
From our perspective, we had not had a sizable—or any—military force on the ground since 2014 when we withdrew from Afghanistan. In fact, I was at ISAF headquarters in Kabul when we lowered the flag.
For a period of seven years, we had no sizable military presence there, and our ability to project force across the globe into a highly contested environment with our air capabilities, with our special operations capabilities and with our global signals capability, and to extract as many Afghans as we did, speaks to the ability, the passion and the proficiency of our members.
Madam Chair, I'm very proud of what our members accomplished in some extremely difficult conditions. We've learned and we've continued to apply the lessons over the last number of years.