"God Is Good"

Almost drowned out by March Madness, the Artemis II lunar mission, and long airport lines, the news that a US aircraft had been downed by Iran became an instantly compelling story.

By Kenneth Allard

Almost drowned out by March Madness, the Artemis II lunar mission, and long airport lines, the news that a US aircraft had been downed by Iran became an instantly compelling story. But how to square that shocking bulletin – that one of our supersonic fourth-generation jet fighters (an F-15E) had been shot down by a crude surface-to-air missile - possibly square with the preferred narrative of American air dominance – and on Good Friday, no less? There was quick reassurance that the F-15 pilot had been rescued – but then nothing at all about his back-seater, known in Air Force parlance as a Weapons System Officer. Because something was clearly wrong, I said a quick prayer before heading off for Friday night services.

While never belonging to the elite Search & Rescue mafia of our Armed Forces, I spent the last half of my military career in joint operations and advanced command and control systems. Those systems – once the fiefdoms of quasi-autonomous service bureaucracies– have over the last two decades become the life’s blood of the tight teamwork on which our warfighters now depend. Naturally my mind reviewed the mistakes along the way, beginning with Desert One, the Jimmy Carter nightmare that demonstrated our inability to fight this new kind of war. Under the bi-partisan leadership of Senators Barry Goldwater and Congressman Bill Nichols, an ambitious wave of Pentagon reform was enacted in 1986; that transformation was tested only four years later by Desert Storm. While General Schwarzkopf now had more clout than any American commander since MacArthur or Nimitz, the machinery of joint warfare was creaky. His tasking orders to subordinate commanders, for example, were the size of telephone books and had to be flown out to aircraft carriers or handed off manually to distant air warfare centers.

Fortunately, we won but soon had to deal with the uncertainties of modern war in backward places like Bosnia, Haiti and sub-Saharan Africa. With the War on Terror, we found that trimming the Pentagon bureaucracy also improved field readiness; with greater communications inter-operability, Special Forces A teams could now talk directly to their USAF counterparts orbiting at 30,000 feet. By dispatching laser-guided bombs and other sophisticated weaponry, the joint Army-Air Force team could wreak unimaginable havoc almost at will. After the Second Gulf War, for example, I remember visiting Baghdad, carefully picking my way through the rubble left behind by “Shock and Awe.” My Air Force escort proudly oriented his laser pointer between two fairly small holes about a foot apart in what was left of a building’s roof. “Sir, those were the entry points for our ordnance.”

But if those were the high points of American military sophistication, then it bears remembering that technical prowess ultimately depends on politics: to borrow a line from “The Right Stuff,” “No bucks, then no Buck Rogers.” My greatest concern during the presidency of Joe Biden mirrored that of Barack Obama: How well would their respective administrations maintain the pace of joint warfare development? Equally important, would they be inclined to promote true warfighters or Woke bureaucrats? A graphic now making the online rounds pictures Clinton, (abandoning American troops in Somalia); Obama, (failing to reinforce American troops in Libya); and Biden (leaving 13 US soldiers to be killed in Afghanistan, not to mention a treasure trove of advanced military equipment left to the Taliban). The contrast with Trump: He moved mountains just to rescue two Americans in Iran!

Whether or not the Dems realize it: They have just handed Donald Trump a club and practically invited him to swing for the fences. How would Mr. Obama, for example, defend himself against the stark record of his cowardice in trying to buy off the Ayatollahs? The same bunch who most recently told their American counterparts that they already have the enriched plutonium for 11 nuclear weapons?

Given the backdrop of Easter imagery, maybe it was appropriate that our wayward back-seater did everything he was trained to do, climbed a 7,000-foot ridgeline despite his wounds and then confirmed his presence on Easter Sunday with an encrypted message to his superiors, “God Is Good.” That signal in turn cued a massive armed rescue: fighters, bombers, drones and even the venerable A-10 Warthog! All sworn to carry out Trump’s order: We Leave No One Behind!

Yes, Colonel, we also worship a Good God and thank Him for your safe return! And please tell your teammates that we rejoice to call them comrades-in-arms!

COL (Ret.) Kenneth Allard is a one-time draftee who became a West Point professor, Dean of the National War College and NBC News military analyst.

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