Retired Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. , who goes by Frank , wants you to know upfront that there was no ghostwriter involved in his new book, The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century.
“Every word in this book is mine,” he notes proudly, recalling his time as a young cadet at The Citadel, South Carolina ’s military school, at which he discovered he had a writing facility. “Any errors of commission or omission are mine and mine alone.”
The Melting Point, which takes its title from a line in The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, is not a memoir . But rather a very inside account of the “highs and lows” of McKenzie’s three years as commander of the U.S. Central Command, responsible for active war zones in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, and dominated by the malign influence of Iran .
“I made good decisions, and I made some wrong ones. I’ve led well, and I’ve led poorly,” McKenzie writes, taking a stab at humility while spending most of the book recounting how he got most everything right.
Nevertheless, readers, especially journalists and military historians, will appreciate the window McKenzie provides into the complexities of modern warfare and the difference between taking risks and rolling the dice.
“A risk can be contained and mitigated,” he writes, while a “gamble could have irrecoverable consequences.”
While providing lessons on leadership, expounding on the primacy of civilian control of the military, and sharing some frustrations of the national security bureaucracy, McKenzie focuses primarily on the three most consequential operations he oversaw — the 2019 U.S. commando raid that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in Syria, which he advocated, the 2020 drone strike that assassinated Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, which he supported with reservations, and the chaotic abandonment of Afghanistan in 2021, which he strongly opposed.
In meticulous detail, McKenzie lays out the deliberative planning that went into each operation and, in the process, fills in some previously unknown details.
For instance, the credit for the defeat of ISIS in Iraq should go to his two predecessors, Gens. Lloyd Austin and Joe Votel, for crafting “a well-designed campaign that inexorably squeezed” ISIS with the use of partner forces, not U.S. troops.
When McKenzie was sure of the location of Baghdadi’s “safe house” in northern Syria, he flew to Washington to pitch the helicopter assault in person to then-President Donald Trump , using large printed slides the size of placemats, aware of how Trump preferred briefings with pictures and maps.
“He was focused and asked good questions,” McKenzie remembered.
After the successful raid, in which Baghdadi blew himself up with a suicide vest while holding two children, Trump was anxious to make the announcement, even before U.S. allies had been advised of the operation.
The Soleimani strike was also a McKenzie initiative, although the idea had been bandied about for years, beginning when McKenzie was a three-star working in the Pentagon.
“My interest in his removal from the battlefield became a running joke,” he recalls. “I asked about his activities and the effect of removing him from the fight during every Iran brief I received while on the Joint Staff.”
But by the time CENTCOM planners devised a workable scheme to take out Soleimani with a hellfire missile fired from a drone after he deplaned at Baghdad airport, McKenzie was having second thoughts about the blowback.
There were already angry protests at the U.S. Embassy following U.S. strikes against Iranian-backed militants in response to a rocket attack that wounded four U.S. troops.
“I was increasingly worried about what could happen after we struck Soleimani. Would it spur the crowd to attempt to overrun the embassy?” McKenzie writes. “What would our relationship with the government of Iraq be like in the wake of an attack? More dangerous, what would be the reaction of Iran?”
Trump approved the hit, along with two other targets, an Iranian Quds Force commander in Yemen and an Iranian spy ship that would be sunk, likely killing 50 Iranian sailors.
McKenzie was concerned the National Security Council, which advised the president, wasn’t considering the aftermath seriously enough.
The idea that Iran was unlikely to respond directly was a “bad assumption,” he thought. “I didn’t disagree with the decision to strike him, and, in fact, I supported it, but I felt that we needed to be prepared for the most dangerous course of action, not the one that was easiest for us to react to.”
It turned out the Yemeni commander was missed, and the sinking of the ship was scrapped out of concern about the possible Iranian response.
One aspect of the military planning that McKenzie underscores, which seems particularly relevant to the debate about the death of innocents in Gaza, is the consideration given to avoiding unintended civilian casualties.
In the case of Soleimani, his plane takes off from Tehran on New Year’s Eve 2019, but instead of flying to Iraq, where the U.S. has an MQ-9 Reaper drone loitering to deliver the coup de grace, he continues on Syria.
There is a brief discussion of whether to scramble a pair of Air Force fighter jets to shoot down his plane, but it turns out it’s a civilian flight with 50 people on board.
“Remembering the USS Vincennes incident from 1988, I told [Gen. Mark Milley] that ‘the U.S. record of shooting down Iranian airliners is not that good,’” McKenzie recalls. “Not even Soleimani was worth that loss of life.”
Possible civilian deaths also weighed heavy on McKenzie in planning the Baghdadi raid.
“Baghdadi ... settled in to live carefully, surrounding himself with several children and his bodyguard. He well knew that we were loath to hit targets with noncombatants likely to be killed or wounded,” McKenzie writes.
“We could have struck the compound with precision fires — bombs or missiles — but that would have almost certainly resulted in several children dying, in addition to his wives. ... I wasn’t comfortable with the loss of innocent life that it would have entailed,” he notes.
The United States did make a tragic mistake at the very end of the Afghanistan withdrawal mission on Aug. 29, 2021, when just days after the horrific attack by an ISIS suicide bomber on the Abbey Gate at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers and 170 Afghan civilians, the U.S. military mistook an innocent aid worker for another bomber and hit him with a hellfire missile outside his home.
“In striking his car, we killed not only him, but also nine other family members, including children as young as 3,” McKenzie said, suggesting “confirmation bias” played a part in the high-pressure life-or-death decision that was made by “harried, stressed drone operators, analysts, and commanders on the ground who were trying to avert another Abbey Gate.”
“One thing I’m sure of,” McKenzie writes. “Nobody involved in this got up that morning with any appetite or desire to kill 10 innocent men, women, and children. I said at the time that I was responsible for the strike, and I feel that responsibility just as strongly now as then.”
Several chapters deal with the deeply unsatisfying end to America’s 20-year intervention in Afghanistan, including a full accounting of what happened that led to the deadly bombing that marked the entire withdrawal mission as a policy failure.
McKenzie traces that failure back through several administrations, beginning with President Barack Obama’s 2010 decision to surge forces into Afghanistan while, at the same time, setting an end date on the operations.
But McKenzie singles out the February 2020 Doha Agreement with the Taliban negotiated by the Trump administration, which not only promised all U.S. troops would leave in nine months but ended U.S. air support for beleaguered Afghan forces, as “the single tactical decision that contributed most to the collapse of the Afghan military.”
“These two decisions represent some of the worst negotiating mistakes ever made by the United States. They were both purely a reflection of our desire to have an agreement at any cost,” he writes.
Shortly after President Joe Biden took office, McKenzie presented him with our options, the first of which he strongly recommended as the best chance to salvage the mission.
1. Keep 2,500 U.S. forces, plus a small number of special operations forces, in Afghanistan, along with eight bases, including maintaining the sprawling Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, which McKenzie saw as “critical.”
2. Reduce U.S. troops to 1,800 and draw down to three bases, including Bagram, a plan that would require the Afghan military to defend Bagram.
3. Withdraw all U.S. forces except a small force to keep the U.S. Embassy open in Kabul.
4. Pull all forces out and establish an offshore embassy, or interests section, in a neighboring country.
Biden picked option No. 3, which McKenzie believed was the worst, and in the end, it proved untenable as the Afghan government collapsed and the embassy was forced to evacuate.
“I do not believe it was a foregone conclusion that holding at 2,500 would have inevitably resulted in higher U.S. casualties and required the introduction of additional forces,” McKenzie concludes. “I am certain that we would have sustained casualties had we stayed, but it’s just not possible to say how many.”
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And he acknowledges neither Trump nor Biden had the “political appetite for taking the inevitable partisan heat that would attend a continued presence in Afghanistan.”
“Presidents Biden and Trump were as unalike as any two presidents have ever been,” he writes, “but they shared one abiding objective: to end U.S. participation in the war in Afghanistan.”
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