Somewhat lost in the outrage over Joe Biden’s unforgivable Afghanistan withdrawal was Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller Jr., who put his career on the line in late August 2021, when he called out his chain of command over the disastrous efforts to evacuate the war-torn country.

Lt. Col. Scheller was imprisoned, court-martialed, and ultimately relieved of duty.

In an opinion piece published at Human Events on Thursday, Scheller absolutely told it like it is, blasting the Armed Forces of the United States, as decimated by their “commander” in chief Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the proverbial Three Stooges, hellbent on crippling America’s fighting forces with more emphasis on so-called “critical race theory,” gender self-identification, pronouns, and LGBTQIA+ (LMNOP) rights than maintaining combat readiness.

The bottom line, declared Scheller: “The American military is promoting cowardice.”

Scheller began with his imprisonment:

Following the Afghanistan evacuation, I was imprisoned for publicly challenging military leadership. Nearly a year later, Americans still don’t appreciate the dire implications emanating from foundational issues in the U.S. military. During critical moments when military leaders should be standing for American values, we instead find impressively dressed old men nodding “yes.”

When that unconditional obedience leads to disaster – as it did in Afghanistan and Benghazi – military leaders focus on managing political narratives to save their own careers. In doing so, they miss timely assessments of failure, and inadvertently squander the sacrifices of selfless young servicemembers.

Austin and Milley — the “wokest” of the “woke” were shamelessly unavailable for comment. Speaking of woke generals, Scheller took a different tack — and blasted the lack of moral courage.

Some blame the problem on “woke generals.” But that’s a catch-all term misdiagnosing the root problem: the American military is currently led by senior general officers lacking moral courage. Most Americans don’t understand how this quality is actively filtered out by the military promotion system.

Officers are easily influenced, focusing on pleasing superiors for high markings on subjective evaluations. When senior military leaders focus on pleasing their bosses for forty years (the time required to make four-star general) it’s not surprising they consistently acquiesce to political whims at the expense of building effective combat power.

In practice, they tolerate, even incentivize, silence during military failures. Thus, it’s not surprising that General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and General Kenneth McKenzie, the theater commander, remain entrenched in their position that the Afghanistan evacuation was a success. To say otherwise would end their career, or worse, threaten lucrative post-service positions within the oligopoly of government contracting firms.

Incidentally, as many of us observed at the time, Biden’s Afghanistan debacle was never about leaving Afghanistan; it was about how he left it, including leaving an untold number of American civilians behind the lines of the most brutal terrorist organization on the planet.

Scheller also took a couple of well-aimed shots at Gen. James Mattis and the aforementioned Lloyd Austin:

General James Mattis went from General Dynamics to Secretary of Defense and then back to General Dynamics, impervious to scrutiny due to the supposed greatness of his military policies – which contained many failures.

Secretary Lloyd Austin followed a similar path: from four-star to the board of Raytheon to Secretary of Defense. When the media (beholden to their own corporate interests) cover this at all, they often focus on irrelevant problems, only scratching the surface of the deep rot.

While a growing number of patriotic Americans understand, to varying degrees, the failures of the military under Biden, Austin, and Milley, the question is, how to fix it? What must be done to refocus — from the top down — America’s energies on combat readiness, first and foremost, and away from the continuing metastasizing of the left’s woke, crock-of-crap, nonsense?

As Scheller sees it, not top-down — the stringent M.O. of the U.S. military and the federal government alike — but bottom-up.

Reform must come from the ground up. Simply replacing “woke generals” doesn’t correct the system producing hollow military leaders. Fortunately, America has two decades of combat warriors, the best young talent, and the finest training facilities on the planet.

The next generation of generals could potentially break the cycle of working just to impress their boss. Instead of people-pleasing and nepotism, competitions illustrating performance in warfighting should earn officers the fast track to promotion.

But these reforms won’t get anywhere if the military is not held accountable to itself and to the public. The Afghanistan evacuation exemplified military failure, but America failed to hold anyone accountable.

Accountability forces acknowledgment that in addition to pleasing superiors, senior military leaders must fight wars effectively. If nobody demands effective warfighting, the demoralizing failures will continue.

At the end of the day, it’s still all about “real leadership,” Scheller admonished:

Without real leadership, the cracks in the military foundation continue widening. The obvious problems cannot go unidentified much longer without great risk to the American people. Americans desperately need courageous leaders willing to confront and reform our deeply flawed systems.

Fix the leaders, fix the culture, and watch as all other problems self-correct. The American military truly finds itself in a crisis of command.

Again, Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, and Mark Milley were unavailable for comment.

Wouldn’t you be, if you were one of them?