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Washington, D.C. — At the House Foreign Affairs Oversight Subcommittee hearing on the Biden Administration’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik questioned Command Sergeant Major Jake Smith, the current Infantry Battalion Command Sergeant Major at Fort Drum, who testified before the panel on the State Department’s recently released after-action report.

Watch her line of questioning here.

Read a full transcript of her line of questioning below:

Congresswoman Stefanik: Thank you Chairman Mast and Chairman McCaul, for the opportunity to waive on this hearing on this committee today. I would like to start by thanking our witnesses for their service, sacrifice, and your testimony today.

Command Sergeant Major Smith, I am especially grateful that you took on this tremendous responsibility of testifying, as I have the distinct honor of representing Fort Drum, home of the 10th Mountain Division, the most deployed division in the U.S. Army since 9/11. And I want to make sure in today’s hearing that we remember to highlight that although Joe Biden and the Biden Administration made reckless decisions that resulted in the avoidable, tragic deaths of our Servicemembers, it is important to recognize so many men and women in uniform who served valiantly and bravely.

In the spring of 2021, Command Sergeant Major Smith, you met with a U.S. embassy site survey team, and they told you they were considering Bagram and HKIA (H-kaya) as two potential evacuation operation sites. 

Why did you advise the site survey team against using HKIA and were your concerns taken into consideration?

CSM Jake Smith: I appreciate you letting me speak. As far as the site survey team taking my advice into consideration, I don’t know the private conversations they had. I cannot speak on that. From my standpoint, Bagram had a much more tactical advantage to conducting EO out of. It was much easier to defend. The entry control points were very much defended in depth. It would have been very easy to create a filtering process within those entry control points to filter out those who needed to be evacuated and those who didn’t. It was just a much more tactically advantageous location. 

Congresswoman Stefanik: Meanwhile, the Taliban was rapidly advancing on Kabul and every day it became clearer that an evacuation would likely be necessary. The recently released State Department After Action Review shows that the Biden Administration understood that the closure of Bagram meant that the only place this evacuation would be conducted would be HKIA. We know there were 113 soldiers from Charlie Company 431 of the 10th Mountain Division assigned to protect HKIA as the Taliban was rapidly approaching. From your extensive experience in Afghanistan, was a company-sized element adequate to perform the mission the 10th Mountain Division soldiers were assigned? 

CSM Jake Smith: If I was in command, I would have had at least a battalion there. 

Congresswoman Stefanik: A battalion. That is a big difference from a company. This disastrous decision leading up to the Afghanistan withdrawal forced Charlie Company 431 into a mission that was nearly impossible to execute. And yet, for over a month, the brave soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division defended HKIA as Afghanistan was engulfed in chaos. This hearing is important to bring transparency and shed light and ultimately answers to those families, particularly our Gold Star families of whom I know some are here today. We can never thank them enough for their sacrifice, thank you for your service, and I yield back the balance, Chairman Mast.

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