Managing Chaos: The 2021 Kabul Airlift
War on the Rocks
War on the Rocks
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 June 2023
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this special edition podcast, listeners will get to hear the first 20 minutes of Unspent Rounds, a members-only War on the Rocks podcast that features interesting conversations with interesting people. On this episode, Aaron Stein spoke with Capt. Adam "AI" Solomon, an airfield operations flight commander. Adam was in charge of airfield operations and oversaw almost all aspects of flight operations during the evacuation from Kabul. The conversation explored the withdrawal, how it all went down, how challenging it was to coordinate flight operations, how Adam dealt with logistical challenges when evacuating people from the country, and the tragic killing of 13 Marines guarding the airport.
To listen to the show in its entirety, and to other episodes of Unspent Rounds, sign up to become a War on the Rocks member.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody a sneak preview of one of our new members only podcasts called Unspent Rounds which |
| 0:15.0 | features interesting conversations with interesting people. On this snippet of the |
| 0:19.7 | show I spoke with Adam A.I. Sullivan, who was an airfield operations flight commander and who also |
| 0:25.4 | oversaw the withdrawal from Afghanistan from the ground. |
| 0:28.7 | If you're not yet a member and you want to hear the rest of the show head on over to |
| 0:32.5 | www that war on the rocks dot com |
| 0:34.8 | slash membership |
| 0:36.2 | Adam it's good to have you on the show |
| 0:38.0 | thanks proud to be here well I think maybe we should start |
| 0:41.5 | you were talking a little bit off the podcast. I am curious where the call sign AI comes from. I think |
| 0:46.9 | listeners will understand that you're in the Air Force and we'll come back to your role in that in a second. |
| 0:51.6 | So why tell us a little bit about yourself? |
| 0:53.4 | My call sign is AI stands for artificial intelligence. I got it back in tech school. |
| 0:57.8 | Some tech school for what I do is airfield operations officer as I go through a bunch of smaller tech schools if you will for air traffic control, |
| 1:05.4 | airfield management, and Ross which is radar and airfield weather systems. |
| 1:10.0 | Anyway during that time you have to be able to compute a lot of data and to figure out scenarios pretty quickly and then also do that with your people that you're training with and hopefully to train with different people in different |
| 1:23.9 | roles and so try to not to repeat all that I kind of came up with a system and just |
| 1:30.9 | did it up really quick and said, |
| 1:32.5 | like, all, this is how we're gonna do |
| 1:33.9 | to help so we're not like repeating |
| 1:38.1 | all the same stuff or like, yeah, I met with somebody |
| 1:40.9 | or trained with somebody in that similar position. |
... |
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