MATT STOLLER: The War in Afghanistan Is What Happens When McKinsey Types Run Everything. “There is a more basic question at work that keeps coming up, whether it’s the Boeing 737 Max, opioids, Covid mismanagement, or anything else of social importance. Do we have the competence to govern ourselves anymore? There’s also a follow-on question. Will this loss spur genuine reform of our McKinsey-ified elites who failed so spectacularly?”

Will they pay a stiff price for failure? That’s the only way things will change. It’ll be business as usual otherwise. And why not? It’s working out fine for them.

Plus: “And their embarrassment covers up something even more dangerous. None of these tens of thousands of Ivy league encrusted PR savvy highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do anything useful. They can write books on leadership, or do powerpoints, or leak stories, but the hard logistics of actually using resources to achieve something important are foreign to them, masked by unlimited budgets and public relations. It is, as someone told me in 2019 about the consumer goods giant Proctor and Gamble, where ‘very few white-collar workers at P&G really did anything’ except take credit for the work of others.”

That’s a pretty good summary of our ruling class, and now it’s catching up to us, all over. It’s just extra-obvious in military affairs, where visible defeats can happen.

Plus: “Last month, I noted that American soldiers are constantly complaining that bad contracting terms prevent them from fixing and using their own equipment, just as Apple stops consumers from repairing or tinkering with their iPhones. In 2019, Marine Elle Ekman noted that these problems are pervasive in the U.S. military.”