Insider Attack Takes Soldier's Life

It is with great sadness and remorse that we learned of the death of Command Sergeant Major Timothy Bolyard. He was killed in an apparent insider attack while deployed to Afghanistan as part of the 1st SFAB. He is one of many, he is another solider that has died due to insider attacks. We have to ask the question, when will we fix this problem?Insider attacks are common in Afghanistan. Think about that. It's something that happens often and yet it is still happening. How is our vetting process not working? How are we letting these low level "hitmen" what seems like unrestricted access to our forces at their most vulnerable? We just don't understand. Several times throughout the course of the Afghani and Iraqi campaigns we have seen that enemy fighters posing as soldiers or police have gained enough trust or found loopholes in the system to gain access to personnel and weaponry they shouldn't have had.While in Iraq, on a Military Transition/Training Team, we severely regulated the control of ammunition to the Iraqis on the base. We recognized a simple premise. There weren't very many of us, there were a lot of them, the last thing we should do is allow them unfettered access to ammunition. We had Marines roving throughout the day and night checking on the posts that the Iraqi soldiers manned.That's what we did. Those were the controls we put in place, they worked, and they also probably could have been better. There were also things we did that didn't make any sense, but that's not here nor there.They may very well be exercising the same controls in Afghanistan, we don't know and quite frankly it's not our place to assume they weren't.[caption id="attachment_18592" align="alignnone" width="750"]

Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaks to soliders while visiting Task Force - Southwest at Camp Sharob, Helmand Province March 22, 2018. (DoD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dominique A. Pineiro)[/caption]However, the question we want answered seems reasonable. How does this keep happening? We've said it once we'll say it again for effect because we don't want another soldier, sailor, airman or Marine to die from an insider attack. Were they trusted fighters that got shamed and acted out? Were they plotting the whole time?Look, we're not your typical news outlet, we're going to hold off on Monday morning quarterbacking out of respect for our brothers. We know, none of them wanted this and certainly, there are soldiers that may feel like they could have prevented what happened. Maybe they could have, maybe they couldn't have. We can "shoulda woulda coulda" all day, but it won't bring him back. We don't want to add any guilt to the issue. We just want the insider attacks to stop.Rest in peace Command Sergeant Major Timothy Bolyard.