Los Angeles County wants you to believe it is learning lessons from January’s wildfire disaster. Last week, officials quietly released an “After-Action Highlights and Recommendations” report, drafted by the McChrystal Group, that supposedly lays bare what went wrong with alerts and evacuations. On paper, it looks like an admission of failure. In reality, it’s a political smokescreen.
Four Star Fall from Grace
The author of this after-action report, retired General Stanley McChrystal, carries a checkered past that makes the county’s choice all the more suspect. McChrystal was implicated in the 2004 Pat Tillman cover-up, when the Army initially misrepresented the NFL player’s death by friendly fire in Afghanistan as enemy fire for public relations purposes. Tillman’s family has long accused McChrystal of playing a role in the deception. That same year, while leading the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq, McChrystal oversaw operations tied to Camp Nama, where interrogators later described detainees being beaten, subjected to induced hypothermia, and tortured, while the Red Cross was banned from inspections.
His fall from grace became public in 2010, when President Obama recalled him after a Rolling Stone profile captured McChrystal and his aides openly mocking senior civilian leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden, and disparaging the administration’s handling of the war. McChrystal apologized, but the damage was done. His career ended not in quiet retirement but in controversy over poor judgment, a lack of discipline, and a willingness to blur the line between accountability and spin.
This is the man Los Angeles County hired to examine its catastrophic wildfire response. A general accused of whitewashing tragedies abroad is now entrusted with reviewing failures at home. Considering McChrystal’s record, the report was destined to be less about accountability and more about protecting the political establishment.
Command in Collapse
The report acknowledges outdated policies, a broken chain of command, chronic understaffing, and decades-old technology. It admits the Office of Emergency Management is not remotely prepared for a county of this size. It even concedes what every resident already knows: people didn’t get evacuation warnings because alerts failed, power shutoffs cut communications, and the county’s technology was stuck in the past.
But here’s where the spin kicks in. Instead of naming names or assigning responsibility, the report hides behind soft language. Policies weren’t ignored or mismanaged, they were simply “unclear.” Alert failures weren’t the result of negligence, they “may have been” caused by smoke, dead zones, or bad luck. And the county’s botched transition between alert systems, which left countless residents vulnerable? Officials claim it “did not appear to cause significant issues.”
This report takes no clear responsibility, it’s nothing more than classic damage control.
While LA County leaders are selling the report as a blueprint for change, in reality, it’s a sanitized document designed to protect those in power. It acknowledges outdated policies and vague “resource constraints,” but nowhere does it confront the catastrophic leadership, specifically the collapse inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department under Sheriff Robert Luna.
On the evening of January 7, the Eaton Fire erupted in Altadena, driven by winds of up to 80 miles per hour that the National Weather Service had warned about for nearly a week. Their alerts were blunt: “Life Threatening Destructive Wind Conditions.” Luna’s response to this extraordinary warning was a single perfunctory post on the department’s “X” account. No surge planning. No coordinated action with fire agencies. No proactive preparation for what would become the largest single disaster in Los Angeles history.
The result was chaos. LASD insiders describe a response crippled by poor coordination, indecision, and staggering mismanagement at the top. Insiders questioned the department’s delay in immediately mobilizing all available personnel to effect evacuations. This failure falls directly on Luna and his executive management team and their collective lack of experience in managing large scale events. Look no further than Assistant Sheriff Jason Skeen for the failure to push the button and mobilize all available personnel on the night of January 7th.
The delay in issuing evacuation orders during the Eaton Fire wasn’t just a tactical mistake, it was deadly. More than 17 people lost their lives because evacuations were botched and issued far too late. The responsibility rests squarely with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, working in concert with the Office of Emergency Management. Both failed catastrophically, and their negligence directly sealed the fate of residents whose deaths were horrific, unnecessary, and entirely preventable.
The failures did not end there. Luna also stalled the order to activate the National Guard, a critical resource for containment, evacuations, and freeing deputies to focus on looting suppression and other law enforcement duties. They could have been deployed by Tuesday and on the ground within four hours. Instead, they weren’t activated until Thursday, another leadership blunder that left communities exposed.
Insiders say Luna leaned heavily on Assistant Sheriff Jason Skeen, a career administrator with barely five years of combined field experience at the deputy, sergeant, and lieutenant levels. Skeen’s lack of tactical command background showed. He may be a capable bean counter, but as one retired executive put it bluntly: “Jason Skeen has almost zero field experience. He primarily hid behind a desk.” With lives on the line, LASD leadership relied on spreadsheets instead of instincts.
The larger context makes Luna’s incompetence even harder to excuse. LASD isn’t merely short-staffed; it’s collapsing. Assistant Sheriff Skeen himself revealed the numbers at the Civilian Oversight Commission: 4,166 vacancies. Nearly a quarter of the department’s authorized staffing has vanished. Patrols are stretched impossibly thin. Jails are short-staffed. Specialized units have been gutted. Deputies still standing are forced into mandatory overtime — six days a week, 16-to-18-hour shifts, sometimes without a day off for weeks. The mental and physical toll is devastating, and when disaster struck, the cracks split wide open.
This isn’t an isolated failure. As Chief of the Long Beach Police Department, Luna earned the nickname “Bunker Bob” for his habit of hiding while officers floundered in the streets. During the George Floyd protests, it was Sheriff Alex Villanueva, not Luna, who stepped in with 50 deputies to stabilize Long Beach. The city’s population is equal to two or three LASD patrol stations, and Luna couldn’t handle it then. Why anyone believed he could run the largest sheriff’s department in the nation defies reason.
The after-action report avoids all of this. It mentions “resource constraints” and “staffing challenges” but never points the finger at the sheriff whose historic staffing collapse and paralysis during the Eaton Fire directly led to delayed evacuations and the deaths of more than 17 people. It frames systemic failure as bad luck and “unclear policies,” when the truth is simple: Luna ignored warnings, failed to plan, failed to act, and failed to lead.
The loss of life, homes, and entire neighborhoods in January was catastrophic. But what’s worse is knowing it didn’t have to be this way. A sheriff with foresight and courage could have mobilized resources, activated the National Guard, and executed timely evacuations. Instead, Los Angeles got Bunker Bob, hiding once again while his deputies were run into the ground and residents were left to burn.
The end result is county’s report is a nothing short of a blatant whitewash. It erases accountability and shields Luna, Bass and others from the consequences of their incompetence.
Until Los Angeles County stops protecting failed leaders and starts demanding real accountability, every fire season will carry the same tragic risk: residents paying with their lives for the cowardice and mismanagement of the people sworn to protect them.
Supervisor Janice Hahn and her colleagues on the Board of Supervisors tout this report as proof of ‘transparency,’ when in reality it’s nothing more than a watered-down highlights version, stripped of detail, devoid of timelines, absent measurable reforms, and free of consequences. It reads like a consultant’s playbook for looking busy while avoiding the hard work of actually fixing what’s broken.
Most glaringly, the voices of those directly affected are absent. The report doesn’t include testimony from residents who fled with no warning, families trapped in gridlock, or communities historically left behind in emergency planning. Their stories would expose the very real human cost of bureaucratic failure. By erasing those voices, the county has reduced a public safety disaster to a sterile list of talking points.
County officials had years to modernize their systems, update their protocols, and prepare for inevitable wildfires. They didn’t. Now, rather than face the music, they’ve produced a document that lets them check the box of accountability, while shielding themselves from scrutiny.
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