Two former top military officials involved with the United States’s withdrawal from Afghanistan blamed the State Department for the chaos that played out due to what they said was a delay in ordering an evacuation.

Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Frank McKenzie, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, testified in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday afternoon regarding the August 2021 withdrawal.

“On 14 August, the noncombatant evacuation operation decision was made by the Department of State and the U.S. military alerted, marshaled, mobilized, and rapidly deployed faster than any military in the world could ever do,” Milley said. “It is my assessment that that decision came too late.”

The State Department is responsible for ordering a noncombatant evacuation operation, or NEO, to be carried out by the military. The two former leaders indicated that the department made that call much too late in the case of Afghanistan. It did not order the evacuation effort until Aug. 14, one day before the Taliban overtook Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and only about 2 1/2 weeks before the military’s departure at the end of the month.

“I believe that the events of mid and late August 2021 were a direct result of delaying the initiation of the NEO for several months, in fact until we were in extremis, and the Taliban had overrun the country,” McKenzie told lawmakers. “As you are aware, the decision to begin a NEO rests with the Department of State, not the Department of Defense.”

President Joe Biden announced the military would be withdrawing from Afghanistan in April 2021, and at the time, the president said U.S. forces would depart on Sept. 11, 2021 — the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that prompted the war in Afghanistan. He reiterated in July his belief that the U.S.-trained and -equipped Afghan army would be able to hold off the Taliban, even as they gained territory in Afghanistan.

The U.S. had not intended to evacuate the embassy staff or the Afghan partners who worked alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan, however, the “general consensus of the military” was that “the embassy should be coming out roughly speaking the same time we should be coming out,” Milley explained, adding that keeping an embassy open in a war-torn country without a U.S. military presence would be “untenable.”

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While Biden ultimately ended the U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan, which former President Donald Trump also sought to do, he did so against the advice of his top military advisers.

Milley’s belief, he said, was that “an accelerated withdrawal would likely lead to the general collapse of the Afghan security force and the Afghan government.”