The Source: Rule Breakers, Lawmakers & Influencers | Episode 7 — He Flew the Last Plane Out of Afghanistan. Now He’s Running for Congress.

A conversation with Alex Pellbath, congressional candidate for South Carolina’s First District

On August 30, 2021, Alex Pellbath flew the last American aircraft out of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. He was the air mission commander for the final withdrawal — a 17-day operation that became, despite the chaos surrounding it, the largest airlift evacuation in the history of the world.

He is now running for Congress.

The connection between those two facts is not incidental. It is the entire argument.

What He Saw From the Inside

The withdrawal from Afghanistan did not go well. Most Americans have some version of that understanding — the images from the airport, the news coverage, the political aftermath. Alex Pellbath has a different version. He was there.

What he describes is a mass problem with impossible constraints. Too many people who needed to get out. Too few aircraft and too few days to move them. An arbitrary August 31st deadline that the people on the ground could see, mathematically, was not going to work.

At two in the morning, during the middle of the operation, Pellbath and his pilots were in the dining facility when they saw the Taliban spokesman appear on Al Jazeera. The message was an ultimatum: August 31st is a line in the sand. America will be gone.

His team’s immediate expectation was that the commander in chief would appear the next day and respond with clarity about American resolve. Instead, the president doubled down on the August 31st deadline. Two days after that, a suicide bomber killed 13 Americans at Abbey Gate.

Pellbath tells this story not to relitigate a political moment but to illustrate a governing principle: policy decisions have consequences that are felt by real people in real time. The people making those decisions are often insulated from those consequences. The people carrying them out are not.

That gap — between the policymaker and the person living the result of the policy — is the central argument of his campaign.

What Congress Is Actually Missing

Pellbath is not a politician. He has never run for office. He spent 22 years in the Air Force, most of it as a pilot and commander, with a stint in the Pentagon working in the Air Force Budget Office and on the staff of General Joe Dunford when Dunford was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

His argument about congressional representation is not partisan. It is structural. He believes that Congress is disproportionately populated by people who have spent their careers in a narrow professional lane — law, academia, political staffing — and who have never been on the receiving end of the policies they vote on.

His counterargument is experience. As a commander, he was responsible for people. As a budget officer at the Pentagon, he learned that if something is not resourced, it is not a policy — it is an idea. As a pilot for 22 years, he lived in states across the political spectrum — Illinois, Washington, California, Washington D.C. — and experienced firsthand what different governing philosophies produce for the people living under them.

He also spent four years in a C-17 squadron and later ran a special operations unit. The skills that requires — compartmentalization, mission focus, the ability to execute under constraint when the policy framework above you is creating the problem — translate, in his view, directly to the legislative environment.

His position is straightforward: he would not be running if he thought someone else in this race had the perspective the district needs. He doesn’t believe they do.

Why South Carolina’s First District Matters Nationally

South Carolina’s First Congressional District is not simply a local political story. It is one of the most strategically significant districts in the country, and Pellbath argues it is not being represented as such.

Joint Base Charleston is there — home to C-17 operations, a naval weapons station, and one of the most consequential logistics hubs in the American military. Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort is in the district. Every branch of the armed services has a presence. The military community is not a constituency here — it is the fabric of the district.

The Port of Charleston is growing faster than almost any other port on the East Coast. The national economic and supply chain implications of that growth are significant. The infrastructure around it, Pellbath argues, is not keeping pace — and the federal government has not been adequately engaged on the national security dimensions of what happens if that infrastructure gap isn’t addressed.

The district is also experiencing the pressures of rapid population growth. Charleston is one of the most desirable cities in America right now, and people are moving there. Housing costs are rising. Military families stationed at nearby bases cannot afford to live close to where they serve. Military pay has not kept pace with cost of living increases in high-growth areas. Pellbath’s argument is that a blanket cost of living adjustment applied nationally does not account for what a service member needs to live near a base in coastal South Carolina versus in a lower-cost state. That kind of granular, ground-level understanding of what policy actually produces — rather than what it intends — is the perspective he is bringing to the race.

On 2026

Pellbath is direct about the stakes of the midterm cycle. He sees 2026 as the inflection point at which the policy direction set in 2024 either consolidates or reverses. He is running because he believes South Carolina’s First is a seat that matters to that outcome — and because he believes the district deserves a representative who has spent a career understanding what it means when policy fails the people it was supposed to serve.

He is not walking into the race with a large personal check. He is asking for support the same way he served: by making the case directly and trusting that the people who understand what is at stake will show up.

Alex Pellbath is a retired Lieutenant Colonel, USAF, and congressional candidate for South Carolina’s First District. Learn more and support the campaign at pellbathforcongress.com. He can be found on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as Alex Pellbath for Congress.

This article is originally published on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/source-rule-breakers-lawmakers-influencers-episode-7-alex-yw0le and on October 31, 2025 as Episode 7 of The Source: Rule Breakers, Lawmakers & Influencers on the ROARNetwork.US. New episodes drop weekly.