re: "Defense Secretary Gate's Landon Lecture at K-State."
Also at Castle Argghhh!!!, John notes SecDef Gate's recent speech.
Money quote(s):
"This speech is potentially a historic address, if Secretary Gates can put in motion a plan that the next administration will be able to carry forward. He's couching it in terms that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton could take this concept and move with it, embrace it, and make it their own."
"He's calling to take the concept embodied in Provincial Reconstruction Teams and Human Terrain Teams and greatly expand their scope and ability - to include a deployability matching that of combat forces and essentially the institutionalization of the skill set in the US Gov, and not necessarily in the State Department, but perhaps in a different organization - making American foreign policy "joint" in the ways that the US military is becoming (cuz' it's an on-going process) Joint."
&
"He talked about the almost instantaneous dissolution of functional capabilities at the end of WWII, again after Vietnam, and the real destruction of intel (especially humint) and infowar assets (you can hear Cannoneer #4 whooping and hollering in the background) along with a surprisingly large reduction in State Department Foreign Service Officers after the Fall of the Wall.
He didn't call for a merging of State and Defense, nor a simple plus-up in their abilities. As I heard it - he called for a whole new organizational structures, that would institutionalize the skillset within the US government, across the structural/cultural pipes of the existing Cabinet structure.
That's what I heard, anyway. I heard a call for the true institutionalization of "Talk softly, but carry a big stick, and be able to do so proactively - especially the talking part, with the ability to *do* things."
Money quote(s):
"This speech is potentially a historic address, if Secretary Gates can put in motion a plan that the next administration will be able to carry forward. He's couching it in terms that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton could take this concept and move with it, embrace it, and make it their own."
"He's calling to take the concept embodied in Provincial Reconstruction Teams and Human Terrain Teams and greatly expand their scope and ability - to include a deployability matching that of combat forces and essentially the institutionalization of the skill set in the US Gov, and not necessarily in the State Department, but perhaps in a different organization - making American foreign policy "joint" in the ways that the US military is becoming (cuz' it's an on-going process) Joint."
&
"He talked about the almost instantaneous dissolution of functional capabilities at the end of WWII, again after Vietnam, and the real destruction of intel (especially humint) and infowar assets (you can hear Cannoneer #4 whooping and hollering in the background) along with a surprisingly large reduction in State Department Foreign Service Officers after the Fall of the Wall.
He didn't call for a merging of State and Defense, nor a simple plus-up in their abilities. As I heard it - he called for a whole new organizational structures, that would institutionalize the skillset within the US government, across the structural/cultural pipes of the existing Cabinet structure.
That's what I heard, anyway. I heard a call for the true institutionalization of "Talk softly, but carry a big stick, and be able to do so proactively - especially the talking part, with the ability to *do* things."
---
BTW, I just noticed that Castle Argghhh!!! has added CAA to the "Personal Blogosphere" portion of their "Favorite Blogs." No telling when that happened exactly, but it's towards the top (third one down) of this particular blogroll and marked "NewStuff!"
Thanks Castellans!
posted by Consul-At-Arms at 6:53 AM
1 Comments:
You didn't hear? Obama and Hillary plan on putting Kucinich in to replace Gates as SecDef.
Says DK: "We don't need no stinking military!"
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