At CENTCOM, I had to inform and design strategies to carry out the President’s policies while enabling operational execution by field commanders. Preparing for my Senate hearing, I had written out succinct answers to anticipated questions. The discipline of writing always drove me to be more exact, even at times driving me to different conclusions than I had originally held. A concern began to gnaw at me: I found myself grasping to define the policy end states and the strategies that connected our military activities to those end states. In the back of my mind rang the adage “If you don’t know
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