At Argghhh!!! The Home of two of Jonah's Military Guys

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.


The SecDef is actually calling for a huge reorientation of the Federal Government to blend that Canadian concept of "soft power" with the "hard power" of military power. Not as two separate concepts, but as a unifying theme and construct.


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.


Video at this link