Quote Originally Posted by Tom Odom View Post
Ignoring the later sarcasm,
No sarcasm intended. At was an attempt at mood lightening, observational humour.

I mean the sum total of interaction on the ground--be that writing reports, meeting with counterparts including the Vice Presient/Secretary of Defense one on one, or sharing information with a senior operations officer or a senior intelligence officer--enter into the creation and defining of foreign policy. If one is summoned to the VPs office and he is poised to pull out of a reciprocal program, then what you say in that office and how you react defines where the foreign policy that established that program in the first place. That is but one example.
All those things are good. In the British Army, that is what the "MILO" -military liaison intelligence officers - used to do. Maybe they still do. I have not carried a drunken one back to his hotel in 15 years.

Sure, always good to have military input from the coal face, but that is distinctly different from an officer on the ground, deciding to back X group against another or to reverse a policy already in place. Best he can do, is to argue his case and then act when instructed to do so, his plans first having been scrutinised by the diplomats. Historically the best I can offer is the difference between Allenby's success in the Palestine campaign, versus MacArthur getting himself sacked in Korea.

To whit, and my concern in this thread, while I applaud the Col Jones's insights as to "PCE", his paper does not, to mind, make clear that PCE is a going to have to be set against a very stringent and very specific policy context.

"...that populaces have the right to choose the form of governance which suits them best..." cannot be, or underpin, an overall approach to operations. It's like basing FM-3 on the universal declaration of human rights. Military Force is for the breaking of will, not the building of nations.