 It's been about nine months, I think, since the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Commandant and the Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command signed out the white paper that talked about an exploration of the idea of strategic land power. Yeah. Can you talk about where that stands now, what you think are some of the things that you've learned over the last nine months and where it's headed? Sure. So this idea of strategic land power really came out of a number of different drivers. And it kind of manifested itself in a conversation between General Odierno and Admiral Craven, the SOCOM Commander. And it's a recognition that we can't let the hard-won lessons of the last 10 years, 13 years, slip away first. And in that regard, they, of course, engaged the Commandant of the Marine Corps because, you know, the three forces that, although they're each constituted for a different purpose, those purposes all converge at the end of the day on land and we invariably wind up working in and amongst each other as we work, as you noted, in and amongst the people. So one key driver. Another key driver, again, from the last decade plus of war, is that a recognition that tactical excellence does not always translate to strategic outcomes. And so our operational capabilities, while very effective in direct combat, have not always delivered the necessary outcomes to move to the objectives that we've entered conflict for. And so there's a recognition that we have to work at getting the Army in particular, but the Marine Corps and Special Ops, are postured to be a strategic instrument that actually delivers on strategic outcomes and not just an operationally useful force. So that was a key component. A third aspect was the recognition that, quite frankly, we've strayed away from our understanding of warfare. And by that, what I mean by that is, at the end of the day, and, you know, Sun Tzu talks about it, so this is not truly a, you know, Eurocentric idea that came from Klaus Witt's. It is about, you know, perceiving yourself and perceiving the enemy. And if you do so correctly, you will win a thousand victories. And that was Sun Tzu's idea. And then, of course, Klaus Witt's many centuries later laid out the fact that war is an extension of politics by other means. And, of course, politics is the interaction of human will and war is a clash of wills. We kind of lost focus on that over the 1990s. We lost our understanding that at the end of the day, it's not the physical objectives. It's not the success and the execution of physical tasks that matter. It's their impact on the will of the people you're trying to influence. So, and it doesn't have to be just about, you know, the visiting of violence on people, although that's certainly what we at the end of the day exist for. But when you take physical action without fully considering the human objective that you want to achieve, you're liable to be ineffective. And this is not just a, you know, a treatise on our experience in Iraq. Kosovo is a perfect study of exactly what I'm talking about. Because the air campaign hit every target brilliantly. Some of them were not real, but that's okay. And had absolutely no influence on the Serbian population. They were completely resistant to all of the threats of violence and the acts of violence and the bombing, etc. And then we stopped and took a hard look at Slobodan Milosevic, who of course at the end of the day was the object of all of this effort, influencing him. And we realized that threatening his population was not, or his infrastructure, was not what was going to cause him to turn. And then, so we did a study on his, what they call the crony network. So all of his supporters. So thinking more like a politician than a soldier, I suppose. And after we did that, we understood what mattered to them, and then we started striking things that mattered to them. And they then influenced him and said, hey, you're going to have to sue for peace here, buddy. Because you're costing me money or you're, you know, I'm losing in ways that are not acceptable to me. And you do that enough and that political leader is going to begin to change his behavior. We didn't undertake the war in Iraq with that level of understanding of Saddam, certainly. And we didn't have the right understanding of the social, cultural, ethnic, sectarian realities of Iraq either. And it took us a long time to gain a sense for that. And part of that is, you know, we spent 10 years looking at Iraq, but mostly counting things, not understanding the people. And that's not something that's solely limited to the soldiers, you know, military leaders. You know, the Kerr report that the CIA did has a great kind of two conclusions, which I think are very illustrative, speaking mostly about the policymakers, but also senior military leaders. Their analytical intelligence that was developed by people who understood social, cultural issues, populations, et cetera, and had spent decades, in some cases, studying Iraq and Arab tribal issues and things like that, was almost probably about 60, 40, 70, 30 right and was almost always dismissed by senior leaders. Conversely, the technical intelligence, which was probably 40, 60 right or 60% wrong, was almost always accepted by the policymakers. And so we were making decisions based on things we could see, not an understanding of the people we were trying to deal with. So in the execution of the invasion of Iraq, we perfectly executed the plan, hit all the objectives, struck all the targets, et cetera, got to Baghdad, statue fell, and then we were there for seven more years. Because it took us that long to understand what we really had to do to influence the population. And it started with our misunderstanding of Saddam's priorities. You know, there's a great study done by another think tank, sorry, IDA, in conjunction with the Joint Forces Command when it still existed, called Iraqi Perspectives. And they go through Saddam's, you know, kind of lists of priorities. And so you often, you know, certainly in the early days, well, why didn't Saddam confess he didn't have weapons of mass destruction? Because we weren't his number one priority. His number one priority were the Iranians. His number two priority was maintaining his own position within Iraq and having weapons of mass destruction was a big, you know, that was an acoustic for him to have. And his number three priority was deterring the Israelis. And his number four or five on the, you know, so we were down there in his list of, but we didn't understand it. We had no understanding of that. Had we had done that, we might have been able to do something in a different way and been smarter about it. So, how is this manifesting itself in strategic warfare? So, as you know, they wrote a white paper. And I just, the first thing I want to say is the fact that the Chief of Staff of the Army, and the Commander of USOCOM, all signed the same document is progress. So, and part of that manifest, as I say, of that experience of being more closely intertwined over the last ten years. And since then, we have been exploring, you know, a little more quietly than what we did last year as we rolled this idea out, the underlying ideas to develop a concept that we can all align against and begin to work through the process. Because in order for us to get after particularly this understanding of the human centered nature of conflict, whether it's violent conflict or just, you know, deterrence or whatever it may be, we're going to have to get our act together. I say ours, I'm talking about the military. And then we're going to have to get, the conceptual space allows us to have a discussion without getting into some of the challenges that doctrine often provides us. And if we can gain a consensus through that process, then developing doctrine will be a little easier, I believe. And then once we have a doctrinal foundation, we'll be in a better position to advocate for a stronger consideration of this in strategy and policy documents and direction that we get back. And that I think is probably the most important long-term outcome of this is to rebalance our thinking in that regard. So we have the beginnings of a concept that we think we'll publish early next year. It is really built around two big ideas beyond this human piece that I've already talked about. And one is that we've got to be persistently engaged around the world and we call that maneuvering strategically. And so you've got to invest in the places that are important to you and in some cases, the places that are not. The relative level of investment is obviously going to be driven by interest. But the more that you're out there in that environment, particularly given some of the trends that I talked about earlier and especially this interconnection of people, there's a lot of noise in the global community. And so being down at the local and regional level allows you to separate the signal from the noise and maybe anticipate problems or better develop partners in a particular region to take care of problems for themselves. That interaction and understanding that acculturation that I talked about should then allow us to develop leaders and eventually our senior-most leaders or sustain the understanding we have today in ways where we are able to give better military advice at the most senior levels, develop more or better informed plans, plans that are developed based on a better understanding of the regions that we may have to operate in. We frankly have a more intelligent application of force. Again, whether it's to relieve suffering or to compel behavior. It's that last piece when you transition from what we'll call tolerable instability because we're not going to create world peace, I don't believe. But we can, I think, be an important contributor to maintaining a degree of stability that is useful to U.S. interests and those of our allies. But there will be points where that stability is not going to be sustainable. And it's our ability to rapidly transition into an expeditionary maneuver approach that will be important to be able to influence events at speed because when you think about how quickly the Arab Spring unfolded, if you think about how quickly events occurred in Ukraine, how quickly things have changed in Syria and Iraq, our ability to be agile not only mentally but also physically is going to be increasingly important so that we can get on top of events as part of a coherent political-military response to challenges around the world. So is that the strategic maneuverability is one of the big ideas? And an expeditionary maneuver. The transition. But it's informed as a key thing. We don't want to walk into something uninformed. There are some parts, places around the world where we're pretty well informed. Northeast Asia, Korea is a great example of that. We have not had a war there in the last 70 years. That's the ultimate outcome and the desired outcome of maneuvering strategically is to be able to mitigate conflict trends and prevent the really big things from happening. And then you'll have to deal with all the others, the lesser included cases. And I think from that perspective, bringing the Marines, the Army and SOCOM together, kind of a common view of how to solve those problems is going to be very important. Because that gives, between the three of us, that provides a policymaker with a whole host of options to deal with challenges around the world and not within Marine Army and Special Operations Stovepipes, but in more integrated packages. If you look at how we've operated in Africa, albeit in a non-conflict environment, we've done a, I think, surprisingly good job of being very complimentary. And I say we, I'm talking about the Marines and Special Ops and the Army on that continent. And that's a near-term manifestation of what we're talking about in terms of maneuvering strategically.