david rodriguez

So: $25 billion, five years and 17,000 U.S. trainer troops to yield 400,000 total Afghan soldiers and cops. That’s Center for a New American Security president John Nagl’s estimate of what it’ll cost to double the size of Afghan security forces, Bloomberg’s Indira A.R. Lakshmanan reports. Next week, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces [...]

Nancy Youssef at McClatchy reports that Defense Secretary Bob Gates has ordered incoming Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his deputy, Gen. David Rodriguez, to spend 60 days reviewing war strategy. The task is nothing new for McChrystal, who just finished a different review of war strategy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff earlier this [...]

To adapt, clumsily, one of the more memorable quips of what used to be called the War on Terror: in Afghanistan, we set up the military command structure that we can, and in Iraq, we set up the military command structure that we must. Except maybe not anymore. (You see that piece of writing right [...]