I can remember one day watching a predator drone television feed come into my office and seeing a tall person who looked just like Osama bin Laden, surrounded by people who he always was surrounded by — people that had similar white robes. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind or anyone else’s mind that was Osama. The combatant commander, who had obviously the ability to go in and attack him was getting ready to do it and all of a sudden — I think probably what happened is the people we thought were Osama and his entourage must have gotten the clue that there was a drone overhead — because all of a sudden they broke into a run and the guy ran like he was an 18 year old track star. It wasn’t Osama. It was later verified it wasn’t Osama. And I looked at it, and everyone else looked at it, and we were convinced it was Osama. So, people in good faith can be wrong on things like that.

But, you’re quite right. There’s a pattern in the department, at the top level, the chairman and the chief and the Joint Chiefs will recommend some rules of engagement for a certain circumstance. It will then be sent down the chain of command and it will get to the next command level, maybe the combatant commander, and the combatant commander will look at it, and then he will not want to violate it. So he might take a little tuck in it. And then it goes down to the next level. And it’s got now it’s in a country commander. And he looks at it and he doesn’t want to break the rule so he takes a little tuck in it. You end up with four or five layers down there taking tucks and you end up with some rules of engagement that don’t look like what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the Joint Chiefs of Staff or even the combatant commander intended. Now why is that? Well, it’s fear. It’s because of our litigious society. It’s because of Congress overseeing things and having hearings.

I remember being one time with a commander out, way out in the fringes near the border in Iraq, and he was giving me a report. He told me that his people had been attacked from the Syrian border and then he very proudly said that he responded proportionately. I remember going back and talking to General Casey in Baghdad and saying, “George, here’s a man who thinks that he’s doing the right thing by responding proportionately. Now what’s that mean?”

……That if you are on the Iraq side of the border and there are some people on the other side of the border firing at you with mortars, rockets, automatic weapons, RPGs, you name it – and he thinks his job is to respond proportionately? That means eventually, some of our people are going to get killed. The people shooting are already in a defensive position. So if you respond proportionately, they fire three things, you fire three things back. Does that make any sense?