Transcript
MR. KENNETH M. POLLACK: Thank all of you for joining us. As Kim indicated, this is Ken Pollack, Director of Research at the Saban Center, and also a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policies Studies at Brookings. We?re delighted you?re with us and, of course, I?m delighted to be joined by Michael O?Hanlon, also a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, and one of our best known experts on military and strategic affairs. I will start with some opening remarks, then Mike will have an opportunity to do the same, and then we?ll open it up to questions. We?re hoping to keep as much time for questions as possible.
Without any further introduction, let me start by making some opening remarks to kind of set the scenes. First, overall the sense that I have is that the military campaign is proceeding basically according to plan. That what we?ve seen so far in terms of the progress of U.S. troops is essentially what you U.S. CENTCOM had projected. In some cases I think that it?s going a bit ahead of schedule.
Obviously, the number of casualties is not insignificant, but it is not significant in military terms. What is important is that we distinguish between what are obviously personal tragedies, but not necessarily operational setbacks, and so far what we?ve seen principally are personal tragedies not operational setbacks. I don?t think that any of the number of casualties was unexpected for U.S. Central Command, nor do I think that any of the instances, any of the encounters that we?ve seen so far, are somehow out of the range of expectation for U.S. Central Command.
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