Senior Defense Department Official Holds Background Briefing

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Senior Defense Department Official Holds Background Briefing

SENIOR DEFENSE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL HOLDS BACKGROUND BRIEFING

NOVEMBER 27, 2007

SPEAKER: SENIOR DEFENSE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL

[*] (JOINED IN PROGRESS)

SENIOR DEFENSE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: ... things to talk to you about, just from looking at my notes.

(CROSSTALK) QUESTION: All right.

SENIOR DEFENSE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: And I'm happy to do a couple of those, if you're ready.

QUESTION: Sure.

SENIOR DEFENSE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: We're going to close the door. We'll do these the same way and we're on deep background as a Defense official and you come back to us at some point in time if there's something that you want to use on the record or whatever, a direct quote.

SENIOR DEFENSE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: Here's what I did. This is for you to take a look at. You're welcome to take as many notes on it as you want. The date is 8 August 2003, about a document that we had prepared. This is focused exclusively on major combat operations. It's not focused on the post-major combat operations. It's unclassified and it's a series of observations on the major combat operations that, if you will, ended in early May of 2003.

This was put together and we finished it sometime in mid July, I'd say. Now, this isn't the whole lessons-learned report. These are just operational insights. OK?

QUESTION: OK.

SENIOR DEFENSE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: And I had mentioned this to you because I thought you'd be of some interest. These are the types of things that we had used to talk to other people, so you're welcome to take whatever you want off of that.

QUESTION: OK. Can I talked to you about the lessons-learned process?

SENIOR DEFENSE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: . I'm trying to answer a few of the questions you asked me. And if you'd rather me answer these later, ask me the questions you want now, I can do that.

QUESTION: Well, let me see what you've got and then I can come back to these...

SENIOR DEFENSE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL: OK. One of the pieces that we had talked about before was the -- these are my notes from a trip to theater in August, for about a week, of '03. And there was a series of things that we had put together. But I told you that we had put a lessons-learned report together, which I mentioned to you, which we completed in August and then had forwarded the classified piece in a series of briefings and brought it to the secretary probably the first week in September, right after Labor Day. And then I briefed Bremer on some of the insights -- not the whole report, because he didn't have time.

And what I wanted to do was just talk to you for a couple of moments about this. Here were the big issues, and I'll just read them to you. One of them was capabilities that reached what we consider to be new levels of performance and need to be sustained and improved. One of them was human initiative and adaptability.

The only point here was one of the things that we're very good at in the military is adapting to a situation, generally, and taking initiative to fix things locally, whether you've been trained on it or not. So we went into extensive discussions on that.

The second one was commanders emergency relief program, or what I call Commanders Emergency Response Program. My notes say relief program, but that's wrong -- CERP. Now, you remember, when I talked to you before, I said to you what we learned was we were running out of confiscated I...

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