Alex Thier, the Afghanistan czar at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is leaving his post at the end of next week.

Thier, assistant to the administrator for the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs, is moving on up to head the agency's Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning, "where he will apply his expertise and leadership with Afghanistan and Pakistan more broadly across the agency," USAID spokesman Ben Edwards said.

Thier, in statement provided to the E-Ring, said, "I'm eager to take on the challenge of pushing forward the innovative and ambitious reforms the Administrator Rajiv Shah has enacted in order to increase USAID's development impact around the world. "These include partnering with local organizations to increase the long term sustainability of USAID programs as we have already been doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

Thier's deputy Larry Sampler, senior deputy assistant to the Administrator in the Office of Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs, will take over as "acting" boss.

Thier is one of the most well known names on Afghanistan in Washington, having lived there for about seven years and previously directed the Af-Pak program at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP).

His Twitter handle is even @Thierstan. Anyone who has sat with him has felt his passion for Afghanistan, and the progress one of the poorest countries in the world has made. For him, it's a far different narrative from the "progress" usually assigned to the war, instead of the country or its people.

In an email, Thier explained:

"Afghanistan and Pakistan have made enormous progress in the last few years, despite the continued challenges they face. As I transition to this new position at USAID, I am heartened by the remarkable transitions occurring in both countries. I lived through the civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and the results of our investments in partnership with the Afghan people since the fall of the Taliban have yielded enormous results by any objective indicator. Life expectancy up by 15-20 years, average incomes tripled, government revenues grown 1000% in over a decade. This came from a partnership with the Afghan people that focuses heavily on accountability and sustainability - helping the Afghans transition to a more self-sufficient and secure future. 

In Pakistan, the historic elections this week have moved that country further along a path of democracy and good governance that they will need to solve their significant economic, energy, and security challenges. We reframed our efforts in Pakistan to leverage our resources through partnerships with the government and private sector - like a program with Nestlé that is linking poor women dairy farmers with agribusiness. In both countries, we have also dramatically increased our investment and focus on women - as no country can succeed without half it's population fully engaged in the economic, social, and political life of the nation."

The Pentagon's senior policy official on Afghanistan and Pakistan is leaving his post at the end of this month.

David Sedney, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, will quit the Pentagon effective May 31, the E-Ring has confirmed. Sedney's successor will be Navy Reserve Rear Adm. Michael J. Dumont, who currently serves as chief of staff, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, and deputy chief of staff for strategy, resources, and plans at the same command. DOD policy denizen Jennifer Walsh will fill the seat in the short interim.

Dumont has extensive Af-Pak experience. He was chief of staff of the Office of the U.S. Defense Representative to Pakistan (ODRP) and then served as deputy chief of staff for stability operations at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Joint Command.

Sedney is one of the longest serving DASDs in the Pentagon's policy team and has become a regular sidekick to defense secretaries and top officials traveling through Afghanistan and the region. Previously he was the DASD for East Asia, from 2007 to 2009. In Kabul, Sedney has served as both deputy chief of mission and charge d'affaires at the United States Embassy from 2003-2004. 

Besides Princeton, Sedney also gradated from the National War College and is most likely the only person in the Pentagon -- if not the country -- who speaks Romanian, Mandarin Chinese and Azerbaijani.

"David is a national treasure in the Washington policy community," said Pentagon press secretary George Little, "and has served in an exceptional manner as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan and Pakistan.  He's held prior stints in China, Romania, Azerbaijian, and Taiwan. He'll be missed by his colleagues here and his counterparts overseas.  In particular, when it comes to Afghanistan, I've personally heard him say that our troops always come first."

  Correction: This post originally misspelled Michael Dumont's last name.

Not exactly a broken record, but for more than a year General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has found many ways to make it clear he does not want to get involved in the Syria conflict. 

February 12, 2012 - On CNN

"I think it would be premature to exclusively decide that the time for a military option was upon us."

February 14, 2012 - To the Senate Armed Services Committee

"It is a much different situation than we collectively saw in Libya. I think that's an important point to make, because we don't have as clear an understanding of the nature of the opposition."

May 28, 2012 - On CBS "This Morning"

"I think diplomatic pressure should always precede any discussions about military options. And that's my job by the way is options, not policy. And so we`ll -- we`ll be prepared to provide options if asked to do so."

June 7, 2012 - In the Pentagon

"The pressures that are being brought to bear are simply not having the effect, I think, that we intend. But I'm not prepared to advocate that we abandon that track at this point." 

July 28, 2012 - In San Francisco

"This is one where we need to continue to shape it diplomatically and economically before we would think about applying a military instrument of power."

August 31, 2012 - In London

"The issue of outcomes, I think, is the important question. And as we decide or discuss about the application of any number of means, whether it's humanitarian assistance all the way up through no-fly zones, I think we have to -- we have to understand that the -- we have to have a pretty clear view of what outcome we're seeking to achieve."

January 10, 2013 - At the Pentagon

"The -- the effort -- or the act of preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable."

March 18, 2013 - In Washington at the Center for Strategic and International Studies

"I don't think at this point I can see a military option that would create an understandable outcome. And until I do, it would be my advice to proceed cautiously."

April 9, 2013 - On Alhurra

"I have grave concerns that Syria could be a frozen conflict, if you will -- one that is in a perpetual state of conflict. ... And that is why I think that the diplomatic solution that finds an accommodation for all parties and that avoids sectarian conflict is clearly the best option."

April 16, 2013 - To the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense 

"We're prepared with options, should the -- should military force be called upon and assuming it can be effectively used to secure our interests without making matters worse. We must also be ready for options for an uncertain and dangerous future. That is a future we have not yet identified."

April 18, 2013 - To the Senate Armed Services Committee

"Before we take action, we have to be prepared for what comes next."

April 30, 2013 - In Washington at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast

"Whether the military effect would produce the kind of outcome I think that not only members of Congress but all of us would desire -- which is an end to the violence, some kind of political reconciliation among the parties, and a stable Syria -- that's the reason I've been cautious about the application of the military instrument of power.... It's not clear to me that it would produce that outcome."

Recent accusations by a federal inspector general that additional oversight was urgently needed for foreign aid flowing into Afghanistan did not sit well with officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

USAID officials argue they're on the same page with John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), when it comes to oversight concerns.

In his April quarterly report to Congress, Sopko's office frequently praises USAID's oversight efforts. But they also note examples of past or potential future misuse of taxpayer funds, such as USAID providing $179 million in funds for the 2014 elections, even though no new Afghan election laws have passed to thwart fraud. One SIGAR audit found USAID approved plans for two hospitals that could cost $18 million without ensuring future funding or that Afghans could sustain them with staffing.

In a speech this week, Sopko offered another example, arguing the Afghan electric company was not as capable as USAID had claimed. "SIGAR's audit work says otherwise," he argued.

It may be a case of dueling perspectives between a watchdog looking for imperfections and a government agency tasked specifically with sending money into some of the most imperfectly governed places on earth.

USAID spokesman Ben Edwards emailed this statement from USAID, in response to Sopko:

"USAID has a stellar record of protecting U.S. tax dollars in Afghanistan.  We have 12 years of experience implementing programs and delivering results. USAID is committed to ensuring accountability for all taxpayer funded projects.  Before giving any on-budget [direct] assistance to the Afghan government, USAID assesses the capacity of the ministries involved to properly budget for and carry out the proposed projects.  USAID utilizes robust financial controls to monitor taxpayer funds and expected outcomes.

Indeed, Afghanistan has made dramatic development progress over the past decade, which would not be possible without the help of U.S. taxpayer funding designed to improve the government's capacity to manage its own development and deliver goods and services to the Afghan people.  For example, assistance to the Afghan Ministry of Public Health has dramatically expanded access to health care-resulting in an unprecedented increase in Afghan life expectancy of 15-20 years in a decade.

The U.S. development mission in Afghanistan is not without challenges, but is necessary in order to ensure Afghanistan is no longer a safe haven for terrorists from which to attack the United States."

It seems everyone these days is clawing for a bigger piece of the Pentagon's shrinking budget pie and special operations forces (SOF) are elbowing their way to the trough.

But even elite forces need help fighting Beltway budget wars and winning battle space in the coming Quadrennial Defense Review -- the good book that informs (or at least gives cover fire) to all Pentagon spending. On Friday, Adm. Bill McRaven, head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), who has called for expanding a "global SOF network," just acquired a major ally in the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). 

The watchdog released on Friday a 125-page report, "Beyond the Ramparts: The Future of U.S. Special Operations Forces" outlining how special operations forces should use the post-war era to expand and solidify a global network with more forward basing, more personnel, more "stealthy" and appropriately SOF-like equipment, more foreign headquarters and training centers, and ... well, more of everything.

"Returning SOF to their pre-9/11 roles would undoubtedly squander what has been gained over the past decade and forfeit a major U.S. competitive advantage," writes CSBA Vice President Jim Thomas and Chris Dougherty, research fellow and 75th Ranger Regiment veteran.

CSBA tries to wrap its hands around how to expand SOF forces around the globe in an era where they also predict more restrictive rules of engagement (outside of the "hot" war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq), smaller bases, and yet far more available conventional "enabler" forces to support their missions as those wars wind down.

To get started, elite U.S. forces will need language training and more diversity. Thomas suggested sending troops abroad with "things like Rosetta Stone" books, which allow them to train and test remotely. The face of elite troops, he added, is overwhelmingly white and male, and so does not tap into America's ethnic diversity, which he called "one of the greatest strategic strengths of the United States."

It will take money. Thomas's final slide shows a tiny sliver emerging from a pie chart: it's SOF's current share of DOD's more than $600 billion budget.

But there are other reason SOF is an affordable must-have, they argued.

"We're moving toward more austere basing. The main operating bases, the Baghram's, the Balad's, and other places, we think this is largely going to be a thing of the past," said co-author Jim Thomas.

Among the recommendations: strengthening SOF commands within the regional combatant commands by adding more manning; and transferring or permitting more operational control of SOF forces from SOCOM to the regional combatant commanders.

"This has been an area that has really been neglected in the past 20 years," Thomas said. "That's starting to change now."

They called for more partner SOF training, but did not appear to have crunched the number to determine if the Pentagon has enough trainers for such a mission. Dougherty said the United States should leverage -- train the foreign trainers to train the SOF forces in their own regions.

"I think we need to stop thinking about just the number of U.S. SOF," he said.

Take a look for yourself, the report is posted at CSBA's website.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this post incorrectly attributed the Rosetta Stone and diversity quotes to Dougherty. They came from Thomas. 

As the United States was deploying destroyers, stealth bombers, and missile defense batteries around the Pacific last month as a show of force against North Korea's nuclear provocations, the Pentagon's top leaders said they had little interaction with China, alarming some senators.

But under the radar, U.S. defense and military officials were confident that Beijing understood Washington's intentions, having steadily increased the stream of communications and contact with the People's Liberation Army over the past few years. For the Pentagon's top China policy official, the trend is promising enough to leave him with a "realistic" sense that a page may have been turned and after years of fits and starts, military-to-military relations between Beijing and Washington may be reaching an even keel.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia David Helvey sat with the E-Ring on Wednesday for a rare on-the-record interview about the state of relations between the Pentagon and the PLA, and their joint role in managing the North Korean nuclear standoff of the past two months.

In March, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel used a "hotline" phone to call China's new minister of national defense, Gen. Chang Wanquan, for a 45-minute introductory conversation in which they discussed a range of issues. Hagel, according to Pentagon press secretary George Little, encouraged they keep an open dialogue about North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Helvey said they also discussed other issues. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey also used the hotline to call China's chief of the General Staff, Gen. Fang Fenghui, prior to his own visit.

"We're really looking to expand the use of this hotline just as a mechanism for direct communication between our senior leaders," Helvey said.

A strong sign of the relationship's health has been China's receptiveness to talk at all, he said.

"The Chinese have shown a willingness to discuss North Korea with us. They've taken some steps to cooperate with the international community," said Helvey, especially at the United Nations Security Council.

"These are real opportunities and interactions."

But by design, he said, during the North Korean tension most U.S. interaction with China occurred through diplomatic channels, not the Pentagon.

"Quite frankly, the military aspects of this is not something that we wanted to highlight," Helvey said.  

"We had communications certainly at my level," he explained. Helvey's job was to convey the administration's message from the Pentagon to the PLA through the Chinese defense attaché in Washington. 

"Part of what we try to do in our military channels in situations like that is to make sure we're providing the same type of message that's occurring through the diplomatic channels, so that we're presenting a unified view to the Chinese," he said, "so the military understands the same thing that the Foreign Ministry is getting."

Helvey, in return, took the People's Liberation Army's view back to Hagel at the Pentagon.

At the time, Pacific Commander Adm. Samuel Locklear raised alarms when he told the Senate Armed Service Committee he had not been on the phone with the PLA Navy to manage tensions. Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-NH, both pressed Locklear to reach out and touch someone in China.

"We're not there yet," Locklear said, at the time.

"Quite frankly it is a challenge in the relationship," Helvey said, "because our military and the Chinese military are structured somewhat differently." The PACOM commander doesn't have a direct counterpart in China, though he explained how top brass have found their way into the PLA.

"The Chinese war-fighting commands, if you were to call it that, are reflected along military regions which are organized along interior lines. So it doesn't go outside of China," he explained. Most militaries, in fact, do not have officers directly comparable to U.S. combatant commanders, who command troops deployed over vast regions of the globe.

Instead, the United States has tried to engage with several parts of the PLA in lieu of "a direct fit" by talking to regional commanders, sending Locklear and others to participate in strategic and economic dialogues, visiting Beijing, and calling on senior Chinese officers.

Since Beijing temporarily cut communications with the Pentagon during 2010, the United States and China's militaries have maintained contacts via several appointments. In 2012, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, and Adm. Locklear all visited China. Beijing sent their defense minister and a high-level uniformed deputy of strategy to Washington.

Below that senior level, at least 20 exchanges, meetings, and joint exercises occurred between U.S. and PLA military and defense officials -- events that included policy talks, the convening of a maritime working group, and even a meeting between the Pentagon's office for missing POWs and PLA archivists. National Defense University and the PLA's equivalent continued their exchanges and the National War College sent a delegation to China.

Dempsey visited China last month, and later this year Gen. Ray Odernio, Army chief of staff, and Gen. Mark Welsh, Air Force chief of staff, have scheduled China trips. On the docket are port visits, exchanges of military legal teams, a disaster management exercise, and more academic exchanges.

This summer, Under Secretary of Defense Jim Miller, the policy chief, will attend another round of annual consultative talks.

Outside of the bilateral relationship, Helvey said the Pentagon continues to encourage China to participate more in multilateral venues, "to become part of the international system, part of the international framework that supports stability, peace, prosperity."

But so far, it still makes news if China sends even small delegations to major military exercises, like RIMPAC, or conferences, like the Shangri-La Dialogue.

"I think it's been incremental," Helvey said. "It's something that I think we're going to have to continue working."

But he sees opportunity in the PLA's own global plans. PLA leaders have tasked its force to go beyond regional missions, Helvey notes (as does the Pentagon's latest China power report, released last week), from counter-piracy in the Gulf of Aden to evacuating civilians in Libya. China now deploys more U.N. peacekeeping troops than any other permanent Security Council member.

"From our perspective, if China's going to be out there using its military forces -- deploying them farther and farther away from China -- to the extent that we can encourage them to cooperate with the international community, I think that helps to bring us toward that positive outcome in the relationship that we seek."

"We want to be able to develop a positive, cooperative, comprehensive relationship with China. There's a role for having a healthy, stable, reliable military-to-military relationship, and that's what we want to do," he said.

Still, there are skeptics who remain less than eager to lock arms with the PLA. Just last year, China often was painted as a rival, even an enemy, in a heated presidential campaign. But Helvey persists.

"The U.S.-China relationship is complex," he said. "It is very complex, but a critically important relationship. I think the military-to-military relationship has improved, but I think we have very real expectations of what we can get out of it." 

Friction is, he said, "inevitable." 

"The relationship now is probably as good as it's been in recent memory."

The goal remains to be able to weather those storms without another military-to-military blackout.

"We have realistic expectations."

The U.S. government's watchdog over taxpayer money in Afghanistan today will deliver a clear and sobering message: if Kabul is unable to do a better job safeguarding and spending the billions in U.S. funding coming its way, Washington should shut its wallet.

"We need to have the courage to withhold funding if progress is not made by the Afghan government," Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko will say in a speech he is scheduled to deliver at the New America Foundation on Wednesday, according to an advance copy provided exclusively to the E-Ring. 

Sopko since last summer has turned in a steady stream of reports finding millions of dollars from the Defense Department, State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development going to waste. The offenses range from poorly designed and managed reconstruction projects on the U.S side to lax oversight by Afghan government offices. In the SIGAR's latest quarterly report to Congress, Sopko trains his sights on direct foreign assistance delivered through USAID, and questions the Afghan government's ability to maintain safeguards over the cash influx.

"And, more importantly, USAID must be willing to stop funding Afghan ministries if they do not live up to these safeguards," Sopko will say.

UPDATE: SIGAR Going After ANSF

Sopko also announced in his speech that the SIGAR for the rest of this year will focus its auditing power on measuring the state of security in Afghanistan. That mission may seem far afield from usual inspector general bean counting. But the effectiveness of any U.S. funding is dependent, Sopko said, on the U.S. effort to stand up the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

"Because of SIGAR's ongoing concerns with the ANSF," he said, "SIGAR is building a body of work to eventually answer the ultimate question - are the Afghan National Security Forces ready?"

The E-Ring reported last week that SIGAR found the ANSF was 20,000 people short of its personnel goals. "The number of troops ready for duty is even lower when you consider AWOL employees, desertions, and ghost employees," Sopko said on Wednesday.

But those numbers are a guess, at best, due to poor recordkeeping, which means the true U.S. cost for supplying, training, and maintaining Afghan forces is unknown.

"The DOD told SIGAR there is no way to validate the ANSF's personnel numbers," he said, "often derived from reports prepared by hand by Afghan troops. It is hard to know if the afghan army and police are ready if we don't know how many troops are available to fight insurgent forces."

Sopko also warned that next year's parliamentary elections may prove to be no more legitimate that the last round, which was marred by fraud. Afghans have not changed their elections laws, leaving the process open to continued voter fraud, ballot box stuffing and fake voter identification cards, he alleged.

"Unless we fix problems like these before the 2014 presidential election, the Afghan people may have powerful reasons to question the results."

President Barack Obama tore into U.S. troops who commit sexual assault for "betraying the uniform that they're wearing," on Tuesday, responding to a recent spate of criminal allegations currently commanding headlines and attention in Congress. 

Obama said he has told the Pentagon's highest chain of command that he has "no tolerance for this." In a press conference at the White House just minutes before the Pentagon was to release its latest report to Congress, the president called for more than just words.

"I expect consequences. So -- so I don't want just more speeches or, you know, awareness programs or training, but ultimately folks look the other way. If we find out somebody's engaging in this stuff, they got to be held accountable, prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged -- period."

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, later said, "We know we've got big problems." Hagel vowed to hold commanders accountable for sexual assault in the ranks.

The president's statement comes hours after a heated hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee where Air Force leaders were grilled over the sexual assault issue. Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., said the DOD report issued today reveals there are 70 sexual assaults each day involving military personnel, and called it a "plague" among the Armed Forces.

The president's comments come one day after it was revealed that the top Air Force officer in charge of sexual assault prevention was arrested over the weekend for sexual battery. Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinksi allegedly was drunk when he groped a female who alerted police, in Crystal City, Virginia, near the Pentagon.

Here is the president's full quote:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, let's start with the principle that sexual assault is an outrage. It is a crime. That's true for society at large, and if it's happening inside our military, then whoever carries it out is betraying the uniform that they're wearing. And they may consider themselves patriots, but when you engage in this kind of behavior, that's not patriotic; it's a crime. And we have to do everything we can to root this out.

Now, this is not a new phenomenon. One of the things that we've been trying to do is create a structure in which we're starting to get accurate reporting. And up and down the chain, we are seeing a process, a system of accountability and transparency so that we can root this out completely. And this is a discussion that I had with Secretary Panetta. He had begun the process of moving this forward. But I have directly spoken to Secretary Hagel already today in indicating to him that we're going to have to, you know, not just step up our game; we have to exponentially step up our game to go at this thing hard.

And for those who are in uniform who've experienced sexual assault, I want them to hear directly from their commander in chief that I've got their backs. I will support them. And we're not going to tolerate this stuff. And there will be accountability.

If people have engaged in this behavior, they should be prosecuted. And anybody in the military who has knowledge of this stuff should understand this is not who we are. This is not what the U.S. military is about. And it dishonors the vast majority of men and women in uniform who carry out their responsibilities and obligations with honor and dignity and incredible courage every single day.

So bottom line is I have no tolerance for this. I have communicated this to the secretary of defense. We're going to communicate this again to folks up and down the chain in -- in areas of authority. And I expect consequences. So -- so I don't want just more speeches or, you know, awareness programs or training, but ultimately folks look the other way. If we find out somebody's engaging in this stuff, they got to be held accountable, prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged -- period. It's not acceptable.

The U.S. Army's top officer said that force readiness is "degrading significantly" enough that if President Barack Obama decides to put boots on the ground in Syria, soldiers may not be fully prepared for the job if they don't move out by the end of this summer.

Gen. Ray Odierno, Army chief of staff, said he believes the Free Syrian Army will prevail because the rebels have been able to win and hold territory.

"I kind of believe its not a matter of if, it's a matter of when," Odierno said of the FSA's chances to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

From a military perspective, Odierno did not offer advice to the rebels, which the U.S. support officially and with non-lethal aid, but said he was encouraged by what they've been able to accomplish against Syria's forces.

"I think from what I've seen is they have made some significant gains. I think they are controlling the territory. It makes you think that, you know, it's going to be difficult for the regime over time to survive," Odierno said, at a Defense Writers Group briefing with reporters in Washington, on Tuesday.

Odierno cautioned, however, that training cutbacks due to the sequester mean that, within months, the Army will be less prepared for a ground intervention.

"Its a matter of us having the dollars to make sure they are ready and trained to meet such a contingency in Syria."

"Readiness is OK right now, but it's degrading significantly because our training is reducing. So, the next three, four months, we probably have the capability to do it," he said, of a Syrian incursion. "Next year, it becomes a little bit more risky."

"If you ask me today, we have forces that can go. I think it will change over time because the longer we go cancelling training and reducing our training, the readiness levels go down."

When readiness falls, he warned, risk inevitably goes up.

"What is the risk? The risk is lives."

Odeirno said that while Pentagon continues to present President Obama options for Syria, including acting unilaterally or in an international coalition, he's more concerned about the future facing the region.

"What I worry about is the next day. So, when it happens, what happens the day after?" he said. "To me, that's important, what happens to Syria."

"Nothing happens independently in the Middle East. What's the impact on Israel? What's the impact on Lebanon? What's the impact on Jordan," he said, mentioning Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, as well.

"If we don't get this right, what happens the day after ... could change the whole face of the Middle East, or it could go smoothly," he speculated. "How do we from an international coalition try to make this happen in such a way where we don't create incredible instability once Syria falls. That's what I worry about."

Add the use of chemical and biological weapons to his list of concerns.

"There's lots to worry about," Odierno said. "For me, it gets very, very messy."

There's one more layer to the Syria mess that complicates any outcome, said the Army chief: terrorists in the rebel ranks. 

"With the rebels, we do know there's some terrorists in there," Odierno said. "Obviously, we don't want them to be involved in the outcome, we don't want them to gain power because of the impact they could have on the rest of the region -- regionally and then potentially internationally."

What's going on in this photo of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel greeting Secretary of State John Kerry at the Pentagon?

The two men met at the Pentagon for the first time since taking office in the new Obama administration, marking the first time that two Vietnam combat veterans held those positions. Hagel presented Kerry with a print of a painting from the Navy's collection depicting two Navy Patrol Craft Boats on the Mekong River Delta, from 1968. Another term for those type of vessels: swift boats.

For more photos, and a look at the painting, click here.

Just because the United States is gaining energy independence from foreign oil doesn't mean the Pentagon shouldn't remain on mission to secure energy supplies.

That's the argument made in a new book by Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of its program on energy security and climate change. The book, Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future, was released Thursday.

"Achieving American energy self-sufficiency wouldn't make us independent in the way that people would like to think it would," Levi told the E-Ring, in an interview Friday. And, he added, it won't decrease U.S. vulnerability in energy or other areas. 

Since most national security wonks are not energy wonks, and vice versa, we'll allow Levi (who might be a triple wonk: he studied string theory at Princeton and his last book was on nuclear terrorism) to explain. He argues that the United States still remains so tied to the decades-old global oil-supply market that only a significant drop in total U.S. energy consumption would do anything real to free the United States from foreign security concerns.

"We've accepted the reality of an interdependent global oil market. We've encouraged the development of a flexible markets so that if supplies in one place go away, we can get supplies from someone else. We still stock strategic petroleum reserves, large stocks of oil that we can put on the market to make up for losses if they happen -- and that's all made us more secure. But what it also means is that we are much more integrated."

"If we somehow became self-sufficient in oil and things went haywire in Saudi Arabia, the price of oil would spike here too," Levi said, "and we would suffer economically and we would still be entangled in those events." 

Consider the Libyan crisis, Levi noted, when the price of oil rose in the United States as much as it did in the Middle East.

Several studies by RAND Corporation and others have tried to quantify how much the U.S. military spends on protecting energy supplies and traffic, such as sea lanes. Those studies end up informing arguments that energy independence can be a quick money saver for the Pentagon. Levi says that's wrong.

As the United States weans itself from foreign oil, he said, the Pentagon may want to changes its mission or focus in relation to energy, but "it shouldn't be driven by a mistaken belief that we no longer need to worry about the security of energy supplies."

It may come as no surprise, then, that Levi supports the Obama administration's use of the Defense Department to fund the development of an alternative energy market.

"I think it would be mistake for the U.S. to spend less in those areas," he said.

"One of the lessons we known from the history of the Defense Department is that government involvement in big tech innovations can often yield really important advances," he argued. "And energy has the potential to be yet another example."

"The Defense Department can take a longer view of things than the typical private investor, it can operate at a larger scale than a lot of private investors, and it can be patient. And that's important." 

Additionally, there's something intangible to be said for seeing the Navy's "Green" F/A-18 Super Hornet fly on biofuels.

"Its hard for people to think that biofuels are a silly thing for people to play around with when military jets can fly on them. There is habit in the energy world of thinking about alternative sources of energy as somehow inferior and weaker. And it may just be a level of perception to say that when the military uses these things, it boosts their credibility, but perceptions matter a lot."

At the British ambassador's residence in Washington, British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond sat with the E-Ring the for an exclusive one-on-one discussion about the United Kingdom's defense priorities and challenges amid shrinking military budgets, the threats along NATO's Middle Eastern and North African boundaries, and its role in collective security post-Afghanistan.

In 2010, nearly 20 percent of the British army was still in Germany, manning heavy armor against a Cold War threat from the Soviet Union. Today, the United Kingdom wants to build a more affordable, yet shared defense. That requires Hammond to convince European NATO partners to do more while convincing the Pentagon to treat its allies more as partners in collective security, rather than as add-ons to its missions.

The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

E-RING: I'd like to talk about how you see the U.K.'s role in interoperability or "Smart Defense" for Europe and beyond, elsewhere in the world. What are some of your ideas of where the U.K. should be or doesn't need to be? But in the immediate future, Syria and the possible responses to come brings about the criticism of Libya, and what capabilities Europe was exposed to have lacked: ISR, tankers --

HAMMOND: We have not fixed those problems. In our own case, we're well on the way to fixing our tanker capability problem. We're still using, at the moment, 50-year old VC-10s but they're -- within the next 12 months, maybe sooner, they will have been replaced by the new air-to-air refuelers that we've bought. They're already in service in their trooping role, but there are still some teaming problems on the air-to-air refueling thing which we're confident are now solved. So that's a work in progress. But as of right now, we in the U.K., and certainly across Europe, still have a lack of the air-to-air [capability].

E-RING: Refuelers are a good example. How long before those become fully operational and your pilots are trained?

HAMMOND: The pilots are trained already. It's a technical problem around the basket and we're not fitting a U.S. basket. The program slipped, I mean, these aircraft should have been in service now. The VC-10 should have gone out of service before its 50^th anniversary. [The first should be ready by September and fully operational by March.]

E-RING: With the downsizing and defense budgets, realistically what is the plan to correct those wrongs, if you call them, the capabilities that Europe didn't have? Or is that not the plan, is there a sense of, well this is what the Americans are going to provide so we're going to provide something else?

HAMMOND: No, there's not a sense of that. The most important thing is the planning. It's the NATO planning process and looking at the overall capability that European NATO needs to be able to field and making sure that in the next planning framework horizon we get the capabilities we need, we deal with the surpluses. Because the truth is, we have surplus capabilities in some areas and inadequacies in other areas, and it's about shaping the pattern of investment across the alliance to address those gaps, those inadequacies, and to do it efficiently by collaborating together, "pooling and sharing" where that's possible. Although, "pooling and sharing" is a term that's been coined and frequently used and is not so easily delivered into an operational context.

E-RING: That was my immediate thought. How long does it take to do this?

HAMMOND: I think our approach, the U.K.'s approach, is so long as we sit around a very big table talking about "pooling and sharing," nothing will happen. So our preference is to start doing some small bilateral deals with individual partners and allies where we have sensible arrangements that we can build or build on. In fact, you got those things we already do, long before the term "pooling and sharing" was invented, that we can build upon.

But the real key, the real win here, as NATO has to address trying to do the same with less, is driving deployability and operability -- effectiveness of NATO forces. Of course there's an issue, as [former U.S. Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates very clearly pointed out, about inadequate budget contributions in European NATO countries. I wouldn't for a moment dispute that. I would caution about putting too much hope on being able to resolve that in any time soon, or maybe in any time, absent a major shock of the scale of 9/11 to the system. [It] isn't clear to me what would persuade European public opinion to devote greater proportions of national resources to defense.

But there is huge headroom, even within the money we're spending now, which is too little -- but even within that, vast amounts of it are wasted. They're wasted because of national duplication. They're wasted because they're being spent on the wrong things: excessive force size without deployable capability. I'm thinking of some allies in particular, where a focus on reshaping how we spend the budgets [inaudible] to smaller more deployable, more agile forces properly equipped for the kinds of tasks we need to do [that are] interoperable with the U.S. so that they can effectively deploy alongside either a U.S-led operation, or an Anglo-French led operation if it is a European-only mission. That is the way to go, and we have quite a lot of headroom within the NATO and European budget. Yes, it's a small -- too small budget overall. But if you walk through that budget and scrubbed all the stuff on which we are spending money that delivers no real military effect at all, you would find that you have a large pot which was usable to deliver real effect.

E-RING: So, thinking of public opinion, the desire to spend on defense, there's a sense here that over the last few years as the U.S. withdraws out of Afghanistan and draws down its own budget, one of the things debated is pulling somewhat out of Europe and asking Europe, per Gates' speech, to pay for its own defense a little more. But is there really that desire in Europe to have more? To have a bigger military? The kind of military the Americans envision? Or is there a sense in Europe that a much smaller vision of that is okay? That we're comfortable with our defense, we're comfortable saying out loud, as you just did [in an earlier media roundtable], that we don't see state-on-state war happening with a Russia, so we're going to give up that entire capability?

HAMMOND: It's not a homogeneous picture. The further east you go, the more of the concern remains that we should be prepared for a -- maybe not full-blown state-on-state conflict -- but we need to be prepared to protect the borders of NATO against incursions, probings, mischief-making, ethnic trouble.

If you go to Poland, for example -- you probably in your daily life are not focused on the Kaliningrad enclave -- but if you go to Poland to talk about defense, the Kaliningrad enclave is the number one issue on the Polish agenda. So I think we have to recognize that many of the Eastern European partners joined NATO as an insurance policy against Russia, and now they are slightly alarmed at seeing NATO turning away from Russia to focus on other threats, including asymmetric threats.

So there's definitely not a single European view of this. But the further away you get from Russia -- so this is not just an East European/West European question. The Norwegians are closer to the Poles' thinking than they are on our thinking on this. But the further away you get, and certainly by the time you get to the U.K., the idea that somehow we need to configure ourselves to be dealing with the Russian threat doesn't feel very real to public opinion. Although, of course at a strategic level, the Russians do still pose the most credible potential threat.

E-RING: So you have a lot to balance. East versus West, state-on-state versus asymmetric, and then you just mentioned the strategic deterrent. Going back to the budget, the New York Times just questioned the value of the Tridents.

HAMMOND: Well, we consider it has a very high value. We have no intention of giving up our independent nuclear deterrent. And that is not the view -- the New York Times' opinion is not the view of the U.S. administration, which places a high value on having a second nuclear deterrent within NATO.

But it is clear that when we talk about how we configure European NATO defense, we have to be clear what we're trying to defend against -- where the threat is coming from. Certainly among most NATO countries, we see the most immediate threat being from North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East region and delivered in the form of an asymmetric threat, terrorist-based threat, rather than state-on-state warfare. Although, Libya, Syria, Iran are reminders state actors can have an important role to play.

So, I think it's wrong to think about the debate in Europe as whether we put more troops in Europe to replace U.S. troops being taken out of Europe. The debate we should be having is whether European NATO is prepared to extend its focus of operations into an area where traditionally the Americans have led -- in the Middle East, Near East, Horn of Africa, North Africa.

And there are some political challenges. Britain and France recognize this demand and recognize our responsibilities in those regions. There will be some issues, some challenges where U.S. leadership is always required -- Iran, Syria. There will be others -- Mali, for example -- where it is possible for the Europeans to do things without active U.S. engagements. Certainly without U.S. leadership.

But we also have to recognize that some of the European partners are not yet at the point where they can embrace this agenda for political reasons -- most obviously Germany. The idea of -- NATO is well established in the German public's mind, and well understood and well accepted. But as we move NATO to look more like the basis of expeditionary forces into areas like North Africa, Horn of Africa, this becomes much more difficult for some of the allies.

And this is not a static position. Germany's government position has evolved dramatically over the last 20 years. I mean, if you had said 20 years ago the Germans would have 1,000 troops dug in, in the middle of Central Asia somewhere conducting combat operations, nobody would have even believed that was even conceivable, and yet now it's -- I won't say it's popular in Germany but it's accepted by the German public that Germany has to engage in these types of operations. But this is work in progress, it may take another 20 years to get Germany to the place where we'd ideally like it to be.

E-RING: Give us a sense of British support of the military back home. Is there a sense of good feelings or reestablishment coming off of Afghanistan that the British military that is well respected, hundreds of years old, with a purpose? Or is there a conflict? Look at America's pivot, rebalancing to Asia, is there no vision to be part of that, to have a more global sense beyond the Middle East and North Africa?

HAMMOND: First of all, public opinion on the backs of significant losses in Afghanistan is very favorable to the military. But public opinion distinguishes, as I suspect U.S. opinion does, between the men and women who make up the fighting force and the institution of the military, and certainly the political institutions that sit over it. The support for "our boys," as the tabloid media call them, does not translate into support for the generals and the politicians who make the decisions necessarily. There's a skepticism about the senior leadership which persists.

There is also a question mark in the minds, I think, of quite a lot of people, including military charities, about how long post-Afghanistan this hagiography will continue, this public mood of unquestioning support for the armed forces will continue. It's not a given that the public mood has shifted permanently in the favor of the armed forces.

On the question of Britain's ambitions, part of our strategic defense and security review in 2010 was about trying to be realistic about making sure that we add value in what we do. In many cases, that will be adding value to U.S. operations. We expect to operate normally in partnership, and most likely in partnership with the U.S. So we're focused on making sure that we deliver components of a combined force which will have real value to our allies -- genuine interoperability and niche skills and capabilities, rather than trying to have global broad-span reach. We're too small to do that effectively and credibly.

So we will have, we do have, involvement in the Pacific, but it's very limited. We have a commitment to something called the Five Powers Defense Arrangement around the defense of peninsular Malaya. So it's Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. That's our principal defense commitment in the Asia-Pacific region.

We are an Indian Ocean nation, in the sense that we retain British Indian Ocean territory and we, therefore, own some numbers of millions of square miles of the Indian Ocean. And so we have a seat at the table when Indian Ocean matters are being discussed. But as with Diego Garcia, we try to leverage that with our allies to the maximum alliance effect. It's much more effective for the U.S. to use Diego Garcia than for us to be sitting on it. It gives more value to the alliance.

So we're trying to maintain a capability to deliver our own sovereign national tasks, including if I may make a more political point, including the defense of the Falkland Islands, where we have to assume that we do that alone. And to some extent that distorts the shape of our military. If we knew that our allies would support us were we ever called upon to defend the Falkland Islands, we would not need to shape our military in the way we do to carry out that particular national [inaudible] pretty much the rest of our military effort is focused around making the best contribution to the alliance that we are able and being as interoperable as we possibly we can with, principally the U.S., but also the French more and more.

There's a kind of hierarchy here. We seek to be interoperable with the U.S. We seek to shape our military so that U.K. units can operate effectively as part of a U.S.-led force. Other, smaller NATO partners like Denmark work with us with the same aspiration, to shape their military so that Danish units can embed with our forces and work effectively with them. So there's a kind of hierarchical structure which I think is quite practical way to do it.

E-RING: How was the recent meeting of our Joint Chiefs and yours? Is there going to be any announcement?

HAMMOND: I don't think there's to be a formal agreement. I mean, the sense was obviously it came together in the context of a very important historical event. But it was an opportunity to take stock of the extraordinary level of cooperation and collaboration we already have. I mean, it's been described -- and I would absolutely endorse this, in many areas -- the level of collaboration that we have is about as far as it is possible to go while remaining sovereign. And I think that's what we aspire to do: the maximum level of collaboration between our nations, which is compatible with maintaining our individual sovereignty.

And the chiefs certainly are energized about strengthening the possibilities for strengthening collaboration in areas where, perhaps, we've not gone as far as we can. And on both sides of the Atlantic, the chiefs are looking at some very difficult resource challenges and are seeing one strand of the solution: additional levels of cooperation.

We're very excited about the prospect that, possibly, the U.S. is willing to engage in a planning process for its capabilities that envisages incorporating the capabilities of allies into its core plan. Whereas for many years the U.S. has built its -- has used as a planning assumption that it will be fighting on its own and if allies come along then that's a bonus. The idea that we may be able to embed some core capabilities as part of U.S. planning is something that we're very enthusiastic about.

As an example, in the [Persian] Gulf, where we provide countermine capabilities as part of the combined U.S.-U.K. effort, that is a vital capability, of course, nobody can move without countermine in the kind of environment that we're looking at there. And we know that we have a task and an obligation and a responsibility by taking that on, but we have to deliver. And therefore it's a very high priority in our own spending. 

British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond said that Britain backs President Barack Obama's insistence on "conclusive" evidence that Syria used chemical weapons before moving forward with any military intervention.

The defense leader said on Thursday that Britain's physiological samples, which led them to declare that they believed sarin gas had been used in Syria, was "compelling but not conclusive" and did not meet courtroom-worthy standards required to muster international support for a military response.

"For that evidence to have any chance of being admitted in court, it would need to have been collected under controlled conditions, secured through a documented chain of custody to the point where it was tested," Hammond told a small group of defense reporters at the British Embassy in Washington. "We do not yet have samples that meet that standard of evidence."

The unknown chain of custody for that evidence, Hammond said, may impede a quick response. But while the evidence continues to be analyzed, Britain was pressing to build international legal support and authority for a military intervention, if needed. Short of that, London is already seeking legal alternatives to acting without United Nations approval, he said.

The purity of the evidence that Bashar al-Assad's forces employed chemical weapons is particularly important to convincing Russia to end their support for the regime and support a U.N. Security Council authorization of the use of force. It is also important for Arab allies in the region that likely would be called upon to join an international intervention.

For the British public, however, Hammond said the Iraq war looms large, fueling a nationwide skeptical streak about the prospect of going to war on inconclusive intelligence.

"We in the U.K. are particularly sensitive to this. There is a strong sense in U.K. public opinion that we went to war in Iraq on the back of evidence that proved not to be correct -- what in British political space is called ‘the dodgy dossier,'" he said, of the Bush administration's claim of Iraq's imminent use of weapons of mass destruction.

Hammond said he does not know what evidence the United States may possess in addition to what Britain has shared, but that he would discuss it with U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon, later on Thursday.

"I don't think there is a gap between us," Hammond said of the evidence. "I think we're now in a place where we both recognize that there is compelling but not conclusive evidence that chemical weapons have been used."

"We need hard evidence. The kind of evidence that would be admissible in court," about what, when, where, and by whom, said Hammond. "We don't yet have evidence that would pass our own legal systems tests."

In the meantime, Britain will continue to pressure the Syrian regime to allow in U.N. inspectors to establish "definitively" if chemical weapons had been used. [The team, however, has a goal to determine if chemicals were used, not necessarily the custody chain.

Hammond showed no movement toward providing direct lethal aid to the Syrian rebels.

"No decision to provide lethal aid has yet been made," he said. No options are off the table, either, but Britain is giving all it can, he said.

"We are currently providing support to the [rebels] right up to the maximum level that we can without crossing the line into lethal aid." Britain most recently provided armored 4x4 vehicles, body armor, and night vision goggles. 

Hammond also defended Obama's "red line" over the use of chemical weapons and the international community's right to deliberate over a larger military intervention in Syria. An estimated 70,000 Syrians already have died in conventional fighting.  

"Use of chemical weapons is specifically illegal under international law. It is a war crime, and therefore it takes the level of culpability of the regime to a new level. It crosses a new threshold."

If the U.N. is unable to pass a resolution, Britain is preparing other legal frameworks to act on its own, if needed.

"We are exploring other options under British interpretation of international law, under the doctrine of humanitarian necessity, which may allow us scope to act," he said. That unilateral determination was Britain's justification for military action in Bosnia, he said.

Hammond reiterated that due to sensitivities of "the neighborhood" and Russia, Middle Eastern countries must take a role in any military response, as well as in helping crafting a political future for a Syrian opposition that the West can support. 

With the U.S. drawdown from Afghanistan underway, Afghans are leaving their security forces faster than Americans and NATO allies can recruit them.

International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) officials confirmed on Wednesday that Afghan recruiting has slowed since last year, citing an unexpected level of attrition, or troops exiting the ranks, in the Afghan army.

The U.S. government's lead watchdog over wartime spending, John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), sounded an alarm in his latest quarterly report to Congress, released on Tuesday. Spoko said that ANSF troop totals had fallen by 4,000 last year and were 20,000 short of the end-strength goal of 352,000 personnel.

U.S. officials long have stated that a key factor governing the yet-to-be-determined speed and size of the American troop withdraw is the ability to stand up in their stead the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), which includes military and police personnel. 

"Lower recruitment, coupled with several months of higher than average levels of attrition in the ANA [Afghan National Army], resulted a net decrease," ISAF said, in a statement provided to the E-Ring through Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Bill Speaks.

As of March 2013, the ANSF stood at 336,365 personnel. ISAF said as the total ANSF nears its 352,000 end-strength target, "fluctuation" was expected and "recruitment targets were lowered to slow growth."

"While the coalition and the Afghan government have placed a ceiling of 352,000 on the total strength of the ANSF," ISAF argued, "the focus of the training mission is now on the quality of the force; developing the right balance of seniority, skills, and specialization that are vital to their long term sustainability and success."