discipline in this white house. the criticism of reince priebus is that he didn t have access to the calendar. he couldn t actually marshall anything because he was given such a tight berth to move around in. you know from having meetings at the white house that sometimes you show up at the white house. there was nobody on the calendar. our own chris stirewalt had this to say about that whole mess. listen. you can t possibly be a successful chief of staff if you are not the chief of the staff. you re talking about a white house in which the president s daughter andson are top advisors. you are talking about a president who plays favorites. he has got a new communications director that apparently delights him. and so this guy gets a direct access to the president. and doesn t have to go through the chief of staff. reince priebus was not in a position to win because he had those problems. if you replicate the same problem set, it doesn t matter how good of a commander general kelly was
afghanistan is the afghan army is taking the brunt of the fight against these transnational terrorists and the tally ban. we are working with our taliban. we re working with our allies to have a more effective strategy, what are option weiss can bring to the president to be more effective in meeting the objectives in afghanistan, and what more can we ask our allies to do which we re asking them now. this is going to be consistent with the president s guidance to us. there should be thousands more troops? the president hasn t made a decision yet on the course of action. what we have done, in many cases on the north korea problem set for example, consulted across the government and with allies. the president wants to hear from our allies as well. this is a president who listens to his allies and partners. we will have an opportunity to do so at the nato summit, an opportunity at the g-7. what we will have, at the end of this next few weeks here, is an opportunity for an effective
readiness crisis in naval aviation. more than 60% of the super hornet, the f-18 on the fleet are not ready to fly today. when he said we re going to put a very big order with boeing, maybe, he s negotiating both with boeing and lockheed martin, which makes the f-35 at same time. he s pretty sh rude in that regard. when he finishes by saying, god bless boeing. i agree with dana, that s what we like the president to say. but if connects up to the 77 minutes yesterday when he talked about the mess he inherited. jim mattis general mattis, secretary mattis, made the same point in europe yesterday when he lectured nato on how only four, five of the cntries in nato were spending his 2%. he has a huge problem set. i kind of thought yesterday s press conference had its peaks and had its valleys and certainly had entertaining moments but this connects with it very much. president trump appears to be a long with governor master,there making his way across the tarmac, headed to
times. that clearly is not effective. we need a leader and a policy behind it, a warrior that doesn t want to go to war but if he s tasked to go to war we re going to go war to win. here is what he said last night congressman and what he said repeatedly while running for the white house. here is donald trump. i love the generals. i know more about isis than the generals do. believe me. they don t much because they are not winning. i mean, this is a totally stunning change, right? do you think the president elect truly respects mattis and the other generals in this country? well he respects general mattis enough to name him to the secretary defensof defense. and he knows isis, he knows the problem set and he also knows iran continues to be the number one sponsor of terrorism.
if i want to steal from you, i have to figure out how to get in take what i want and get out. if i want to attack you all i have to do is figure out where you congregate and i go there and attack you. it s much easier. colonel, a last word or anything you want to add to that concept of how anyone is to go about their business on a day-to-day basis and try to protect themselves? i just want to underscore as jonathan said how difficult this is to defend against because you can t be everywhere all the time. you can t defend every target and as you shift your focus of what you re going to defend then the attackers will simply move somewhere else. they will go where the defenses aren t. so as he says if you re targeting a stadium and they see police protecting that target they ll go somewhere else, they ll go to the mall where everybody else is at the stadium so it s a difficult problem set. lieutenant colonel francona and john thank you for talking