paint both sides into a bit of a corner. what you're looking at is looking at a way in which these folks are going to the brink in terms of the rhetoric, they are ratcheting things up basically beyond a 10 at this point when talking about each other and theoretically to each other, but they're doing it, of course, through public media and they're doing it in a way that clearly shows that they want to get inside each other's heads, they want to actually probably develop something that allows them to work political positions for their own domestic consumption and both have domestic constituencies, so that is something that i think is really serious in this case because i think it increases the risk of a miscalculation and that to me is the most dangerous part. >> so barbara starr at the pentagon, what predicament situation, position, does all of this rhetoric back and forth put general mattis? >> well, defense secretary