Our Marine captain who asked for career advice writes to summarize the incoming he got from youse:

After Tom posted my previous email on Friday, I was taken aback with the sheer volume of great emails and blog comments on the matter (at last count, 25 emails and 23 comments). I suspect I am not the only Best Defense reader in this position, so I've compiled some of the general trends of advice that I've received.

As a first point, almost EVERYONE recommended taking time off to decompress and relax before beginning school or work (or at least no one recommended against taking time off). Most valuable were the comments from former officers who jumped immediately from their July EAS into an August start for work or school and found it miserable. The general consensus seems to be that anyone separating from the military should take two to three months before jumping into the civilian world to allow for a clean mental and spiritual break. The recommendations for how to use this time included international travel, bike trips, road trips, spending time with family, reading, introspection, and anything else that was difficult to accomplish while on active duty.

After the consensus on taking some time off, the advice on internships split roughly 50/50 between an internship in government and the private sector. This split was interesting and unexpected, both because I never mentioned any interest in the private sector (although I am interested, as the business school admission may have indicated) and because I would have expected advice from Best Defense readers to skew more towards the DOD than it did. Several emails recommended specifically against any government internships, if for no other reason than to allow for a cleaner transition from active duty to civilian life. For those who did recommend an internship in the public sector, Congress was the clear favorite, with the Senate specifically mentioned as a better option than the House. Some responses implied that these positions were very difficult to obtain and that a clearance would not transfer, while others said the exact opposite. I'm not sure who is correct, so maybe someone with more experience on Capitol Hill can provide some commentary.

You can post comments below, or if you like, write to him directly at andrew.bestdefense@gmail.com.

I am an active duty Marine Corps Captain, and a regular reader of your blog. I will be separating from the military soon to attend Harvard Business School next fall. My question for the combined wisdom of your readers is what I should do with my time until school? I have some flexibility with dates, so should I stay in the Marines for a few more months of mundane admin work? Take a well-deserved long vacation after years of training and deployment? I am a signals intelligence officer with an active TS/SCI clearance, and in my perfect world would like to intern (paid or unpaid) in the DC area at the White House, Pentagon, or one of the intel agencies. Do these internships even exist? Any and all advice would be appreciated.

At a commander's call earlier this week, I am told, the new commandant of the Army War College disclosed that 10 civilian faculty members are being let go.

My PME correspondent "Alejandro" writes thusly:

"The Commandant of the Army War College, Major General Anthony A. Cucolo III, decided to reduce the personnel budget to meet this objective.  He directed that the next round of personnel cuts come directly from the Title 10 faculty -- the civilian scholars, instructors, and retired practitioners teaching the resident course.  These are the core faculty implementing the core mission of the school: educating senior leaders.

He reportedly did so in the belief that TRADOC would reject a cut to the core faculty, perhaps affecting some of the college¹s most prominent academics, thus preserve positions across the college.

His gamble failed and 10 civilian scholars, whose positions were offered up in a bureaucratic gambit, will be told this week that their appointments will not be renewed. Indeed, some may be let go sooner.

By Michael Cummings

Best Defense defense budget department

Seeking to capture the national security voting demographic, presidential candidate Mitt Romney has vowed to, "reverse President Obama's massive defense cuts." His website says it will increase Navy procurement from nine ships a year to fifteen. Most monumentally, as Travis Sharp pointed out on this blog a couple of weeks back, a Romney administration would increase defense spending to 4 percent of GDP, or around a trillion dollars a year, in ten years.

While a debate over the size of the military's budget is important, I think as a voting population we are ignoring a much bigger question: When did a really smart business person, Mitt Romney, lose his business sense?

When it came to running Bain Capital, creating Staples, or rescuing the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, businessman Romney made tough decisions -- especially when it came to cutting costs -- to strengthen bottom lines. Yet Romney refuses to apply this same fiscal acumen to the Army, Navy or Air Force.

Amazingly, for a cost-conscious fiscally minded businessman, he wants to give the military more money. Apparently, the military is the sole exception to "government is wasteful" rule that has driven his campaign thus far.

That doesn't describe the military I knew. When I was in the Army, I saw waste and, sometimes, epic inefficiencies. If candidate Romney looked at defense as a business, not a constituency to woo, his diagnosis would be simple: cut, cut, cut. I hope a would-be President Romney looks at my experience with waste in the Army -- and countless other examples from around the services -- and says, "You know what? The Pentagon doesn't need anymore money. It just needs to do a better job with what it has."

Example 1: Ammunition

From ROTC to Special Forces, commanders track how much ammunition they use. They do this for a simple reason: They need to fire it all. Even if a unit doesn't need all its ammunition, it fires it anyways. Often units conduct something called a "Spend Ex," short for "Spending Exercise." Every soldier stands in a line at the firing range. They fire as much ammunition as possible as quickly as possible. Units don't want to lose their ammo in the next fiscal year. (Ammo they didn't need the year before.)

I'll put this in "Staples" terms, in honor of Mitt Romney's most successful investment. Let's say Staples portioned out bundles of paper to each store at the beginning of the year. Each store desperately wants the same amount of paper to sell next year, so, at the end of the fiscal year, they would sell as much paper as cheaply as possible simply to make room to get paper for next year. That doesn't sound like a very smart business model.

Example 2: Deployed Contractors

When I arrived in Afghanistan, I didn't have enough equipment. Sure, my packing list filled two duffel bags, a ruck sack, and another two backpacks, but I didn't have the latest issue of body armor or cold weather clothing. So my supply sergeant and I headed to the local warehouse to get the gear. Inside, four contractors sat behind computers, working on who knows what. The whole time (which took about 45 minutes), I was the only person in line. One civilian contractor helped me while the others played computer games or fantasy football.

Maybe the Army needed four contractors because at peak hours at this warehouse on Bagram Air Field soldiers swamped the office. More likely, the Army probably bought about three workers too many. (Like the contractors employed throughout the Department of Defense.) To put this in consulting terms which Mitt Romney would understand, this is like hiring twenty consultants to do a job which only requires five. Bain Capital wouldn't stay in business very long if its customers thought it was hiring four times too many people for every job.

Example 3: Budgets

Every Army unit from top to bottom is given a bag of money at the start of the fiscal year. Then they try to spend it. Everyone in the Army believes that if they don't spend all their money, they won't get the same-sized bag the next year. (Though, for each of the last ten years, the bag has grown by about ten percent.)

At the end of the fiscal year, the Pentagon and every unit under it goes on spending sprees, buying knives, printers, and scanners to spend, spend, spend. I saw units replacing new printers with newer printers, simply to spend the money.

I will put this in Brookstone terms, another Romney success story. Let's say he gave each store a budget at the beginning of the year. What if he heard that at the end of each fiscal year, each store went on spending sprees, buying as much as they could to ensure they got the same budget the next year. Would a businessman Romney support that plan? Probably not, so why does he want to give more money to the Pentagon?

Example 4: Failed Weapons Systems

Imagine that Steel Dynamics -- a steel producer who Romney touts as the pinnacle of innovation -- needed new steel furnaces. If they were the Pentagon, they would hire a contractor and order 250 of the best prototypes they can find. This contractor would tell them the experimental furnaces cost 50 million per unit and won't be ready for ten years.

Ten years later, the furnaces still haven't been delivered. The cost is now 120 million dollars per furnace. And Steel Dynamics still pays the contractor a 600 million dollar bonus. Even better, the ovens won't be ready for six more years. If that sounds ridiculous, well, that is exactly what happened, and is still happening, with the Joint Strike Fighter. (Meanwhile, the Joint Strike Fighter's predecessor, the F-22 Raptor, still hasn't flown a single mission supporting the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya. It also poisons its pilots.)

The list of failed, over-budget or late weapons systems -- the Comanche, the Littoral Combat Ship, the Future Combat System just to start -- boggles the mind. Meanwhile, the Air Force has tried for years to kill the A-10 Warthog, a plane that literally kept me alive in Afghanistan. The Marine Corps only adopted the MRAP because of a Secretary of Defense fiat.

What Romney Actually Believes

Instead of calling for higher budgets, the Romney/Ryan team should demand the Department of Defense focus on productivity growth, efficiency, and a new culture of fiscal-minded reform -- not just by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, but by every leader from buck sergeant to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. They should demand "audit-ready" budgets. Can you imagine Bain Capital telling shareholders they don't have a budget? The problem with the Pentagon isn't the size of its budgets, it is the people making massively inefficient and wasteful decisions with taxpayer money.

Mitt Romney just needs to listen to himself. Describing the naval procurement system Romney said, "A business like that would be out of business." I agree. But the solution isn't giving the Pentagon more money, it's giving it less. Mitt Romney should make the Pentagon establish strict new efficiency goals, then use his business acumen to ensure the Pentagon does more with less, like he did as a private equity investor. To do otherwise is simply pandering to win votes.

In other words, Romney has become a politician and forgotten how to be businessmen.

Michael Cummings is veteran and a writer, who deployed to Afghanistan in 2008 with the 173rd Airborne Brigade as a platoon leader, and Iraq in 2010 with 5th Special Forces Group as an intelligence officer. He run a milblog at On Violence and currently attends the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Reacting with alacrity to Monday night's bo-ring debate, my friend Tim Noah had the gumption to find the last American who led a cavalry charge. It was Lt. Edwin P. Ramsey, in January 1942 in the Philippines. (Unless you wanna count 5^th SF Group riding with the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan in 2001, but that was more indirect approach, not conventional U.S. forces.)

Horse cavalrymen must have been pretty tough hombres. Lt. Price is now 95 years old, and hanging out in Los Angeles -- not unlike Wyatt Earp did a century ago, I guess. When the Japanese prevailed (temporarily) in the Philippines, Ramsey went underground and became a guerrilla leader.

Two possibly related questions: How many American WiFi signals can you pick up from the middle of Bagram Air Base? (A: 54.) How many Taliban WiFi signals can you pick up? (A: Zero.)

Finally, a little-known bayonet fact: O.P. Smith, one of our greatest generals and one of our most under-rated, once did a study of the use of the bayonet in World War I and concluded it was over-rated. He even interviewed surgeons about the wounds that they saw and concluded that the bayonet was actually used very little. I write a little about this in my new book, which has a chapter on him. Another little-known fact: Smith, though a Marine, studied under George C. Marshall at Fort Benning.   

By Jim Gourley and Mike Gore

Best Defense gory analysts

Last night's presidential debate on foreign policy is already old news, with most commentators hanging their hats on "horses and bayonets." History will no doubt remember these as some of the most memorable words of the campaign. But beyond declarations of winners, losers, and meme-worthy moments, the real significance of the dialogue lies in other words both spoken and unspoken.

An analysis of key terms indicates how the candidates' arguments represent the greater American dialogue on foreign policy. There were several items mentioned enough times to merit a Twitter hashtag. Others were peculiarly absent.

A foreign policy discussion usually involves relations with other countries, so it's probably most informative to assess which countries came up most often in the conversation. According to the transcript from last night's debate, the rank-ordered list is:

Iran: 47
Israel: 34
China: 32
Syria: 28
Pakistan: 25
Iraq: 22
Afghanistan: 21
Libya: 12
Russia: 10
Mali: 5
Latin America: 4
North Korea: 1
Somalia: 1
Yemen: 1
Palestine: 0
Mexico: 0
Canada: 0

It is evident that the single issue represented by tensions between Israel and Iran allow them to trump China, which presents a vast array of foreign policy challenges for the United States. It is also puzzling that Iran and Syria can be mentioned more than four and twice as many times as Russia, respectively, when that country is so instrumental in shielding them in the U.N. Security Council, not to mention its resurgence as a power broker in its own right. Afghanistan, the only country where the American military is actively engaged in a full-scale war, is number six.

Also remarkable are those left unmentioned. Completely left out of the discussion are the United States' closest neighbors, as well as Palestine, the diplomatic gravity of which is inescapable by the second-most talked about country in the debate. Especially troubling is Mexico. When one considers the political instability, rising violence and influence of the cartels, the infiltration of drug gangs into the United States, and the increasing sophistication of their networks, it is arguable that narco-terrorism to the south is a greater existential threat to national security than fundamentalist terrorism based overseas.

To further contextualize the shift in American foreign policy dialogue, we examined the transcripts for all three debates during the 2000 presidential election and select phrases in the 2008 foreign policy debate. None of the debates focused on specific issues, which led us to aggregate the total mentions in conversation. The countries, by number of mentions:

Russia: 21
Middle East: 18
Europe: 8
Africa: 7
Bosnia: 7
Mexico: 6
Iraq: 2
Canada: 2
Iran: 2
China: 1
India: 1

A comparison before and after 9/11 indicates significant changes in the dialogue. Before 2001, only two countries in the Middle East were mentioned by name in the debates. The rest were considered part of a larger amalgam. In 2012, half a dozen are mentioned by name. Though Russia is arguably as relevant today as it was then, it only received half as many by-name references in this debate. This precipitous decline in noteworthiness seems only to have occurred in the last four years. In the 2008 foreign policy debate, it was tied with Iran for most-mentioned country with 31 by-name references.

There was also no mention of Europe last night, which twelve years ago was the third-highest trending word in the debate. This is especially relevant in the context of Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite the support received from allies in both wars and the prominence of NATO's role in Afghanistan now, NATO was not mentioned a single time in this debate. In 2000 it came up fifteen times in the course of three debates.

Other proportions seem odd. Mali's name was spoken five times with regard to the emergent terrorist threat there, while Yemen and Somalia only received mention in passing despite our existent military presence there for the same reasons. Though the last combat troops were declared withdrawn from Iraq over a year ago, that country was still mentioned more times than Afghanistan. Interestingly, this is a repeat of the 2008 foreign policy debate, in which Iraq out-mentioned Afghanistan by a margin of 35 to 33. Though the fear of nuclear proliferation drove much of the conversation, North Korea was only mentioned once.

There are indications that the United States' foreign policy dialogue has been gradually yet increasingly laced with the vocabulary of fear and force. "9/11" still found its way into the debate on three occasions, while "Arab Spring" only came up once. The word "threat" was used ten times in three debates in 2000. In the 2008 foreign policy debate it surfaced 17 times. It was uttered 25 times last night. It appears that "nuclear" is the only type of threat the candidates cared to discuss. It came up 38 times during the debate, compared to only one mention apiece of cyber and space (both by the President, neither of which he elaborated on). "Military" was mentioned 49 times compared to 56 twelve years ago. Forms of "diplomacy" came up only one-fifth as many. Curiously, in the context of the looming sequestration threat, references to defense and military spending were approximately the same -- six times in 2000 versus seven times in this debate.

Still other causes for concern exist when last night's potent potables are considered in light of this decidedly economy-driven election. The word "economy" came up 25 times; the same number of mentions as "threat." But if economics are so tied to American foreign policy concerns, there is a perplexing absence of certain countries in the discussion. Mexico has already been mentioned, but India, Argentina, Japan, Germany and South Korea join it in the cast of unmentionables.

In all, the debate primarily revolved around American preoccupation with fears of imminent danger and hostility. The candidates spoke to the issues in a distinctly martial dialect. The prevalence of key terms and the glaring omission of others leads one to wonder if the candidates believe politics is the conduct of war by other means. Both candidates are certainly knowledgeable about countries and issues beyond those discussed, but their time was limited. With that said, it is a rational conclusion that the debate was limited to those items perceived as most important to the American public consciousness. Such being the case, this debate was a disconcerting indication that Americans' fixation with bayonets is more troubling than it appears.

Mike Gore is a Journalism and Communications Student at Western Washington University. Jim Gourley is Best Defense's number one commenter.

Congratulations to Fort Bragg's Sgt. Saral Shrestha.

The ability of the United States to attract talent and determination from around the world is one of its great strengths.

By Col. Jason Brown, USAF

Best Defense guest columnist

In years to come, historians will ask important questions about the role of power in the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. Specifically, they will ask how Afghanistan became America's longest war, and how we were able to invade and leave Iraq within the bookends of the Afghan conflict. It is especially hard to understand how we recovered power in Iraq after Abu Ghraib and a fractious civil war. Although arguments over what we accomplished in Iraq will endure for years, we regained enough power to leave Iraq without a debate. We subsequently attempted to carry the momentum of the Iraq counterinsurgency campaign to Afghanistan in 2009, but still struggle to achieve something resembling the ambiguous success in Iraq. The disappointment in Afghanistan goes beyond a misapplication of what worked in Iraq; the power equation between Iraq and Afghanistan was altogether different.

In war, power wins. Individuals often confuse military might with power, but in reality, there are many power factors relevant to the outcome of war. Power flows from diplomatic, political, and economic strength as well as strategic, operational, and tactical effectiveness. Sound analysis of warfare will avoid focusing on any one of these sources, and will instead examine relevant power, which accounts for the interplay of power sources within the context of conditions and rivals in a war.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, our relevant power ebbed and flowed due to changes in our power sources. We did not have adequate power to influence conditions in Iraq before 2007 due to limitations across the power spectrum, from diplomacy to military tactics. Changes in leadership and an effective counterinsurgency campaign adjusted our relevant power to influence the human terrain, the adversary, and the diplomatic and political environment. While many credit the increase in U.S. troops as the key factor in the Iraq campaign, in reality political settlements with the Sunni population, a counterproductive terror campaign by Al Qaeda, and the decision by Iran to no longer incite Shia resistance had greater impacts on stability and thus increased the coalition's relevant power. As conditions changed in Iraq, military coercion became relevant when we coupled it with an acceptable political alternative. In contrast, increasing economic pressures, tensions with Iran and Pakistan, and corruption within the Karzai government have likely created insurmountable conditions for a similar outcome in Afghanistan. Consequently, our military-centric Afghanistan "surge" lacked the political component which boosted our relevant power in Iraq.

Additionally, the Taliban affected the power equation in Afghanistan by using available time and space, provided by our shift in focus to Iraq, to mitigate our counterinsurgency campaign. The Taliban attacked our strategy directly by weathering drone strikes in their Pakistan safe havens, and adopting tactics with strategic payoff-namely IED, high profile, and insider attacks. They understand the parameters of our relevant power in Afghanistan, and to some degree, they learned how to leverage their own power to counter ours.

To understand the relevant power equation between Iraq and Afghanistan, we must keep two things in mind. First, we cannot assume political, economic, or military strength will translate from one conflict to another or will even endure throughout a war. Because power fluctuates between and within wars, the conditions that define a conflict provide the first measuring stick for relevant power. Conditions in Iraq were eventually ripe for our power to influence the political and security situation. Not so in Afghanistan. Second, we cannot always compensate for deficiencies in one source of power by increasing strength in another. War is a duel, and any ability to adjust or adapt depends on the capability of our adversary to do the same. The Taliban exploited conditions to evolve into a strategically savvy opponent, whereas Al Qaeda in Iraq diminished due to their own strategic ineffectiveness. Our relevant power depends on internal factors as well as the external ability of our opponent to counter our strengths, exploit our weaknesses, and adapt and influence at a faster rate.

Power plays the leading role in war, but assessing power is not straightforward. Iraq and Afghanistan proved power in war is neither broadly applicable nor enduring, it is relevant to changes in conditions, our opponents, and ourselves. Good strategy must account for the give-and-take between power sources, and their changing value within and between conflicts. It is far easier for strategists to measure strength in isolation and assume it translates to power, but that shortcut does not serve them well when preparing for war. Success in war requires an understanding of when and how to expend or preserve power -- and when and how to end a war in order to retain future freedom of action. The consequences for misunderstanding relevant power could cause a nation with considerable military might to lose a war by stubbornly pursuing an unrealistic end state, significantly draining its power in the process. Avoiding that outcome requires asking two simple questions. When told our nation inherently possesses power due to military, political and economic strength, our military strategists and the policymakers they serve should ask, "power to do what ... to whom?"

Colonel Jason Brown is an active duty Air Force officer attending the Air War College. He is a graduate of the Marine Corps School of Advanced Warfighting. He commanded the 13th Intelligence Squadron and has deployed to multiple locations including Iraq and Afghanistan. The conclusions and opinions expressed are those of the author. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, or Air University.

Remember Lt. Gen. William "My God is stronger than yours" Boykin? It turns out he thinks that the United States is on the verge of economic collapse, and that martial law could be declared.

Well, it takes all types. But it does amaze me that a guy this deep into survivalism held a senior position in the U.S. Army and in planning the war on terror. (HT to Bill Arkin.)

I wish generals and admirals would get out of the business of endorsing presidential candidates. It's a bad business and can only result in politicization of the relationship between our presidents and our military leaders.

The upside of this list is that it is very heavy on Marines and Navy, and surprisingly light on Army generals (with the notable exception of Tommy R. Franks!). Is the Army the most reliably obedient of our services? I remember an admiral saying at the Naval War College that the Navy is a golden retriever, the Air Force is an airedale, and the Army is a loyal Labrador. (He wasn't sure if the Marines were mastiffs or pitbulls.) 

I think President Obama lost the debate last night, not because he screwed up, but because the whole debate was so damn boring. I'm an Obama fan, and I turned it off at 9:37 to go read a book, which turned out to be a better use of my time.

Political journalists will go on and on today about the debate, but remember, they had to watch the whole thing, and got paid to do that and also to yak about it. I think that skews their judgment -- they lacked the reasonable option the rest of us had, of just turning it off. 

I've been reading a terrific short history of The Company, which argues that the corporation -- not the state, religion or political party -- is the basic unit of modern society, and in fact the biggest change in centuries the way society organizes itself.

The first big modern companies were American railroads, which came out of nowhere in the 19^th century, they write. Their presence was revolutionary: "In 1891, the army, navy and marines employed a total of 39,492 people. The Pennsylvania Railroad employed over 110,000." Railroads also played a major role in knitting together the nation, they say.

Companies also reflected national characteristics. In part because guilds had a more durable presence in German society, companies preserved the system of apprenticeships -- which, they write, "helps explain the German fascination with training." Factory foremen had more influence on operations. This carried over into the military, they say: "the Germany army gave far more power to non-commissioned officers."

By Al Mauroni

Best Defense guest columnist

In a recent article in The Diplomat, Professor William Martel says that the strategy of containment is dead. He suggests that containment was useful for dealing with past adversaries with certain political ideologies hostile to our own, but not today's adversaries. He suggests that global trade and commerce has made containment an impossible choice, and that Russia, Iran, and China cannot be "contained" as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

I'm not so sure I want to write off containment as part of the national security strategy quite yet.

Let's take a look at two recent examples of containment. First there was the strategy to contain Iraq between 1993 and 2002. After the end of the Persian Gulf War, it was in the U.S. government's interest to contain Saddam Hussein's regime without invading and occupying that country. Through a combination of diplomatic initiatives (such as U.N. security resolutions), economic sanctions, overflights of the north and south regions, and a continued military presence in the Gulf region, the U.S. government effectively stopped Iraq from pursuing its goals to annex Kuwait, suppress the Kurdish and Shi'ite populations, and develop a WMD program. In hindsight, it does not appear that Hussein's regime had any practical capability to do anything hostile to U.S. interests that would have warranted an invasion and overthrow of his government.

Today we have a similar discussion about Iran, in particular whether the tools of government power -- diplomacy, intelligence, military, and economic -- have adequate capability to contain that country's ambitions to grow as a regional power. There are constant discussions within the U.N. Security Council on organizing multi-lateral coalitions against Iran's nuclear power program and support to violent extremist organizations. Iran's economy has taken heavy hits as a result of organized sanctions, and it is surrounded by U.S. military bases in the Gulf States. Where, exactly, is containment failing? Professor Martel suggests that Iran is too tied up in "an economic and technological web of global connectedness" for containment to work. Is that why Iran's government is developing intranets for its people and military forces, effectively taking them off the global information grid?

Why does the U.S. government (and other governments) support a containment strategy against certain militant or authoritarian regimes that have hostile ideologies or agendas to our own? It is because that going to war with a country based on emotional rationale that "well we just don't like them and they won't change to be like us" really isn't a good reason. It is also a very expensive way to challenge hostile regimes (see U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2002 to 2012). At the least, it's a principle of war -- economy of force -- that allows the U.S. government to selectively decide where to apply its scarce resources and personnel. At the best, containment is a time-honored approach to smart warfighting strategy. As Sun Tzu said, "To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."

Al Mauroni is a senior policy analyst with the U.S. Air Force, and has more than 25 years experience addressing counter-WMD policy and defense program issues. The views expressed in this paper represent the personal views of the author and are not necessarily the views of the Department of Defense or of the Department of the Air Force.

I was impressed with last night's debate. This blog has criticized VP Biden quite a lot, so I have to begin by saying I have never seen him so focussed. He only drifted off into blather territory a couple of times. He also scored solid points on foreign policy issues such as Iran. I sit here a bit stunned that Biden did so much better than President Obama did in his own first debate.

I'd never heard Ryan speak more than a sentence or two until last night. I thought he handled himself well. I didn't expect him to be strong on foreign policy, and indeed he hemmed and hawed some, but he didn't commit any major gaffes.

I do think both he and Biden bobbled the question posed by Martha Raddatz from a soldier who reported unhappiness with the tone of the election. I thought Ryan, by getting into military spending in his answer, failed to grasp the question. It was not about the state of the military, it was more about having an election process a soldier can be proud of defending. By the same token, I thought Biden was off base when he rattled on about how the topmost, sacred duty of our leaders is to take care of the military. Rather, the topmost, sacred duty of our leaders is to defend the Constitution.

The third winner was Martha Raddatz, who showed how to moderate one of these things. She should replace Jim Lehrer at NewsHour.

The biggest winner was the American people, who saw what a good debate looks like, and heard real differences explored.