Lawrence Thomas Di Rita (born March 12, 1958)[1] is an American political advisor who served as an aide to United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He has also worked as a spokesman for Bank of America. (wikipedia)
It's not known, to the best of my understanding.
When we turn over two dozen forward-operating bases, that's two dozen that no longer require US military, ... So at a certain point you have to start to connect that to force levels.
Generally speaking, as is true anywhere, if these kinds of lawsuits take place with American servicemen in the cross-hairs, you bet it's something we take seriously,
but there just has been no decisions made.
It's still classified, ... along with a lot of the underlying planning.
I would expect fully that he will come back and give an assessment of where he thinks he is. I don't know, I simply don't, whether that will include his recommendation on the way ahead.
If we're asked not to proceed, or ordered not to proceed, then we won't. That's the plan.
Decisions were made then that seemed appropriate at the time. And now the Iraqi government is making decisions that seem appropriate to this point.
For the next election, I wouldn't be surprised to see it go right back up to 160,000 based on puts and takes and in-place rotations and relief, and everything else,
There was already a significant flow of Guard troops. Changing the nature of the operation wasn't going to get people there any faster.
