rather welcome. mattis could do it all. the mattis/shanahan team was stronger. leland: is there anybody else at the pentagon who is perhaps not as well-known of a name but fills the mattis role you re saying is now gone in terms of institutional knowledge of the military in terms of knowledge of history, in terms of policy versus important curement of a technology? i m a fan of general joe dunford in office for nine more months, extremely good himself and john rude, a well recognized name. he does broader foreign policy aspects. and the thing is they ll be very good in their own lanes. they won t have the larger than life presence or influence with the president that i think mattis had, at least for the first year and a half or so of
his tenure. in that regard there is a gap. leland: we ve seen this interesting change. one of the reasons mattis left if not the reason, he disagreed with in the when it came to syria and the line in his resignation letter where he said you deserve a secretary of defense who agrees with you when it comes to policy. now we re learning from the new york times at least that seems as though the president stepping back from his original syria policy of 30 days, now saying four months. a lot can change in four months. that s true. maybe it s more than four months. i hope the president can make that statement about syria as an aspirational kind of tweet or rhetorical statement that gives the country an indication of where he wants to go but make a distinction between that and actual policy. if he can do that. if we can formalize the policy decision making and making it less responsive to president trump s impulses but let him be trump on twitter maybe we can have the best of all worlds.