Page:CTRL0000034609 - Transcribed Interview of Kashyap Pramod Patel, (December 9, 2021).pdf/92

92 20 years of blood and treasure out of Afghanistan, Somalia. We're dealing with Syria and Iraq. The bulk of the details is classified.

Yes.

But the general directives were, as you stated and as I've stated.

Okay. And I don't want to get into the classified stuff. Do you remember there being dates certain before the end of the administration that were, I don't want to say ordered, but were—

I think there were targets like in any other—what we—so what we call campaign plans that the Department of Defense, CAM plans, are how the Department of Defense operates, Russia, China, CENTCOM, AFRICOM, what have you.

In a situation like this, what we do is we go to our combatant commands, or commanding generals in the theater of war, and our special forces community and say, what is the best campaign plan to do X, Y, or Z. We did that in these instances. We received their timelines.

On top of that, Acting Secretary Miller and I wanted to ensure that we were doing something that was appropriate from a soldier's standpoint. So we traveled 65,000 miles in the 80-some days we were there to visit with our soldiers in Afghanistan and the Middle East, in Africa and elsewhere, to obtain the ground-level intelligence of the people that would be fighting these wars if they came—if they continued to serve there.

So that's just some of the mixture that went in, and there was an extensive memos that would come back from combatant commands, which I haven't reviewed in a long time, from commanders on the ground, from the Secretary, from myself. So that's my general recollection of how we handle these events.

Okay. And then—so nothing outside of that normal process in which