“We’re moving towards a talent management system where we will manage people by 25 variables instead of two,” Gen. McConville said. It will be “a system that recognizes and capitalizes on our people’s knowledge, their skills, their behaviors and even their preferences.”

The SecDef will tell allies in Brussels next week they must take a hard line on Turkey as the body count in Syria continues to rise. The question is, does this emperil Turkey’s NATO membership?

The services are collaborating as never before, officials said, as they outsource non-combat networks through new “IT as a service” contracts.

The new office will, director Dan Flynn told me, assess what other intelligence agencies around the world are doing and why, what the most effective technologies will be to cope with those changes, how the world is changing strategically and make recommendations to the Director of National Intelligence.

The Pentagon and State Department spent much of Monday scrambling to respond to the White House’s Sunday night announcement. Three days earlier Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters he and the Turkish Defense Minister had reached an agreement on joint US/Turkish patrols in northern Syria.

There’s not a lot of confidence out there about the prospects for a 2020 budget agreement. “A stripped down mini-NDAA may be all that could pass this year for defense,” says one long-time budget watcher.

General Counsel Paul Nay directed DoD officials to “preserve all documents, records, and writings, and any associated attachments, in any format,” that relate to the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.

“We have a fairly well-positioned and growing counterintelligence activity across the organizations,” the official said, adding that the shift to DoD has created “what is arguably the single largest security-focused agency in the federal government.”

“New START matters to our security, to the security of the alliance, to the cohesion of the (NATO) alliance,” said Tom Countryman, former assistant secretary of State for international security and nonproliferation,

If you count next year’s budget, the president will be actually selling himself short. But his other superlatives are not justified.