Breaking: Understanding Enemy Doctrine—don’t kid yourself!

You can eliminate a leader, but you cannot eliminate a doctrine. Iran has spent 40 years establishing a decentralized command structure designed to endure beyond any targeted strike.

Bin Laden is no longer alive, and several top commanders of Hezbollah have been removed, yet these movements continue to survive and grow.

This is the reality we need to grasp before we declare victory.

Are we studying the doctrine, or merely counting the casualties?

There is a moment in every man's life where the question is not what is strategic, not what is convenient, not what is politically comfortable, the question is simply, what is right and what is wrong.

These sources did not step forward for fame. They stepped forward because they believed in something greater than themselves. They infiltrated one of the most brutal regimes in the Western Hemisphere. Their families — including children — are now being hunted because they chose to stand on the right side of history.

Those are real people, in real danger, right now. The United States of America asked these men and women to trust us. They did and the silence they have received in return is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is a moral failure. Plain and simple.

I have spent my life in service to this country. I know what we ask of people who work in the shadows. I know the weight of that ask and I know that when a nation stops honoring its word to the people who sacrificed the most, it has lost something far more valuable than any intelligence asset.

This is not complicated. These people did right by us. Now we do right by them.