Retired Admiral James Stavridis Being Vetted As Clinton’s Running Mate

Retired four-star admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO James Stavridis is being vetted as Hillary Clinton’s running mate, the New York Times reported Tuesday.

Stavridis, currently the dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, has experience overseeing operations in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya leading up to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi. The Times wrote that some people close to Clinton said she was “always likely” to have a military leader on her VP short list.

Also the onetime Commander, U.S. Southern Command, Stavridis has been an advocate of “smart power”. One his favored lines is, “We are excellent at launching Tomahawk missiles; we need to get better at launching ideas.”

Part of that worldview is reflected in his recently published five-pronged plan for defeating ISIS, which included a modest troop increase in Iraq (to 10,000) and a special forces campaign in Syria, but also political and cultural approaches:

… Using the international financial system to ensure that no funds can flow into the caliphate will be helpful. This will require both international and interagency cooperation, and the U.S. must lead this part of the effort. Fourth, the war must be carried out online as well. ISIS is effective at publicizing, proselytizing, recruiting, fundraising, and command and control on the Internet. We need to use offensive cybertools to counter all of those efforts, and the increasingly capable U.S. Cyber Command action teams—essentially the SEALs of the web—should have a central role in this campaign. [F]ifth, we must cut off the already diminishing flow of new recruits to ISIS. This is the long game of education, opportunity and employment for the disenfranchised and disillusioned Muslim populations all around the world, but especially in Europe, a major source of foreign fighters.

Read the Times story here.

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