These are such interesting matters to me. First, the issue of boots on the ground...you're quite right. There were flip-flops and running shoes, and they belonged to many, but no NATO forces under my command. So that was the one point. There's an interesting strategy to that. Every day that went by, I would have liked to have had boots on the ground because I could have acted in one way, but not having boots on the ground made the exit strategy so much easier for us. At midnight, I said “stop”, and the ships turned around, the airplanes turned around, and we were done. We were disconnected.
The second part, more importantly, is a strategy that I think we need to look at. If the people on the ground can handle it, should we put our troops on the ground, or force the ownership on these people? If you put 150,000 troops in Libya, I suspect the Libyans would have stood back and said they would wait until NATO was done, and then they'd start doing it. As it was, we didn't give them that. The essence for us was, without telling them what to do, how did we make sure we enabled success, which for us was the protection of civilians. It stayed there. I was not the private air force or navy of the NTC, but essentially by stopping the violence it shaped the environment for them to continue. Again, the end state and the end game were the will of Gadhafi to start talking and stop hurting his people, which he opted to do differently.