Yes, and there's proof.
I really appreciated listening to the previous testimony. Your questions about measures of effectiveness are spot on. How do we measure whether or not our training is working? How do we measure whether or not one of those international seminars were working?
There is evidence that relationships built in advance of deployments can be called upon in theatre to advance an operation, whether it's tactically, operationally or strategically. Those are potentially iterative, whereas when somebody returns home, the relationship ends. That is, unless it's the next time you go to the field and you can say, I knew such and such an officer, or this USAID person who was in the field when I was in Afghanistan. Now you're in Mali and you can pick up the phone.