As with so many things, the reaction to the failures and shortcomings of the responses probably swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. Just as the initial enthusiasm was too great, creating unfulfillable expectations, the pessimism that now set in helped create excessive caution. Militarily, current US policy is guided by an overly strict and narrow set of criteria represented by PDD 25 and embodied, for example, in the Dayton Accords. End states have been transformed into 'end dates' and exit strategies into 'exits'. What has been missing in all this is a sound strategy, and that absence has contributed to the wild swings of the pendulum. We did not spend the time to understand the nature of the conflicts that were arising, and a tendency emerged to assume that they were essentially all the same (or at least of the same basic genus). There was therefore little serious effort directed toward understanding the nature of the objectives that we should seek in addressing those conflicts, and then the ways with which we could address them.