lieutenant general steve townsend, who knows it well, having fought there as a commander. a really talented commander. if that authority is there, he chooses to use it. beyond that, there is a base being reestablished, at the west airfield, a huge sort of strategic level airfield that in fact housed one of our brigade combat teams and 80-100 helicopters. was101st airborne division deployed. that was a very important base to protect a lot of different power, perhaps even running unmanned aerial vehicles, attack helicopters, perhaps some long shooters on the ground, and so forth. it is a very important element. it is the huge base though. an northquires protection if you put a lot of vulnerable coalition assets on the ground there it is interesting now that we are approaching 6000, the cap i have seen as the estimate what we may find on the ground and i very much support that. the parent does is of course that we have them there -- the paradox is of course that we have been there, preventing them from keeping 10 thousand troops on the ground when we pull them out before. cha

townsend. steven brill contributes to "the this month's cover story, "are we any safer." and jeffrey goldberg writes for the atlantic and he's also a visiting fellow at the carnegie endowment for international peace. steve, i want the start with you. you worked for a year on this article, "are we any safer," and i apologize, but can you boil it down into an answer? >> in only 20 words. >> well, we're along stronger because of the work of the people like fran did and tens of thousands of others and the on we strengthened our defense, but the nature of the threat has changed and evolved in a way that arguably in many ways makes us less safe. >> dickerson: fran, are we adapting to that environment that steve describeed? >> you'll appreciate, john, what happens is we never adapt fast enough. as you heard from the chairman of the intelligence committee, the threat has metastasized and spread. we have more bad guys in more different places now. you add to that the internet and the radicalization that happens over the internet, even very late to that game as a government across two administrations, frankly, and that is a problem. we don't treat the internet as a battle space as we this land, air and sea. >> di