Brigadier General Robert L. Caslen, Jr. served as chief of staff for Combined Joint Task Force-180 (CJTF-180) in Afghanistan from May through September 2002 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, and later as deputy director for the War on Terrorism within the J-5, the Joint Staff, in Washington, DC, from July 2004 through June 2006 in support of the broader Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Upon arriving in Afghanistan, he immediately realized that their biggest challenge would be finding and fixing the enemy in an enormous area with limited resources coordinated across the different service components. He also recalls an instance wherein he and the incoming and outgoing commanders of CJTF-180 were lambasted by President Karzai after an apparently successful raid against a Taliban corps commander, highlighting the ineffectiveness of their strategic communications with both the Afghan government and the people of the area. He recounts the difficulties of getting subordinate units to adopt more than a purely kinetic approach to the fight, how their ultimate goal was to provide a secure environment in which the Afghan government could prosper, and the invaluable role the International Security Assistance Force played by providing legitimacy to the government in Kabul. Caslen discusses the Afghan Military Forces, their funding and control by special operations forces outside his span of control, and the utter lack of coordination amongst all concerned about these forces. Moving onto his time with the Joint Staff, Caslen describes his responsibilities for strategy and plans for the GWOT. Specifically, he talks about the interplay of the various pieces of government and how the military took a very proactive role in establishing a government strategy which the military strategy comfortably nested in. He goes on to describe a situation wherein neither the National Security Council nor the National Counterterrorism Center can provide command and control across government departments, how no department will willingly surrender their resources to the control of another, and how each department is free to pursue their own strategy independently of the others. He states that in his personal opinion, when the history of the GWOT is written, the government's inability to organize itself for the GWOT will be seen as a critical failure. Caslen closes the interview by talking about the Corps of Cadets, their changes in training since 9/11, and their commitment to the challenges at hand.

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