By the way, Admiral Mullen was more careful so he wouldn’t be misunderstood yesterday:

MULLEN: I’ve said in my opening statement that it’s very clear to me we will need more resources to execute the president’s strategy from the end of March. And I really await this submission from General McCrystal — which I think is going to occur here very quickly — to evaluate specifically what that means, and to look at the risk associated with various options.
So it is — and this — maybe I can give a little better answer to the chairman on why we weren’t doing a program like the one Graeme Lamb is now in charge of. We very badly under-resourced Afghanistan for the better part of four or five years. Now I’ve spoken about a culture of poverty there. That’s been interpreted to focus on the poverty level in the country. That isn’t what I meant — and certainly that is a problem — but we have a culture of poverty there amongst us in terms of being under-resourced in economy of force for this extensive period of time. To get to a point where we didn’t have the wherewithal to create a program like that –and not that we didn’t think it would be needed. And the totality of that under-resourcing is something we’re just coming to grips with.

Overall, his testimony was rather extraordinary in that he was telling the chairman of the committee, Levin, that his scheme won’t work and was signaling that the top military leadership is united behind General McChrsytal and his impending request for more troops. This is a contrast to the situation just prior to the surge in Iraq, when the brass was split.