Jeffrey Kendall is a Brigadier general in the United States Air Force, assigned as Deputy Director of Intelligence, Operations and Nuclear Integration for Flying Training, Headquarters Air Education and Training Command, Randolph Air Force Base, Texas.[1]
He was a Council on Foreign Relations military fellow from August 2007 to June 2008.
While a student at the National War College in 2002, he wrote a research paper challenging the planning assumptions in the George W. Bush Administration, which has been cited by several other researchers on the planning process. It dealt with the situation, after the Gulf War, in which the
the U.S. was left with the task of how to plan for future
military operations while drawing down forces in an attempt to control spiraling national debt. The use of a threat-based strategy in a world with no clearly defined emerging threat proved to be worrisome. A new approach began to emerge in formulating U.S. national military strategy - capabilities-based planning, or designing a military with distinct asymmetric abilities that could be used universally in different theaters against diverse foes. Operating with no currently published National Security Strategy (NSS) and updated National Military Strategy (NMS), defense planners are condemned to guesswork on military mission definitions, makeup, scale, and transformation goals that greatly increase the potential for a mismatch between ends, ways, means, and risks spread across
the full spectrum of military conflict.[2]
While the Administration did publish the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), Kendall provides a review of various approaches to planning, on which others build. [3]