More information (David Ignatius in the Post):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... olleagues/
"Would Kamala Harris make a good president and commander in chief? The vice president certainly strengthened her case with a deft performance in Tuesday night’s debate. To use a combat metaphor, she appeared to encircle and at times overwhelm her adversary.
Harris was forceful in discussing America’s role in the world and her commitment to a strong, secure nation. She stole some of former president Donald Trump’s lines, calling him a “disgrace,” a weak leader and a man manipulated by the flattery of dictators.
But skillful performance as a debater isn’t the same thing as executive leadership. Baiting an opponent on television isn’t preparation for making decisions in the Situation Room. So it’s important to examine how Harris would perform on national security issues in office if she won the presidency.
To get a better sense of her potential strengths and weaknesses, I interviewed more than a half-dozen current or former officials who have observed her in the Situation Room or other sensitive national security meetings.
They all expressed versions of the same basic theme: Harris behaves like the prosecutor she was for much of her career. She’s skeptical, probing, sometimes querulous. She can be impatient and demanding. But she asks good questions. And if she’s convinced of the need, she’s not afraid to act. “She’s more hard-line than most people think,” said one retired four-star general who has briefed her many times.
One top member of her staff put it this way: “She’s always the same person, pushing for information, making sure people aren’t bulls----ing her.” Having watched her often in discussions about using military force, he concluded: “Her approach is to measure twice, cut once. But she’s not afraid to take the shot.”
Based on these and other conversations, I can offer a narrative of the “hidden Harris” as she was involved in key national security decisions during the Biden administration. My sources requested anonymity, but each detail in this account comes from someone who was with Harris when the events happened.
Harris got off to what her aides agree was a bumpy start with her intelligence briefer. During the administration’s first year, the briefer was presenting a classified personality profile of a female foreign leader Harris would be meeting. The briefer was a woman, but Harris thought some of the language she was using was gender-biased. Rather than just voicing her discomfort, Harris requested an intelligence community internal review.
The result, never previously reported, was an internal assessment by the intelligence community of whether analysts had routinely used gender-biased language in intelligence reports. The review examined several years of analytical reports, comparing how often certain words had been used about women and men. Harris was so concerned that she asked intelligence agencies to train their analysts to avoid any such bias in the future. She also requested more reporting from the intelligence community on gender issues and sexual violence around the world.
Though she is said to have been pleased by the agency’s responsiveness to her concerns, after that first year she dropped the personal, one-to-one briefing.
A spokesman for Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines declined to comment on the gender-bias review. The ODNI oversees the President’s Daily Brief and other reports to top officials, but many of them are prepared by analysts at the CIA.
The Biden team’s first big national security crisis was Afghanistan in mid-2021, and Harris played an interesting role. Philip H. Gordon, her national security adviser, agreed with the Pentagon that President Joe Biden’s plan to pull all U.S. troops from Kabul would be unwise. Biden strongly disagreed. Harris pressed the Pentagon briefers about what would happen if 2,500 U.S. troops remained, as the military wanted. Would the Taliban resume attacks on Americans — and would more U.S. troops be needed to protect the residual force? Pentagon officials conceded that additional forces might indeed be necessary.
Harris backed Biden’s decision to pull all the troops out — which led to a collapse of the Afghan government and a chaotic, bloody withdrawal. On that issue, and all other major ones, she was careful to always support Biden when he’d made his choice — as vice presidents nearly always do."
