You're listening to Software Radio, Special Operations Military Nails, and straight talk with the guys in the community.

Hi, welcome back to Software Radio. I am your host, Rad, and I have a very special guest today, and I'm going to tell you about him real quick here.

So first of all, his name is Douglas Luthe, and he's a part of a group of former national security advisers under the Bush administration who are set to release a new book, Handoff, the foreign policy George W. Bush passed to Barack Obama on February 15th.

The book makes public for the first time a set of 30 newly declassified transition memoranda that were prepared by President Bush's National Security Council staff for the incoming Obama administration to outline the key foreign policy challenges that it would be facing.

The book features self-critical insights and analysis from a handful of National Security Council experts who advised President Bush, including the former deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, our guest Douglas Luthe.

Now, he currently serves as the CEO of Cambridge Global Advisers LLC, which is a certified service to save old veteran owned small business for those of you out there that are in the small business world and our veterans.

He's one of those. Here we go. So in the book, Douglas contributes to the analysis of President Bush's foreign policy legacy with an in-depth look at military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. So with that introduction, welcome to our show.

Oh, great. It's really good to be with you. Yes, thank you. So tell me, how old were you when joined the army? Well, so look, I grew up in Michigan City, Indiana on the southernmost point of Lake Michigan as it juts down around Chicago into northern Indiana and left there when I was 18 went to West Point and frankly never went back.

So I guess the short answer to your question is I was 18 when I went to West Point. Yeah.

And were you like baseball? No. Well, if you're in Indiana and you're growing up, you're playing basketball. I did that as well as everybody in my record, but not well enough to make anything of it beyond sort of high school.

So I didn't play at West Point, but played recreationally up until maybe 10 years ago or so when, you know, eventually your knees give out.

Sir, now what was your academia focused on in West Point?

So at the time, everybody graduated from West Point and those days got a bachelor of science degree because West Point originated, you know, hundreds some years earlier as an engineering school.

Right. So as a legacy of that beginning, everyone gets a bachelor of science degree, but we did not yet have majors and minors when I graduated, they do now, but I focused on international security affairs.

So pretty much the sort of thing that I ended up doing later, much later in my army career.

Yeah. So here you are, a young man going into West Point 18 saying, when I grow up, I want to be involved in international affairs.

And now when you look back on your younger self, telling yourself you're going to be involved in international affairs, did you believe it?

Well, you know, it was so far over the horizon for me when you're an undergraduate student, I think most undergraduates have some image of what they want to do.

But I suspect the hit rate, that is the connection between what they end up doing and what they imagine they were going to do as undergraduates isn't very high actually.

Right. And as you know, life takes a lot of sort of twists and turns and unforeseen opportunities and so forth. So I had a persistent interest in foreign policy and international affairs and sort of strategic geostrategic issues.

But you know, when you're in the army as a lieutenant, a captain, a major, even a colonel and lieutenant colonel, you've got your head down doing what the army expects you to do.

And now really, I mean, it could be a passing interest, but it's mostly that you're consumed as an army officer with day to day affairs and, you know, the next deployment or the next national training center rotation or, you know, whatever is around the corner.

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