From personal experience I can tell you without reservation that the highest levels of the Department of Defense seem to be inherently incapable of stating what they want clearly -- they can't even specify software systems with enough clarity to engineer them with any confidence. Throughout the DoD, millions of dollars are spent just compensating for the inability of Admirals and Generals to clarify their own thoughts before they send them down the chain of command. And that's in engineering, where the switches are guaranteed to stay where you set them 99% of the time!!

So it is hardly surprising that vagueness and ambiguity should be the order of the day in the much more volatile and unbounded arena of human interactions, especially under adversarial circumstances.

But, just as in the engineering department, this kind of loosy-goosy thinking and talking gets VERY expensive as it rolls out. In software it is just very expensive in terms of dollars and manhours. In politics it has similarly high costs paid in sudden death or life-long disfigurement, maiming and crippling of humans. Pretty high price to pay for a little stupidity at the top.

A