. >> you had mentioned marja. it does been referred to as like fallujah. >> from an operation point of view it is important. marja is not fallujah in a way that it has the symbolic meeting that fallujah had. the all infrastructure is different. -- the whole infrastructure is different. knowing the insurgency and the way they have operated, i think you will see some heavy connecticut by the mayor. -- kinetic fighting there. i'm not saying -- i am not saying that we will see no intensity but from a geographical point of view, i would not call it fallujah. it is important, though. >> tells about the counter-ied effort and what shortcomings' you have in terms of troops. >> we need to get better in our counter-ied peppers. -- efforts. if we do not get better, it will have major implications. you can only be successful in this if you do not focus on only one approach. we need to train the afghans and have a better system in place and so on. let me focus on how we looked at this situation and how we want to improve it. w

marja is one of those places right now. it has to be cracked open. the people there, i think, will welcome us when that happens, because the reports that we get is that there is a murder- intimidation campaign at work there, that people are being kept in against their will. marja will be one of those areas of direct concern for us in the coming weeks and months. >> are we talking like fallujah one, fallujah two? >> that is all i want to say about it because it is a pending operation. >> general, based on what you saw in this recent trip to both theaters, what is your assessment of the ied threat now? is it getting better, worse? what observations you have on that? >> ok, i think i can say this. we are encouraged by what we're seeing. you know, we have working dogs that in the heat of summer don't do much for you. they simply want to go where it is cool. and those dogs were initially trained against military-grade explosives. what is being used in afghanistan are larger ied's, volume-wise, than some what we saw even in iraq, where the tendency was for