You have the intelligence front and the engagement front. On the intelligence front, the French are better than many of their European counterparts. But they are really challenged in two specific ways.

They [ French] still have an open border in Europe. And they have a Europe which doesn't have an integrated intelligence system like we do in the United States.

The language of North Korea is always bombastic. But what has really changed is the acceleration of their nuclear program, the likelihood that they have more and more weapons, and the acceleration of the testing of ballistic missiles in very, very aggressive ways towards Japan.

When you do have really tapped out resources that cover so many investigations, it can help you move through and discard some faster.

I think we have started accelerating over the past years. It's a modernization of NATO. It's at air, it's at sea, it's undersea, it's in cyber. Estonia in 2007, hit by Russian cyber-attacks. So what you see there with those exercises are critical.

I don't think bulk data collection was an enormous factor here, because generally, that deals with overseas calls to the United States. But what bulk data collection did was make the process more efficient. So there were no silver bullets there.

You have the intelligence front and the engagement front. On the intelligence front, the French are better than many of their European counterparts. But they are really challenged in two specific ways.