Dateline: SWA flight from BWI to Louisville KY, 16 November 2005

Drove to Louisville on Monday afternoon, after some house decision stuff in southern Indiana, because the SWA flight out got me direct to BWI in time to drive all the way to Warrenton VA to catch Art Cebrowski's wake.

Had a nice talk with his older brother John (spitting image, especially in sound) and his spouse, a very wonderful lady named Cathy. Hadn't seen her since Bethesda Naval Hospital when I stopped in for a last time with Art on 3 November. I had hoped to see him again, but did not expect to when I left his room that day, so we both said all we needed to say. And I'm glad we did that.

Stayed overnight in Warrenton, then attended his funeral mass the next day, lighting candles for him and my Dad on the way out. Saw a bunch of old friends and colleagues, a couple of which said they were so glad I noted Art's passing on my blog, otherwise they would have missed the mass.

Much like my posts about my Dad's passing brought me a bunch of emails from long-lost acquaintances, so too have I received emails from guys who flew with Art back in the 1960s and 1970s. People just want to reach and connect at moments like these

John Cebrowski's eulogy for Art was simply stunning. Beautiful beyond words. If Art had been delivering it for John, it would have been the same eulogy. That's how close they were. I told John that afterwards, and thanked him for the personal courage it took to deliver it. For a minute there, we had Art back, and it was worth every second of John's amazing effort to witness it.

Then I tried to drive on back roads from Warrenton to Quantico. Bad idea. Got lost several times, and landed in Quantico 15 mins late for my speech to a full auditorium of Marines. Then they couldn't figure out how to hook up my laptop. Then I gave them my brief on a stick and they couldn't get that PC to come up on the projector. Finally they did and I rushed to the stage, only to discover that they PC in question had an old copy of MS Office, so my animations appeared but did not disappear as required, making several of my early slides (all PNMers) a bit incomprehensible visually.

The Marines were very patient with me, and once I made it to Bradd Hayes' BFA slides, I was okay, because Bradd eschews layering.

By the end of the talk, it was a rocking-and-rolling audience, full of Iraq and Afghan vets. More questions afterwards (we went a half hour late in their school day, but no one walked), according to their head prof, than he's ever seen before with this class with all of its previous guest speakers. That made me feel good, along with the cool coffee mug that Marine Corps U gave me.

Disappointed that the journalist who promised to show up and cover the event in order to complete a profile of me for a major pub didn't bother to make it. Apparently he couldn't convince his editors that my stuff was being taken seriously by the Pentagon and/or the government.

Hmmm.

Last night I had dinner with someone that people have been telling me for months that I "just have to meet!" No one any of you have heard of. Not a celebrity, but a real guy. There were a couple of close calls in the past, and then the right intermediary makes it happen last night, followed up by an even better F2F in an office setting. I now know why so many people said we needed to get together (egomaniac that I am, imagine how often I meet people I immediately recognize are easily as smart as I am and a whole lot wiser), and I hope it's the start of something big, because, in the end, we're all looking for the same thing: me, this guy, Bono, Jeffrey Sachs, and a host of other people. We're looking for the ultimate push package, or what I've taken to calling "development in a box."

It will be built . . . eventually, because failure isn't an option . . . ad infinitum.

This guy's story is one I would love to tell some day, but for now we seek to do, not teach.

As Robert Duvall's character "Fish" said near the end of "Deep Impact" as he was beginning his crew's suicide run to blow up the asteroid hurtling toward earth: "We can either do or we can teach, now which is it going to be?"

I'm deciding I'm going to focus on doing more than teaching in coming months. I'm going to focus on the amazing array of "doing" opportunities that Steve DeAngelis and I are lining up for Enterra Solutions with the Pentagon, various commands and intelligence community members, and other key institutional players in the national security realm (like Oak Ridge National Lab).

To focus on that doing, I will need to cut down a bit on the "teaching." The speeching will remain, because it pays bills and I love "the the-ah-ter!" of live performance. Plus it creates amazing professional connectivity (along with business opportunities) that's important to me. There are simply too many good opportunities coming up to make the vision real for me to devote the same amount of time and effort to describing things from my blog perch.

Doesn't mean I won't continue to blog, but there will be a serious retooling.

First, I'm parting ways with my longtime webmaster Critt Jarvis, by mutual consent. Critt and I have been together since the beginning of the blog, but recently, my needs for personal assistance have simply gone through the roof, and Critt's not willing to pursue that sort of full-service situation with me. There are certain things he likes to do with his schedule and his substantial presence on the web, and I respect that.

But I desperately need that sort of personal help, and if I can't arrange it, there will be no blog, pure and simple. The stress of trying to do-it-all and be-it-all for everybody (especially all these readers who send me lengthy reading assignments every day!) simply doesn't work for me in a family sense. I only have so many years with these kids, and there are limits to the sacrifices I'm willing to make: yes to changing the U.S. national security establishment and, through that, the world, but no to trying to play teacher full time through this venue. Again, I need to focus more on the doing, simply because the historical opportunities being afforded to me right now are too important to piss away.

I also need that personal assistance to be all inclusive, as in an all-in-one person. Why? Because my travel, my blogging, and my schedule and recordkeeping are so highly intertwined. I already have PR people (via Putnam and Esquire), an editor (Mark Warren), a publisher (Neil Nyren), a literary agent (Jennifer Gates) and a speaking agent (Jenn Posda), and negotiating all those relationships, as much as I personally enjoy them singularly and in aggregate, is hard enough. I need someone who can do a lot of coordinating among all those entities, plus keep track of all my Enterra commitments (my logistical help from that direction remains fantastic), AND be able to keep the site up and running in all its forms (in response to a neverending stream of commands and demands from me).

Now, clearly I want the site to remain in all its archival glory, and I want the blog to remain, because it's my brain and my memory. Questions arise about the weekly pubs that gather up all my story blogs and present a mix of Q&A and essays (the newsletter).

For now, I think both of those weekly pubs go into hiatus until I figure out how important they are to me. As for what Critt does to the ancillary sites he's set up (e.g., the readers' forum "Blogging the Future"), that's up to him WRT however his future worklife unfolds. We both need to take care of our families, so we both need to make some choices on balance in our lives.

I'm enormously grateful to Critt for what he helped me start via the blog and this site, and it saddens me somewhat that our collaboration is sacrificed to the sheer trajectory of my career right now, but I remain committed to the vision, as I know Critt does (no less fiercely), so sacrifices are made out of a sense of the larger good to be generated and preserved. Critt will remain an important friend of mine, like few others I have known in my life. But like a lot of colleagues whose paths I've crossed over the years, our professional collaboration ends up reaching a tipping point that is inescapable.

I'm on my fourth career in adulthood (academic from 84-90 at Harvard, think tanker from 90-98 in DC, Defense Department employee from 98-05 at the Naval War College and commuting to the Pentagon, and now full-time writer and "thought leader" via the blog, Esquire, the books, and, most crucially in the "doing" as Senior Managing Director of Enterra Solutions) and I don't expect it will be my last (I dream of concert pianist still Ö), so there's no telling where Critt and I will meet up again.

And I look forward, instinctively, to that possibility.

But the key thing right now is to get life better with my family, and for that, I need to reorganize my work situation a bit. Yes, this is somewhat in response to what I'm hearing from my spouse and kids, but mostly it's just my sense of what matters to me most. Enterra's gotta have some priority, because it packs so much potential in the "doing" category, and the book writing is my bread and butter. Esquire fuels the writing process via Mark, so that ranks (and I simply treasure him so). Speaking pays the bills. The website . . . comes behind all of those.

And all of those come behind my family, because none of you are going to be around my deathbed, only (I hope) Vonne and my kids (and their spouses and all my grandkids).

So the reorganization begins, with the biggest question now being, Whom do I take on in this all-important position?

Rest assured, that process began long ago in my mind, and it's begun for real in the personage of my former NewRuleSets.Project business manager, Steff Hedenkamp. With her help, I'll make that call in coming weeks and the revamped me/website/sked/life balance will make it's appearance sometime after the beginning of the new year.

I know I'm making this decision under duress. As I've said many times before: planning for failure is easy, but planning for success is hard. The reality for me, personally, is: the less seriously my thinking/vision is received by academia and experts, the more seriously it is taken by real-world political, military, and business players the world over.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

I gotta show some respect for that serious treatment, because I know far too well what's on the line for individuals, countries, and this entire world.

So be patient while I find that balance Ö

FYI: today I testify to a small panel of House Armed Services Committee members on future nuclear postures/issues/questions, offering alternative viewpoints to the usual conventional wisdom (two other panel members for that: "Pakistan, China, Iran . . . oh my!). Event set up by Geoff Davis, first-termer from Kentucky with the Ranger/SOF background. Davis continues to impress me: conservative in good ways, moderate and flexible in others (one can never call a Republican the "l" word, even in compliment), but mostly just a hugely sensible guy. So many who come out of the military are either all war (can't get enough) or all peace (like one huge mea culpa for their careers), and then there are the balanced ones, like Davis: head on straight, able to deal in either venue without fear.

One good upshot of the GWOT: the return of vets to Congress. It needs them badly.

Here's my weak-ass attempt at catching-up:

■ The essence of a bad sign in Iraq's economic recovery

■ Snow birds will help grow America southward



■ Duh! It's all Kim's delaying tactic!

■ The $100 laptop: shrink that price, shrink the Gap

■ Another reason why Ayatollah Ali Sistani wuz robbed on the Nobel Peace Prize