Great day at Central Command in Tampa

After getting back with Kev from DC Sunday night, I flew to Tampa first thing Monday morning and keynoted a security cooperation conference there chaired by Deputy Commander of Centcom, VADM Dave Nichols.

Spoke in big, cool auditorium to about 250 officers all in desert cammies.

Real thrill was during minutes before talk as place fills up. Officer after officer walks up, intro's self and tells me how My books/briefs/articles influenced his work in this or that billet.

My favorite? Guy who saw me at NDU two years ago, then goes to OSD and is told to read PNM in order to get ready to help write DOD directive 3000. Again, the word "guidebook" is used.

After several sloppy-phrasing deliveries over the past week or so, this one was dead on. I spoke faster and more clearly than I think I ever have. I was completely in the zone. I credit it simply to catching up on sleep and not switching so many time zones so rapidly.

You may remember Nichols from the piece Ignatius wrote about his use of PNM as a strategic guide to his planning while head of naval forces in Central Command.

Well, Nichols gave me a really fantastic introduction, saying he still uses PNM as a guidebook for his work as Deputy Commander of CENTCOM and that the vision infuses a lot of CENTCOM planning. If I never got another compliment in my career, hell, if this was the ONLY compliment I ever got in my career, it would be more than enough for me.

Remembering all the reviews I've gotten over the year about how my stuff isn't practical and can't be used in any real planning sense, and then having the sorts of experiences I've had this month in Africa with CJTF-HOA, in the Med with our naval/NATO forces, and yesterday in Tampa ... well, it's both gratifying and indicative of how detached from reality the average academic pinhead reviewer is. Those weenies like to review my stuff from their academic perches, criticizing my theory. Their own problem is that I'm not a theoretician but an active, career-spanning practitioner of strategic planning whose main client has always been and will always be the U.S. military. What I do, and what my impact is, is but slightly glimpsed by the outside and when it is, it's rarely interpreted correctly (Ignatius the Wise is a rare person in this regard, like Jaffe). What I write down for publications is a refracted view of that world, delivered to the best of my ability and delivered for maximum understanding while protecting the equities of those whose trust I value as they value mine.

But this is all primping, silly-ass stuff to begin with.

If I had wanted the approval of a bunch of pinhead academics, I would have stayed in academia back in 1990 (and no, I was never an academic at the Naval War College, which was a big part of my problem there). Instead, I have always sought a different audience with a very different goal: to lead a worldwide revolution in thinking about the seam between war and peace.

Judging by my travels this month, my side is definitely winning.

And I'm very proud to be a small but crucial part of that historical process.

Many thanks to Tyler Durden for hosting me yesterday at CENTCOM, and yes, Tyler, I still want that write-up and that POC info.

Comments

[RCBev]

Very COOL!! If you have pers listening to you at CENTCOM -- that is a VERY good thing!! BFA is going to happen. I believe it!! :)

So is a SOCCOM brief in the near future??