Dateline: Holiday Inn at BWI Airport, MD, 28 September 2004

Flew to Baltimore-Washington International today for a couple of days of meetings/briefs. Today my schedule brought me to the Pentagon to sit with senior staff from the J-5 (Plans and Policy) of the Joint Staff. This is the same branch I briefed last spring in the off-site event covered by Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Jaffe in his profile of me.

As you might expect, these guys try to take the longest view of things like the war on terror (inside the Defense Department now it is called more and more the WOT, instead of the GWOT, a change I approve of, simply because I say it's a war only inside the Gap, whereas it's basically a law-enforcement ops inside the Core). It was a great session, held in the Secretary's Executive Conference Room in the National Military Command Center (I sat at the head of the V-shaped table, which was pretty weird, since I'm so used to always standing up the entire time in rooms like thatómade me wonder if I could catch "neoconservatism" from a chair). J-5 told me in advance they didn't want the brief, but simply to have me sit with them and discuss a series of questions they wanted to pose. So that's what we did for two hours. I got a lot of good feedback in the process, and plenty to think about. I feel myself close to an explosion of new slides. I just need a couple of days back in the office to settle it all out in my brain.

Meanwhile, here's a bunch of stories from various papers on various dates (reducing my backlog quite a bit):

■More Army adjustment as the Sys Admin role drags on

■If this be "Indian Country," then they be the Pony Express

■The middle is disappearing in Iraq

■China and India reshape the Core, each in their own way

■More scary news on the Bird Flu in Asia

■Why Pakistan may end up being China's mess to fix

■Yet another example of why it isn't Islam versus the West

■David Ignatius cracks the code on the Big Bang strategy

■A Core-Gap map that's all about the oil

■Cell phones lead the way in changing both Japan and Russia