COP28's two little words
Can change one's sense of the past, present, and future
Let me start with a story from The Pentagon’s New Map: It’s about the historic Naval Force Capabilities Planning Effort (NFCPE), a collection of the best and brightest Navy and Marine Corps flags and senior officers who were summoned to Washington DC from around the world in 1991 to come up with THE new Department of Navy White Paper — the first in decades, mind you — that would lay out the strategic vision for the naval service in the post-Desert Storm/post-Cold War world.
Well, it was a very intense bunch of very ambitious officers who were basically locked in a big spare meeting space at the Center for Naval Analyses, where I was a just-starting out analyst with no standing but some great mentors. The initial round of trying to come up with something we could all agree upon failed dramatically, as the 3-star flags overlooking the whole thing were extremely difficult to impress, much less please.
After one particularly bad presentation to the so-called Gang of Five, the axe came down and many of the 40 or so officers were kicked off the NFCPE right then and there. They didn’t fire me because I was just the hired help — the scribe, so to speak. So here we pick up the story in PNM:
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