Talking with "Capt. Phil" and the rest of the new class of Navy admirals in West VA
Dateline: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's National Conservation Training Center, outside Shepherdstown WV, 4 October 2005
Landed at Dulles around 9pm last night, and it took the usual hour to get into a car.
Then I'm driving a couple of hours in the dark, my eyes getting a bit too blurry (my weird night of oxygen-lite sleeping the night before left me funky), and I'm lucky I've already made this trek in the dark.
This place is one of the most beautifully ornate (in a very organic sense) collection of facilities and buildings that I've ever been to, and I'm sure it's all due to Senator Robert Byrd. Really, if you love wood and stone, this place is just plain gorgeous. The dining hall is just stunning, as your eyes are simply pulled up to the amazingly complex ceiling (sorry, no pix because I'm still figuring out my Treo).
Well, I get to bed around 1am, setting my Treo for a 7 am wake-up, except I didn't bother to reset the volume control from buzzer to ringer, so I slept through it right up to 7:52. Problem: I was supposed to start my almost three-hour brief at 8am.
That was the fastest I've ever rolled into action, running from my lodge through several hundred yards of forest trails, almost running (literally) into grazing white-tail deer.
So I'm thinking as I run: if this is Tuesday morning, I must be dodging white-tail deer in West Virginian woods!
This place has an auditorium that has to be seen to be believed: all wood like some cathedral in the forest.
Audience was all the new navy admirals.
So at one point I'm talking about how my master slide on the changing focus of U.S. war planning is one that I generated way back when with War College colleague Bradd Hayes and my next-door neighbor at that time, a Navy captain named Phil Wisecup (our kids played together a lot for a good year and a half, his son was my star soccer center, his older daughter babysat our kids, and so on). Phil is the "Capt. Phil" of PNM (his story of dealing with being a cop on the beat in the Indian Ocean. I called him "Capt. Phil" in the book, because I couldn't locate him fast enough after he moved on to his next assignment (White House situation room) to get his permission (I finally did, but the book was in printing by then).
So I'm going on about Phil, saying he's currently working in the White House, when the assembled flags start protesting and pointing to the back of the auditorium: there was Capt.-now-Rear-Admiral Phil, currently the commander of naval forces in Korea.
So very cool to see Phil again and share a meal after my talk, along with the new head of Deep Blue (the longest of the Navy's long-range think tanks), the new boss of the Office of Naval Intelligence (who told me Bill Manthorpe has published an article in an intell community journal on his "curve" slide and my write-up of it in PNM), and the guy in charge of submarine force structure planning. Funny thing is, you'd think this trio would all be hostile to my vision, given my criticism of the navy, but nothing could be further from the truth, which I find quite comforting. It tells me that things are changing big time, even in the usually recalcitrant (meaning tradition-bound) Navy. Yet none of them tell me to lay off. The ship is big, we all agree, and the rudder is small, so the good fight is a long one.
Rest of the day is pretty relaxed. Tomorrow is another one.
Here's the daily catch:
■ Give it up for the private-sector SysAdmin forces!■ Bush's compassionate conservatism works for me on his Supreme Court choices
■ The EU talks with Turkey DO begin, after midnight compromise
■ When oil prices go up, citizens freak and governments scramble