Something to thing about for national security thinkers and practitioners. Excerpt:
I plan to take a step back from the world of national security and military affairs. My aim is to avoid the negativity and non-constructive criticism--the destructive commentary--that seems to almost wholly surround those affairs today. War doesn't create anything, a friend once said. It only consumes and destroys. The culture that surrounds national security seems to me to be similarly destructive, and growing more so day by day. I will continue to edit the SWJ, but my intent will be to stay away from the commentary there, on Twitter, on Facebook, etc, that all too often descends into criticism of everything and production of nothing. When I do write about national security, I plan to take lessons about strategic planning, decision-making, culture, and organizational design and to apply them more generally to problems of creation and competition in the world more broadly.
MONDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2012
New Year, New Direction
It has been a while since I posted here. Life, always busy, has gotten busier. This fall, I was selected to be the aide de camp to the Commander of US Marine Corps Forces, Central Command. While the aide position to a 3-star is roughly analogous to an executive assistant in the civilian world, the military uses this as a senior management/leadership development program, selecting officers with around 15 years of experience to sit in for a year on the world of senior decision-makers, giving us almost unfettered access to their meetings and thoughts. This has been an extremely rewarding few months, filled with travel and long days. What's more, I found out early in December that I was selected for lieutenant colonel.
This isn't all, of course. I've also been keeping the journal side of the Small Wars Journal rolling, lightly editing, selecting, and posting all the great essays submitted by the community, keeping those coming out Monday through Friday. I've also been editing my own work, finishing the edits for my book War, Welfare & Democracy: Rethinking America's Quest for the End of History (available for pre-order now for a late-January release at Potomac Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or other booksellers online).
(Continued at the link below)
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