So, we have brushed past some of the interesting ways our government responds to crisis. Our last exposure commenced in the wild response to 9/11. In part of the immediate response, we found ourselves attached to the person of the Cabinet Secretary designated to be the one who would survive the next attack. The means to do so was to open one of the old hardened facilities that had been constructed in cold War days out in the countryside around the capital until the other Cabinet members were again dispersed and the chain of command likely to survive a mass attack.

Sitting with Secretary Thompson under a mountain gave us plenty of time to explore what was happening to our government and how he was going to respond with the dozens of public health organizations under his Department. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) was one of them with a public face, but there were others in the National Institutes of Health. Secretary Thompson asked how the military did it, and I ran him through the crisis response process on the Joint Staff operated, mobilizing personnel to staff central information centers and establishing the flow to decision-makers.

Thompson was interested in having the same sort of capability, one managed by his Headquarters staff, not the organizations in Atlanta or at the NIH campus in Maryland. He asked if it would be possible for me to come over to the Hubert Humphrey Building, his headquarters, and see if we could set up something that would support him a little better than his weekly visit from the CIA briefing staff. I told him I would ask the system if it was possible, and that remarkable experience of being the only member on a Cabinet staff turned rapidly to something else.

We will get to that presently, but the events currently in progress in our changing world need mention. We recall something from long ago- a “Missile Crisis,” is what they told us as part of a “duck and cover” exercise in the school hallways. We apparently are in the midst of another one, though we have been told to just stay six feet apart and things will be fine.

Ukraine continues to simmer in what is allegedly a Spring Offensive, though that season has passed. Ground combat continues across the eastern arc of oblasts. Drones and anti-drone rocket fly in the night, and Europe’s largest atomic power plant is discussed as a possible target by both sides. A half world away, China is dispatching naval units to demonstrate resolve and commitment in a new world order belted to their ambition. Even further around the spinning surface, the Iranians are taking potshots at oil tankers in an effort to demonstrate their imagined regional mastery.

We first ran into that when the Iranian “students” seized the United States Embassy in Tehran back in 1979. So, our response to all that is part of the same swirl of all this activity. A restive Iran, the fall of a mighty Soviet Union, venomous anti-Zionism, the flood of Peace Benefit cash into entirely new aspects of economic and kinetic warfare. And the muttering about weapons of mass destruction that includes the atom and biologics.

Some of this has been laying about in plain sight for years. Other aspects remain undisclosed. We will try to trace through how some of it came to be while appreciating just how extraordinary the trip has been!

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com