We asked Legal to have their intern Melissa stop at the Metaphor Locker on her way to the morning production meeting at the picnic table. Splash had pulled in some of the more striking examples late in the previous day when the storm was changing intensity and pulled his end of the picnic table to be sheltered under the concrete portico of the towering structure above.

Sometimes the metaphors inched up to reported Cat 4 intensity, but Legal has warned us against inadvertent alarmism and we wanted the one from Florida not to swirl on the table as we gathered our thoughts about the other storms in progress.

Helene is erratic. Her violent behavior had intensified since landfall last night near Perry, Florida, with 140 mph winds. That made her the first Cat 4 storm to hit Florida’s Big Bend region since 1851. Which is not “The First Storm!” with an exclamation point, but rather the first one humans noticed and wrote down in a sort of convergence of observation and time.

Overnight, Helene’s urgency declined to sustained winds of 70 mph east of Macon, Georgia, headed north at 30 mph. It is curling west in passage but some of the moisture is already here with more to come as the front passes tonight.

“We did the weather report yesterday,” said Section Leader DeMille. “So, we can dispense with that and try to integrate the other events to what now seems to be a continuing combination of tropical storms.”

Melissa frowned, having dealt with the stack of figures of speech containing, implied comparisons between seemingly unrelated human events. Rocket smiled and leaned back to fumble in his canvas rucksack for the electronic folder highlighted “Overwatch.” He waved it around in the light mist as the wind gently rose.

“We saw this in the last part of the Israel offense in Gaza. That was the one where they went down into the tunnel network Hamas had constructed to put military facilities adjacent or under civilian structures like hospitals and schools.”

Vic frowned, since he was a strike planner who had been immersed in Rules of Engagement in his time. “That is a new sort of defense, using the Rules of War intended to prevent collateral damage in order to protect lethal command and control and logistics capabilities. Didn’t that be as much of a war crime as actually hitting them?”

That took a couple cups of coffee and some smoldering Marlboros in the aluminum butt-kits on the table to resolve. Rocket recoiled from the smoke that blows along in the rising wind along the base of the building that forms a sort of wind tunnel along the parking lot.

Melissa dumped the spare metaphors on the table that made the steel legs grind on the patio’s concrete. On this day in 1960, Kennedy and Nixon squared off in first televised presidential debate. That was something new at the time, but reflected a collision of technology with traditional discussion that JFK won with the better haircut and cleaner shave. Or the entry of the miraculous, another traditional human activity enhanced by electricity.

Former First Lady Melania Trump released a statement saying that Divine intervention saved her husband from two assassination attempts, characterizing his survival as “really miracles if you really think about it.”

We agreed, and that naturally led to a discussion of the multibillion-dollar effort to tie together all components of the U.S. military, from sensor to shooter to inflict destruction on narrowly identified high-value targets of material and people. Apparently someone brought the term “holistic” down from the BuzzWord Locker to use until we figure out what it means.

That is why the glowing characters on Rocket’s tablet rolled continuously from screen to screen. It had started with his notes a few weeks ago that the US Navy had somehow contributed to the destruction of the Hamas tunnels in Gaza. We thought it was sort of unusual at the time, and held it aside for discussusion.

We did not understand the reference to what was called “Project Overwatch.” Available information came from a leak to journalists about something larger. This morning, Gaza operation complete and the astonishing campaign in motion against Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, there was more data to fuse into the tale.

Earlier this year, DoD ran an un-pronounceable thing called Project Convergence- Capstone 24, or (PC-C4). It was a big deal, roping together efforts by Army, Navy, Air Force, Space, Marine and Coast Guard in a joint data integration concept. Then, link the product with partner and allied militaries for combat use. Those partners included the usual suspects in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France, and Japan. And also apparently Israel.

What were they trying to demonstrate? Press releases claim the thrust was to harness data from sensors and weapons ‘deployed in all domains’ to “detect and defeat air threats and missiles and take out enemy maritime, air and land targets by connecting disparate systems to share threat and execution data at machine speed.”

IRON DOME is what the Israelis call their application, but it is not a shield over just their homeland. It is something a little different, and not just a local shield but a holistic means of sharing what may be in your garage or on your desk. Or in pocket or purse.

You can see Melissa did not want to deal with that level of granularity since it doesn’t lend itself to either humor, pathos or irony, though of course it is intrinsic to the morning. She is more direct in approach.

“So, that stuff about the Israelis targeting cell phones, pagers, radios and solar panels in order to kill the leadership of people with whom they are at war is just part of something more universal and shared between at least seven nations with trillions of defense dollars available?”

There was some general nodding around the table, with the unspoken agreement that it was liable to get a little moister where we were sitting and luncheon inside and dry was a logical idea. So long as no one knew where we were. We agreed to leave the phones, pagers, tablets and MP3 devices outside and try to keep our voices down so Sirri doesn’t summon something to help us out.

It is hard enough to generate the morning edition, you know?

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com