Nested

Today, in 1995, I was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant of Infantry and went on Active Duty. It was, and probably still is, one of the top five most impactful events of my life. Every year, I try to think back to some of the lessons I was taught as a young Lieutenant and how they apply to my life now, either directly or indirectly.

One of the things we were taught as we went through the Infantry Officer Basic Course (IOBC) at Ft. Benning, Georgia is that missions are successful when everyone is moving in the same direction. My mission as a platoon leader needed to be part of, or “nested with”, my company commander’s mission. It didn’t need to be the same, or even equal to, the mission of the other two platoon leaders, but we all needed to be nested with our boss. He also needed to be nested with his boss, who was nested with his boss, and so on. They used Russian nesting dolls as a visual. That one always stuck with me. The biggest doll on the outside dictated the mission and all the smaller dolls fell in line.

As I reflected on my drive to work today about being nested with my new boss in my new job, I realized that nesting is one of the things we are missing in our government, and has been for a while. As I scrolled through social media this morning, I saw multiple examples that confirmed my belief.

I’ve said multiple times that we do NOT have to agree on how to get there, but our mission as the United States of America is very, very unclear right now. Who are we? What are we doing? Where are we going? Until we know that, how we get there is irrelevant. I am not old enough to remember President Carter in any adult context. I know what I have read and been told. I remember under President Regan, the United States was the global deterrent against the Soviet Union. Under President Bush, although short, we focused in both Panama and Iraq on defeating tyrants. Under President Clinton we became the world’s peacekeeping force.

The events of 9/11 gave us a very different focus. We became the global force leading the rest of the world in the fight against terrorism. Near the end of President Bush’s administration, it seemed that we lost our nested focus. There seemed to be an increased division on who we wanted to be as a nation. President Obama determined he would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but didn’t provide much direction on who we were to become AFTER that was done. President Trump was focused internally. He was focused on America and American interests. He succeeded at a few things; he improved the American economy and, arguably, his focus on American First didn’t do much to improve our global stature and international relations. What he didn’t do, much like President Obama, was determine WHO we were going to be as a nation. Through both President Obama and President Trump, the divide and the infighting got worse without any direction, without any nested focus.

The current administration has provided nothing. Literally no guidance, no direction, no vision. There is no nested mission for us to focus on as a nation. The infighting by our politicians is trickling down to us as citizens. We are not a nation with a goal or a focus. The divide is growing and not getting better.

We need a leader. I don’t give a crap what party they are from. I don’t care. We need a focus. We need to determine who we are, what we want to be, where we are going and only then can we determine how to get there.

As a nation, we need to be NESTED.