[Infowarrior] - Everything I Ever Needed to Know About the News I Learned in the TOC

[Richard Forno]

Everything I Ever Needed to Know About the News I Learned in the TOC

By Robert BatemanApril 17, 20131 Comment

The tactical operations center is, as most ground-pounders like me know, the brains of a battalion or a brigade.

Information flows in from a million sources, and decisions resulting in actions flow outward.  As a young lieutenant you think of the TOC — pronounced “tock” — as alien territory, host to unfamiliar creatures with arcane motivations.

Eventually you learn better, and you figure out that the most critical elements inside that headquarters are patience and wisdom.  I should note that it is the latter element that leads to the former.  This is a basic statement which applies to infantrymen like me, but any grunt, jarhead, wingnut or squid, of any rank, should grok these basic precepts.

The bottom line is that if the collective personality of the TOC has those two attributes, you win.  If it does not, you lose.  It does not get much simpler than this binary statement.

But there is more to this than meets the eye, because you really can learn something about living as a thinking citizen in a representative democracy which has a free press…just by learning this lesson from the TOC....

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Read more: http://nation.time.com/2013/04/17/everything-i-ever-needed-to-know-about-the-news-i-learned-in-the-toc/#ixzz2QjRD96Cl


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.