My lunch with Peter Pace

Today I braved the weather, 50's and sprinkles, and went golfing. Having just taken my clubs to the Caribbean and Tampa, I was not equipped with my cold weather golf gloves or a knit hat that I often taken with me this time of year. Damn. Had to buy a headband from the pro-shop, otherwise I would have been in trouble. On the front nine I shot a 42 and had 20 putts. Twenty!! If you do the math, that's more than two putts a hole....terrible. On the back nine for instance, I only had 14 putts, which is pretty good. All in all, it was a good day, but like most rounds of golf, it could have been better!!

So on Friday, Ricardo and I went to the Hyatt downtown to see Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as take in a couple of seminars sponsored by the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. I didn't really appreciate who we were going to see, but others did as there were protesters outside supporting: homosexuals, veterans against war and immigration rights. An interesting mix. I wonder if they like each other at all?

General Pace is a pretty good speaker. I'm not sure dynamic is the word I would use, but he is effective. Here's an outline of his talk which is geared towards the college graduate:
1) Choose your parents well. If you failed at that, move on to #2.
2) Choose a company with good leadership.
3) Make decisions. Don't wait for orders. A leader can do 10 things well. A good leader with an organization behind him who allows them to make decisions can do 100 tasks of which 90 will go well and he's more than happy to clean up the other 10.
4) Grow where you are planted. Job hopping isn't the way to go.
5) Check you moral compass. You start your life and each day with your name and your integrity and no one can take either away from you. You can easily lose your integrity though.
6) Take care of those in your charge as they will take care of you at some point in the future.

Then he took questions from the audience. Interestingly, he moved out from behind the podium to take each and every question. This accomplished a couple of things in my mind: 1) he appeared more engaging 2) he appeared somewhat more intimidating 3) it gave him time to gather his thoughts before returning to the podium.

Here are some of the questions he answered:

First question: How do you reconcile taking care of those in your charge with the 10,000 homosexuals discharged under the don't ask don't tell policy? Yowza, nice first question! Ricardo and I don't really feel he answered the question at all. Our thoughts were: 1) it's a legacy policy that he couldn't change if he wanted to; 2) none of those homosexuals died in Iraq, so maybe they were being protected; 3) unfortunately, it's the policy of the people since the administration is elected and they made the rules.

Second question: Wouldn't your time be better spent dealing with your troubled recruiting and the war instead of talking to us? He very professionally dealt with this question, instead of just saying "You're right" and walking out, like I probably would have done.

One of the last questions he addressed was how and when will we know that the surge is working? He actually said that by September, we'll know if the military side of the surge is working. Baghdad will be the indicator for the military side. I was a little surprised by the mention of a specific month. He said the governance and economics evaluation of the surge will be analogous to how many people vote here in the states: am I better off today than I was yesterday? He also stated the party line that we won't be able to stop all the violence and that we have to come to grips with an acceptable level of violence. I'm not nuts about it, but it's probably the way we have to go at this point.