You're Cleared Hot.
Are you and I operational? Are we cleared, even if only in our own minds, to fly or trek or sail into combat, even if that combat is only against our own Resistance and the problems of our work?
Capital Thinking · Issue #956 · View online
Do you know the word “operational?”
I didn’t. It’s a military term, used in armed forces all over the world. It means “certified for combat.” It means they give you the keys to the plane or the tank or the aircraft carrier.
You have passed the test.
You’re cleared hot.
“I wasn’t even operational”
I was interviewing Zvi “Kantor” Kanor, a pilot who at age seventeen got called out of flight school to fly combat missions in the Six Day War.
“It was crazy. I wasn’t even operational!”
Other pilots have described harrowing action in the sky. “This happened on my first mission. I was barely operational!”
Here’s a true story from Afghanistan. My friend Major Jim Gant of the Special Forces wrote a book called One Tribe at a Time.
It was a white paper, laying out a different type of strategy—what came to be called a Tribal Engagement Strategy—for fighting the war in that overwhelmingly tribal country. General David Petraeus was in charge of all US and Coalition forces in Afghanistan at the time. He read Major Gant’s paper and thought it made a lot of sense.
The story is that General Petraues called his staff together and, dropping the paper on the table before them, declared, “Operationalize this.”{Full disclosure, there was no happy ending for the Tribal Engagement strategy.]
The point is the word. Operational.
“Officially certified to participate in a military operation.”
Or operationalize. “To make operational. To make ready for ‘live’ or ‘kinetic’ action.”
Are you and I operational? Are we cleared, even if only in our own minds, to fly or trek or sail into combat, even if that combat is only against our own Resistance and the problems of our work?
If we’re Charles Dickens, are we ready to wrangle Pip and Fagin and Mr. Micawber? If we’re Jon Krakauer, are we ready to leap Into Thin Air? If we’re Elizabeth Gilbert, have we got the guts to Eat Pray Love?
In a way, our writer’s type of combat is harder than the kind faced by military men and women. It’s harder because nobody certifies us.
There’s no flight school or boot camp or BUDS training for us. Nobody mentors us or validates us. Nobody pins a Trident or an SF tab or an Eagle, Globe, and Anchor on the breast of our tunic.
We have to train ourselves. We have to test ourselves. We have to validate and commend and reinforce ourselves.
Peter Brockwell