Remarks to the Nevada National Guard Pre-Command Course, September 15, 2026
By Robbin F. Laird
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in the waiting area outside the Secretary of Defense’s office at the Pentagon, watching a small television, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. As a New Yorker, my reaction was immediate — this was no accident. Someone in the room mentioned that an air defense alert was going up, but there was still a strange, suspended hope that this might stay a “New York event.” I didn’t believe it. We went ahead with the meeting anyway. Then the building shook.
What happened next has stayed with me longer than almost anything else in four decades of this work. We moved outside into what I can only call controlled chaos, smoke rising, people running, and yet, in the middle of it, an extraordinary sense of purpose. No one was waiting for orders. As I made my way toward the parking lot, I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers heading back into the building. It wasn’t a photo op. It was instinct, leadership that had no plan to consult, because no plan existed for what had just happened, and that acted anyway.
About a week later, I took the train up to New York to sit down with Mike Wallace for a 60 Minutes segment on the French counter-terrorism model. I knew Manhattan from my Columbia days, long before the towers existed, and I’d watched the skyline get redefined by them. Now I watched it redefined again, pulling into the city and seeing that absence, like a chapter had been written into that skyline and then physically torn back out. On camera, I talked about Judge Bruguière and how France had built its counter-terrorism approach the hard way, through trial and error, including stopping a hijacked Air France jet in 1994 before it could be flown into the Eiffel Tower. The warning lights had been blinking for years. We just hadn’t believed anyone would pull it off here.
That’s the distinction I want to open with tonight. Crisis management assumes the ground eventually goes still again: you identify the problem, you fix it, you get back to steady state. On 9/11, and in every homeland defense scenario your Guard has trained for since, the ground doesn’t go still. The people who function best in that moment aren’t the ones with the better binder. They’re the ones who can act on an incomplete picture, adjust in public as the picture changes, and keep moving. That’s not crisis management. That’s chaos management.
Some of you have read the book. I’m not going to summarize it. I’m going to spend our time together on five things from it that I think apply directly to what you do.
Stop Managing Crises. Start Managing Chaos.
Crisis management has a built-in assumption baked into the word itself: disorder is temporary. You identify the problem, you fix it, you restore the prior steady state. That logic still works for a bounded, well-understood incident, a single building fire, a single accident, a single bad actor with a known playbook.
It fails the moment the system itself is shifting under you. And that, not the bounded incident, is the normal operating condition for homeland defense. Cascading wildfire, grid, and cyber events arriving on top of one another. Compressed timelines that don’t leave room for the deliberate planning cycle you trained on. Multiple jurisdictions and multiple agencies in the room at once, each with its own authorities, its own chain of command, its own definition of what “resolved” looks like.
I want to give you a diagnostic test, and I’d genuinely like you to sit with it rather than just nod along: look at how your unit spends its planning energy. Is it organized around solving named contingencies one at a time, Scenario A, Scenario B, Scenario C, each with its own binder, is it organized around building the capacity to absorb whatever comes next, named or not?
Most organizations, without meaning to, drift toward the first model. It’s easier to brief. It’s easier to resource. It produces a plan you can point to.
But a plan built for Scenario A doesn’t bend well when reality hands you Scenario A-and-a-half, arriving at the same time as an unrelated cyber intrusion and a jurisdictional dispute with a neighboring state’s Guard.
The reframe I’m asking you to make is this: the goal isn’t to get back to normal faster. It’s to build the capacity to function while normal keeps moving because in this line of work, normal is rarely going to hold still long enough for you to get back to it.
Reframe Exercises as Laboratories, Not Examinations
This is where I want to connect directly to your own language, because you’ve already lived this one. When I sat down with General Lau to talk about Desert Forge, we landed, almost by accident, in the course of the conversation, on a phrase that captures exactly what I’m describing: operational discovery.
Here’s the distinction. Most exercises, in most organizations, are built to validate a plan somebody already wrote. You run the scenario, the plan performs roughly as expected, everyone gets a passing grade, and the after-action report confirms what leadership already believed going in. That’s an examination. It tells you whether you can execute what you already know.
A chaos-ready force designs exercises to do the opposite: to break the plan. Deliberately. The point isn’t to confirm what you assumed walking in. It’s to surface what you didn’t know you needed, and to find that out in an exercise rather than in an actual event where the cost of discovery is measured in something other than an after-action slide.
That takes a specific kind of structure, not just a mindset. It means standing up something like a chaos cell, a small group sitting near the commander whose entire job is short, iterative experiments rather than the production of glossy concepts. It means building rapid learning loops that get insights out of the exercise and into doctrine, training, and acquisition conversations fast, before the organization pays for the same lesson twice, once in the exercise and once for real.
I suspect that, listening to this, you’re not hearing something foreign. Desert Forge is proof that you’re already doing a version of this. What I’m offering is language for it, and a frame for pushing it further and more deliberately.
There’s a reason this matters beyond the exercise itself. An organization that only ever validates its plans develops a kind of institutional confidence that isn’t earned. It looks like readiness because nothing has yet forced it to be wrong in public. An organization that deliberately breaks its own plans, on its own schedule, in a controlled setting, earns a different kind of confidence: the knowledge of exactly where the plan bends and where it snaps, discovered before an adversary or a wildfire discovers it for you. That’s the return on investment for operational discovery, and it’s why I’d argue for treating it as a standing practice rather than a one-time exercise design choice.
Build for Resilience, Not Brittle Efficiency
Modern organizations — military and civilian alike — are trained from the ground up to prize efficiency. Single suppliers. Single data hubs. Single command paths. That’s a rational design choice when conditions are stable, because every redundant channel, every backup path, every bit of leadership depth beyond the bare minimum, looks like waste on a budget slide. It’s overhead you can cut without anyone noticing until the day conditions stop being stable.
This point is directly relevant to a force that has to plug into civilian authorities, other states’ National Guards, and federal agencies on short notice, often across jurisdictional seams that don’t map cleanly onto any single chain of command. You don’t get to choose your partners in a cascading event. You get whoever is standing in the adjacent jurisdiction when the grid goes down, and you’d better already have a working relationship and a backup way to talk to them.
So here’s the question I want to leave with you, and I mean it as something to actually take back to your unit, not just a rhetorical flourish for this morning: if you lost a key node tomorrow — a headquarters, a data center, a comms hub — what could still function within twenty-four hours?
Multiple channels instead of single suppliers. Backup decision paths that cross jurisdictional lines before you need them, not after. Leadership depth beyond the minimum required to fill a billet. All of it looks like waste on a normal Tuesday. None of it looks like waste on the day the node goes down.
Forge Chaos Navigators
Everything I’ve described so far, chaos management as a stance, operational discovery as a method, resilience as a design principle, is architecture. And architecture doesn’t run itself.
It needs leaders who can operate inside it under pressure, who can hold a structure like this together when it’s being tested in real time rather than on a slide. That is, specifically, the person this course is trying to produce.
There are four trainable capabilities I want to name plainly, because I think naming them is half the battle.
Adaptive thinking: the ability to act on a provisional map and revise it in public as new information comes in, without treating the revision as a failure of the original plan.
Pattern recognition under uncertainty: reading weak signals before the picture is complete, rather than waiting for certainty that a fast-moving situation will not grant you.
Emotional regulation under stress: holding steady judgment when the stakes feel real, which is a different skill from holding steady judgment in a training environment where everyone knows it’s an exercise.
Collaborative sensemaking across functions that don’t normally talk to each other: building a shared picture with people whose training, vocabulary, and institutional incentives are not your own, the civilian emergency manager, the utility operator, the neighboring state’s Guard, the federal liaison.
Here’s the honest note, and I want to be direct about it: none of this shows up automatically with seniority or rank. Command time alone doesn’t build it. It has to be deliberately built, through realistic simulation and structured reflection, not just accumulated experience, which can just as easily teach you to trust a plan that happened to work once as it can teach you genuine adaptive judgment.
So let me ask you something, and you don’t need to answer it out loud: where in your career have you actually been trained to act on incomplete information, as opposed to simply being expected to?
For most people in this kind of career, the honest answer is that the expectation arrived well before the training did. That gap is exactly what this course, and frankly what Desert Forge, exists to close.
I’d add one more thing about this list of four, because it matters for how you use it. These are not personality traits that some officers have and others don’t. They’re skills, in the same sense that land navigation or weapons handling are skills and they degrade without practice, they improve with deliberate repetition, and they can be assessed. If your unit’s leader-development program doesn’t have a way to observe and coach adaptive thinking, pattern recognition, emotional regulation, and collaborative sensemaking with the same rigor it applies to physical and technical proficiency, that’s a gap worth closing before your next command, not after.
The Five Imperatives
I’m not going to re-teach these. I’m going to give them to you as a fast, punchy list you can write down and carry with you, because if you remember nothing else from tonight, I want you to remember these five lines.
One: stop managing crises — start managing chaos. Disorder in this line of work is not a temporary deviation from a stable baseline. It is the baseline.
Two: build for resilience, not brittle efficiency. Redundancy that looks like waste on a quiet day is the thing that keeps you functioning on the day that isn’t quiet.
Three: normalize operating in sustained ambiguity — treat early decisions as tests, not final commitments. You will act before you have full information. The goal is not to eliminate that condition; it’s to get comfortable revising in public rather than defending a first call past the point it still makes sense.
Four: treat wicked problems as ongoing terrain, not solvable tasks. Some problems in this field don’t have a resolution state. They have a condition you manage continuously. Stop looking for the finish line on those, and start building the muscle to operate on that terrain indefinitely.
Five: make your own thinking — and your team’s — the primary object of attention. The organizations that survive sustained ambiguity are not the ones with the smartest single leader. They’re the ones where thinking clearly under pressure is itself a monitored, coached, and deliberately improved skill, the same way marksmanship or physical fitness is.
This isn’t a slogan. It’s a shift from being the leader who personally fixes every fire to being the one who builds the organization’s capacity to keep thinking clearly while the fire is still burning.
Those are not the same skill, and the second one is harder, because it means your job is no longer to be the smartest person solving the problem in the room. It’s to make sure the room itself stays capable of solving problems it hasn’t seen before.
Closing
You already do a version of this. Desert Forge is proof of it, operational discovery didn’t arrive in this room tonight as a foreign concept; it arrived as a name for something General Lau’s team is already practicing. My hope today is more modest than convincing you of something new. It’s that you leave with language and a framework for what you’re already doing well, and a few concrete places to push further before your next command.
Go back to your diagnostic question about planning energy. Go back to the twenty-four-hour node question. Go back to asking where in your own career you were actually trained, rather than just expected, to act on incomplete information and then ask whether the people under your next command will be able to answer that question any better than you can right now.
That’s the work. It doesn’t end when this talk does, and it doesn’t end when the exercise after-action report gets filed.
It’s the ongoing terrain I mentioned a moment ago.
Thank you — I’ll hand it over to your questions.