Delegates,

Welcome to the NCSC XXXVI US Armed Forces Future Planning Committee. It is my pleasure to be at the helm of this innovative effort to combine both policy construction committees and fast-paced crisis. I am a current junior in the IPOL: Security Studies program here at Georgetown and a member of the NROTC program. So unlike you, I’m not paying for any of this. To all of you that have jobs, “Thank you, taxpayer.” I’m proud to be working with Andrew Rugg (COL ‘09), my friend and co-chair, another veteran of crisis simulations. Adam Sikes will be our head analyst. He is a fellow undergraduate in the SFS. It would be only partially accurate to say he is a former gunnery sergeant in the Marine Corps, since “once a marine, always a marine” as they say. He will ground our simulation in reality, not allowing Rugg or I to stray to far into the Ivory towers of impractical theory or the insanity of impossible crisis.

The committee started as an idea for a small-scale ECOSOC which would plan for the future of the US military and its role in foreign policy. However, we wanted to avoid the bland impotence of typical compromises that come out of ECOSOC’s and other small non-crisis committees. Therefore, we have shrunk the committee size and divided this committee into two blocks, to give you the incentive to truly fight for specific programs and policies. Half of your time will be spent as the 2008 special commission to develop an image of the future military. The second half will be an un-named crisis 20-30 years in the future that will bring into focus the very real consequences your machinations years before. The crisis will depend very heavily on the decisions you make during the first half of the simulation. The history of the nation’s foreign policy up to that point will be shaped by the vision you provide.

You will have the interesting position of having to fill two rolls during this conference. The positions during the crisis will not be the same as those during the planning stage, and will be randomly assigned. While this will require you to be open and flexible in your perspectives, you must remember you are real-world characters with personal and institutional interests. There will be red lines over which compromise cannot cross. There will be no “resolve to commission a commission” documents passed to create the illusion of progress. The buck stops at you; there is no lazy General Assembly-style delegation. You will have to decide from where the future enemies are coming, what these enemies are going to look like, and the tools needed to defeat or prevent these enemies from becoming a threat. The more specific and comprehensive you are, the better off you will be for the crisis, the more potent and refined your tools against the targets and missions you have envisioned.

Finally, I realize that in many committees delegates can slide through without using the background guide. That is a failure of both the Background Guide’s quality and the quality of the simulation. We will avoid that. In this simulation, you will need to lean on your background guide. There will be many terms, concepts, and acronyms (acronyms especially) that will be unfamiliar to many people. As such, I realize how painful it is to read a BG. We promise to make a quality and interesting document that is more like a quality program from the military channel, rather than watching roll-call on C-span.
Consider this a policy for the whole committee. It is, obviously, a competition, but we’re looking to have a good time doing it. The more you enjoy what you’re doing, the higher the quality of debate. The higher the quality of debate, the better the quality of material we can provide to you. The relationship is symbiotic. Keep that in mind. I look forward to seeing you all in October.

V/r,
Matthew “America” Hipple
matthipple(at)gmail.com