The military spends decades, and a fortune, building a particular kind of mind. The operational planner-strategist: the person who can take a vision, a tangle of competing demands, and not enough of anything, and turn it into direction a team can actually execute. The schools that forge them, SAMS, SAASS, SAW, MAWS, JAWS, BSAP, JADS, are among the most demanding programs in the profession.
Then graduation comes, and the system that built the talent has no plan to keep it together. Assignments scatter the class across organizations and continents. Alumni networks run on a volunteer and a spreadsheet. Year by year, the connections that took a year of hard intellectual work to build quietly go cold.
That is the part that should not stand. Forty years of institutional investment should not evaporate at the schoolhouse door, and a community forged in shared discipline should not be dismantled by a change of address.
Here is what years of this work taught me. We can solve so many of our own problems, and create so many opportunities, if we just knew each other existed. The capability is already out there, in thousands of people who learned the same craft. The only thing missing is a way to find and be found by your own.
I learned it as Director of the Joint Advanced Warfighting School. I could not build the alumni association our graduates deserved with volunteers and a spreadsheet, and while I wore the uniform I was formally part of the problem: a body that keeps graduates connected has to stand outside the Department, and the Department has other priorities. No one is at fault. Someone simply had to build it after the uniform came off.
ERETAI is what I built, and doing it right takes three organizations. The ERETAI Foundation, now in formation, keeps the community connected to each other and to the public that educated it, starting with ERETAI Connect, where you find and are found by your own. The ERETAI Institute, with its first programs planned for 2027, will carry the planning discipline beyond national defense. The ERETAI Group, the firm that built Connect and operates it until the Foundation is formed, serves its clients. Three separate entities, united in a singular purpose.
The point is not a bigger directory. The point is that no worthy vision should fail for want of planning, and no planner’s talent should go to waste for lack of a place to put it. All of it is built so the people who learned to turn intent into direction can keep doing it, together, long after the uniform.
If that is your community, come home. Request your invitation.
Row Well and Live.
First published May 19, 2026. Updated October 2026 to name the three ERETAI organizations.
