The South PacificBoard

What is your main goal for your term as Minister of Defense. The one thing that you 100% want to get done or achieve?

The main goal is to not only to maintain our strong and active updater force, but also to recruit nations that might not ordinarily get involved in military gameplay or who can’t make update to helping us out through the Tidal Force. This wing of our military will serve as critical support staff for our operations and allow updaters to focus their efforts even more intensely on the time-sensitive operations which are their main responsibility.

Do you think that you along with the MoFA Roavin will be able to work well together in the realm of R/D FA and Defending logistics?

Roavin and I have an excellent relationship that goes back years. He’s one of the people I’ve worked the closest with in recent years and I have tremendous respect for his work ethic and commitment to the region. We’ve worked on all sorts of projects together and have a long history of sharing high-level intelligence, time-sensitive defender missions, and navigating tricky FA situations. I think we will work (and are already working) extremely well together.

Now a couple of questions about your campaign.

In your campaign, you mentioned wanting to continue the Phoneix Flock Fleet and aim to expand it. How exactly do you plan to do so and would you be open to running events with the MoC or publishing advertising dispatches along with MoE to assit with this?

So I’m not sure I am capable of continuing the PFF in its current form. I think that’s a misreading of my campaign - Phoenix is far better than I will ever be at coordinating that level of insanity. Her strengths as a community organizer are literally unmatched. However there are some key things we can learn from it: notably, that with enough elbow grease you can find people who support the defender cause in the most unexpected of places. And that’s definitely something I want to build on in the coming months.

But as an answer to your second question - yes, and some of that work has already begun.

In your campaign, you talk about SPSF record-keeping. Why is this important?

That’s more of a pet project of mine. When I was coming up as a defender I loved keeping track of how many updates I had attended, how many missions I had done, etc. the next goal or milestone was hugely motivating to me. So at some point probably in the next couple of weeks, I’m gonna sit down and dedicate a silly amount of time to organizing as many SPSF records as I can find into one easily-searchable per-soldier database so members can track their statistics. We have a TON of update reports but I really want to actually do something with all of them, not just use them for weekly or monthly activity reports :stuck_out_tongue:

You also briefly talk about the Partnership for Sovereignty, what are your thoughts on it and what do you see i the future for it?

I think it’s amazing as long as we actually commit to it. It aligns with both my personal views as well as TSP’s quite well, and it’s great to see defenders pooling their resources to fight for the cause in the WA as well. But there’s even more we can do with it - culturally, militarily, and generally as a community of players with common goals. We should be taking advantage of all of that.

What do you think is you biggest strength and your biggest weekness?

My biggest strength is probably raw defending skill and game knowledge. I’m really strong in “boots on the ground” situations like triggering (both setting and calling), chasing, detagging, combing through data dumps, etc. I’m also really good at teaching these things: I’m a teacher irl, so that bit sort of comes naturally.

What I’m not so good at is things like FA, communications-oriented, and forward-facing parts of the job. In many ways I prefer to be left in peace and do the good work of defending without much ceremony. I update, I trigger, I get tons of chases or detags, I do the report, that’s a day at the office. Those parts of the job are certainly not my favorite.
That’s not to say I’m not social - I certainly am. I just don’t enjoy doing FA things, nor am I particularly good at it, especially lately I’ve become quite stubborn and dogmatic in some of my positions.

What do you see in the future for the Ministry of Defense?

That is a hard question to answer because the military is by nature reactive: our literal job is to respond to threats as they arise. But I genuinely hope that the future will see broader involvement not just from soldiers but will see significant civilian presence too, whether through intelligence, off-update operations, or other ways we can expand involvement beyond the traditional spheres.

And how about for TSP as a whole?

Hmm... that’s such a broad question. Stay the course I suppose. There’s a lot going right. We’ve committed strongly to our defender principles and the community is thriving. I hope it keeps going in that direction.

Any last remarks?

Peace, love, and cards. Especially cards.