By Bob Hennelly
Military history is a great teacher (click here) that has application to all human endeavor. History is littered with the carnage caused by generals who threw their troops into battle without a clue about the facts on the ground because their ego eclipsed their judgment.
The stakes are every bit as high with the kind of large-scale efforts to protect the public health that Phil Murphy and Andrew Cuomo, the governors of New Jersey and New York, are now engaged in as they lead our nation's most densely populated region through the coronavirus challenge.
New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the country is really getting hit with this stuff.
A public health crisis on this scale requires Cuomo and Murphy to make significant judgment calls informed by real -ime conditions on the ground, in the transit system, in the financial markets, on the streets, our hospitals, in our schools and in the privacy of all our homes.
In the jargon of the "table-top" exercise, this is what we call situational awareness. Every assumption has to be challenged. All "facts" must be vetted through the deceptive question, "How do we know what we know?"
Having that kind of first-hand awareness in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 earned former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie an enduring and well-earned footnote in history. If part of Christie's legacy will always be his sycophantic relationship with Donald Trump a few years later, this is another part. Amid the crisis posed by Sandy, he demonstrated that the most important thing is knowing how to listen deeply....
