Chairman’s Update

Our Spring Red Tie luncheon was our largest ever with 204 people registering. For those of you who didn’t get the chance to be there, you missed a great opportunity to listen to and meet or reconnect with ADM Bob Inman.  He provided us some important observations on the importance and value of Naval Intelligence to the Navy and the Nation.  We also honored Tish Long with the Red Tie award and her heartfelt acceptance remarks were simply exceptional.

In July, our NIP Foundation provided six $5,000 scholarships to dependents of Naval Intelligence professionals for the academic year 2017-18. All 21 applicants were exceptionally qualified and Holly Vaughn and our other scholarship panel members had a tough time making their final selections.  Our winners include: an International Relations major and Arabic minor at Stanford;  a Biology major at William and Mary who is looking to become a doctor; a Maritime Engineering major at SUNY Maritime College;  a Geography and Environmental Systems major at University of Maryland; a National Security Affairs major at Virginia Tech; and a repeat winner attending Duke and double majoring in International Comparative Studies (Middle East) and English with a minor in Arabic who is looking at a career in the IC.  It’s wonderful to provide these exceptional students some help with their finances and, from their “thank you notes” it’s clear they all greatly appreciate the support from the NIP membership.

We’re seeing more interest by Naval Intelligence professionals in getting together to support each other. Our 3rd Thursday events in Old Town Alexandria have drawn several dozen every month and we now have active chapters in Hawaii and Bahrain as well as San Diego. I attended the STRATCOM JIOC change of command in late July where Captain Tony Buterra took command, reporting to RDML Curt Copley. With the help of veterans like Capt (ret) Eric Taylor, now a contractor in Omaha, we hope to see a restart of an Omaha NIP chapter.  Finally, RDML (ret) Rob Hoppa, recently led an effort to get our many Tidewater Naval Intelligence personnel together.  RADM Sharp, COMONI attended the event held in early August and we can expect more events in the future in Tidewater.

The Essay contest we are sponsoring with U.S. Naval Institute has proved even more popular this year as we have a total of fifty entries for the three prizes and there are some perceptive and very well written articles.  Along with the USNI, we’ll announce the three top winners at our fall annual meeting and luncheon.  You’ll see the winning essays published in Proceedings and given the quantity and quality of the inputs this year, we’ll be publishing a number of them on the navintpro.org web site as well.

The 2017 Fall annual luncheon and general membership/board meeting will be held on Wednesday, 18 October at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington.  Our membership/board meeting will commence at 1000 followed by lunch at noon.  We’ve invited RADM Bob Sharp, Commander of ONI, to provide an update on the Community following our business session.  Our lunch speaker will be VADM Matt Kohler, Commander Navy Information Warfare Force.  I hope to see many of you there!

We’re always looking for feedback from members and thanks to NIP Board member and Membership committee lead Chris Bott, we’ve gotten some help in creating a short online survey of NIP offerings.  Copy and paste in your browser the link below to access the online survey.   We’ll work to get results back to you at the fall meeting and thanks in advance for your comments!

Take Survey Here

All the best,
Tony