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- picairn
Midterm Address
14 July 2024
When I first took up the post of Minister of Defense on the 12th of May, I was filled in equal parts with excitement and trepidation. While my head was full of ideas on how to improve the NPA to new heights, a part of me was worried that the dreaded summer lull would slow down the NPA's activity and impede the implementation of my projects.
Fortunately, that scenario did not come to pass. Instead, the NPA was greatly invigorated and performed excellently, thanks to the combined efforts of the High Command as well as our officers and soldiers. In May, we launched the first iteration of Operation Solar Storm, a delegate capping run of BoM's holdings and trophy regions, and rapidly mobilised to defend The Wellspring in the face of a potential invasion. Despite having most of our manpower pinned down in TW for a month, the NPA nevertheless began Operation Solar Storm II and conducted a 3-day invasion of Warzone Trinidad, a BoM treaty ally. The invasion was particularly successful as we banjected all residents and closed all of WZT's embassies despite repeated liberation attempts by the WZT Mafia and their allies. To add sweetness to our victory, after the operation ended the WZT Mafia was forced to admit defeat by relocating to Palmetto, one of their holdings, and subsequently renaming themselves as the Palmetto Mafia.
Once the WZT invasion was over, we quickly launched our Detag Week with four detag operations from June 12th to 16th, starting with two joint detags with the NPO and TBO. I had the pleasure of mentoring Colonel @Kaschovia on detagging skills in preparation for his return to leading NPA operations. In total, we detagged a staggering 46 regions in four updates.
Towards the end of June, the NPA was deployed to the Confederation of Corrupt Dictators. While it is still ongoing, the turnout for this operation was quite incredible and I intend to commemorate our historic operation with a ribbon to our soldiers at the end of it.
Devoted to fighting and leading operations as I have been, I have not forgotten about my other initiatives. At the start of the term, I promised to focus on achieving a steady rate of applications through various recruitment methods and getting our soldiers battle-ready through mentorship and written guides. In terms of recruitment, I have collaborated with Home Affairs to create two recruitment telegram lists for the NPA, written a recruitment ad for 9003's RMB bot, and regularly published gameside dispatches to advertise and inform the region of our activity. While the number of new applications isn't as consistent or numerous as I'd like, the NPA still received a sufficient number of new soldiers who were quick to participate in our operations after some training and guidance.
Speaking of guidance, I'm pleased to report that the Instructor program has been revived, and our officers have taken on new mentees to teach them basic R/D skills. A new Soldier's Manual in the form of short forum posts concentrated in a single thread is also being written to replace the old one, and we are making very good progress on this - half of the manual has already been published. Once that's done, I look forward to completing the Officer's Manual next.
For the rest of the term, I'd like to redouble our efforts on graphic designs, namely exploring further on ribbons or medals to reward our troops, creating new posters to increase recruitment, and updating the NPA Mission Leaderboard. There's also the fact that while we certainly have done a lot so far, little progress has been made on persecuting the war against BoM and TCB. There's more work to be done, and I will try my best.
At your service,
Minister of Defense