Arctic Forge - An NPA Renewal Project (and Ministerial Opening Statement)

[Cretox]

Arctic Forge - An NPA Renewal Project (and Ministerial Opening Statement)​

Greetings.

@Halsoni has appointed me to run the NPA. I'm grateful for the chance to rebuild, revitalize, renew, and rewhateverelse this org as Minister of Defense Military Affairs aka your mommy. We have some serious work to do, but we also have one of the strongest military legacies in the game to draw from and significant opportunities ahead of us.

In case we don't know each other yet: I'm Cretox, former VD, MoWAA, and MoD. While I haven't been involved in TNP or the NPA for roughly two years, I'm well aware of the struggles this org has consistently faced and have developed this plan based on consultation with Ruben and a few others prior to my appointment. I also have a lot of unpublished training materials and guides from years past to build on, as well as tool knowledge. While I didn't have access to the Reform Committee or other internal spaces at the time, the issues I identified and proposals I came up with seem to align closely with those articulated there. Take that as you will. I sincerely apologize for the delay in getting this going and for my recent inactivity. I had a few RL emergencies in quick succession. I suppose the site shutting down when it did was convenient in that sense.

Before we get started, I hereby appoint @Koopa103 and @Lord Dominator as Deputy Ministers of Military Affairs. They should need no introduction.

This post will serve as both my opening address for the remainder of this term and the opening post of a comprehensive NPA renewal project, which I'm calling Arctic Forge. I plan to post updates on reconstruction efforts in this thread, and eventually close and archive it for future reference. Feel free to post comments, questions, and feedback here as well, or in the usual Discord spaces or in my DMs. Quite a lot needs to be done across pretty much every area of the NPA, but I'm confident most of it can be accomplished quite quickly. I'll circulate this post around for targeted feedback on specific ideas, and start with clerical changes and JP founds tomorrow.

There have been quite a few renewal efforts in the past, with mixed success. I hope that this one will succeed due to its comprehensive nature and a lot of my ideas being "phase 0" reforms, in that they're structural in nature and don't require much time or effort to implement. I've organized my thoughts into specific, concrete plans to make feedback and implementation easy. Much of the logic behind them overlaps. All of these plans stem from five overarching objectives:

1. Restore and develop the NPA's operational capabilities. A military org should be capable of effectively executing military operations. The NPA's been dormant for a while, with what minimal activity exists being driven by a tiny handful of people. Reforms should be focused on making the NPA a premier org once again, through administrative changes like having an ops schedule and restructuring the ranks to personnel efforts such as active promotion and training to tools and beyond. Additionally, we're in an era where raiding is extremely weak and defending dominant. As an Independent org, we're well-positioned to leverage our alignment to our advantage.
2. Maintain continuity with established traditions where possible. The current incarnation of the NPA is over a decade old and has a storied legacy to match. We have an excellent military tradition here in TNP, backed by the single largest potential manpower pool of any region. We have years of renewal efforts to learn from, plenty of unpublished training materials, and extremely experienced members. A lot of what I plan to do focuses on taking advantage of the resources and potential we already have. It's also important that changes respect our existing traditions where practical, particularly where rank reform is concerned.
3. Ensure the org is self-sustaining. In recent years, NPA activity and reform efforts have been driven by a handful of people, with the org and institutional memory deteriorating the moment those people burn out or move on. This particular struggle isn't unique to the NPA or to TNP, especially as the game's population continues to dwindle. Now more than ever, it's critical to focus on developing institutional infrastructure and resources that'll continue to serve our org and region as individuals come and go. This means training materials and tools for both soldiers and officers, strong and modern internal procedures, and rebuilding our officer corps and high command. It also means avoiding bloat and unnecessary overhead. The system of older players being gradually succeeded by newer ones simply hasn't functioned properly in some time, and it's critical to fix that.
4. Leverage intersectionality. The NPA is unique among all of the region's executive bodies, but it's still just one part of TNP. We should take advantage of that, both in terms of maintaining a presence on different platforms and coordinating with other parts of TNP. In particular, I'd like to succeed the litany of one-off awards we give NPA soldiers into one or two, ideally enshrined in the law and confirmed by the RA. This would intersect with both culture and the Regional Assembly. I also have some potential areas of coordination with World Assembly Affairs in mind.
5. Serve the regional interest. As a part of TNP, the NPA fundamentally exists to serve TNP's interests. This may be the vaguest of these principles, but it's also the one tying everything else together. It's also closely linked with the aforementioned intersectionality. NPAers should be encouraged to be involved in other parts of the wonderful community we have here in TNP, and the NPA should be able to accommodate different skill, activity, and interest levels.

With that bloviation out of the way, here are the concrete ideas I have:

Create an ops schedule.

I'm not going to do a roll call. I don't like them in general and I think it's the wrong approach here in particular. Instead, I'll personally reach out to every NPA member on the roster to work out their availability, experience level, and interests. Command and I will use this to make a weekly schedule for NPA ops, with different kinds of ops depending on people's responses. Of course, people will still be free to organize ad-hoc updating and it's not like we can expect major liberations and such to conform to a weekly schedule anyway. This'll be a pretty significant departure from how we've typically done things. I'm not certain whether to keep the corresponding question in the sign-up template.

Relatedly, I'll also reach out to all our partners to figure out availability and interest for joint ops, and compile a dossier with that information.

Reform the rank structure.

This was a focus of Reform Committee discussions and our ranks have seen a small amount of consolidation over the years. I think it's a good idea to start from first principles. Crushing Our Enemies had this to say about TBH's rank structure:

I redesigned the TBH rank system to revolve around three purposes. First and most important was the retention of active members - give someone a meaningful promotion and they feel proud of what they've accomplished and want to do more. This is why when you complete your very first successful operation, you are immediately promoted to the second rank. Second, recognition of skilled members - promotions send a message to everyone else that these are people who are doing it right. It signals that these are folks to be emulated, which can gradually increase the professionalism of your entire force. Third, to create meaningful standards by which we can decide how much power and trust to give someone.

The NPA has a 4-tier structure: Recruits, Soldiers, Officers, and High Command. This is a core part of the org's history and I don't intend to collapse it down to three even though I'd probably do that if I was starting from scratch. What I do intend to do, however, is collapse every tier down to a single rank: Recruits will be Privates, Soldiers will be Sergeants, Officers will be Captains, and HC will be Generals. So for a lot of members: congratulations on the promotion. In the NPA's current state, tracking and arbitrarily promoting people within each tier is a distraction we can't afford. The focus needs to be on turning recruits into soldiers, interested soldiers into officers, and competent officers into HC. Once our officer corps and HC are well-stocked, we can start reintroducing sub-ranks. The ranks being consolidated also makes this a great time for people to join and get promoted quickly.

Warrant Officer will no longer exist in its weird current form. I introduced the rank myself a few years ago as a stopgap to accommodate both inactive officers and officers-in-training. I'd like to rework it along with a new Chief Warrant Officer rank as promotional opportunities for active, competent soldiers who aren't interested in leading ops themselves (this would also be more accurate to our branding). WOs would have access to officer areas and CWOs might have access to HC; I'm uncertain at the moment. Both ranks would technically be inferior to officers.

Inactive and retired officers and HC will get a Retired Officer and Retired HC role, respectively. None of this weird WO or pseudo-demotion stuff. Officers-in-training would either be called literally that or "Officer Candidates" or "Officer Cadets" while maintaining their soldier rank until their training is complete.

I also never liked deputy ministers getting provisionally ranked as Colonels. They're clerical help and should use their actual ranks. If they want to help lead things, they should be promoted rather than get a provisional rank as a crutch. I'm unsure how to handle things for Ministers. My instinct is to give them a distinct rank like "Marshal" or "General of the Army," or just keep them as provisional Generals.

Collapsing the vertical ranks will also allow us to focus on our criminally underdeveloped lateral roles. Here's what I have in mind:

1. The NPASF and Commandos will be succeeded by the NPA Rangers. All our active updaters will be Rangers on top of Soldiers, with pilers simply being Soldiers (I don't see a situation where updaters wouldn't be included in pile orders). Becoming a Ranger or dropping the role will be voluntary. Rangers and Soldiers will use the same ranks (just like NPASF and Auxiliary). Auxiliary will be rendered defunct.
2. The NPA Militia is a fantastic concept. We need an organized way to mobilize members of the region for important operations. The infrastructure for this already exists and it just needs to be resurrected. I'm open to changing the name to something like the TNP Militia or Northern Militia if people think framing it as a TNP program rather than an NPA division is a good idea.
3. Every so often, there's talk of formally including people who want to be involved in triggering and leading ops but are WA-locked, such as Security Councilors and Delegates. I don't see this as a priority, but we can do something with this if there's interest (I know at least one person this might apply to). Something themed after sharpshooters or snipers, perhaps? Or call them armchairs?
4. People who don't actively participate anymore but would still like to offer their experience will be called Military Advisors and have access to either officer or officer+HC areas depending on what people think. I plan to transition the Reform Committee into this after Arctic Forge is complete.

We also need to definitively establish who is "High Command" for the purposes of forum access. This is an ongoing headache that has previously resulted in people who shouldn't have access retaining it long after their departure from the NPA, and former Delegates being unable to see forum areas they should have access to.

Daily piles and piler activities.

I have a pretty novel idea for leveraging pilers outside pile operations. I'm not going to publicly share what I have in mind just yet, but it'll replace the daily piles with a brand new system that projects regional power far more effectively.

Awards and recognitions.

As I mentioned earlier, the NPA as well as the broader region currently rely on random, arbitrarily created and awarded one-off honors. I'd like to replace that with one or two honors given legal backing and awarded by the Delegate with RA confirmation and an explanation of what they did to earn it. That would introduce cultural gravitas to NPA activities, expand our presence to other parts of our regional community, and hopefully streamline the path to members getting commended or condemned by the Security Council. Ideally, the awards people earn would be directly mentioned in those C/Cs.

The first award I have in mind is for exemplary NPA service. The second is for exemplary regional service. Naming the things is going to be fun. Culture, the RA, and the Delegate will naturally be involved in discussions on this, and on the subject of regional awards more broadly.

Tools.

As far as I can tell, the NPA currently has no standard tools and the toolshed channel has even been archived for some reason. So we need to work out a tool framework until I or someone else develops new internal ones.

Training materials.

I have old drafts of soldier and officer training resources that I'll get input on, modernize, and publish. Additionally, every soldier should have access to non-sensitive officer resources and feel empowered to run ops. In the past, we locked things as basic as triggering behind ranks. That creates a lot of overhead for leadership, stifles new talent, and delays promotions.

Housekeeping.

The roster needs to be updated. The dispatches need to be updated. The Discord server needs to be cleaned up. We need to figure out a better way to handle HC forum access. And please stop putting ranks in Discord nicknames, come on.

Forum threads.

Related to the above, I'll restructure the forum threads. The Military Affairs subforum will be for public-facing posts and the NPA one for internal resources and announcements.

Jump point and region founds.

We need a new JP due to update order getting shuffled. We needed a new JP anyway due to its current ownership. We also need backups and some miscellaneous regions. That means founding a lot of regions, which means we need potential names. If you have ideas, just reach out to me and if we end up using your suggestions then you'll be credited in the new region's WFE. We also need to work out a better way to administer NPA regions. I might ask former dels for ideas (we have to jump out of Ghosty McGhostyface?).

Reform Committee.

This was a good idea with solid discussions even if it didn't actually lead to much in the way of reforms. I'll use this as a key vehicle for feedback on Arctic Forge and transition it into the previously mentioned Military Advisors system when that's wrapped up.

Branding.

Reusing the region flag works but is hardly ideal. The NPA needs its own distinct logo, flag design language, nation and regional banners, and WFE templates. Fortunately, we have access to some solid talent for that.

Recruitment.

Last but certainly not least, we need to recruit. Personally, I favor a directed "shoot and recruit" strategy where we personally reach out to people who have already demonstrated some level of commitment to the region, particularly new citizens. It wouldn't be hard to get a template going and shoot new arrivals a quick forum message or Discord DM. Part of this is maintaining a strong gameside presence as well, both through actively running ops and being present in gameside spaces such as the RMB and TNP's GP forum thread.

Your voice matters.

I'll seek feedback on specific parts of this plan and the broad vision behind it from stakeholders, particularly the Reform Committee and NPA Officers and Soldiers. The structural and easy-to-implement nature of a lot of this makes it easy to put into practice and adjust in response to input. I'll also post updates in this thread. If you have thoughts, questions, or ideas, please feel free to either reach out to me or post in this thread or on Discord. Let's have some fun.