Strategy, tactics, and plans

Have any of you ever been asked whether you are better at strategy or tactics? If you can answer this question without hesistating, you are a strategy person. Not that being a strategy person is bad. Its just that good tacticians know that to execute at their highest levels, behind all their tactics must be an underlying strategy. If there isn't one, due to intransigence or uncertainty or stupidity, the tactician must formulate one in order to proceed. This is what separates the great from the adequate.

Now recently Condi Rice has been getting some heat over her concession, that perhaps the US has made mistakes in Iraq, "thousands of tactical mistakes". She said tactical mistakes to make it sound like trivial mistakes, like when you start to put your shoe on the wrong foot and waste 1 sec of your life before you figure it out. Well, to some this sounded dangerously close to "blaming the troops" for our problems. I dont think this was her intent but she managed to offend former senior military commander Anthony Zinni, who shot back with the assertion that the mistakes made were strategic mistakes and that the senior strategist, Rumsfeld, should resign.

I doubt that will go anywhere but we have some parallels here in New Orleans. We have the tactical mistakes made in levee protection such as the specific number of feet the sheet pilings should have gone down. We have the larger strategic mistakes such as not providing for wetlands protection and the minimization of the potential impact of the MrGO. Now we have to look forward, and as we rebuild the city, we have to have a plan. If there is no plan, each of our excellent and some of our adequate tacticians will put together their own strategic plan, and some will work out and others wont. I would like to endorse the partially phrased 4P plan, I have confidence that the remaining Ps will be as persuasive as the prior postulates.