A military planner/strategist often contends with the fact that much of what they do ends up on a shelf as a plan, only for use when needed. Most of the time these plans are not needed; and it’s equally important to know that we don’t want them to be needed. For when they are, something bad has happened. During my time as an officer in the United States Army, I served for a time as an operational and strategic planner, and often drew the task of writing plans in support of Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (NEO). Some of those plans were specifically built for Afghanistan while I worked out of a Bagram headquarters in 2011.