A Naval Academy graduate and officer of Marines, Gregg Nakano served as an infantry platoon commander during the first Gulf War and intelligence officer during the 1991 Los Angeles riots. Embracing the Art of War dictum to “know yourself and know the enemy,” he spent three years studying Mandarin at Fudan University and one year studying Farsi at the University of Tehran before enrolling in Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Hoping to embody Abraham Lincoln’s approach of destroying one’s enemies by making them friends, he joined USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance after 9/11. As part of USAID/OFDA’s military liaison team, he facilitated the provision of humanitarian assistance by civilian and military stakeholders to disaster survivors in Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Guatemala, and Philippines.
In 2004, he created the Joint Humanitarian Operations Course (JHOC), a primer on US Government coordination during overseas disaster responses. The JHOC became USAID’s most frequently requested external courses and by 2020 had been delivered over 1,000 times to military units around the world. In the wake of Hurricane Stan, Gregg took the initiative to coordinate with US Army Corps of Engineers and provide Joint Task Force Bravo with the ability to conduct near-real time geo-referenced post-disaster assessments. For this and other services rendered, he was awarded the Joint Civilian Service Commendation medal.
In 2007, I was invited by students from Tufts University’s Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) to be part of a panel on civil-military collaboration in humanitarian responses. They were leaders in the Institute’s ALLIES initiative (Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services) an immersive experiential service-learning program of liberal arts students, cadets and midshipmen.
The students’ knowledge, self-confidence, and ability to think critically about complex issues impressed me greatly. After meeting the founder and Director of the IGL, Sherman Teichman or “Sherm” as he was known to everyone, I knew why. Sherm is a charismatic force of nature who sees and lives life not as it is, but as the better version of what it might be. And his goal in academia is to tear down the ivory tower and help teachers remember what it was like to plow the fields.
In a way I’d never witnessed before, Sherm can make things magically appear by a process he referred to as “serendipity.” As brainstorming sessions generate flashes of brilliance, the resulting dreams are thrown out into the universe and somehow, somewhere, someone answers the call to provide what was needed for the next step. It was as if he is manifesting the Goethe attributed quote: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” And perhaps most importantly, Sherm infuses his students with the belief that they too have magic and can create the impossible.
Since then, I’ve rethought my life purpose and way of operating. After barely surviving self-induced judgement errors for half a century, I’ve decided to focus on empowering the next generation to overcome the anthropogenic climate change conflicts our generation will leave unsolved.
Macro interests include midwifing global governance systems that evolved from Westphalian sovereignty, spiritualization of One Health ecosystems, and transforming the military industrial complex into the human security network. Micro scale proofs of concept include developing Pacific ALLIES, (Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services) designed to help students, cadets and midshipmen understand the climate change impacts on national security by transforming Kwajalein Atol into a living sustainability laboratory.
I’m currently in the process of establishing Pacific ALLIES as a 501(c) 3 and doing the same on the Marshallese side working on creating a consultancy based on climate change adaptation and human security…and getting ready for Pacific ALLIES 2022.
I often think of Machiavelli –
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the innovator has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this luke-warmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.”
Gregg is one of the most influential educators I have ever encountered. Soft-spoken, humble, insightful, thoughtful, bold, and courageous, he is the very antithesis of hubris. Gregg took a nascent initiative, ALLIES we created at the Institute – Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services, a civil -military educational framework and matured and galvanized it into a profoundly critical program with global reach.
I had the extraordinary fortune to secure his services as an INSPIRE Fellow (Institute Scholar/ Practitioner in Residence), and within a year he inspired our students to re-conceptualize the concept of security, with an emphasis on human security, and led its first sensitive joint research program of cadets, midshipmen and arts and sciences liberal arts students to Jordan to study the impact of Iraqi refugees on the nation. He thankfully has made ALLIES a core element of his professional life, now negotiating to bring Singaporean military officers and cadets into his Pacific ALLIES Pacific endeavors. Given his deep concern for the environment he is a superb LEAP Fellow with LISD.
He treats every individual with dignity and compassion, and unfailingly has earned the respect of every person he has met. He defines, in his thinking and actions, the very essence of moral and ethical leadership. Of the many people I introduced from my professional life to my family, he made one of the the greatest human impressions.
Gregg recently earned his doctorate in Education at the University of Hawaii. His future students will be extraordinarily fortunate. I’m tremendously honored to be his friend.