A campus of cool in Northern Suffolk

Perhaps it's because I'm easily impressed, but I often walk away from military installations wowed by things other folks take for granted.

At Oceana, I crashed a simulator while the CO watched, and I hung around the tower while jets came and went. At Yokota Air Base, I marveled at the American dedication that could build a huge piece of Nebraska in the middle of a Tokyo suburb. At the DMZ, I was a little freaked out by the showy posturing of North Korea's soldiers, not to mention the Potemkin Village in the distance.

Suffolk's campus of the Joint Forces Command impressed in a quieter way during a visit a few years back. The place isn't much to look at: A giant generic suburban box - albeit with a fence and gate - surrounded by a crowded parking lot filled with commutermobiles and the hormone-fueled roadsters of young soldiers and sailors. Inside are the usual cube farms and conference rooms.

The weirdness starts with the uniforms. There were all kinds representing every branch of the military. That's more common on installations these days than it was before the wars started, but I still didn't expect to find it in North Suffolk. I suppose JFCOM's name should've provided a clue.

One of the first things I did after I got back home was to brush up on what all the shoulder hardware means in the different branches, something I'd forgotten in the years since Japan.

I had been invited to JFCOM to watch a tabletop exercise on how to deal with a terrorist threat - specifically a dirty nuke in Norfolk. I expected to see U.S. military folks gaming possibilities - the usual thing we've all seen before.

What I found instead was a big room filled with U.S. military folks, along with Homeland Security types, representatives from governments at every level, corporate bees and military officers from a dozen nations running through the risks and solutions, trying to figure out how to coordinate and communicate it all.

I wrote at the time: "They're deciding how to improve decisions. Communicating to improve communication. It's simple. Maybe even a little geeky. But if the folks at Joint Forces get it right, it might also save lives."

There are two ways to look at the SecDef's announcement Monday that he intends to close JFCOM: Either the folks there got it right, or getting it right isn't as important as it was back in '07.

That's when JFCOM's mission seemed relatively secure. One of its biggest champions - Donald Rumsfeld - had been ousted the year before. The new Secretary of Defense, a guy named Robert Gates, seemed equally enamored of the gadgets and brains at JFCOM.

As the folks in the conference room broke into smaller groups that day, I was taken on a tour of the place.

It's a bit of a blur - and was even then - but I remember being led into a room filled with people staring into computer screens. I was invited to look over the shoulders of several military folks and civilians as they gathered and distilled real-time information from Afghanistan.

They monitored all kinds of data, including how Afghan civilians felt about what the Americans were doing. You could see in color-coded splendor how U.S. popularity varied from province to province, and over time, and with effort. There was plenty more info on those screens, much of it beyond my comprehension, but the goal of all of it was to help American brass in Afghanistan make better decisions in a place where right and wrong isn't always obvious. And it was done in a room in Suffolk.

Another computer lab, and another program. On a giant high-def screen, I watched as Hampton Roads sank under rising sea levels and under the tide surge of a hurricane. This was the result of the modeling and simulation you hear about all the time. JFCOM used it for military applications, too. When I was there, I watched as individual, animated houses in the Hague were submerged in the tide. I watched as the program predicted and showed how much of the region would be soaked by seas a foot higher. Two feet. Three.

It was immensely smart stuff done by people who had a mission they believed in. A mission they had been told was critical to the nation's future. What they were doing in a boring building in northern Suffolk was profoundly cool. Probably important.

After the announcement on Monday, it's also probably gone.

Donald Luzzatto is The Pilot's editorial page editor. E-mail: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.