Thomas Elliott Fite

Former US Marine, CEO at FocalShift, TedXABQ speaker, entrepreneur, @newmexicoswc Chapter President + Founder @nmblockchain - let’s build what’s next.

[Thomas Elliott Fite @tefiteusmc]

@AlexFinn I love this - and I also love the NorCal redwoods! One of the best places to recharge the soul.

[Thomas Elliott Fite @tefiteusmc]

@saarth_ I’ve been getting these non stop. Very annoying.

[Tim Denning @Tim_Denning]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“The most successful people I know are violently allergic to pessimistic, unhappy, and unlucky people.”

[U.S. Marines @USMC]

#OTD in 1798, the modern United States Marine Corps was formally established by law. Following the Revolutionary War, the Continental Marines were disbanded. However, recognizing the continued need for a dedicated naval infantry force, Congress passed "An Act for Establishing and Organizing a Marine Corps."

This pivotal legislation created a permanent Marine Corps under the Department of the Navy, solidifying its place as an integral branch of the American military.

#Marines #USMCHistory #SemperFidelis

[Words & Wisdom @WordsnWisdom26]

"The only effective solution against evil and violent people is good people more skilled in violence. "

— Miyamoto Musashi

[Thomas Elliott Fite @tefiteusmc]

All government agencies from the top down should be in a race to modernize systems and improve efficiency. Way to go @DoWCTO for leading from the front! 🫡👏🏽

[Department of War CTO @DoWCTO]

🚨CALLING ALL PATRIOTS🚨

War Force is embedding engineers across the @DeptofWar to rapidly deploy AI and modernize the Department.

ANSWER THE CALL: https://t.co/8CrgK6K3GD

[Cloudflare @Cloudflare]

We're opening the waitlist for our Monetization Gateway, which will allow you to charge for any web page, dataset, API, or MCP tool behind Cloudflare. The charges will settle in stablecoins over the x402 open protocol. https://t.co/pvICtEIixj

[Omo Ade @MaxToks001]

how it feels when you're winning quietly and nobody knows

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

when Carl Jung said, “No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown allies will seek you out.”
He was saying that real work has a frequency. When you commit to your path with truth, discipline, and solitude, the people meant for your journey eventually find you. So don’t fear the lonely season. Sometimes God removes the noise so your real allies can hear you clearly.

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

To the Americans:

I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States.

And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness:

You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence.

This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns.

Success is equated with exploitation.
Ambition is looked upon with contempt.

This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom.

But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated.

This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet.

And so I say, as all should who are fortunate enough to live in the western world, let alone America:

Thank God for the United States.

Thank God for the wisdom of its founders.
Thank God for its faith in the free market and in the natural rights of man.
Happy birthday, you damn Yankees and Southerners.

Long may your admirable country dominate the world.

Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states.

May your two and a half centuries of unparallelled success be just the beginning.

Your country is the light of the world, and the city on the hill.

Thank God for the USA.

Happy 250th.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

Continental Congress HAS SIGNED A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE! 

The UNITED STATES are OFFICIALLY INDEPENDENT from BRITAIN.

LIBERTY BELLS ring out throughout Philadelphia; the streets ERUPT IN ECSTASY.

[U.S. Marines @USMC]

Happy 250th, America!

Celebrating 250 years of independence and the enduring ideals of liberty, opportunity, and justice that shape our nation.

Since our nation's founding, Marines have upheld these ideals around the world, serving with honor, courage, and commitment.

Today, we honor the freedom they defend and the nation we’re proud to serve.

#July4th #FREEDOM250 #USMC

[Thomas Elliott Fite @tefiteusmc]

Incredible! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

[Spike Brehm @spikebrehm]

they did it. the mad lads actually did it.

i never talked about my time at DOGE last year because it was so controversial and contentious (remember that?)

early last year, @jgebbia recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the "retirement paper" problem.

processing a federal retirement took months, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to 6 months for their full pension to arrive. what was the holdup? paper. remember hearing Elon talk about "the mine" in Pennsylvania? we got to visit it. in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone, there were literally acres of file cabinets, as far as the eye could see, storing files detailing federal employees' employment and paystub history. a simple "case" might be only a quarter or half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. one famously took up a whole pallet.

each case was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. they checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly (many weren't), and handled a long tail of complex issues. we'd watch as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago.

since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review, and additional rounds for complex cases. case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. sometimes it would sit in one place for days, waiting to be picked up.

to OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of "digital transformation" spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. there was a big effort in the mid-90s. but the systems were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. there was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the necessary forms — just to be mailed to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. and few federal agencies were even using it.

when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation, delivered by a software contractor.

the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn't believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it's clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it's a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned.

we fired the vendor and took over the project. they'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch.

it was around this time I had to go back to new york — i had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, and a wife whose patience was running out. but i got to watch from afar as the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. and now they've fully done it.

huge congrats to Joe and the team. @yatshitcray was the hero in the trenches. indefatigable, unrelentingly optimistic, and determined to see this project through. when i recruited him for "ok i can do two, maybe three months", he stuck it out over a year making this project a reality.

while the retirement project was under the DOGE banner, it operated different from what you heard from the breathless, negative media — we came in with the attitude of partnering with career OPM employees. we were team members determined to bring our software talents to bear on the problem they've been trying to fix for years, which they hadn't had the resources to solve before. they were wary at first, not sure about us, but they quickly saw how authentic and determined we were to work together toward the same goal. props to Joe for developing those relationships, setting the example of how to collaborate together.

what's the end result? lifelong federal employees, veterans, postal carriers get their full pension installments almost immediately. days instead of months. peace of mind for these people to devoted their careers to serving our country. massively streamlined operations inside of OPM. and NO MORE PAPER 🫡🇺🇸

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

250 years ago today, on June 29, 1776, New Yorkers looked out at the water and saw a nightmare on the horizon. The British fleet had arrived, and so many ships filled the bay that witnesses said the masts looked like "a forest of pine trees" growing out of the sea. The timing could not have been more brutal.

This was the empire's answer to the rebellion, and it was overwhelming. The first wave of around 45 warships and transports dropped anchor off Sandy Hook and Staten Island carrying General William Howe and roughly 10,000 troops. Within days it kept growing. Then his brother Admiral Richard Howe arrived with more. It would eventually swell into one of the largest seaborne invasion forces of the entire 18th century, hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of professional soldiers and German mercenaries, aimed at one city.

Now sit with the timing. While that forest of masts was filling the harbor, delegates down in Philadelphia were in the final days of debating whether to declare independence. They voted for it on July 2 and signed off on the wording on July 4. So at the exact moment America was being born on paper, the most powerful military on earth was already anchored off its coast, getting ready to strangle it in the cradle.

The people of New York understood exactly what they were seeing. Alarm bells rang, panic spread through the streets, and soldiers sprinted to their posts to stare at a force they had almost no hope of matching. Washington's army was outnumbered, outgunned, and about to get badly beaten in the battles for New York that followed.

That's the part that gets lost in the fireworks every Fourth of July. Independence wasn't declared from a position of strength. It was declared with an enemy armada already sitting on the doorstep, knowing full well what was coming. They signed their names anyway.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

.@danawhite says one of the keys to longevity is to block out all negativity:

“It never even crosses my mind that something's not going to work. I just keep going until it does work.”

“There's this Bruce Lee quote where he says, ‘Never say negative things about yourself or what you're working on even if you're joking, because your body doesn't know the difference.’”

“I never take in any negativity.”

[Department of War CTO @DoWCTO]

The @DeptofWar's GenAI Task Force embedded with the 82nd Airborne Division and XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg to transform operational workflows through the proliferation of AI agents.

The GenAI Task Force continues to transform workflows and save thousands of man-hours across the Joint Force. Under the purview of the @CDAODoW, the Task Force is helping to systematically remove barriers to AI adoption to ensure a more lethal Department of War.

[Sea Beggar 🪢🏴‍☠️⚓ @KnotSeaworthy]

"If all else fails, I will retreat up the valley of Virginia, plant my flag on the Blue Ridge, rally around the Scotch-Irish of that region and make my last stand for liberty amongst a people who will never submit to tyranny whilst there is a man left to draw a trigger." -GW

[War Times @wartirnes]

US Marines Boxing Smoker on Okinawa (June 17, 1945) 🇺🇸🥊

During a brief lull in the brutal fighting, U.S. Marines set up a makeshift ring under the Okinawan sun for a boxing smoker.

Crude ring, heavy gloves, no headgear. Just hard-fought bouts and loud cheers from Marines trying to forget the war for a moment and find a sense of normalcy amid one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific War.

[Thomas Elliott Fite @tefiteusmc]

@FBI_Response Something everyone should be united on. Thank you @FBIDirectorKash 👏🏽👏🏽