Jonathan Archer Order of Merit #2

Date
Jan 22, 2023
Quantity
1
Holding a key role in Bravo Fleet, the Operations Officer helps keep the trains running on time by helping each task force staffer keep on top of the litany of promotions, awards, and reports that much be done on a regular basis. The Chief of Staff similarly has the gargantuan task of overseeing the processing of all of those nominations. Since his last recognition on October 14th, 2021, Fleet Admiral Zack Marshall-Bennet, a.k.a MJ, has served well in both of these roles, first as Chief of Staff until March 25th, 2022 and presently as Operations Officer since the same date through the present. In his time on the Bravo Fleet Senior Staff, MJ has been involved in a huge number of significant decisions and has become an integral part of Bravo Fleet.

As Chief of Staff, MJ oversaw the period following a fleet action (which is always a busy time for OCS) before transitioning into the Operations role in the spring of 2022, because of his talent at organizing events and mentoring others. During this same period, he has also served as Task Force 93 Commanding Officer (from October 19, 2022 through November 2, 2022) and presently is the Task Force 86 Commanding Officer, a role he has held since December 17th, 2022. His flexibility and willingness to help pick up the slack in this way has been extremely valuable. If this wasn’t enough, he also helped oversee the creation of Task Force 47 for its debut ahead of the 2022 Fleet Action!

During his tenure, he has overseen the successful integration of numerous task force staffers into their role, while also mentoring game managers as the other side of his duties. From the end of August 2022 through the beginning of October 2022, MJ also ran Operation Back to Basics, which involved organizing multiple competitions and asking the task force staff to participate with event weeks of their own.

For his excellent work as both Chief of Staff and Operations Officer, and on behalf of myself and the BFCO, I am pleased to award Fleet Admiral Zach Marshall-Bennet the Jonathan Archer Order of Merit!

Jonathan Archer Order of Merit #1

Date
May 10, 2021
Quantity
1
Justification

Anyone who pays attention to the awards feed knows that MJ is one of our most prolific members. Since his last award in December, he has also stepped up into the Task Force 17 Commanding Officer position, a role which he has done with great aplomb. Task Force 17 is one of our largest and most active units, and as its leader, MJ has been responsible for nominating innumerable ribbons, promotions, and medals. He has also organized four fleet-wide competitions on behalf of his task force, alongside greatly expanding the task force’s lore presence.

In terms of his personal activity, MJ wrote. A lot. Like… a heck of a lot, I tell you what. Since December, MJ earned 348 Service Ribbons for 87,000 words of fiction written and 17 Duty Ribbons for RPG posts. To put that in perspective, that’s longer than either of the first two Harry Potter books, or any of the individual Chronicles of Narnia books. Impressive by any standard. 38,457 of these words were written for the Lore Office-sponsored Archanis Campaign, both in solo writing, writing alongside LadyBlue in a duet, and official releases for Task Force 17. Participation in department-sponsored events is one of the ways we hope our members will engage with the fleet, so it’s great to see a unit leader setting an example in this way. What’s even more impressive is that within this time period, he still managed to write 48,543 words on his own projects!

Writing isn’t the only activity that MJ has done in this time period, though. He entered twelve competitions and placed in eight of them, earning 2 Action Medals with Galaxy Clusters, 3 with Star Clusters, and 3 with Planet Clusters. This is not only a high entry-to-placement ratio but evidence of varied activity, which is another thing we hope our unit leaders encourage.

For these contributions, I am pleased to nominate MJ for the Jonathan Archer Order of Merit.

–RADM Aubrey Seagraves, Bravo Fleet Operations Officer