President’s Forum

We recently had visits from the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and General James Mattis (Commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command) to Newport. CNO likes to talk about the advantages of students hav- ing “unstructured” time to think while at the Naval War College. Granted, there are courses, research, conferences, and the like constantly in progress, so it’s not completely unstructured. That said, a famous scholar of the Middle Ages, Joseph Strayer of Princeton, liked to critique his students’ work as needing more “look- ing out the window” time

President’s Forum

A recent article in Forbes by Steve Cohen discusses the future of aircraft carriers in the larger context of maritime security and argues, even more important, that the American public seems uninterested in what is happening in the Navy generally. Jim Bencivenga recently addressed in the Christian Science Monitor the impact the state of the economy will have on future naval forces. Finally, Dr. Hew Strachan has written about civil-military relations and grand strategy

President’s Forum

The epigraph above is what the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, told me within a month or so of my arrival as President of the Naval War College. Frankly, I had very little idea of how true this statement is until I witnessed the Nineteenth International Sea Power Symposium (ISS), which took place in Newport from 6 to 9 October. This conference was the brainchild of Vice Admiral Richard G. Colbert, who was President of the Naval War College at the time the first one occurred, in 1969. Admiral Arleigh Burke was in attendance and spoke at this inaugural event, now forty years ago