Presidents Hour, 1977 Dec 19

Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale, USN President, Naval War College "PRESIDENTS [PRESIDENT'S] HOUR" 19 December 1977

I don't know how I ever got talked into this business of coming out and giving a one man show, inept shy guy that I am. This situation reminds me of one that took place in one of the nearby Rotary Clubs. There was a member much like myself, a hard worker and a big organization man, but never up front. Everbyody loved Charlie; they waited for the opportunity to let him get up and take a bow, because he was always the busiest guy on every committee, and he did all of these good things for the group. One day they had the chance; a rather callous loud mouthed guy happened to be emcee at a regular meeting when it was announced that the man scheduled as next week's speaker had to cancel. The emcee said, "Charlie, you are going to give the speech next week." Charlie was thunderstruck, and started making excuses. The man said, "No. We have waited long enough. You are going to give the speech, and I'll give you a subject; you are going to talk about sex."

Well, that just ruined Charlie's whole noon hour. One of his friends came up later and said, "Don't worry about that; it's no trouble in giving a speech on any subject. You always do the same thing, go to the library, go to the card catalogue, and look up the subject. You find some references, take some notes and put together a speech. Don't worry about the sex subject. It doesn't have to be an ambarrassing speech. There are a lot of interesting books about sex from Freud and others. You can put together soemthing if you work at it."

Well, Charlie didn't like his predicament very well. He went home that night to his wife. She was also shy and retiring, but tended to be a little bit of a nagger. He didn't want her to know the whole story. He said, "I'm going to give a speech to the Rotary Club next week."

She jumped all over him. "What are you going to talk about?"

He wasn't going to tell her the whole truth. He said, "Oh, I'm going to talk about aviation."

She replied, "Aviation? You don't have any experience in aviation."

"It doesn't make any difference, I go down to the library and look up aviation in the card catalogue, read some references, and make an outline, and that's all there is to it."

Well he was at the library every evening that week, getting the speech ready. He looked up sex, looked up Freud, all the while worried about making a fool of himself. He cam eto the big Rotary meeting and stood up with his voluminous notes. The speech went off pretty well; he was relieved to have it over.

That very afternoon all the men started phoning their wives about his talk. The phone started ringing at Charlie's home. His wife was getting all these compliments from the wives about the speech Charlie gave. Well, that was a new experience for her; she was very happy to be in the limelight. That next night they wnt out to a party where a whole group of members of the Rotary Club gathered around this rather shy woman and were complimetning her on her husband's talk.

She said, "Well, I just can't get over how Charlie came through on this. He knows practically nothing about the subject." The men's jaws dropped. And then she innocently added: "He's only tried it wice. The first time he got sick to his stomach, and the second time his hat blew off."

So, in preparation for today I went to the card catalogue and I looked up War College--I found that there were 195 references, one for every Admiral in the Navy. each had a different idea of what a War College should do. Should it equip you for the Pentagon? Should it equip you for a Fleet Staff? Should it equip you for a command assignment? Of course, the answer to all these, is, "More or less." Should it teach you to think?--more or less--, I suppose. However, when I was forty years old I was pretty sure I knew how to think, as I am sure most of you do. Should it help assure one's selection for promotion? I suppose it should, but as we all know, that linakge is never going to be assured. Anyway, these are not the kinds of questions that I would expect to have asked about a good educational institution.

I am new here, and do not have a perfect knowledge of the curriculum, but I have some firm ideas about what mid-career education should accomnplish. It should give you some selfconfidence, at least enough to not be hynotized by procedures. You should learn to scrutinize the assumptions behind formatted procedures. It's always amusing to me to find so many people in the Fleet who are so shackled to their routines that they miss the whole point of the exercise.

I'm not preaching anarchy but I can recall times in prison, after we had five or more years of organized experience, when a couple of guys would pipe up wondering what our Government's SOP was, what people in Washington would expect us to do vis a vis procedures etc. It seemed so ridiculous even to give a moment's thought to those who were in such a different world than we. Mid-career education should at least give one the

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self-confidence to make his own laws, to make his own rules, to improvise as the situation dictates, when that's obviously the thing to do.

Secondly, while here you should gain a new degree of spontaneity to go along with that self-confidence. The ability to improvise should be a dividend that springs from such a period of mental refreshment. This may sound highblown. But, as I talk a little later, I think you will agree with my mentor that inventiveness probably is the defining characteristic of man.

Thirdly, you should gain enough sophistication to be healthily skeptical. I'll close with a poem that frames that virtue.

In addition to all of these, I think that, if you are like myself, the thing you should find in this mid-career education is a more comfortable feeling about where your profession stands in the heirarchy of disciplines. Now this is a tough one. You must gain at least enough historical perspective to realize that we are in a new age -- and that most of the slogans of the times are not really to be taken seriously. There is nothing new under the sun.

Id we are doing our job here, those of you who are trying in a thoughtful way o get your stuff together can attain what my friend Dr. Rhinelander (of whom I will speak later) might call metaphysical equanimity. I think the course should help you do that. Naturally, I also believe that the course must have some sort of structure and rigor -- to give you pride. I think you should be proud to be part of this community. I say that rather bashfully. I'm going on one input and that I received in the week we had te Presidents of the other War Colleges here, before I took over. Those Presidents, those Generals, envy us in many ways; for our teaching faculty, for our structured curriculum, for our departments and for our grading system. It has been a long bloody road to get here. I never had so clear a signal before to be cautious about change. In many peoples eyes we have done something that has never been done quite so well before. I'm talking about my predecessor, not myself.

It takes structure and rigor for credentials. I am going to read a paper here now that was presented to me after those conversations. Fred Hartmann wrote it. I'll read it because I didn't memorize it. This is in the nature of an announcement. I hope what he describes will come to pass quickly as we can work the bugs out: [underlined] Cooperative Degree Program. [/underlined] I am happy to announce to you that the CNO has approved a Cooperative Degree Program linking

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the work of the Naval War College and the Naval Postgraduate School. The Program will lead to a Master of Arts in Strategic Studies. It is a 44 quarter-hour program which counts your work here with grades of B or above as 18 quarter-hours. The rest of the 26 remaining hours will be completed in 6 afterhour off-campus courses. These courses will be offered this year (we hope) beginning in Washington, D.C., and later in Norfolk and San Diego. It is the PG School who will hire the professors. Costs are expected to be covered by VA benefits. Within the 26 remaining hours there is also an allowance for substitution of 12 quarter-hours of work of appropriate courses taken at third institutions. These are graduate-level courses taken either prior to attendance at Newport or subsequently. The program applies to all resident students regardless of the branch of Service and including civillians who have graduated since the present curriculum was established in 1972, meaning the classes of 73, 74, 75, 76 and 77, plus you and later classes.

Today you will receive in your student mail boxes a blue folder giving some details about the program. We cannot tell you all until the Postrgraduate School decides exactly when first classes will be held. Professor Hartmann is handling the remaining details. He is in Monterey now. The CNO has approved it. So much for the announcement. We'll wait for PG School coordination before we print it in any publications.

I think your course should give you some contact with the practitioners in the art of military science, strategy and politics. Again, as an announcement of sorts, Helmut Sonnenfeldt is coming here to spend several two or three-day periods on the campus (maybe, half a dozen) as a Bates Fellow and Lecturer. As you know, he was Henry Kissinger's European expert. He is now on the faculty at Johns Hopkins. He is going to write a formal speech and give another one. He hopes to engage in many face-to-face contacts with small groups of you, including CAR's project people.

There is another announcement of sorts that you may have heard about. The annual Current Strategy Forum this year is scheduled for late March, moved up in time for several reasons, particulary for the convenience of the student body. We will have as speakers, the Secretary of the Navy, either the CNO or one of the Fleet Commanders, hopefully Brzezinski from the administration (we haven't asked him yet) plus a forum of OPNAV and OSD Seniors. It will last about 2 1/2 days. One of the purposes is for you to meet our guests, some 250 people, depending on how many accept. I hope that you are naturally and seriously enthusiastic abour what goes on at CSF. I think it provides a big payoff to the War College, to yourselves, and particularly to the reputation of this Navy. The audience, the guests we invite, are people of substance and experience in the fields we are discussing. They are also people of influence;

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like any other College our reputation is formed by what knowledgeable and well known people think of you.

So much for the contact with the practitioners and the rigor. I think the most important transaction that should take place here is between you and your mind. You are giving yourself a mid-career calibration. Are you going to be able to hold the pace? Is the military the place for you? Can you think? Can you write? Can you speak? These are skills that will make or break you in the years ahead. I think you need this time in your lives -- I certainly did -- to face up to this in your own time and in your own way. I hope that the atmosphere here allows you to do that. In my case it was a structured course of departments and curricula; it happened to be a private one, but I was able to shop around to some extent as you are able to shop around in your electives. What I am trying to say is that this should be more akin to a grad school than to a canned program or master lecture course.

Is the place perfect? Of course, it's not. It's always going to be in a state of change. We can't sit and watch yesterday's creative ideas become dogma. We must stay ahead as the world changes. I am blessed with a fine system that I inherited that is "in grind." That allows me to do what I have been so fortunate to be able to do time and again in my career. I don't like to tend the store but to explore tangential areas and make contributions from a unique viewpoint. I liken myself (and this is no joke) to William Tecumseh Sherman as described in a book by Fletcher Pratt, I read years ago. It was about the Civil War; he discussed the relationship between George Thomas and Sherman. George Thomas was the stalwart, the soul of integrity and stability. He was Sherman's junior, but Sherman would always give him tactical command of the main body--while Uncle Billy, in Pratt's words, would skirt the flanks with cavalry, "weaving his arabesques of maneuver." This was the way I always handled air strikes as an Airborne CAG--weaving arabesques with an open switch around a main body under delegated tactical control, commanding by exception. This is what I would like to be able to do here, leaving the Department Heads "in grind," with the main body.

Although a school's job is to look ahead, as an arabesque I want to glance behind. As you may have realized from my Change of Command address, I am a little uneasy about the state of affairs of this profession. In the early sixties, 15 to 20 years ago, the language seemed to change. It was the Defense Economics jargon that, I think, dominated the change, but I am not looking for a scapegoat. There also was a civilization in the wind. That is to say, we had to adopt a vocabulary which appeared more akin to a successful businessmen than to a winner on the battlefield. New utilitarianism sprang up wherein the only thing that counted was future consequences. I wondered,

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