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“NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE CELEBRATES 60TH ANNIVERSARY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E675-E677 on May 2, 2006.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE CELEBRATES 60TH ANNIVERSARY
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HON. IKE SKELTON
of missouri
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Speaker, let me take this means to congratulate the National War College on 60 years of excellence in national security policy and strategic thinking education. On April 5, 2006, I had the privilege to address the Commandant's dinner in celebration of this anniversary and I am proud to share that speech with the Members of the House:
National War College 60th Anniversary The Next 60 Years
Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you. I am honored that you asked me to be your speaker. And thank you, General Peterson for that generous introduction.
First, I have to say Congratulations. What you have built here is truly a national treasure. You can be proud, as the entire nation should be, of this school and your product--because your product literally is the strength of this nation as we anticipate and respond to world events. Among your students and your faculty, you have educated some of the finest strategists this country has ever produced.
I was going to give a short speech. But then I thought about the critical time we live in and got excited all over again about National War College. I don't want to take too much time with serious thoughts, but it is important to reflect on our past in order to respond to the challenges ahead.
Sixty years ago, it was a novel idea--to create a college that would focus on grand strategy and bring together a diverse student body and faculty--senior officers from all the services and senior officials from the state department and, later, other agencies.
This was a place where students were presented with strategic dilemmas, with a curriculum that ``focused on the interrelationship of military and non-military means in the promulgation of national policy.''
In 1946 Ambassador George Kennan, the first deputy for foreign affairs here, explained that in those days of
``transition and uncertainty,'' there was little in the policy world being done on the relation between war and politics. Kennan noted, ``American thinking about foreign policy had been primarily addressed to the problems of peace, and had taken place largely within the frameworks of international law and economics. Thinking about war, confined for the most part to military staffs and institutions of military training, had been directed . . . to technical problems of military strategy and tactics--to the achievement, in short, of victory in purely military terms.''
Kennan saw this school--its curriculum and its student/faculty interaction--as a home for the development of new strategic thinking at the beginning of the Cold War.
Through the years, National War College faculties have done a magnificent job teaching national security policy and strategy. This College's special place among the senior schools of Professional Military Education has been based on your attention to grand strategy. As Lieutenant General Leonard T. Gerow--President of the Board which recommended the War College's formation--said, ``The College is concerned with grand strategy and the utilization of national resources necessary to implement that strategy .
. . Its graduates will exercise influence on the formulation of national and foreign policy in both peace and war.'' It has also been based on your insistent attention to academic rigor. And, your excellence has been based on the inclusion, from the beginning, of interagency and international students. These elements of excellence, in the context of a residential program that builds lasting ties between officers of different services, different countries and different agencies, is unmatched anywhere.
Congress has been supportive of your continuing advances in all these areas. I guess I don't have to remind you of my role in the Goldwater-Nichols reforms to increase
``jointness'' among the services and my investigations of the Professional Military Education system.
But we can't rest here. Keeping your institution relevant and on the sharp edge takes the constant attention of Congress and the Chairman in support of each new Commandant, and Dean, and the faculty.
Your graduates test your teaching every day in a very complex environment. Senior decision makers have made some mistakes that have increased the difficulty of their missions. I know the current students review successes and difficulties as case studies so they will be even better prepared. But while today's wars demand our focus, we need to be careful we don't become so myopic that we fail to see the great challenges and opportunities ahead.
One challenge is that, with all our advanced technology, when we still have failures. I believe this is because we are ill-equipped intellectually and because we don't work together well enough. Our successes are achieved because our most astute military and civilian leaders understand people, cultures, and root causes of problems or conflicts. And they anticipate opportunities. In Iraq, Afghanistan, the global war on terror, and even with Katrina and beyond, human interactions have caused great uncertainty for our security at home and abroad. Just these few examples show why any success we have is not just a matter of doctrine and technology.
We can all think about failures among leaders at transitional periods such as Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg. He failed to grasp the impact on war of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial age. This lesson shows that what might appear to be tactical mistakes are really strategic! And I'm convinced, we are once more at a transitional period in our history just as Kennan was sixty years ago.
Today we not only face the continuing transition from the industrial to the information age, but we are also recognizing that adversaries can capitalize on technologies in unanticipated ways. As new technologies have increased the complexity of our world, we see two other phenomena. Our adversaries use tactics we would be familiar with if we studied history. And, with our focus on technology, we must not neglect the critical dimension of human interaction.
This brings me to my real point. The challenges and opportunities before us place as great an intellectual demand on our national security professionals as at any time in our history. And while their understanding of the art of war and international relations might be pretty good today, it must be even better tomorrow. And it must be broader. It must be even better integrated across all the instruments of national power. And it must be more expansive to include nontraditional national security partner agencies and departments, as well as more and different foreign partners.
Beyond the employment of joint forces, beyond the effort to pursue the newest technologies of the science of warfare, you know that National War College graduates must be prepared not just to adopt technical transformation, but also must understand the art of statecraft as well as war.
While I do not pretend to understand the Future Combat System or the avionics of the F-22, I do know they will be useless unless we have wise leaders who know the value of all the instruments of national power and have the skills to use them at the appropriate times and in the appropriate combinations. I know it's easy to measure the increased payloads and speeds brought by new technology. But while it's difficult to quantify the value of a Kennan, a Powell, or a Pace, it's more important than ever to recognize the value of our best strategists.
As we used to say about jointness, ``this can't be a pick up game.'' Now, it's our interagency planning and operations, and our focus on a broader definition of national security that must not be ad hoc or ``come as you are.''
What would help? I want to challenge the Services and other agencies, to design systems that deliberately select the right people for the right level of professional education and the right school for strategic studies. They should be able to articulate why they send one person to Air, Naval or Army War College and another to this College or ICAF, or to a Fellowship. At the same time, they need to place a real value on how well their members take on what is taught. Your graduates' future assignments should not only reflect that they went to the premier interagency national security strategy institution. Their selection for command, senior leadership, and interagency positions should be based in greater measure on how well they perform here. Did National War College Distinguished Graduates and outstanding faculty get treated any differently by their Service detailers or their agency human resource directors than those who did not do quite as well, or as those who were not selected for this outstanding education? Perhaps they went back to the very same job they were doing. This is what I mean when I have spoken about the Services taking intellectual performance at PME seriously. This is what I mean when I critique them for not promoting officers who have excelled teaching or studying world affairs and the art of war and politics.
Is this impossible? Only if we're wedded to machine age personnel systems. The Services and agencies need information age human resource systems that can recruit, retain, train and educate the innovative people we need in government and the military.
And, we need a sufficient number of people in the Services and agencies if we are going to build intellectual capital, fight these wars and prepare for the next catastrophe or conflict. We have to have enough people to be able to send exceptional military and agency leaders to be students or faculty in school assignments. The cost of preparing for the challenges of tomorrow pale in comparison to the price we will pay if we are caught without the cadre of wise leaders we need for the future.
You know, whenever I haven written the Chairman, or NDU President or you as Commandants a letter, I have been pretty consistent in my questions. Do you select the right officers and civilians to serve as faculty and in the right balance? Have you kept your faculty to student ratio low with 10-12 students per seminar? Are you emphasizing history, political science and foreign area studies? Does the faculty have these credentials? Do you have the resources to ensure your students are able to conduct field or regional studies? Do your resources enable faculty to contribute to national strategy and policy through research and sabbaticals? Do you stay relevant by using real world and historical case studies? Have you fully integrated your reserve component, civilian and foreign students?
To me these are not academic questions, if you will pardon the expression. These are about the character and the continued relevance of this school.
Let me be clear. We know that the National War College has no counterpart among civilian universities. Not Harvard, not Princeton, not Stanford--none of them has a faculty, or curriculum or student body remotely comparable. This College must be protected and supported as the elite institution it is. The nation's future security requires it. The quality of the faculty, of the instruction, of the curriculum, of the students must not be compromised. A false choice must never be forced on us between spending on current operations and new military technologies, and investing in the education of our future premier national strategists.
For sixty years the National War College has been the crown jewel of Professional Military Education. Since the days when President Harry Truman sat in student seminars to learn about the Soviet Union, this College has been the place where strategic thinking has been nurtured, taught and refined. At a historic moment of great challenge and peril George Kennan, worked in this building, to formulate the containment strategy that ultimately won the Cold War without a nuclear exchange. Today, at another moment of great challenge, the need for strategic direction and thinking could not be greater. The price of failure is far too high. We have to get it right. We have to have wise people, with the right education, in the right positions, to think through these challenges and take action in concert.
When you think about all the political debates, the expedient compromises, and the resource trade-offs that take place in this town each day, it's a miracle that a college of this quality has been able to survive and prosper within the larger bureaucratic confines of the government. In a more immediate sense, I have always been concerned that bureaucracies can kill even the healthiest intellectual organization. A college such as this can decline and die if bureaucracies and administrative arms bloat while they cut corners, dumb down, impose numbing uniformity, enshrine group think, standardize mediocrity or gorge themselves on the resources meant to be spent on the real stuff of education--the interaction between small groups of faculty and students wrestling with the profound issues of the day.
The National War College has always embodied something unique. As I look at you leaders of this college during different eras of war and peace, I sense a continuity of intellectual engagement and energy in these historic halls. It is called excellence.
Why is it here? Yes, you have an outstanding faculty, and superior students, an ever adapting curricula and your wonderful location here in Washington.
But the key, from the beginning--the genius of General Eisenhower's vision--is that experienced professionals from various backgrounds and come together, over an extended period of time, to learn from each other, and to tackle problems together in an environment that fosters understanding. This is one institution that has had no agenda other than to make wise and thoughtful leaders. In the current atmosphere of partisan tensions, this College remains a refuge from the bureaucratic skirmishes and wars.
As the first War College Commandant, Admiral Harry T. Hill explained, his intention was to ``make the students ponder'', to give the students practical problems upon which to think and arrive at individual conclusions.
This is a safe space for men and women to engage each other in the search for a better understanding of each others' agencies and departments. They can gain a true appreciation of the character and conduct of war, the complexity of strategy, and the utility of the diplomatic, political and economic instruments of state. Your product is strategists. They are still critical to our future.
I can see this in your graduates . . . General Pace, our Chairman; General Martin Dempsey on the ground now in Iraq; David Sedney, our first senior State Department officer in Afghanistan after 9/11 and now deputy chief of mission in China; Buzz Mosley, Chief of Staff of the Air Force . . . generals, ambassadors, foreign military officers, and interagency leaders. Even one of our newest Armed Services Committee staffers, Lorry Fenner, is a former member of your faculty and a National War College graduate. I could go on and on . . .
This is a proud tradition and serves as the foundation for the next 60 years ahead. I hope the War College will continue to lead the way in inter-agency and inter-service strategic education. As we broaden our definition of the national security community to include homeland defense and increased international cooperation, I hope that the War College model and experience can be used to broaden government's approach to our nation's challenges.
George Kennan, typing away in his office right next door to this room, charted a strategy to meet a past threat . . . a policy that endured and was adapted, through Administrations of both parties. You all have been the watchful guardians of this heritage.
I want to challenge you tonight continue to work with us in Congress and at this College to think about how to improve interagency planning and operations to defeat our adversaries and to capitalize on opportunities. Lend your wisdom to the significant questions we face today--should we be working on a National Security Act for 2007 or 2009? How can we adapt a Goldwater-Nichols type reform to the interagency process? These are only two of the topics we wrestle with. You can see how significant they are and imagine the sustained, long term effort they will require.
So, we enjoy a celebration tonight, but tomorrow we must start again to renew and reinvigorate this great project of creating national security strategists. Given your history, and the imperative for the future, I am confidant this College's faculty and students are up to this challenge.
Thank you for including me in your celebration. I welcome your continued engagement on these issues.
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