DCI'S REMARKS TO ARMED FORCES STAFF COLLEGE GRADUATION CEREMONIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000100160007-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 23, 2000
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: June 24, 1966
• Content Type: MISC

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DCI's REMARKS TO
ARMED FORCES STAFF COLLEGE
GRADUATION CEREMONIES
I propose to borrow, shamelessly, one of the
most useful opening lines of this year's crop of graduation
speeches. It was used at the baccalaureate service of
one of the high schools near Washington a couple of
weeks ago, and before that by Joshua when things were
going badly before the walls of Jericho.
The priest who was giving the main address looked
at the audience, then looked heavenward, and intoned:
" O Lord, what shall I say?" .,.
The padre went on to explain that he found this
a particularly useful invocation for graduation
exercises because he had rarely run into any adults
who could remember anything that was said in the
baccalaureate or commencement addresses of their youth.
Now, there is a corollary that goes along with
this observation, which I am going to take for my
guidance in these remarks: we may not remember the
contents of our high school graduation addresses, but
we rarely forget how long they were.
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I know the old maxim of one of our finer ser-
vices that somebody always fails to get the word,
and I assure you that I get the message loud and clear.
My main purpose today is to congratulate you--
both on your original selection for this course, and
on your completion of it. I am a firm believer in
our use of the senior service schools as a selection
process to make the best even better.
It seems to me that these exercises here today
differ significantly from most of the graduation
ceremonies that take place by the thousands all over
the country every June.
For one thing, this graduation is not your first.
You are not a bunch of unknown quantities, about to
be launched sink-or-swim into the world. All of you
have been tempered, tried and proven in your field,
or you would not be here.
By the same token, graduation in your case does
not mark an end to education. You have learned, since
your first graduation, that education is a continuing
process. One of the abundances of this century is an
abundance of knowledge--we will never run out of things
we need to learn. We have even had to create machines
to store and retrieve information for us, because man
can no longer absorb the totality of our knowledge in
one lifetime.
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Thirdly, of course, you are in a far better position
than the new high school and college graduates to
appreciate the use of the term "Commencement"--the
beginning of confrontations with new responsibilities
and new problems, armed with new talents and new outlooks.
One of these fresh outlooks, I hope, is that the
probing, demanding human mind has not returned to the
classroom and the library in its maturity just to be
given answers to memor?ize,_ as a_machine might store them.
In this day and age, it is even more important to our
future that we seek out the questions, particularly
those for which there are as yet no answers. There may
have been greater wisdom than we realize in the discovery
which has now been revealed to you, that the first and
foremost step in the preparation of a staff study is
to find out what the problem is.
There is an anecdote to the effect that Napoleon
made it a practice to stack up all of his incoming mail
unopened for 30 days, because he had discovered that
with the passage of time, most of the mail would no
longer require an answer after 30 days; the problem
had either disappeared, or solved itself. Today, however,
our world is one of challenge and rivalry, where problems
are not likely to disappear by themselves if we just
ignore them.
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The problems are going to be solved, either by
us, or on the other fellow's terms.
Now, in regard to that "other fellow:"-----
The Russian Communists have been keeping our
experts on so-called "Soviet-ology" working overtime
ever since Stalin died, with their leadership changes
and shifts and zigzags, but one thing remains clear:
the Soviet Union may have changed its style and its
tactics, but never its long-range objectives.
Communism today remains a dynamic and aggressive
creed in which so-called "co-existence" is only a
temporizing tactic, not a definitive solution. The
ultimate objective is still world Communism, and the
destruction of those who resist it.
As for China, whatever change of style there may
have been recently has been for the worse. Mao Tse-tung
keeps charging that the Soviets are soft on imperialism,
and his potential successors are just as hard-nosed, or
more so.
Regardless of the Sino-Soviet dispute; regardless
of the many explanations given for Khrushchev's famous
remark, "we will bury you"---and the zig-zag course
since that time of U.S.-Soviet relations, we must keep in
mind that these two large and powerful Communist nations
probably agree on one thing: that they do want to"bury"
the United States and the entire Western free world.
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The differences between them boil down essentially
to questions of when and how they should best do this.
Now, one of the first and best rules of self-defense
is to know your enemy. We must---for our own security---
know everything we can about the Soviet Union and the
Communist Chinese.
This is an extremely difficult task. Communist
countries are closed societies----police states,
where a man may not change his address, or draw his
ration coupons, without the knowledge of the security
authorities; where even in his own home, perhaps
within the circle of his own immediate family, a man
is not safe from informers and surveillance of every
kind. It is not a healthy environment for classical
espionage. When, in the case of China, you add to
this police state the racial barriers, it would be
easy to say that James Bond and his illustrious
fellow spies of fiction wouldn't have a"Chinaman's
chance," except that it is no joking matter.
To do the job, we have got to use the best
analysis, the best methods, the best technologies
that our Twentieth Century world can provide today,
but even more essentially, the best that we are going
to be able to provide tomorrow.
Both in the science of intelligence and in military
science, the defense is prone to catch up with the
offense. We pried open Russia's closed society to a
-5-
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degree in 1956 with the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft.
By 1957, a year later, the Soviets were beginning to
deploy a surface-to-air missile system capable of
shooting it down. Today one of the weapons which
looms largest in military science is the intercon-
tinenetal ballistic missile. Tomorrow it may well be
the anti-missile missile.
As long as science and technology maintain this
rapid point and counterpoint of scientific break-
through and offsetting countermeasures, we are
forced, in both the military and intelligence, to
learn to plan for innovation, plan for change. We
must be planning, in other words, not only for the
best application of the assets, the methods, and the
technologies we have today, but for the ones we are
going to have in the future. And this brings me
back to what I said about the questions which can be
just as,important as the answers. We should be planning,
not just for the use of what is still on the drawing
boards today, but for the application of ideas which
at present have not even reached the drawing boards.
At the Central Intelligence Agency, for instance,
we are projecting our plans and programs five, ten,
and even 15 years into the future. We postulate our
requirements in terms of the target dates, long before
we have the assets to meet them. Then we can work
backward from the goals and put our best thinkers to
work coming up with the necessary tools t d tie job.
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In effect, we have added to the catchphrase about
"'daring to think the unthinkable" a new one:
undertaking to "plan the unplannable."
As many of you know, the intelligence profession
in reality is a far cry from its fiction. We have
very few James Bonds in the headquarters building at
Langley, but we do have enough expert scholars, both
in the humanities and the sciences, to staff the
faculty of a great university: economists, scientists,
historians, statisticians, all bringing their vast
knowledge and keen minds to bear on the problems
relating to the national security of the United States.
These men are engaged in searching out both today's
answers and tomorrow's questions.
As a nation, we face,a challenge, not only to
learn to cope with our enemies, but to learn to cope
with a future which is difficult to foresee. We are
fore-armed if we have started by speculating on the
nature of some of the challenges which may confront us.
As for today, let me finish by thanking you for the
privilege of addressing you on this occasion, congratulating
you on your graduation, and wishing you well in your
future assignments.
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