CONVOCATION ADDRESS BY VICE ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER, U.S. NAVY PRESIDENT OF THE NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01554R003500090001-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 16, 2001
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: August 24, 1972
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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CONVOCATION ADDRESS
by
Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner, U.S. Navy
President of the Naval War College
Welcome to distinguished guests and
families.
Today we extend a warm welcome to
the students of the 89th session of the
Naval War College. You are now the
newest matriculants in the oldest Naval
War College in the world.
In the Naval Warfare Course you are
188 strong at the commander/captain
level. Fifty percent of you are U.S.
Navy officers. The rest are Army, Air
Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, State
Department, CIA, naval and defense
civilians.
In the Command and Staff Course
you are 232 strong at the lieutenant/
lieutenant commander level; two-thirds
are Navy.
In our two international courses you
are 46 strong, representing 35 different
navies.
Our total student body is 466.
Our 89th session will have a number
of unique characteristics:
? This is the first year that we have
,iad an academic convocation.
? This is the first year that we have
had U.S. student participation in the
two courses designed for international
students. This is a direct reflection of
the increasing importance of coopera-
tion with allies under the Nixon Doc-
trine.
? This is the first year of our new
Naval Staff Course for younger interna-
tional officers.
? This is the first year five countries
have been represented in our interna-
tional courses. We welcome Cambodia,
Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Singa-
pore.
? This is the first time in over 30
years that we have completed a new
academic building expressly for the War
College. Just behind historic Luce Hall
here, our new Spruance Hall is gearing
completion.
? This will be the first time in over
20 years that we have built new family
housing for War College students.
Thanks to the efforts of one of my
predecessors, Adm. Richard Colbert,
this housing has been specially designed
to harmonize with the historic architec-
ture of Newport.
? TMs is the first year that we will
teach an academic program exclusively
for the distaff side.
? This is the first year that we have
provided a textbook allowance to our
students.
w This is potentially the finest stu-
dent body that we have had in many
years. At the express direction of the
Chief of Naval Operations, the naval
officers in your classes were rigorously
screened. Because of this emphasis on
quality, we have less than our autho-
rized students. You in this new student
body are to be congratulated on having
been chosen to attend the Naval War
College.
? Finally, and most significantly,
this will be a year of major changes in
the college's academic program.
Why are we changing our curricu-
lum? First, because every academic in-
stitution must periodically review
whether it is fulfilling its mission. The
changes in the issues and problems
which the Navy faces today call for
changes in what we teach here. The
problems we face are increasingly com-
plex. More is demanded of us as officers
than ever before. This college, in turn,
must demand more of its students.
Beyond that there has been a creep-
ing intellectual devitalization in all of
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our War Colleges since World War II.
Rarely does one meet a graduate of any
War College who said that he had been
intellectually taxed by a War College
course of instruction. This is not to say
that these men did not find their
courses stimulating, time consuming,
and worth their year of effort. What is
unfortunately true, however, is that few
were challenged to anywhere near the
limits of their intellectual capabilities.
Further evidence of our intellectual
weakness is the ineffectiveness of our
Military Establishment in answering the
questions, criticisms, and doubts raised
against it in recent years. You can be
certain that your morning newspaper
contains several attacks on the per-
formance or motives of military men.
The fact that these questions are grow-
ing in crescendo indicates that we are
not providing convincing responses or
taking positions that are credible to
others not in uniform. Admittedly,
some of the criticism is neither genuine
nor constructive and cannot be satisfied.
However, most of it is legitimate and
deserves satisfaction. We must not per-
mit ourselves to think that these voices
will be stilled simply by the ending of
the conflict in Vietnam.
Why have we eroded our credibility?
One cause is that higher military educa-
tion has come to substitute prolonged
briefints for rigorous intellectual de-
velopment. This is because almost every
aspect of our society today has some
impact on national security. Our War
Colleges have succui5bed to the tempta-
tion to add piecemeal to their curricula
in a fruitless quest to cover everything
of relevance.
Another sample of the ineffective-
ness of our military educational system
is our increasing reliance on civilians and
on "think tanks" to do our thinking for
us. Do not misunderstand. These people
have done outstanding work for us. We
very much need their help and stimula-
tion into the future. We must, however,
be able to produce military men who
are a match for the best of the civilian
strategists or we will abdicate control of
our profession. Moreover, our profes-
sion can only retain its vitality so long
as we ourselves are pushing the frontiers
of knowledge in our field.
There are many other symptoms of
our professional decline. The War Col-
leges' reputations have regressed to the
point that. many officers believe that
assignment to any one of them is
primarily a year of release from the
pressures of sea -or field duties, a year to
"recharge batteries," as the saying goes.
It appears that no student in recent
years has ever flunked out of this
college for academic indifference or
incompetence. That is either an amazing
record or a false concept of gentlemanly
treatment that can only foster intellec-
tual laziness. As of this moment, how
ever, those who do not perform have no
guarantee of a full year at the Naval War
College.
Any new improvement in the col-
lege's courses of instruction must sup-
port the objective of the Naval War
College which is to enhance the capa-
bility of naval officers to make sound
decisions in both command and manage-
ment positions. This means developing
your intellect, encouraging you to
reason, to innovate, and to expand your
capacity to solve coi.:plex military prob-
lems. To do this the college will empha-
size intellectual development and aca-
demic excellence.
Now for the specifics, we will start
by increasing the academic content of
our courses and at the same time placing
greatei emphasis on what you, the
students, do rather than what is done
for you. We will expect lots of individ-
ual effort in research, in reading, in
writing, and in solving case problems.
The first semester, for instance, those of
you in the Naval Warfare Course will be
assigned about 1,000 pages of carefully
selected reading each week. We will
temper this with seminar discussions led
by our recently expaflded and strength-
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CHALLENGE! 5
away from the broad issues of strategy
and international relations into areas of
more exclusive concern to the U.S.
naval officer. In the last 25 years, we in
uniform have been very aware of the
importance of understanding our rela-
tionship to the economic, diplomatic,
and other factors of national strategy.
In the process, however, we have lost
some of our ability to offer pure mili-
tary advice. Few of us in uniform will
ever be required to deal in the creation
of national strategy. All of us here,
however, will influence our military and
national strategies. We will do so
through the recommendations we will
offer and the decisions we will make on
how to allocate those scarce national
resources that will be entrusted to the
Military Establishment in the years
ahead. We will formulate the strategy of
tomorrow by the way we spend and
manage our defense budget today.
Thus, the second part of the curricu-
lum will be entitled management. The
focus of all of the four courses here will
shift in this direction. We are in danger
of pricing the United States out of a
military capability that is sufficient to
be a deterrent. Therefore, under man-
agement we will study cases of choice:
choices of weapons characteristics;
choices between weapons; choices be-
tween weapons a.d other necessary
elements of military power such as
personnel; and choices of how to pro-
cure and manage military forces. We will
deal in only a few representative cases,
and we will not attempt to cover the
full range of military managerial prob-
lems. Rather, the cases used will illus-
trate how to select and weigh the
factors relevant to a decision and how
to understand the organizational and
managerial functions of translating a
decision into action. Hopefully, working
on a few representative cases will make
you better prepared to handle whatever
particular decisions or choices you sub-
sequently encounter.
Thirdly, we will also shift emphasis
toward the study of the employment of
the forces that we procure and manage.
This section of the curriculum will be
called tactics. Again, we will look at
specific tactical cases but, perforce, we
will not attempt to cover all types of
naval tactics. The emphasis will be on
how to solve problems, using reasoning
that can be applied to whatever cases
you encounter after leaving the War
College.
Each section of the curriculum,
strategy, management, and tactics, has a
common thread, that of allocating re-
sources. Strategy is the art of allocating
total national resources: economic,
diplomatic, psychological, military, and
others to serve our national purposes.
Management is the art of allocating
scarce financial resources to procure and
manage a military force that will sup-
port our strategy. Tactics is the alloca-
tion of available resources or forces
when the action starts. We badly need
officers who are capable of handling the
trade-offs in each of these fields. The
skills of doing this are infinitely more
demanding than the allocation of assets
in the business world of profit and loss.
That makes our job here wonderfully
demanding.
This year's shift of emphases toward
a deeper study of strategy on the one
hand and toward more attention to
management and tactics on the other is
really not something new at the Naval
War College. It represents a return to
our great traditions-to the strategic and
historical contribution of men like
Mahan; to the tactical and operational
studies of men like William Sims, Ray-
mond Spruance, and Kelly Turner, who
were the experts in naval warfare in
their day. The idea of hard work is by
no means new either. One of our re-
searchers recently dug out the complete
course materials for the 1926-27 cur-
riculum. He said that it was a whale of a
workload, for students and faculty
alike, and that the marginal comments
indicated that lots of midnight oil had
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6 NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW
been consumed back then. It will be
that way again in 1972.
The balance between strategy,
management, and tactics will vary be-
tween the four courses we teach. Our
senior courses, the College of Naval
Warfare and . the international Naval
Command College, will spend more time
on strategy. The College of Naval Com-
mand and Staff and the international
Naval Staff Course will look more
toward tactics. They will all four share
common ground in management, and
there will be more interchange between
all four student bodies than there has
ever been before. Each can stimulate the
others. This is one campus and one basic
curriculum with different shades of
emphasis.
Speaking of togetherness, we all
know the importance of our wives'
interest in and support to our careers.
Military wives usually become familiar
with their husbands' areas of profes-
sional specialty, if only in self-defense
against the foreign language they speak
in acronyms such as ASW, TACAIR,
FYDP, and other unintelligible mumbo-
jumbo. Perhaps it will be even more
difficult for wives to feel a part of
Thucydides' Peloponnesian wars, case
studies of the F-14, or warfare tactics
new to her husband. As a pilot project
this autumn, we are going to offer an
exclusively distaff course on strategy
and another on anthropology. If they
work well and meet a need, we will look
at expansion in the next term.
Now those of you in the entering
classes may well ask, "What is in all of
this for me? This is not the relaxing
sabbatical I had hoped for!"
The only response necessary is that if
you are inclined ? to shy away from a
challenge, you are not the kind of
officer we want here. All of you here
are too capable to afford a year away
from the intensity of professional de-
velopment or from the heat of competi-
tion.
Now let us look also at the rewards
that you can achieve under the new
curriculum. They are considerable.
Those. who have the capability to con-
tribute to our profession's intellectual
growth will be identified, and efforts
will be made to assure assignment to
appropriate responsibilities after leaving
this college. If we are to redress the
balance of unfavorable public opinion,
we must be able to place the intellectual
square pegs in the square holes and
those otherwise qualified into holes
shaped for them; and many of those are
equally important and challenging. We
don't all want to be squares. (Forgive
me.)
Second, and far more important, you
can have the reward of becoming a more
capable and productive officer, but not
because you learned a lot of new facts
here.. If you attempt to make this a prep
school for your next duty assignment,
you will have missed the purpose of
being here. If we trained you for a
particular assignment or type of duty,
the value of this college would be
short lived. We want to educate you to
be capable of doing well in a multitude
of future duties. The common in-
gredient to them will be the ability to
make good decisions. Now the essence
of decisionmaking is not finding facts-a
plebeian chore. Rather, it is considering
all of the key factors which bear on a
decision-and weighting them in a man-
ner that will assist in making the final
judgment. Your objective here should
be to improve your reasoning, logic, and
analysis, not to memorize data that will
soon be outmoded. Don't look for
answers on how to conduct antisub-
marine warfare or whatever. Search in-
stead for methods of approaching anti-
submarine warfare problems. Learn to
discern which facts are trivia and which
drive the results.
The new curriculum should leave you
with abundant free time without the
distractions of musters, coffee breaks,
committee meetings, and lectures. You
can run the risk of abusing your free-
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dom, or you canuse it for self-develop-
ment. You are on your own to get your
higher education in military decision-
making during these next 10 months.
The basic premise underlying this new
approach is that if we point you in a
reasonable direction and just turn you
loose, you will conquer every height
ahead of you on your own. Always keep
in mind that the product which the
country desperately needs is military
men with the capability of solving com-
plex problems and of executing their
decisions. Scholarship for scholarship's
sake is of no importance to us. You
must keep your sights on decision-
making or problem solving as your
objective. Problems are not solved by
standard or pat solutions, especially not
in times of such rapid change as we are
now experiencing.
Here in an academic atmosphere, free
of real world responsibilities, you have a
particularly valuable opportunity to ex-
press thoughts freely and let your
imagination roam. We want this year to
be built around an uninhibited exchange
of ideas, and rank has no monopoly on
those. Note that student and faculty
name badges emphasize first names and
purposely omit rank. From today on,
also, everyone will be wearing civilian
clothes to blur rank distinctions.
Take advantage of this opportunity.
If you find yourself taxed hard, over-
taxed in cases, do not let that dis-
courage you. If we tailored a course to
the average student, we would fail to
tax those who are most ready to pro-
ceed. Remember the related point that
course content is secondary. It is the
development of habits of thinking that
counts. If you cannot cover everything
that is assigned, do what you do accom-
plish well, so that you think creatively.
Ploughing through a wealth of material
just to absorb it is not what we want or
what you need. A modicum of excel-
lence and understanding will far out-
balance a plethora of mediocrity and
superficiality.
There is, of course, also a danger that
we may not challenge some of you to
capacity in the standard programs here.
If so, it will be up to you to seek out
academic opportunity equal to your
talents. You can undertake additional
independent research projects under the
guidance of one of about 30 well-
qualified tutors we have on campus. Or
you may audit the academic program of
one of the other courses, no matter
which course you are in. Or if you
believe that you have exceptional talerRr
and conceive of a particularly de-
manding project, you can apply to be a
Research Associate under our new Re-
search Department and do independent
work at the doctoral level. Hopefully,
many of you will take some of these
directions.
We in the Military Establishment
have the intellect and the capability to
provide the answers demanded of us
today. We can tap those capabilities
only through hard intellectual endeavor
such as you are about to undertake. We
are a profession, not a trade. You are
going to help us continue to be profes-
sionals. You have a unique opportunity
for these next 10 months. It will be
only as productive as you make it for
yourselves. Cherish this one golden
opportunity and give it all you have.
Your first meeting on Thucydides
commences at 1:30. Between now and
then all of our facilities are open for
you and your families and our guests to
visit.
Again, welcome-and good studying.
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