Given the named professors at the NWC, it doesn't appear that "diversity of viewpoint" is lacking at the institution. OBTW, Tom Nichols has a case of TDS that borders on a pathology.
Tom did a terrific job of teaching history in the late 1990s there. He was one of the profs that was so good, the staff would sometimes come and watch his lectures from the back of the auditorium. His politics never came up, or could be discerned from listening to his teaching. Sad to see it come to this.
I think they are two poisonous berries of different bushes, often practiced together because, in our modern world, the "LEFT" has become a monolithic Borg where to agree on one issue is to support on all.
DEI should be common sense: "If we provide Equal opportunity to all, and Include (i.e. do not Exclude) anyone, we will end of with a Diverse group of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, and social classes."
Unfortunately, the E stands for "Equity", not "Equal" and that ruins everything, because it requires focus on outcome and not opportunity.
Clearly the administrators who believed they had to remove/degrade/change info like that related to the Tuskegee airmen were greatly mistaken. History is history. However, “teaching Critical Race Theory” is something that is best left to those at Oberlin and Brown, and it should have no place in any DoD institution. Good riddance!
I don't believe they were "mistaken." These are purportedly smart people, most with advanced degrees in their fields. I think it was malicious compliance, pure and simple, in order to realize the Orange Man Bad narrative they've had in their closed minds for ten year.
Looking at what has happened in my lifetime, we have lost track of what's important. The War Colleges, which started in the late 19th Century as a training facility for staff and command officers to formalize the lessons of von Clausewitz and Jomini as well as American experiences.
How do we get back to the status of the as respectable institutions that are focused on the roles in educating and developing officers for command rather than as educational institutions with mostly uniformed student bodies where the professors research?
Perhaps I was unclear in my comment. The problem is the faculty has lost the focus on the institution's role as a graduate level military institution. They act as if they are at just another academic organization featuring maritime decor.
Then that’s the fault of the SecNav and CNO for not making it clear what the NWC is all about. If you hire a CRT person you will get CRT lectures. Maybe the NWC should be shut down for year and all the faculty fired and rebuilt from the keel to the crow’s nest.
I don't think you're wrong...it's clear the upper reaches of our military institutions are not just infested with far-leftward thinking believers but, has either willfully allowed it to bloom and grow or, mentally cloistered themselves to believe like a naive parent of college students that, such ideas are merely the ramblings of a small number and they'll re-center themselves upon entering the real world.
Time to halt non Naval students. If I see one more careerist from the State Department waste a year on enjoying the Newport Life I’m tempted to reopen Goat Island and let loose in the opposite direction of the old range.
I feel like non service none combatant students helped to drive the slow then fast spiral to irrelevance.
Bingo! Our next war will not be fought because an aggressor nation thought we haven’t been sufficiently inculcated in DEI. We should be using the Naval War College and its cousin institutions to generate the next Alfred Thayer Mayans and the next Edwin Thomas Laytons. If the latter name is unfamiliar to you, I recommend the 2019 edition of “Midway”. (Then) LT Layton was assigned to duty as an assistant naval attaché in Japan, where he learned the language and culture of the country, which served him and all of us well when he was Nimitz’ intelligence officer. The softer arts embodied in a liberal eduction do not have to be the focus of person’s post-secondary efforts. We need people who can take technical knowledge to its next more useful level - application. All of our officer acquisition programs produce people with that technical knowledge capable of taking on the responsibility of enhancing our strategy and intelligence corpus. The only thing stopping us is us.
Just to help future Googlers, it was Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Edwin Thomas Layton. And don’t forget Joe Rochefort when it comes to Midway intelligence.
I was at the NWC graduation a couple of weeks ago and I was struck by how many graduates came from foreign countries other services and civilian agencies. Perhaps it should be renamed the Combined Joint Interagency College (CJIC) and a graduate program that deal strictly with American naval matters be established elsewhere. Just a thought.
When the QM 'A' school was still at Newport, I encountered several USAF officers at the base pool. Being a former USAF Dependent, I was a bit taken aback that they would be at the NWC.
When I was still a dependent my father, a Naval officer, did a stint as an instructor at the Air University at Maxwell AFB. This was well before "joint" was a thing. He also did some time at a joint Army-Navy-Air Force activity at Wright-Patterson AFB (heck of an "O" club there).
Seems to me... That there's a certain element of "diploma bling" to War Colleges anymore... Many attendees whose shadow will never darken the door of a military command & control cell. It's just a nice, TDY-ish, govt-paid academic thing to do; a resume-padder and diploma for the wall.
Meanwhile... Per the broad scope of American culture and health of the Res Publica... It's a shame that almost no American universities have a true program in Military History or Military Science.
I’m a med school professor in a civilian school and my med students who are in the military are more focused on being sailors (and soldiers etc) who are also doctors, than in being doctors who are incidentally in the Armed Forces.
I took the NWC nonresident seminar courses in the late 1990s. We had a mix of students - military, civilian - but a shared interest. Real diversity of perspective, not the rabid leftism of academia.
I think that may be the source of the problem - the War Colleges trying to get academic accreditation for their programs. From accrediting organizations that despise them. Perhaps it’s time to self-accredit, or form an accrediting body of worldwide higher military colleges.
I think the issue here is the knee-jerk approach to banning broad topics.
There's plenty of ways to think about how, say, concepts like masculinity might affect things from recruitment (does emphasizing masculinity for instance lead to more effective recruitment campaigns) to crisis behavior (e.g. the finding that female leaders might be more militaristic in crises to compensate for perceptions that they aren't as "tough"). These topics also aren't limited to just critical theorists; one could draw on Harvey Mansfield's book on "Manliness" for instance, which has plenty of discussion of the virtues of martial valor in relation to war. There's connections there all the way back to the Iliad.
I agree that the full-on critical studies approaches aren't particularly helpful and shouldn't be prioritized in a war college, but walling-off some topics entirely in both teaching and research seems like a bad idea.
CRT and DEI are both instantiations of Sun Tzu's maxim "if your opponent is united, divide him." They're identity politics by another name, and if you're in the thick of things, you don't have time to worry about the racial, sexual, or whatever identity, the person on whom your continuation in life remains, is a member of. The NWC is a graduate-level college for people experienced in the craft of doing Navy things, it isn't ROTC at an undergraduate school. CRT and DEI have been used to split up American society into a set of warring identities, fostering division and strife - not "understanding" or "tolerance", in fact it seems like an ideal stratagem for an enemy to use before commencing military action.
It don’t take long for the Trump/America/Israel haters to tell us that Iran has no desire to acquire an atomic bomb, that no damage was down to the deep underground fortified bunkers where Iran was not building a bomb and that all the equipment and uranium that was not being used to build a bomb has been removed the day before.
Interesting details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc78GJbpen8 - and they had those exits buried under truckloads and truckloads of dirt and sand in anticipation of an Israeli special forces attack. If that dirt had been removed, the tracks laid down by the excavators would have been obvious - no such tracks were seen, that site was thoroughly closed off and that would have taken days to do... and the same case for removing the dirt and sand.
It really comes down to an intense hatred for Trump and Hegseth. There are lots of Vindmans in the bureaucracy that need to be cleaned out and there are lots of stupid people in the media who was to be the next Bob Woodward.
It's easy to re-write history that way, not the clumsy Stalinist method of disappearing people in photographs or using scissors to cut out non-politically correct pages...
I've read these sorts of things here repeatedly; and every time, I am incredulous. I spent a bit of time in Newport, and I always believed it was a place where the Navy focused on military matters centered on two things: TACTICS and STRATEGY, as relating to Naval WARFARE.
I have been saddened over the years to discover that I was wrong then, and wrong since.
Why would anyone think NWS, or any other PME school, need to be more like a civilian institution when the US military essentially requires everyone to get post grad education. That's where the contact with civilians comes in. And that's fine to see what the people you are serving think in that setting.
But PME should be just that. And it needs be only that.
Oh sure, I 100% agree. But it's the current reality. Has been for some time.
That said, the last few years it's been overlooked due to manning issues.
And a second thought:
Anyone who is going to be posted as a naval attaché might find some PG studies of value if they are within the scope of the job (i.e. not an accounting degree, but rather history or language of the area of posting).
Perhaps staff officers may find similar education valuable.
I may be wrong, but I get the impression most get an MBA, which is utterly useless. It checks the box, but that's about it. For useful grad degrees the Navy has the postgraduate school. War needs to be the emphasis at all the war colleges.
The MBA is the easiest to obtain with almost any college that means anything offers them by distance.
Nimitz found the NWC useful to his command in the Pacific, saying that he did not encounter any problem that had not been anticipated in the NWC.
I'm inclined to agree with the last sentence. An MBA would not have much relevance to the Supply/Quartermaster Corps either. The accounting component probably does though..
Then send them to the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts, so they can learn the jargon of the diplomatic trade - but DEI is a presence there, too: https://fletcher.tufts.edu/community/inclusive-excellence so any students would have to deal with that stuff. As for languages, there's always Monterey - https://www.dliflc.edu/.
I think they are useful for those who will use them (whether technical in nature, or simply people who are very good at their hobbies) but should absolutely not be required for advancement out side Engineering disciplines (EDO, perhaps Program Management, etc.)
Most education in the military should be within the bounds of the profession of arms. Given the mission of the war colleges, accreditation is meaningless and is a waste of time and effort to pursue.
One meaningful requirement is found in the Army. You will rarely make Major without going through the Command and General Staff school. Destroyer School is the rough equivalent of that in the Navy.
Nice post. Dear Pauline, how good of you to not want to have your selfish self promotion [Getting fired] “to be part of the legacy of the Stockdale Chair.” Considering whom the chair is named for, service/duty over self should not be a question.
Given the named professors at the NWC, it doesn't appear that "diversity of viewpoint" is lacking at the institution. OBTW, Tom Nichols has a case of TDS that borders on a pathology.
He is no longer there
I know. I had some personal contact with him, and was stunned to discover he taught there. Was there a LONG time...
Tom did a terrific job of teaching history in the late 1990s there. He was one of the profs that was so good, the staff would sometimes come and watch his lectures from the back of the auditorium. His politics never came up, or could be discerned from listening to his teaching. Sad to see it come to this.
Thank God.
how does one rationalize,
I teach CRT, and
I don't do DEI work?
Easy. If you believe in CRT you are no longer rational.
I think they are two poisonous berries of different bushes, often practiced together because, in our modern world, the "LEFT" has become a monolithic Borg where to agree on one issue is to support on all.
DEI should be common sense: "If we provide Equal opportunity to all, and Include (i.e. do not Exclude) anyone, we will end of with a Diverse group of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, races, and social classes."
Unfortunately, the E stands for "Equity", not "Equal" and that ruins everything, because it requires focus on outcome and not opportunity.
Clearly the administrators who believed they had to remove/degrade/change info like that related to the Tuskegee airmen were greatly mistaken. History is history. However, “teaching Critical Race Theory” is something that is best left to those at Oberlin and Brown, and it should have no place in any DoD institution. Good riddance!
I don't believe they were "mistaken." These are purportedly smart people, most with advanced degrees in their fields. I think it was malicious compliance, pure and simple, in order to realize the Orange Man Bad narrative they've had in their closed minds for ten year.
You may well be correct. People suffering TDS - and they are legion even within the DoD - would rather America fail than DJT succeed!
CRT has no place anywhere other than the dustbin of bad ideas and Marxist idiocy.
I doubt that Tom or Pauline would agree with Trump, Hegseth, Rubio and CJCS Caine definition of "obliterated"!
I hope the Iranians don't come up with nukesin the next year or so!
I hope so too.
Trump may regret his decision not to finish off the mullahs once and for all while he has the chance.
Looking at what has happened in my lifetime, we have lost track of what's important. The War Colleges, which started in the late 19th Century as a training facility for staff and command officers to formalize the lessons of von Clausewitz and Jomini as well as American experiences.
How do we get back to the status of the as respectable institutions that are focused on the roles in educating and developing officers for command rather than as educational institutions with mostly uniformed student bodies where the professors research?
Create a course similar to the one for a CO, XO or DH that focuses in on being a staff officer on a navy staff.
Perhaps I was unclear in my comment. The problem is the faculty has lost the focus on the institution's role as a graduate level military institution. They act as if they are at just another academic organization featuring maritime decor.
Then that’s the fault of the SecNav and CNO for not making it clear what the NWC is all about. If you hire a CRT person you will get CRT lectures. Maybe the NWC should be shut down for year and all the faculty fired and rebuilt from the keel to the crow’s nest.
I don't think you're wrong...it's clear the upper reaches of our military institutions are not just infested with far-leftward thinking believers but, has either willfully allowed it to bloom and grow or, mentally cloistered themselves to believe like a naive parent of college students that, such ideas are merely the ramblings of a small number and they'll re-center themselves upon entering the real world.
Time to halt non Naval students. If I see one more careerist from the State Department waste a year on enjoying the Newport Life I’m tempted to reopen Goat Island and let loose in the opposite direction of the old range.
I feel like non service none combatant students helped to drive the slow then fast spiral to irrelevance.
Bingo! Our next war will not be fought because an aggressor nation thought we haven’t been sufficiently inculcated in DEI. We should be using the Naval War College and its cousin institutions to generate the next Alfred Thayer Mayans and the next Edwin Thomas Laytons. If the latter name is unfamiliar to you, I recommend the 2019 edition of “Midway”. (Then) LT Layton was assigned to duty as an assistant naval attaché in Japan, where he learned the language and culture of the country, which served him and all of us well when he was Nimitz’ intelligence officer. The softer arts embodied in a liberal eduction do not have to be the focus of person’s post-secondary efforts. We need people who can take technical knowledge to its next more useful level - application. All of our officer acquisition programs produce people with that technical knowledge capable of taking on the responsibility of enhancing our strategy and intelligence corpus. The only thing stopping us is us.
Just to help future Googlers, it was Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Edwin Thomas Layton. And don’t forget Joe Rochefort when it comes to Midway intelligence.
Or how about teach them how to plan, organize and write clear concise orders to organize a fleet to prosecute and win a peer war.
I am always struck by reading Eisenhower and how his staff work trained & prepared him.
Absolutely needed. That skill had started to fade 50 years ago.
I was at the NWC graduation a couple of weeks ago and I was struck by how many graduates came from foreign countries other services and civilian agencies. Perhaps it should be renamed the Combined Joint Interagency College (CJIC) and a graduate program that deal strictly with American naval matters be established elsewhere. Just a thought.
When the QM 'A' school was still at Newport, I encountered several USAF officers at the base pool. Being a former USAF Dependent, I was a bit taken aback that they would be at the NWC.
When my dad was in Newport for SWO Department Head School, one of our neighbors on Worden Street was Air Force at the NWC.
When I was still a dependent my father, a Naval officer, did a stint as an instructor at the Air University at Maxwell AFB. This was well before "joint" was a thing. He also did some time at a joint Army-Navy-Air Force activity at Wright-Patterson AFB (heck of an "O" club there).
Seems to me... That there's a certain element of "diploma bling" to War Colleges anymore... Many attendees whose shadow will never darken the door of a military command & control cell. It's just a nice, TDY-ish, govt-paid academic thing to do; a resume-padder and diploma for the wall.
Meanwhile... Per the broad scope of American culture and health of the Res Publica... It's a shame that almost no American universities have a true program in Military History or Military Science.
More than. It means a couple of steps for those on the GS payroll.
Hear hear. Been down hill as slots increased for State and other non afflicted Federal agencies.
It is a mini paid vacation/reward for getting stations is sh1tholes like Pakistan & South America for State Department careerist.
Not just agencies.
Congressional staffers, too.
Where can you learn how to assemble an amphibious task force to land on someone’s beach?
Anyone know where that is taught these days?
Really nicely done here, Sal.
I’m a med school professor in a civilian school and my med students who are in the military are more focused on being sailors (and soldiers etc) who are also doctors, than in being doctors who are incidentally in the Armed Forces.
How do they compare to other students?
I'm wondering if you think that is a bad thing? The one Navy Doc I know was a sailor first and still made a great doctor. I'm more concerned about the unprepared undergrads in medical school and jamming 2 years into 1 year and schools favoring DEI over medicine and: https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/ucla-medical-school-in-crisis.1494584/ and https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13454451/UCLA-medical-school-dean-Jennifer-Lucero-DEI-affirmative.html
The rest of the world doesn't take as long to train doctors as we do. We can shorten the time necessary for an MD.
I was going to comment, but rather I'll second Tom F's comment:)
I took the NWC nonresident seminar courses in the late 1990s. We had a mix of students - military, civilian - but a shared interest. Real diversity of perspective, not the rabid leftism of academia.
I think that may be the source of the problem - the War Colleges trying to get academic accreditation for their programs. From accrediting organizations that despise them. Perhaps it’s time to self-accredit, or form an accrediting body of worldwide higher military colleges.
I had the pleasure of being in the C&S class of 1973, Stansfield Turner started the process with us.
I think the issue here is the knee-jerk approach to banning broad topics.
There's plenty of ways to think about how, say, concepts like masculinity might affect things from recruitment (does emphasizing masculinity for instance lead to more effective recruitment campaigns) to crisis behavior (e.g. the finding that female leaders might be more militaristic in crises to compensate for perceptions that they aren't as "tough"). These topics also aren't limited to just critical theorists; one could draw on Harvey Mansfield's book on "Manliness" for instance, which has plenty of discussion of the virtues of martial valor in relation to war. There's connections there all the way back to the Iliad.
I agree that the full-on critical studies approaches aren't particularly helpful and shouldn't be prioritized in a war college, but walling-off some topics entirely in both teaching and research seems like a bad idea.
CRT and DEI are both instantiations of Sun Tzu's maxim "if your opponent is united, divide him." They're identity politics by another name, and if you're in the thick of things, you don't have time to worry about the racial, sexual, or whatever identity, the person on whom your continuation in life remains, is a member of. The NWC is a graduate-level college for people experienced in the craft of doing Navy things, it isn't ROTC at an undergraduate school. CRT and DEI have been used to split up American society into a set of warring identities, fostering division and strife - not "understanding" or "tolerance", in fact it seems like an ideal stratagem for an enemy to use before commencing military action.
We are certainly a house divided.
It don’t take long for the Trump/America/Israel haters to tell us that Iran has no desire to acquire an atomic bomb, that no damage was down to the deep underground fortified bunkers where Iran was not building a bomb and that all the equipment and uranium that was not being used to build a bomb has been removed the day before.
Interesting details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc78GJbpen8 - and they had those exits buried under truckloads and truckloads of dirt and sand in anticipation of an Israeli special forces attack. If that dirt had been removed, the tracks laid down by the excavators would have been obvious - no such tracks were seen, that site was thoroughly closed off and that would have taken days to do... and the same case for removing the dirt and sand.
It really comes down to an intense hatred for Trump and Hegseth. There are lots of Vindmans in the bureaucracy that need to be cleaned out and there are lots of stupid people in the media who was to be the next Bob Woodward.
Agree totally on the PS statement! Digital libraries are too easily changed by humans and potentially AIs of the future.
It's easy to re-write history that way, not the clumsy Stalinist method of disappearing people in photographs or using scissors to cut out non-politically correct pages...
I've read these sorts of things here repeatedly; and every time, I am incredulous. I spent a bit of time in Newport, and I always believed it was a place where the Navy focused on military matters centered on two things: TACTICS and STRATEGY, as relating to Naval WARFARE.
I have been saddened over the years to discover that I was wrong then, and wrong since.
Tactics are essential to the conduct of warfare.
But always keep in mind that wars are won at the operational-strategic level.
“doing my job responsibly”
🤣
Why would anyone think NWS, or any other PME school, need to be more like a civilian institution when the US military essentially requires everyone to get post grad education. That's where the contact with civilians comes in. And that's fine to see what the people you are serving think in that setting.
But PME should be just that. And it needs be only that.
Civie grad degrees are a waste of time for the troops. Requiring them is malpractice of the worst sort.
Oh sure, I 100% agree. But it's the current reality. Has been for some time.
That said, the last few years it's been overlooked due to manning issues.
And a second thought:
Anyone who is going to be posted as a naval attaché might find some PG studies of value if they are within the scope of the job (i.e. not an accounting degree, but rather history or language of the area of posting).
Perhaps staff officers may find similar education valuable.
I may be wrong, but I get the impression most get an MBA, which is utterly useless. It checks the box, but that's about it. For useful grad degrees the Navy has the postgraduate school. War needs to be the emphasis at all the war colleges.
The MBA is the easiest to obtain with almost any college that means anything offers them by distance.
Nimitz found the NWC useful to his command in the Pacific, saying that he did not encounter any problem that had not been anticipated in the NWC.
Maybe MBA works for Supply Corps. I'd assume there's some relevance.
But for the unrestricted line types, those going to combat commands, no, MBA doesn't do much.
Back in my day a graduate degree wasn't as big a deal as it is now. Though had I had to do it I would have found a mail order military history degree.
I'm inclined to agree with the last sentence. An MBA would not have much relevance to the Supply/Quartermaster Corps either. The accounting component probably does though..
Not so sure. I do think financial accounting and tax would be of much use to a pork chop. Maybe budgeting.
Then send them to the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts, so they can learn the jargon of the diplomatic trade - but DEI is a presence there, too: https://fletcher.tufts.edu/community/inclusive-excellence so any students would have to deal with that stuff. As for languages, there's always Monterey - https://www.dliflc.edu/.
I think they are useful for those who will use them (whether technical in nature, or simply people who are very good at their hobbies) but should absolutely not be required for advancement out side Engineering disciplines (EDO, perhaps Program Management, etc.)
Most education in the military should be within the bounds of the profession of arms. Given the mission of the war colleges, accreditation is meaningless and is a waste of time and effort to pursue.
One meaningful requirement is found in the Army. You will rarely make Major without going through the Command and General Staff school. Destroyer School is the rough equivalent of that in the Navy.
Department Head School now, or Submarine Officer's Advanced Course.
Nice post. Dear Pauline, how good of you to not want to have your selfish self promotion [Getting fired] “to be part of the legacy of the Stockdale Chair.” Considering whom the chair is named for, service/duty over self should not be a question.
I get the impression her heart is in the right place but her brain has been compromised or suffered an infection of bad information.