[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 50 (Tuesday, May 2, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E675-E677]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE CELEBRATES 60TH ANNIVERSARY

                                 ______
                                 

                            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.''

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       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

[[Page E677]]

     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.

                          ____________________