 Dr. Kroger, we are so happy to have you with us today. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor to introduce our Department of Navy's first chief learning officer, Dr. John Kroger. Good morning, everybody. Thanks so much for coming together. So I'm going to talk about 10 minutes this morning and then save the whole rest of the time that we've got for questions. And hopefully we can have a really robust dialogue, talk about whatever people want to talk about. So the main reason I'm here is to just give you a heads up that on Monday, the Secretary of the Navy is going to be releasing our first ever comprehensive Navy and Marine Corps Joint Naval Education Strategy. So it is called Education for Sea Power Strategy 2020. It's dated on the assumption that we'll constantly update this strategy as we learn more when we react to events on the ground. What I want to do for a few moments this morning is just talk about a few of what I think may be the most important impacts of the strategy on the Naval War College and its role in Navy and Marine Corps education. So I'm going to highlight a couple big picture things and then we'll open it up for questions. The Secretary is going to send out one of his vectors tomorrow that announces the strategy is coming on Monday. And it's going to highlight what is most important from the Secretary's perspective about this new educational effort. So you may want to keep an eye out for that. I actually only have one copy of the strategy. It's the very first that was printed. And Admiral Chatfield now has it. I have to say she has the Secretary of the Navy's copy. So if he comes asking for it, you'll have to cough it up. So here's the big picture thought underlying the Naval Education Strategy. It is a result of the 2018-2019 self-study that the Navy and Marine Corps did, the Education for Sea Power Report. And it's really driven by an awareness of the changing geopolitical position of the United States. So if we go back to 1990, one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, two things were true about the United States Armed Forces. One is that they were backed overwhelmingly by the largest economy in the world. So in 1990, the United States was by far the largest economy in the world. Our two closest economic peers were Japan and Germany, which were both close allies. It meant that we really had massive economic power. The other thing that was true was we had technological capabilities unlike those possessed by any other force in the world. And we saw that in Desert Shield, Desert Storm. It was this public unveiling of a military capability unlike anything anyone else had, which gave us complete dominance in the military space. Fast forward today, both of those massive advantages have narrowed, they've eroded, they've closed. So thinking about the size of the American economy, when I ask audiences what's the largest economy in the world, everyone instinctively says the United States. And the truth of the matter is there's two different ways, primary ways. You measure GDP and in one of them, the United States is the largest economy in the world and the other, China is the largest economy in the world. The basic point being that they are an economic peer. And the reason that should matter to us is if you look historically, there are very few examples where military strength ultimately hasn't been a function of underlying economic strength. If you're thinking of this in naval terms, Professor Kennedy's study of the Royal Navy through its history, one of the fundamental conclusions of that book was it was just impossible to sustain the Royal Navy's military power at a time when the economic power of the UK was declining relative to other societies. So in so far as, right, military power is a function of economics, the fact that that margin has narrowed should be a matter of concern to us. The other area where we've really lost a lot of advantage is technology. The Department of Defense released a study a couple months ago, it identified five key technologies that are important for the future of armed conflict and it noted that in those five areas, China is equal to us in technological capability or has surpassed us. There's just things like 5G networks, hypersonic missile technology, energy storage and batteries. Basic components of 21st century warfare are advantages not nearly as strong as it was back in 1990. So what does this mean for us? The basic conclusion of the Education for Sea Power Report and what we're affirming in the strategy that will come out on Monday is that in a world where the United States no longer has massive economic and technological advantage where we're really dealing with potential peer adversaries for the first time in 30 years, we're going to have to be able to outthink opponents in order to outfight them. And so the whole goal of the strategy is to up our game in the Navy and Marine Corps around education. Obviously the Naval War College is positioned to play a very key role in this strategy. So I want to talk a little bit about what may change over the next five years as a result of the strategy if we're successful. So one very simple thing to say is we need to send more officers to more graduate education and we need to do that in ways that are directly tied to our war fighting capability. And this is a challenge. So to put it in rough terms and the strategy does this, every year right now we have about 2.7% of our US Navy officers in graduate education of some sort. And we need to increase that number significantly. So what you're going to see hopefully is more officers who are attending here at the War College. You're gonna see more officers going to the Naval Postgraduate School. You're gonna see more officers going to graduate programs in civilian education programs that are directly related to capabilities we need. So you're gonna see a big increase in the number of people who are getting educated. And it's not just us, it's gonna be our foreign partners and allies too. So the Secretary of Defense recently called for a 50% increase in the number of partner and allied officers attending US military schools. A big chunk of those students are gonna come here because this is by far one of the most globally respected of our institutions. So point one, increase in the number of students. The second thing I would say is how we educate those students is gonna change. We are gonna be doing a lot more of what we traditionally do which is in residence education students coming full time to places like the War College to spend a period of time fully devoted to their education. But the truth of the matter is we're not going to be able to educate at the level we need if we rely solely on traditional in residence education. So you're gonna see two things called out in this strategy. One is we're gonna create a new mid-career curriculum for Navy and Marine Corps officers. The way to think about it is this, right? If you think about an education for a military officer having a component of a great undergraduate education and then hopefully a capstone senior strategic education here at the War College or at a place like CIS. What happens in the middle? The Marine Corps has a very well-developed mid-career program for O3s, O4s, O5s. The Navy, it's a little bit more hit and miss. And so we're gonna create a new fully online mid-career war fighting curriculum that will reach officers wherever they are in the world. I'm very hopeful that the War College faculty will play a role in designing what this thing looks like. We're also gonna be doing more low residence education. And low residence education has kind of exploded in civilian higher education. I wanna take a little bit of time and talk about what it's like. And the simplest way to do that is just tell you my personal experience with it. My wife went to a low residence doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania. And the reason we decided she would do a low residence degree program is like many people in the armed services, she could not take full time off from her duty station to go get a degree. Every time she thought about going to grad school, she got promoted. She was deeply committed to her career. She was doing amazing things in her career. She needed an educational option that didn't require her to take full time off from her job. So we signed up for the program at the University of Pennsylvania. She was on campus three days a month during the period of her education. And I'll be honest with you, when we signed up for it, I think as both of us are educators, I've been a classroom teacher my whole life, somewhat skeptical about it. And the honest answer is it was a transformational intellectual experience. It was not less work, it was a massive amount of work. And most of the work went on when she was not on campus, right? So when she was not on campus, she was communicating with faculty, she was meeting with her cohort online, she was doing a lot of work. But then she came together with her cohort three days a month to tie it all together and to push forward with the next set of learning objectives. We're not gonna be able to meet our goals of educating more Naval officers unless we have options like low residency for people to get educated in their duty stations. So you're gonna see over the next couple of years a greater emphasis on that. And it'll be a question for this community to figure out whether they want to try to build some low residency programs here on campus. A third thing I'd point out is really aimed at the enlisted force. And it's in some ways, I think, from the Secretary of the Navy's perspective, a signature of the Naval strategy is a new Naval community college for the enlisted force. So we are moving forward very quickly to develop that. We're gonna have the first cohort of enlisted students in the Naval community college in January of 2021. We've got cohorts that we're working on forming from the intelligence community, from the nuclear program and from the Marine Corps and Navy's IT communities. And they're gonna be going to technical associates degree programs in IT, in cyber, in data analytics, and in engineering. And I wanna point that out because for our enlisted folks who are here, assigned to the school, if you've not had a chance to pursue an associates degree and lay the foundation for your career, the community college is gonna be available to do that. The last thing I wanna point out, how many of you are civilian civil service folks? Okay, tons, right? A lot of you are already very far along with your education but one of the things the report calls out is a recognition that the glue that holds the Navy and Marine Corps together is our civil service workforce. And we have not done enough to support the education and professional development of that group. And so we're gonna be doing a couple of things. First, we're going to have in our first cohort of students going through the Naval Community College, we're gonna have civil servants, civilians in that cohort as well. And interestingly, this was a request directly from the Marine Corps. They have in the IT world, teams of Marines working with civil servants side by side and they need both of them trained together. So the community college as it scales up, we're gonna try to make available to as many of our civilian force as possible. And second, we're gonna be supporting the graduate education of mid-career managers in the civilian workforce as well. So the secretary has authorized a new program to send mid-level managers to get master's degrees, MBAs in management financial resources management, which is by far I think the single biggest strength that we need to boost up. All this comes together in what is a strategy to try to lift the educational level of every single element of our force. The first pillar of the strategy is to educate continuously our entire force. Officers and enlisted military and civilian. It's a pretty bold and ambitious effort. It's one that the secretary's really committed to. It's one that in conversations with Congress has been very well received so far. It's going to take additional resources. The secretary has already ordered additional resources for the War College for this year and for next. And we're working very closely with the Admiral to make sure that the promised money shows up on time in ways that you can actually use it, which is always a challenge in our system. But overall, I'm really excited about the vision of the strategy. It's a recognition that in our current geopolitical environment, our single biggest potential advantage is the quality of our people. Like that's the things that makes the Navy and Marine Corps special. And if we wanna take full advantage of that, we have to take our educational and professional development more seriously with a more intentional and more focused effort. So the strategy will be out Monday and I'm hoping people will take a look at it. And like I said, it's gonna be an iterative document. I suspect we will update it yearly, both to report on what progress or lack of progress we're making, but also to incorporate new ideas and what we've learned as we try to increase the effectiveness of education across the services.