 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon and welcome to the first of our four summer sessions in our issues and national security lecture series. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as host for today's event. Admiral Chatfield is unable to join us today, but I'm pleased to welcome you on her behalf. This series is a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body, as well as the entire Naval War College extended family, including members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport, and participants around the nation. Looking ahead on Tuesday, July 13th, Professor Tom Nichols will speak about his nationally recognized book, The Death of Expertines. I'm sure you will find this discussion to be very interesting in the digitally connected world in which we live. Okay, on with the main event. During the presentations that follow, please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom, and we will get to as many as we can at the end of the two presentations. One of the true jewels of the College's excellent academic offerings is the Elections program. Each trimester, students are allowed to register for one of the dozens of courses that are available. Our first presenter will speak briefly about this very popular program, and then he'll discuss his new election. Dr. Tim Schultz is the College's associate dean of academics. Prior to joining the Newport faculty in 2012, he served as the dean of the U.S. Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Tim earned his PhD in the history of science and technology from Duke University in 2007. His research interests include the interaction between technology and strategy, and the transformative nature of automation and warfare. He's a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado State University, the Air Command and Staff College, and the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Formerly a U.S. Air Force Colonel, he spent much of his aviation career as a U-Tune pilot, enjoying the view over very interesting regions of the globe. I will introduce our second speaker after Tim's presentation. So I'm pleased to pass the digital baton to one of the smartest guys I know, Professor Tim Schultz. Over to you, Tim. Thank you, Professor John Jackson, that just tells me you need to meet more people. Thank you for carving out this time, and also to you, Gary Ross, and the whole IRD team for putting all of this together. And we have the opportunity to engage with each other in an intellectual way. Over the summer, it's just a fantastic idea. And I'm very pleased to help kick this off with my cohort to J. Dancy, Dr. J. Dancy, who's going to talk in the second half about something we both love to do, and that's teacher electives. So let me start sharing my screen, because I want to tell you some more about this great program before we get into the sampler portion where we talk about a couple of different electives. Okay, so just briefly a brief overview of the Naval War College electives program. This is part of every student's experience in the resident program. It amplifies, augments, oxygenates their core curriculum. It wouldn't be possible without the three people that I named below, the program manager, Jen Sheridan, our contractor, project manager, Patty Duke, and our brand new admin assistant, Jessica Boggs, plus this team from IRD and AV who make everything come together. And so we so appreciate everybody's role in creating something special for our students. It lets us offer about 70 courses every year, 70 very different courses. It lets students explore beyond the core, something really important to their intellectual development. And it also showcases faculty expertise. And we think that's a powerful expression of the diverse of faculty that we have here at the Naval War College. So our War College electives professors, they come from throughout the college, from the different deanaries from the College of Leadership and Education, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, the dean of academics, and elsewhere we have adjuncts who help us out. And every year, these professors tend to show up, these are some of our hearty perennials. And students like to learn about what these folks have to say. And it's translated through our resident and adjunct professors. And we get to expose students and let them do a deeper dive in subjects like, say, space technology and policy, and the climate change and the Arctic, and cyber warfare, and unmanned systems, and nuclear technology and deterrence, and leadership and ethics, and women in war and combat, and civil military relations, all areas that that different students have very keen interest in. And we create the opportunity where hopefully they'll get one of their top choices of elective that they can go into in any given trimester. And so this is what we work together to create. And it's with the great staff and faculty that we're able to do it. And it breaks me now to where we can talk a little bit about a couple of brand new electives that were just offered this last year, one that I did called Science Fiction, Ideations and Explorations for Modern Leaders. And then about 20 minutes or so, I'm going to turn it over to Professor Jay Dancy, and he'll talk about his new course, Film War in Society in America. And we chose these as two examples of very different courses with different focus, different methodologies, and just to kind of show some of the diversity that's going on in your electives program. So let me start out with this science fiction course. And many of you might be wondering, and it's a fair question, why teach a course on science fiction in professional military education? Why have a sci-fi course at the Naval War College? I'm going to answer that question here by describing the major elements of the course. Specifically, I'm going to talk a little bit about the specific purpose or purposes of the course. I'm going to explain some of the material that we used and the structure that we used along the way. This is all of our electives. They're just two credit courses. They meet 10 weeks in a row, and each week they'll meet for a one three hour long seminar, and it's up to professors to develop the structure and methods within that course. So I'll talk about the methods I used as well, and then maybe get into some of the results of the course from a student perspective, not just the professor's perspective. So let me expand a little bit on the purpose of a science fiction course. One of the authors that we read says that sci-fi is a literature always in the state of becoming a literature that is born on the frontier between the known and the unknown. I like that quote. That resonates with me because the frontier between the known and the unknown isn't that exactly where Naval War College graduates operate. That is where they think, that is where they lead, and that is where they fight, sort of in that shadow lands between the known and the unknown. And we want them to become better equipped, resilient, anti-fragile, if you will, by developing abilities to consider and examine alternative futures and dynamic situations and sort of think differently. To examine how ideas translate into reality in human affairs, science fiction tells us something about that. It tells us something about how to think about technological change and war and politics and ethics and disease and all of that wrapped around human nature. And it also, and this is extremely important, I think it helps us educate leaders who reimagine rather than just reinforce the status quo. That is a purpose of this course. It is a purpose of the electives program and writ large. It is a purpose of the Naval War College to educate our future leaders to reimagine rather than just reinforce that status quo. So let me talk a little bit about the material that was developed to execute this course. And it involved three different things. Some canonical, our classic science fiction, some very new science fiction, and also some articles written by various scholars in and outside of the science fiction literature. Here's a list of the canonical sci-fi. Many of you will recognize these people or their work. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, she wrote it in 1818. It's really the first truly science fiction novel ever written. Isaac Asimov, we read several of his short stories to include the one he wrote in 1942 called Run Around, where he introduces the three laws of robotics, which permeate the next 80 years of science fiction thinking and literature. Arthur C. Clark wrote a great short story called Superiority, where, guess what, the high tech side, the superior side loses and loses badly. That is an important lesson to consider for our students. The biggest book we read is Dune, Frank Herbert's towering classic, and that's followed by a military sci-fi book called The Forever War written by a Vietnam veteran, Joe Haldeman. They read Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain. He wrote that was his first book back in 1969. It really created a pathway and was extremely influential in and outside of science fiction literature. We also read a couple of Hugo award-winning sci-fi authors, Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, their short stories, which really resonated with the students throughout the course. That's part of the sci-fi canon, really a small part of it. I also wove in some new science fiction for students to consider, and we did watch some sci-fi, it wasn't all just reading, and they watched the three-hour pilot to the new Reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, which really gets into some deep lessons about leadership and some ethical dilemmas. We had them read Shishin Liu's Three-Body Problem. He's a Chinese author. Well, I'll talk more about him later. If you want to read a laugh-out-loud book, something really hilarious, and learn about artificial intelligence, read Martha Wells, All Systems Read. Some of you saw the book, the movie World War Z, terrible movie with Brad Pitt, mediocre movie maybe. The book is excellence by Max Brooks, the son of Mel Brooks, and it describes how societies react to unforeseen changes. So that's useful to us. And we read a recent book called Burn In by Peter Singer and August Cole, which is kind of a near-term look at the future in a pretty rigorous academic way. And in terms of other sort of an academic perspectives, we wove in a lot of scholarly articles, and I'm not going to detail all of these here. These are just some of them, but I'll mention two of them. They read an article written by Alan Turing in 1950. It's a 70-year-old article, and it talks about his thoughts about how to detail the difference between if you're engaging with a human or if you're engaging with a computer intelligence. This is what he called the imitation game, which we now know as the Turing test. Another article that really impacted the students in the course is by Lisa Misery called anticipatory discourse in the projectory in technological communities, fancy title, but really she's getting at this notion of a projectory or a projection or a trajectory of what's going to happen in the near future. And it's how organizations actually write the history of the near future with technology that is still under development. And militaries do that all of the time. NASA does that all of the time. sci-fi literature can tell us something about that because that's something that will be expected of our graduates as they ascend the higher levels of leadership. So let me get a little bit into the structure of the course. As I mentioned, all electives are 10 lessons. They're 10 weeks long, two credits, meet in a three-hour seminar each of those weeks. Here's how I broke down those 10 lessons for this course. And I started out with some general perspectives on science fiction. SF can also mean speculative fiction. That's another way to view this course. Then the first major book I had them read was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from 1818. Most of them hadn't read it. Most of them had seen the movies. Most movies are nothing like the book. The book is profound in many ways. I'm going to talk a little bit more about Frankenstein here in a bit. I had them do a lesson on AI and cyborgs. Both of these terms are over 60 years old. And we had them do some readings to kind of help contextualize what those mean. And then we spent a whole lesson on fictions or fiction intelligence or how the power of story, the power of a forward-looking narrative can help translate ideas into reality. And I'll talk more about that and what Peter Singer did with the novel Burn-In to do that, along with his co-author August Cole. We spent a whole lesson on science fiction and ethics. And as I evolve and change this course, I'm going to move that ethics lesson, excuse me, much earlier in the course because the students kept coming back to the readings from this lesson, specifically one by Ursula K. Le Guin called the ones who walk away from a mellis. Powerfully impacted our students. We spent a whole course on politics and strategy by reading Frank Herbert's novel Dune, which is all about this notion of power politics and how the so-called real world works in political realism or what we call realpolitik, this relationship between organizations, between people and militaries and governments. And it connects with something they read in the core course, Thucydides, history of the Peloponnesian War. He's the father of realism. He gets into these notions of how fear, honor, and interest sort of animate human affairs. Well, we see that come to life in the Dune universe. So it's a different lens that the students can use. Naturally, we did a whole lesson on pandemics. That was where the Michael Crichton reading Andromeda Strain came in. And then military or science fiction, the forever war is kind of resonates with our students who have experienced in this century, the long war. And then we spend some time talking about dystopia, dystopic futures or maybe some utopia type of scenarios. And the last lesson, I switched directions with them and introduced them to some Chinese science fiction. That was the book, The Three Body Problem plus some short stories. What do we know about science fiction from a non-Western perspective? What does that tell us about universal themes in human affairs? And it is a very powerful book and gets really at some fascinating Chinese perspectives. I also want to mention some of the methods that we used in the course because I encourage our professors throughout the electives program to try new things and new methods. So I did the same with this course. I had 12 students and every week, three of them were the designated as the geeks of the week. That means they run the seminar that week, they run the facilitated discussion, the psychocratic dialogue about that week's readings. And they're listening the viewpoints and counter arguments from their peers. I thought this was important for their development because this is something that leaders need to be good at. They need to be able to sit around a table with intelligent people and draw out diverse and complex points of view and find ways to connect them all together. It's more evidence that really in reality, this was a leadership course just disguised as a science fiction course. The students were flexible in their approach to the papers. Instead of saying your papers are due on these dates, I said you've got three papers due throughout the course. You choose the dates when they're due. Students were taken aback by that degree of flexibility. It was an experiment and it worked. They de-conflicted with each other. They found what worked for them and I think it helped their creativity in the long process. And then since all of this was online last year, we used the discussion board a lot and I'll get to that here in a bit. But I want to talk about some of the general results. The things that sort of manifested in this course, things that I think that students learned and one of them is that good science fiction, good speculative fiction is timeless. One scholar of science fiction, Gary K. Wolfe, says that good science fiction is temporally fluid and that just means that it applies in all ages. It applies even for decades after it was written. And I'm going to give, I'm giving you an example of that here with this quote from one of the characters from one of our readings. And you can read it here, but I'll read it out loud as well. This character said, I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike the beans concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind. And you would think that is maybe some type of robotic character who's developing some form of sapience and intelligence and is trying to learn about the real world. But so something from a contemporary novel, it was not contemporary at all. Those are the words of Frankenstein's creature, the monster from the novel Frankenstein. He is left unformed in his education. He's exposed to humans and he's trying to absorb reality and figure out and develop his own intellectual understanding of the world, but he fails at that. And instead he becomes this, what they call in the book, the demon. He becomes reckless and evil. And there's a lesson here that Mary Shelley was trying to tell our students that the original sin was on the part of Victor Frankenstein. He created this technology, this thing he sewed together, and then he abandoned it. He ignored it. His, this Frankenstein's creation was a form of technology that went out of control because of Dr. Frankenstein's neglect and lack of foresight. So Mary Shelley is here is depicting a creator, not a creation, who was fundamentally flawed. And the students got that lesson. They understood that, that what are we doing today as creators that are, that is, might be fundamentally flawed, that might manifest itself in very regrettable ways in the future. So there's a timeless nature here. Some of the other results that we saw in, for example, the discussion board, it sparked the creativity of these students. I asked them a question each week, the first week I asked them to answer this question on the, on the discussion board is are you alive? Provide evidence you are a sentient being and not a machine. Basically, pass the Turing test by convincing your classmates you are not an artificial intelligence by describing something on the discussion board. And that was really a challenge for our students. I asked them if Mary Shelley was born 200 years later, what would she have written about in our modern era? I asked them, okay, propose your own speculative fiction or science fiction story that prepares us for a possible future. And I'm glad I asked that question because they came up with some fascinating ideas. And it affirmed to me that our leaders, our students, our future senior leaders, they really aspire to create. Here are some of the, the speculations that they came up with. One of them was a self aware, deeply interconnected city that becomes this authoritarian dystopic overlord as it prioritizes the safety of its residents, their security, but not their freedom and their, and their God given inalienable rights. Another had this really creepy idea of about genetically modified organisms, our food stuffs, when bought to the supermarket, what if they start turning the customers into a form of food? Got to get some ideas about genetic engineering. I'll bump to the bottom one there. One student came up with this notion of a smart home that can monitor the residents. And in an era of a pandemic, it will closely identify any symptoms of a disease, save Johnny's walking down the stairs and he's coughing and has a fever. Well, now the smart home locks the doors, locks the windows, calls the CDC and prevents the family from leaving for the sake of public health. So you can kind of get an idea of why the students were thinking about that. Some of the student observations of the course were instructive to me. They liked the notion of exploring non traditional means of strategy development and decision making, which is fundamental to the war college curriculum. They thought that it's good to have to critically think about risks and opportunity in new technology. One of them, after reading Dune, he saw some resonance in terms of our space policy with regard to how we safeguard our satellites from different interests, internal and external interest. Another student, I don't have it here, he said really the great part of the course for him, and I think this is true with many electives, is seeing the diversity of thought when a group of students, they're all assigned the same reading, the same text, and they draw vastly different takeaways and then they clash those together with each other. And that's where true learning takes place. In keeping with some of the other results, I observed some, I asked students for their recommendations. They liked the notion of Chinese science fiction and they recommend, hey, let's, let's even go further and get to some other cultures. There's a growing literature about of science fiction written by African authors. It's called Afrofuturism. That's something that we may be able to incorporate in the future. Others want to learn more about this fictional intelligence concept that I mentioned. Others offered up some of the hardy perennials that most of us are familiar with, like Ender's Game and Starship Troopers and Brave New World, things that we would, I would love to incorporate and may incorporate in future iterations of the course as it continues to evolve. So what's next for this course? And I asked the same question really for any course offered at the Naval War College. I will offer it again and I'm going to make adjustments and tweak it here and there and get another data point of another semester. I was really heartened by something that happened that I didn't anticipate from the students and after the semester was over, after the course ended, they, a few of them, not all of them, but a few of them, they formed their own book club and they called it the Society for Continuing Ideations on Fiction and Imagination or sci-fi and they met online on a Sunday evening once a month to discuss the book they had read that month that went beyond the Naval War College curriculum, some science fiction novel. And to me that means that their graduate education was really resonating with them. They were taking it an extra mile, they were engaging with each other, they were growing intellectually and developing new habits of mind as they continue to understand the broader world. So I'll leave you with a few quotes that I think help describe why a science fiction course is relevant to the Naval War College. One of them is by the Chinese author Shishin Lu who wrote Three Body Problem and he says, science fiction is a literature of possibilities. I think that's important because leadership is about possibilities. So if we can expose students to a literature of possibilities, might that make them better leaders? Might that help them see things differently? Very similarly another Hugo Award-winning sci-fi author Nora Jemisin, she says, we creators are the engineers of possibility. Well strategists are the engineers of possibility. Leaders are the engineers of possibility. Are graduates be they US military officers or international officers or civilian leaders across the interagency? For the rest of their professional lives they are going to be engineers of possibility. We want them to to imagine the future that should be and to colonize that future, to create that future before others create a different one, maybe one that is less beneficial to our navy and our nation. And finally one of my favorite authors, he didn't make the cut because his books are too long, maybe in a future iteration he'll make it. It's Neil Stevenson. He described science fiction as an invisible magnetic field that roughly orients people's imaginations in the same technological directions. Useful quote but I apply that to our graduates. They are entering a realm where they are the people who convert ideas into actions, convert ideas into reality. They need to align people's thinking and the institutional budgets and institutional visions to align with their own vision of what the future should be like. They need to establish that trajectory of where they think we need to go in this uncertain future, a future which this course hopefully exposed them to. So that's the gist of a rather different and unique course that we just offered that experimented with some new methods. If you want to know some more I'm happy to send you the syllabus. You can contact me at either of these emails or hit me up on Twitter and I will gladly send you a copy of the syllabus if you so desire. Meanwhile, John, let me hand it back over to you. I'm going to stop the screen sharing and let you introduce the most venerable and awesome Dr. J. Dancy. Very good. Thank you, Tim. That's a fabulous presentation. I think you've probably got at least 83 folks who would like to take the course. So you may have to get a bigger classroom because I'm sure there's going to be a lot of demand from those who would like to take it and maybe some that actually will be able to take it. So I love the concept of geeks of the week because I've been one of those for most of my adult life. So all right. Thank you very much. We will now turn to the second presenter and J. Ross Dancy is an assistant professor in the joint military operations department and co-director of the graduate certificate in maritime history here at the Naval War College. His research examines naval administration policy and manpower as well as the veterans returning home from war. Professor Dancy holds a doctorate in history from the University of Oxford as well as degrees from the University of Exeter and Appalachian State University. Formerly a U.S. Marine infantryman, he served both in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2020 he was elected as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society for his original contributions to historical study. Here to talk about his superb elective is Professor J. Dancy. Over to you, J. Thank you very much. Let me share my screen here. All right. Thank you very much for that. I'd like to thank you, Professor Jackson, for the opportunity to talk about my class and thank you to Tim Shultz in the elective's office for helping make that class a reality. It's really a joy to teach. I taught this class for the first time this last winter trimester and it's in conjunction with the graduate certificate maritime history program as an option for students to take and a requirement for any students that enter off-cycle into that program. I taught the class with Mark Fiori who's going to be teaching again with me this year and this class this year mirrors very much an effort that myself and several other colleagues here at the Naval War College are putting together and working on a handbook for World War II in the Pacific for Rutledge and there's a film chapter in that book that Rick Norton, Charlie Chadborne and myself are working on and we've had a few film nights across Zoom over the past trimester and are hoping to continue that in the futures we go forward. So this class Film War in Society in America is a little bit of a it comes out of a class that I taught in my previous job at Sam Houston State University and it was a great course there and I took that course and I changed it to fit this environment and our students here and I think it's done really well and I think probably it has more of an impact here than there. The course itself, I mean the base question here is why study film or films at the Naval War College and really I bullet down to these sort of three principles and they all feedback into each other and it's understanding and studying historiography, understanding society's changing view of war over time and the civil military divide that we have in society and this course does this effectively by looking at a fixed event in history which is the Second World War, granted that's a very large event but that's that's what it looks at and it views, we view films chronologically as they were produced to look at how society's view of that conflict changed over time so we we watch films made during the war immediately after the war and in the years that follow and that's really a lot of that is the backbone of historiography and really this historiography portion of this it's a methodology for writing and understanding history, it's sort of the medicine that is sort of sneakily woven into the to the course, Mary Poppins would say it's the teaspoon of sugar that helps the medicine go down I guess and understanding historiography is effectively the history of the history so understanding how we produce history and the questions that are asked and this is heavily affected of course by changes in society that very much affect the questions that we ask and of history and historical change and of course whether we're writing history or or producing film we are undeniably in our time and those products are products of that time so the questions that we ask in the Second World War today are very different from those asked in 1942 or 1970 or 1998 and at the same time we cannot for instance go back and view Casablanca with 1942 eyes we can't unknow the eight decades of history that have happened since and I think this EH car EH car's book what is history from 1961 I think this quote sort of encapsulates that very well when he says when we attempt to answer the question what is history our answer consciously or unconsciously reflects our own position in time and forms part of our answer to the broader question what view we take of the society in which we live and I think this is a social history concept and I know a lot of people particularly military historians often sort of disdain the concept of social history but it's very important because the stuff that we produce is in fact a part of that and understanding that in the broader context and I think for our future leaders are the officers and civilian leaders they're here that come to the Naval War College this is also incredibly important so if we move on we look at sort of society's changing view of war the other the the second of those three stool legs this the course really does that through viewing these films over time and we can see sort of the the cyclical nature of a lot of this these films effectively are windows the past and we can think of them as sort of flies and amber for instance they encapsulate the past so the first movie the the class watches all quiet on the western fronts the only film that is not a film about war two but it really sets up the class to understand America's concept of foreign war in the 1930s it is very much a film that looks at war as hell and and how it destroys our humanity fast forward 12 years to to Casablanca in 1942 and it's a very different look it's Nazis are clearly evil and America must join this fight and do their part fast forward 20 years and 1962 to the longest day of film of a war epic about D-Day in Europe and this film is really looking at the sort of the enormity of the effort put together by the allies and it very much speaks to the the power of alliances of course this is the height of the Cold War when that's very important continue forward to 1998 we see Saving Private Ryan a very popular film which a lot of most of the students have seen coming into the course as opposed to the earlier films which is very much about sacrifice the greatest generation in their twilight years and looking back at that and then move forward 16 years to 2014 and Fury which is a film about war as hell and how again it destroys our humanity so you see that sort of cyclic nature of how society views these concepts as we move forward we talk about that civil military divide which I think is a very important part of this and it's important for our students to understand this is something that has that divide has grown very much over time the slide here are simply some article article titles that I pulled out about that divide and it's it's it's very popular popular in academic articles you see a lot of this and effectively what that's saying is as we look at how this changes in 1945 that civil military divide certainly existed but American society had a much more intimate experience of military service and war nearly everybody knew someone who had fought if they hadn't hadn't fought themselves industrial production involved the entire United States rationing was something that everybody experienced many people grew victory gardens for instance to help offset that and there was a real threat to the home front and today that's just not the case we've we've we're pulling out of Afghanistan after 20 years and the the conflict barely hits the news and it faded and very much in time as as that conflict went on in fact public's generally more concerned with the next iPhone is coming out than they are with the conflict that's going on and this is important because the public learns a lot of its history from film so these feedback in on each other the general setup for the class is the class watches two films a week one film that is required and then another one that they have the option of of watching from a list the only week the only week that's not true is week nine when they watch two required films which are Clint Eastwood's two films about Iwo Jima we'll talk more about that in a minute they also read roughly 75 pages each week it's a mix of scholarly articles film reviews they also read most of the book Mark Harris's and five came back which is a book about the directors that that went to or to the Hollywood elites that actually put on a uniform and and what they did during the war and when they came back the course they have three assignments in the course they write a historical film review which is a thousand words and is literally a review of a film looking at its historical accuracy was it accurate why or why not delving into that they write they write a film dissection paper and then they actually make a 10-minute presentation that of course is part of that and they really get into the weeds of how the film was made and all types of interesting stuff like that and the presentations are really good helping form the rest of the class and then their their big project is a 2500 word historical film analysis historiographical film analysis I should say and that really looks at change over time in film and they don't have to stick to second world war films on this they can they can broaden out so if they want to compare films made about the second world war with films made about Vietnam with for instance something like hurt locker they can do that had a really good paper written about comedy war films and this this past class that was absolutely one of the best papers that I read and you can see at the bottom of the page there each of the 10 weeks these are the required films that they're that they have to watch the the class can sort of be looked at as four phases as we go through it in the first phase being weeks one through three which really looks at the transition into and through the second world war the second phase is about remembering war two and it's intermediate and it's immediate aftermath the third phase looks at the Vietnam era through the 1990s and the twilight of the greatest generation and then the final phase looks it ties the the course themes together it looks at film war and society and post 911 America and in those phases we we we can look at a lot of different things and this is driven heavily by socratic discussion and also message board since this was an online class so one of the great examples here is is the first two films are required to watch in weeks one and two and it is all around the western front which is a film about the first world war and then they they can contrast that with with Casablanca which is a 1942 film set in Vichy French Casablanca at the at the beginning of the second world war in Europe in the first the initial years of the second world war in Europe and and there's some really interesting differences in this film they're they're dramatically different all while in the western front a notable anti-war film and and Paul Bonner who is the protagonist in the film has this has this great quote he gets wounded in the film if you haven't seen it he goes back to his hometown for a few weeks he's German and he visits his old high school where students are in class and they're literally learning about the honor and and duty and such things and he sort of has a bit of a snap and he stops the class with his quote he says you still think it's beautiful to die for your country the first bombardment taught us better when it comes to dying for country it's better not to die at all we can contrast that with with Rick Blaine played the Humphrey Bogart and Casablanca and it's the point of the film when when Nazi aggression is becoming more evident in Vichy and Vichy Casablanca and he's tearing down selling everything off and he has this great quote of it's December 1941 in Casablanca what time is it in New York bet they're all asleep in New York I bet they're asleep all over America and this is a great a great quote and it's right after he signed a bill that's dated 2nd December 1941 but it's a really great quote about American needing to get get involved in the war so it's a transition from anti-war to support the second phase of the class we look at the films the class goes to the struggle of veteranhood the coming home and the remembering of the war so 1946 best years of our lives an excellent film about coming home from war and we see the three protagonists of the film each dealing with their service and dealing with coming home to the same hometown in very different ways some doing much better than others all having lots of problems and we can fast forward nine years to the film to Helen Beck which is audio is made from Audie Murphy's autobiography the book about his experience course Audie Murphy being the most highly decorated soldier in US history and it's his heroic telling of this of World War two and of course those films at that point in time made 10 years after the war were watched heavily by audiences of veterans people that were had again a very understanding of the war so you see that sort of that movement that transition of no longer supporting war but now looking back at the war and the sacrifice and supporting those who who fought in it fast forward to the Vietnam era and we get some really interesting films and Patton has to be my my favorite for this and the main reason for this is Patton is this this brilliantly written film and it doesn't come down on either side and it's a little bit unnerving a rubber toplan in his book history by Hollywood wrote the movie allowed people with diverse points of view to read their own message into the multi-dimensional story about a complex figure in history Patton helped Americans articulate their heightened feelings with respects to the struggle in Vietnam and war in general and it's it's very true you can see that as a heroic film you can see that as a film about sacrifice you can see that as a film about crazy man who gets lots of American soldiers killed because he's racing across Sicily to beat the to beat the British it's really interesting and the film doesn't come down purposefully doesn't come down on either side so it's really good it's a Vietnam era film also I would highly recommend Nick Sarantakis one of my one of our colleagues here at the Naval War College wrote a really good book about the making of Patton which is a deep dive into just getting this project on film in general it's a really good book there are other great books or great films about this during this period of time dirty dozen is a good example Kelly's Heroes is a great example because it is a western about Vietnam set in World War II and it's absolutely a great film to dissect in class students the students I found absolutely love that film is a great topic of conversation and also in this this the end of this phase of the week following we look at the 1990s Saving Private Ryan as an example of a film that they'll watch and how that has changed in looking at World War II veterans or thinking about World War II veterans in their twilight years more than 40 years after the conflict and then the final phase the last two weeks weeks eight or nine and ten of the course week nine the students actually are required to watch two films there's not an optional film choice this week and that is Eastwood's two Iwo Jima's here Flags of Their Fathers which is an adaptation of a great book and Letters from Iwo Jima and these are two films both came out in 2006 both directed by Clint Eastwood Flags of Our Fathers is very much about sacrifice and about what war does to the veterans that come home and the problems that they often have integrating back into society and Letters from Iwo Jima is a really interesting film that really humanizes the Japanese side of that struggle and again looks at sacrifice in the face of basically a futile effort to try to try to keep that island really interesting films that they watch they also watch Fury in the in the final week of the course so there are several sort of timeless concepts that come through this one of these is of course the moral conflict within war that we can look at and how that changes over time here are three scenes from three different films that deal with that the top all quite on the western front this is the same Paul bomber on the left there during an assault and counter assault he ends up being trapped in no man's land and a giant shell hole a french soldier jumps in with him and he mortally wounds him and and he talks to this guy while he's dying and after he dies throughout an entire night he stays in this shell hole with him and really has a nearly psychotic break during this process at points being mad at him at points sympathizing with him telling me sorry if if hadn't been a war they could have been friends he pulls a picture of his family out of his out of his pocket and says he'll write him and and just really has this real issue with dealing with the concept of having to kill this guy the bottom left you can see this image from saving private ryan many of you will be familiar with the film this is right after the the ranger squad has taken a machine gun nest their medics been killed in the process one of the german machine gunners has survived and they've had him basically dig his own grave and are about to execute him when captain miller played by tom hanks sort of is the the the moral interjection here and stops them with a story about his past and it sort of reveals this this concept this moral concept that runs about the film of sacrifice and doing the right thing and that american always has to has to be on the moral high ground and we can contrast that with fury and in 2014 which has a very different approach to that and this is a scene in fury when word eddie played by brad pit is basically handing a gun to the new guy they've just overrun a german position there's a german p o w there in the foreground on his knees and eventually brad pit's character wrestles the new guy to the ground and literally holds the gun out and forces him to shoot this german p o w in the back and it's this the message that comes with fury is this is this message of morality is the morality of war is effectively winning ending it as soon as as possible and the war itself turns good men into monsters in order to in order to do that and that's what comes through so it's a very different shift in how all this how this deals with all these and these of course reflections of the society and time in which they're made and there are also other timeless themes such as and this is one of my favorite modernity does not equal quality and and you can see this and in 1930 all quite on western front is an amazingly well written screenplay a really well done film even with the limited special effects they had at the time it is a very encompassing film if you haven't seen it i do urge you to go out and have a look and get a copy of it the the you can compare that for instance with pro harbor which is in the running for one of the worst films about world two and you can see here the the two the two reviews of these of these films from their from their time edward shallot praising the quality and the ability of producing all while in the western front and then in contrast at the lane of new yorker in 2001 the effect of watching a michael bay film is indistinguishable from having a large pointy lump of rock dropped on your head which i think is an amazing a review of that film so we return to this this concept of why study films at the naval war college and that is very much it's about the historiography understanding history is important for i i believe it's important for our military leaders understanding how history is made is equally important it's a difference in sort of consuming the sausage and knowing what goes into the sausage is very different being being a consumer and being a producer have put you in two very different perspectives of course societies society's changing view of war understanding how societies views of war change is important american society gets a large portion of its of its history from hollywood and hollywood is also a reflection of that society so these two feedback into each other and of course our military can't function without society backing when we try it's it's been a disaster and vietnam's a great example of that and again that civil military divide which with a smaller percentage of our population serving that divide continues to grow so at that i will i will say thank you thank you for your time thank you for the opportunity to present here and i'm you can contact me at my email address there at the bottom happy to share share a syllabus with you discuss this at length so and at that point i will turn it back over thank you jay that was was an outstanding rundown if anybody thought this was an easy elective you just had to watch a few movies i think you were clear in explaining how important it is and the level of effort that you expect from your students so we've got time for a few questions so let me bounce first back to tim schultz and question the your elective seems to have a very heavy reading load has that been a problem or have the students been able to handle that level of effort that was really my my primary concern john is for a typical elective that meets three hours a week the students have allotted to them six hours a week outside of the classroom so six hours to prepare for the upcoming three hour seminar and it's hard to read a big novel in six hours so what i did is i interspersed the whole 10 lesson arc with a heavy reading week and then a lighter reading week and a heavy reading week and then a lighter reading week and then also letting the students choose which weeks they're going to turn their papers in over that 10-week arc i tried to moderate the workload and told them they would have to use a little bit of innovation and how to make that work and i think i still need to dial it back a little bit on the page count but some of these novels are pretty quick reads others some of the the scholarly articles are slower reads and so it's just a matter of finding that right combination and i've worn the students up front you know this is we're not going to you know you know the topic might sound light but this is a heavy hardcore graduate level course so strap in second question is what books almost made the list for instance why handleman vice hindland or erbert versus leaky um robert highline he he was just he was as close as possible to making the cut as you can be and not make it i want to include and i might in this upcoming version his book the moon is a harsh mistress fascinating story you know a lot about politics and insurgencies from that book um and then there's you know starship troopers and others um highline is a uh um uh former naval officer uh he served under uh uh earnish j king when earnish j king was a captain uh he was influenced by uh king uh significantly one of our work college colleagues is writing a book um a biography of of admiral king and at least one chapter is going to be uh on his interaction with hindland or hindland's interaction with king i've been goading him finished the book i want to assign that chapter in my course so students can get a different perspective of robert highline and how his interactions with one of the most famous admirals in the u.s navy throughout history um influenced this one of the most famous sci-fi authors in history so um other books that i wanted to put in but quite didn't quite make it uh andy weir was mentioned um he has several books out there the martian artemous new one project hail mary all of them fascinating flowers for alganon is is really good in terms of ethics change agent by daniel suarez a newer sci-fi book about genetic engineering neil stevensons the diamond agent so as if the course continues and evolves those will rotate in and out i think good thank you uh j we had one uh comment uh giving a little pushback on casablanca and why that is considered a war movie uh thank you uh yes so the films that we're watching in this class uh war film is uh it doesn't necessarily mean a combat film uh so in this case casablanca is very much a film about sort of a higher level it's looking at uh one at europe and of course north africa european colonies being overrun uh by uh by uh by the nazi advance in europe and and sort of the consumption of european war and the consumption ultimately of the world in war so really it looks at it at that level uh and the call for uh america to get involved which is very much uh looking at it and you see uh sort of the final scene is uh is uh rick blind uh played by hufford gogar and the uh the french captain walking police captain walking away basically talking about this is going to i think this is going to be a very good friendship right that sort of approach to uh america joining the war and and the ultimate of course in 1942 that wasn't obvious but the ultimate uh uh victory that they were looking for in europe with american help and i'd like to react to this uh comment which i have seen reported that someone would say i didn't serve in vietnam but i saw platoon three times what does how do you react to that comment i i think there's uh i i see a lot of that um it is and this is again that that civil military divide and i think understanding that is uh so much of america gets their history uh from from hollywood uh and i think that there is no film that can accurately portray war i think a lot of directors have have tried very hard i think there are some films that come close saving private ryan does a fairly good job of it but there's there's no amount of of of violence or action or anything that you can put on the screen that is the same as as being there and seeing it in person um and i i think that's where that a lot of that civil military divide comes from and as we move forward i mean today you're on your smaller percentage of our population serves in the military and i think that's one of the things that we deal with today is is the this is the civilian world understanding the military which which they support um is part of that and uh there's no amount of uh of watching film or playing video games or reading books that will that will that will put you in that position it can enlighten you certainly uh but at the end of the day there's a divide is is still there and it's something that's difficult to overcome uh tim back to you uh interesting to see that you have chinese science fiction is there anything in general that makes a difference between european style american and chinese yeah i don't know if there's one specific um a theme that i can pull out of that yet uh john what was interesting particularly about this author shi shen lu is in the book we read three body problem a good portion of the book almost a third of the book it takes place during the chinese cultural revolution in the late 1960s and it's it's a chinese citizen's perception of it and that he embedded in this novel he didn't think it would get past the ccp's sensors but it did he originally had it buried in the middle of the book but when he published in the u.s it moved to the front of the book and the students it really grabbed the attention of the students because it's a telling of that portion of history that most of them were unfamiliar with um there are elements where uh maybe they're it's more of a uh a societal approach rather than a single great man approach um maybe that's one minor theme that's in the chinese science fiction that i've seen so far but that might be an overstatement um and it's also uh you have to examine how well how uh truly was it translated and so that's an issue that comes up with chinese science fiction we did read a short story written by a chinese author about it was a dystopian short story about words that were forbidden to say in this imagined society i think he didn't say what what city it was but you might guess what city it could be it might rhyme with hong kong um and it's a fascinating story of what this chinese author had to say about the limiting of speech in this futuristic dystopic world so so we'll continue reading some chinese science fiction in the course and see where else we might expand into the non-western canon thank you interesting uh jay we got comment about uh perhaps more navy oriented movies uh considering uh where we're sitting uh have you looked at it from a service perspective or have you just selected those you feel make the point that you're looking for in a given case uh it is a little bit of both uh one of the problems when choosing films about the second world war is you sort of very quickly end up in a black hole of the enormity of the number of films that you can use uh there there are more written about uh about the army and certainly more written about the war in europe than the war in the pacific or more i should say produced about the war in pacific or in europe and in pacific but a lot of the optional films that they look at uh are our navy films so for instance in harm's way uh which came out in 1965 is a great film uh that they watch uh as well as uh we'll see there's several of the the john wain's uh john wain films about the navy as well that are in there but there are some uh as as this goes on and uh end up speaking it a bit i am going to post more navy films uh into it in that sense but a lot of this was there are a few that are really hard to move so patent's a great example of a film that you really can't talk about the vietnam war experience without uh showing patent as a film for the reasons of it uh of how it comes out with some things um and then there are a few iconic films like saving private ryan that comes at a particular time uh one of the optional films that we can certainly uh thin red line which is about what will come out but that is a bad interpretation of a great book uh which is uh is a problem the film is is really bad also comes out senior saving private ryan does which makes it even worse because that's what it's up against but the book is amazing if you have a chance to go read a you know 700 page book uh a fictional account of guadalcanal it's an amazing book but the film is is problematic but again uh yes uh trying trying to pull more navy films into it and sort of fit that the the midway midway which came out a couple of years ago uh and gray helm which came out last year i haven't seen that film yet i've got to uh i gotta have a look at that i've heard mixed reviews about it so that'll that'll be interesting and of course the course isn't entirely about watching good films it's about dissecting films and what they say about society and i've had a good friend who's uh who uh is a wine carnosaur and he always says uh you get a drink bad wine to appreciate good wine uh so that i think that probably holds true for film film as well as uh you you might have to look at a few what should be bad films really appreciate how good the good ones are okay we're about at the end of our time here uh jay any last comments you'd like to add before we close out uh no i one thing i would say is uh we're we're hoping to bring a version of this myself britt norton and charlie tedborn to the broader naval work college audience with uh we've been talking to to dean haun and some of the leadership about about having a probably a monthly film event where we would watch a film and discuss it afterwards which we're hoping we'll we'll get some legs under it and go forward and everybody be able to participate on all the work still sounds like a great initiative tam anything uh enclosing on your course or on the electives program in general thank you john just about the electives program it's a team sport it reflects the passion and creativity of a large number of professors and the staff people the staff professionals who put it all together and it gives professors the opportunity to be creative and students the opportunity to learn in in widely and wildly different directions as they uh as they develop into our future leaders okay well thank you all for joining us i was very pleased we didn't know if we'd have 10 people or or 11 but uh we had over 80 folks here and and that's terrific and uh we look forward to seeing you back in two weeks when we'll hear from uh uh tom nickels about his very interesting book the death of expertise so thank you very much have a good summer and stay cool