 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval sea power 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. It's my pleasure to turn the session over to the college's president, Rear Admiral Shoshana Chatfield. Over to you, ma'am. Hi, and good afternoon. I'm here with my husband, David Scoville, and we are delighted to join you today for our Issues in National Security Lecture series. We're very fortunate to have our acting provost with us today to talk about our war college actually. And so I think that you'll get a lot out of this lecture. I intend to stick around for the whole thing and David and I will be here after the lecture to join in the family discussion group. So thank you very much for joining us today and back over to you, Professor Jackson. Thank you, Admiral and David. As a second lecture in this series, we thought it would be appropriate to provide each of you with a broad overview of what the college does to educate the future leaders of the United States military and our allies. We've asked acting provost, Dr. Jay Hickey, to provide us what we've labeled as Naval War College 101. As a reminder, during the formal presentation, please submit any questions you may have using the Zoom chat function. Dr. Hickey has been and continues to be my boss, so I'll take great care with his introduction. Dr. Jay Hickey is a 1980 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, who served for two decades as a Naval Flight Officer. He earned graduate degrees from Troy University and King's College London and holds a PhD from Salve Regina University. He joined the strategy and policy faculty in 2000 and he taught for three years at the United Kingdom's Joint Services Command and Staff College. He joined the College of Distance Education in 2005 to help launch the Navy Knowledge Online-based series of professional military education courses for junior officers and the enlisted force. From 2000 to seven until 2010, he served as the non-resident graduate degree program manager, then served as the director of CDE. Since leaving, CDE has served as the associate provost and recently moved into the position of acting provost. Dr. Hickey, over to you, sir. So thank you for the introduction, John, and we'll move on from here. So folks, thank you for joining us today. I was asked to give a sort of a Naval War College 101 talk and I will do so as soon as I get this up on the screen. My intention here today is not to make you an expert in any particular aspect of the college, but try to make you more aware of the totality of what this college does. So for those of you who may have driven in up the 95 corridor or maybe those who flew in through TF Green, when you came over the Newport Bridge and you looked off to your left and you saw that big old granite building sitting there on the point, you probably said to yourself, there is the Naval War College. And to a degree, you are correct. That is one of the original buildings of the Naval War College. However, as I hope to indicate to you in the next 35 or 40 minutes, the War College is much more than that. And I hope at the end of this time together today, you will join me in believing that actually the Naval War College is a worldwide command with worldwide influence, whether that is within the United States Navy, within the United States military, or with our significant number of international partners around the world. So from virtual Newport here, we will go on for Naval War College 101. So as you heard in that earlier video, the Naval War College came into being in 1884. In fact, our birthdays in a couple of weeks, October 6th. At that time, the Navy, the United States Navy was in a time of great transition. And we were moving from wood to steel. We were moving from sail to coal and the such. Admiral Stephen B. Loos, a visionary of his time, was very concerned about the officer corps. And what it was concerned about was not that we couldn't sail, not that we couldn't shoot guns, not that we didn't know engineering, but that we did not think about the wider profession that we were in, this thing called war. Or more importantly, the prevention of war went at all possible. And so he wanted to bring us together and you can see that first quote there, I won't read the screen to you. To really have people study for a year this art and science of this thing called war. Fast forward about 90 years coming to the end of Vietnam and we were once again at a crossroads. We had been very successfully, tactically and operationally in Vietnam and yet we were going to lose that war. Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner arrived at the college and he had the same view that we had lost some of our higher level faculties that we were not thinking as well as we could. And so what he wanted to do was restructure the way we did business here. You can read that quote there. His biggest concern was we had lost, sort of taken our eye off the prize that if we did not know how to argue our position, if we did not know how to make our case, to make sound decisions. And as it says there, both command and management positions that we would abrogate our professional responsibilities to others that could and those people would probably not be in uniform. We believe today that we hold true to this founding and second generation if you will of thinking that we today are still a home of thought, a place where we teach people how to think, not what to know, that we try to avoid wherever possible school house solutions and that we enhance the ability of our students to think critically and analyze, to work their way through thorny or wicked problems and particularly to face things today that we didn't envision five years ago, whether that would be AI or cyber or whatever is going to come next. We believe we still do that and maybe in 35 or 40 minutes, you'll agree with me on that. If you asked me today, what is the role or what is the mission of the Naval War College? I'd say, well, it's really a plural. We have missions. Now, the reason there are four in white and there's one in yellow is this has been an evolving task for the Naval War College. We've always educated and developed leaders. Over time, we had assumed a research role although there was original research at the very beginning. We have expanded into a greater role of combat readiness. Since 1956, we have been strengthening global maritime partnerships. And more recently, we were given the formal task of promoting ethics and leadership across the force. Now, please don't misunderstand. We have always had ethics and leadership in the curriculum, but a former CNO decided that we really needed to re-emphasize that. And so now we have a college of leadership and ethics. And in these five missions are in front of the Navy staff right now and we anticipate that our new mission function and task statement will come out soon and it will have those five formally assigned to us. And the fifth one there would turn white. So the one that we've done the longest is educate and develop future leaders. Now, I put this picture up simply to show that we educate people from across the force. Up our left-hand corner, Admiral Davidson from Indo-Pacific Command all the way down to the bottom right-hand corner who is Mary Beth Leonard, who at one time was the ambassador to the African Union. And I believe is an ambassador to one of the African nations right now. And in the middle there, you can see the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, who is also a graduate of the Naval War College. And so the point being, and you'll see some of this later on, is we educate the entire force. We are a Naval War College, but while we deliver JPME, Joint Professional Military Education through a maritime lens, as you might expect sitting here on the banks of the Narragansett Bay, we do so for the entire force, both military, civilian, and our international partners. Now, this is an old slide. And the only reason I keep it in here is it's from an older Naval education strategy. But what it does show us is that on the left-hand side of the slide, as you look at it, lots of officers enter the Navy or actually enter the Joint Force, but this is a Navy slide. And as time goes on, people leave, people are greater or lesser successful as they move along. But as we move forward, we start to develop three kinds of leaders. We develop strategic leaders, we develop technical leaders, and we develop joint war fighters. And what we try to develop over time is a skill set that will serve our force across all areas. So you would expect that if you were a meteorological officer, we would want deep specialization in meteorology and oceanography and those kinds of things. So you would expect to go off and get a PhD at the Naval Postgraduate School or a top-flight civilian institution. But where our sweet spot is here at the Naval War College is we try to develop strategic leaders and we try to develop joint war fighters. So back when this Naval education strategy was active, we felt we had a sweet spot in two out of three of those areas, delivering value to the Navy and our nation. Now, we do have to answer to several masters. As I said before, professional military education is a service responsibility. And a part of that professional military education responsibility is the requirement to deliver joint professional military education. So while we say we're a joint professional military education institution, that is only one part of the education we deliver. But we are beholden to both our Navy masters, C&O Admiral Gilday and our joint masters, General Milley on the right-hand side. And so these are the ways we start to frame how we build our educational program. We have our Navy responsibilities. We have the maritime lens through which we look at war and peace. And then we have the joint responsibilities, which come from both Congress, the joint staff, the chairman and others. The point of this picture is not the eaches. It's not what every individual block does. Although I could take 10 or 15 minutes and explain all of those to you. What I'm trying to display here is that over the last 15 years, the Navy has taken education more seriously. If I showed you the slide 15 years ago, there would be a big block in the middle, where it says intermediate JPME phase one, there would have been an intermediate slash senior JPME phase one. The courses to the left would not have been there. The courses down below would not have been there. And only some of the courses to the right would have been there. But since 2004, 2005 timeframe, the Navy has built a number of courses, some very short, one week long, some a full year long, to try to instill in our officers and our enlisted force a habit of lifelong learning. And these courses are tailored, as you'll see later in the presentation, such that when you need a given course at a given time in your career, we have an opportunity to deliver that to you. That may be a planning course, that may be a course that prepares you to be on a staff. It may be a course for a very senior leader who's getting ready to take over a battle force in a joint or combined environment. But we have those courses available for you when you need them. You can see here our resident students. Again, I'm gonna show you this a couple of different ways, but you can see that we have both US students in the top half there, 168 US students in the senior course, 245 in the junior, and then our international officers. Normally we have a few more international officers, but this year, because of COVID concerns and difficulties in traveling, we were not able to get as many officers as we normally have here. But that is a key and important part of our academic program here. Some of the other residential programs, the shorter courses I'll talk about later, but you can see broadly the numbers of people we educate each year. We have two graduate level programs. As I said, in 2005, 2006 timeframe, we only had one. We only granted joint professional military education phase one, even though we had an intermediate and senior level course, and we only granted one master's degree. But over time, as we've specialized and as we've broken the education apart into both the intermediate, we call it the junior sometimes, and the senior level course. We have now been accredited for two different master's degrees and we're allowed to give professional military education credentialing at two levels. We are unique. Again, the picture here is to show you that our courses are modular. We teach both the senior level course and the intermediate level course with one faculty. So here in Newport, we have one building, we have two student bodies, and we have one faculty. If you were going to the Army War College or the Army Command and General Staff College, you would either go to Carlisle Barracks or you would go out to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Again, vastly segregated. While the Air Force is co-located down at Maxwell Air Force Base, they are separate and distinct institutions for the most part. And yet here we have both courses taught by one faculty. There are challenges to that. It's more difficult on an individual faculty member. They have to learn two programs of instruction. But the advantages, or one of the advantages is each faculty member fully understands what the junior students are getting and what the senior students are getting. They understand how they can differentiate the instruction at both levels. We also bring those students together in the elective program. So while in the intermediate level course, primarily officers in the rank of major or lieutenant commander, some in the rank of captain or lieutenant in the Navy. And in the senior level course, mostly commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels, when they come together in the elective program, they are brought together in that mixture. So that a young officer can not only have an education with a more senior officer, he or she could gain coaching or mentoring from that officer. We also have phased inputs, which is unique within the military, professional military education world. So whereas if you go into another school, all students would arrive in August and all students would arrive or would graduate in May or June. For a variety of reasons, which benefit Navy and other forces or other members of the force now, we bring in students three times a year. We bring the majority of our students in August, but we bring students in November and we also bring students in February, March time. This allows students to complete key milestone career assignments to stay working for a Flagler general officer until that officer is ready to release them and then they can come and join the course. The challenge for the faculty is they have to integrate three separate distinct courses because we have no idea which student will arrive when. The advantage for the student is when they arrive, there are students here who already understand Newport, they understand the Naval War College and they understand the academic program. So if you're a new student arriving in November, you can turn it to somebody to your left or to your right or nowadays in Zoom obviously and say, hey, I don't understand how X works and that person has been here and can explain that to you. We also have a couple of longer programs, our Maritime Advanced Warfighting School and our Advanced Strategist Program. They build on the core program but they stay for a 13 month program of instruction. Those are equivalent to second year programs in other services. As you can see from this picture, and again, it's just really look at the colors here. You can see that this is the Naval War College and Naval being described as the Navy in the Marine Corps and yet only 30% of our students are Naval. You can see that 44 are Navy and 19 are Marine. Everybody else on that screen is from a different service from a civilian institution or a civilian agency, excuse me, or one of our international partners. So what you're getting, what the students are getting here, the education that's being delivered is truly inter-service, inter-agency, international to the benefit of all. Again, for the intermediate level course, you can see that even though we have a larger US Navy population in the intermediate level course, only 43% of the program or the student body, excuse me, is Naval. Again, international, inter-agency, inter-service. Now people often say, is this course preparing me for my next job? And there are elements of that. I mean, people will come here, they will learn planning. They may go to a planning job next. They may learn some staff skills. They may go to a staff job next. But really what we're trying to prepare people for are a series of jobs for the future. It's not about the next duty assignment necessarily. It's about improving your mind to be able to do better work in jobs of increasing responsibility as one moves forward in a career, whether that's in the military or whether that's in an agency position. And that's what Admiral Stansfield Turner really pushed in the early 1970s, that we had to focus on the long-term development of our officers. We also have an electives program, as I indicated earlier. The nice thing about the electives program is because we teach a common core, every student gets the same common core as opposed to a university where you can pick and choose your courses. And yet in the electives program, there is the opportunity to pick and choose your courses. And what students can do is they can either go broad and take courses in several areas. So they could take a course in Asia. They could take a course in Europe. They could take a course in cyber, for example. Or they could go deep in one of those areas. If they had a particular interest in a part of the world, then they could dig deep and take three courses, all taught, excuse me, by experts in that field to gain a deeper knowledge in one given area. Some of these areas of study will result in a designator given to an officer or a civilian employee. But there are opportunities there. The other opportunities that are offered by the electives program is the faculty have an opportunity to teach their passion. So some of our faculty who teach Common Core, they may be experts in Asia. And this allows them to go back to their chosen academic discipline and pass that knowledge on to the next generation of students. We also have a number of ways we support our students. The Writing and Teaching Excellence Center is an opportunity for students to have both diagnostic work done. And if they identify gaps in their writing skills to have one-on-one work with an expert in writing to enhance and enable that. This doesn't take the place of working with faculty moderators, but it is an additional tool that the students have. Furthermore, in the last year to 15 months, we've brought on additional personnel who have skills outside of the writing side of it into the Teaching Excellence side. And they were invaluable last March when we had, or this past March, when we had to move from classroom instruction to online environment in literally a week. And those people, people, particularly Professor Rosen, have really worked with the faculty to build the skill sets, to move someone who is expert in a classroom to expert in an online environment. Now it has been true for many, many years over a century now that the education offered here is not available to all. That's due to career assignments, that's due to volume of officers, that is due to the needs of the Navy and the needs of being operational at fleet. So 30 years after the college was formed, the College of Distance Education was formed. It was not called that at the time, but it was effectively a non-resident program. It started out with courses that could be taught in a ward room at sea or individual courses and instruction, but for a single officer. Over time, those have built, they've morphed, but the fundamental program has stayed the same. How do we take the education that is given here in Newport at the intermediate level and how do we take that out to the officers where and when they can do the education if they don't have the opportunity to come to Newport or any of the other professional military education institutions? Currently, there are three major programs that are run by the College of Distance Education. There's a fleet seminar program, which is effectively you go to school at night at a naval installation near where you live. So for example, if you were stationed at a squadron at Naval Station Norfolk, at night, you could go to a strategy and war seminar at the Joint Forces Staff College. Completing three courses would get you your JPME phase one instruction. Starting about 15 years ago in earnest, the Naval War College has had a presence at the Naval Postgraduate School. Students going to the Naval Postgraduate School who are out there for either a technical or a national security degree and also complete their JPME phase one as part of their educational program while they're there. In volume, it's our largest number of graduates each year at the intermediate level. Additionally, we have a web-based program. It's recently morphed from a series of three courses to a single course of 11 months. And again, if students are not near a fleet concentration area, they're in an overseas location and they're not at the Naval Postgraduate School but they need their JPME phase one, the Naval War College has a way to get that to them through a web-enabled basis. You can see the numbers there. All I'm trying to show you there is the non-resident population is much larger than our resident population. We also have a series of courses. If you think back to that first slide I showed you or one of the slides I showed you with lots of blocks on it, there are four courses on the left-hand side of that that are self-paced courses although they do have assessments that are hosted on Navy eLearning. And as you can see right now, we have over 300,000 students enrolled in those programs and almost 150,000 graduates. Those courses prepare junior enlisted and more senior enlisted for career milestone courses such as the Senior Enlisted Academy and they also prepare our junior officers for the intermediate level course here at the War College. Now, while this place has always been involved with research, over the last few decades we have taken a much greater role in defining the future Navy for the CNO and others. The Center for Naval Warfare Studies has three major lines of effort. There's a Wargaming line of effort, there's an International Law line of effort and there's a Research line of effort. And I'll speak very quickly about each one. Wargaming has been involved with the Naval War College for decades. We do everything from very highly classified wargames for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Chief of Naval Operations or other four stars, all the way down to supporting wargaming and interactive gaming for the students here at the Naval War College and for some of our international partners. Our Stockton Center, while small in size for permanent employees, brings many international partners in for short periods of time and really is an outsized influence in international law in those discussions, particularly in the area of cyber war and law of the sea. Strategic and Operational Research Department, we call it SOAR, has a number of research groups that look at key areas of the world or key problems but also has a number of institutes. And as you look through that list right there, you can see a number of people that we study that you're probably not surprised. We study the Chinese, we look at future warfare, we study cyber, we study Russia. Additionally, the Naval War College Press publishes a journal but also publishes volumes of compiled works, sometimes put together by the faculty, sometimes coming out of conferences and other efforts. Now you would expect that research priorities exceed our capabilities. So each year CNWS are on a biannual basis. They take a look across the world. They talk to our stakeholders. They try to identify what are the key items that need to be looked at in great depth. Some of those may be regional, some of those may be thematic. And you can see these again here, probably not surprising. The Arctic is important, Russia and China are important, the Indian Ocean. And you can see the thematic ones there. The items that people that deal with the Naval War College want that depth of bench that we provide. So for example, recently the Secretary of the Navy calls up and says, hey, I need somebody who is expert in the Arctic. Well, we happen to have that person, Professor Walter Berberk. And he is now going to be an asset ready to be used by the Secretary of the Navy when needed. And I could give you any number of examples of people who they've been reached out, they provide that deep knowledge, ready unavailable or ready when needed for our senior leadership. Supporting combat readiness. Now you might argue and we would argue that we support combat readiness with every graduate of the Naval War College, whatever course we teach them. But more specifically, in the last decade or so, first in an organization called the College of Operational and Strategic Leadership and now the College of Maritime Operational Warfare, we have gone into a much more focused support of combat readiness. Now the details here aren't important. I can use this slide for any number of audiences. But I want you to think if you will about a career of somebody who might work in a restaurant. And my first job that wasn't knowing lawns or delivering papers was I was a dishwasher. I was a dishwasher in a local restaurant here in my town of North Kingston across the bridges from where many of you are probably sitting right now. And so what we would offer in this series of courses is that a young man or woman comes to the Naval War College and they need to be where it comes to a restaurant, excuse me, and they're gonna be a dishwasher and we have a course on dishwashing. And that might be the Maritime Staffer Operators course or it might be the Maritime Operational Planners course. Now sometime later on that person might promote and they might become a line chef. And that person might need another course to become a proficient line chef. Well the equivalent of that might be the Executive Level Operation of War course for a 05 or an 06 going to a staff. Eventually that person might take over the restaurant. They might become the Executive Chef or they might become the owner of the restaurant. And they would need some education for that. And we can provide that in the Joint Force Maritime Component Commander course or Combined Forces course. For flag officers, one stars or two stars who are getting ready to lead a battle force in either a national or international context. So those are the types of courses we have. Some are one week long, some are five weeks long, some are 11 weeks long. But the point is we have a series of courses that can be delivered at that point in time when that officer or senior enlisted personnel need that course for the next duty assigner. We also do some for international officers, both our international maritime staff officer course or a planning course in Asia Pacific. We do other things. We have sailors, I'm sorry, let me rephrase that. We have officers and civilian professors from the Naval War College that routinely visit fleet commanders and staffs. The advantage we bring there is we're not from a different staff or a different fleet. So when we show up, we're honest brokers, we're independent neutral parties. Having worked with all the fleets, we can then offer suggestions, offer ideas how to make their processes better without carrying the baggage of being from the other team. We have highly qualified experts. We have humanitarian response program, which has been vital recently during this COVID crisis, working with both national and local leaders, talking through how we might deal with those programs. We also do independent flag officer development. If an officer is getting ready to go command at the one star level at a various part of the world, as part of the development or the part of the preparation for that assignment, we can bring them here. They can speak to the deep experts here. Let's say someone's going to Asia, they can speak with Asian experts and talk about key problems that they're going to face when they arrive in those positions. And so this is one of the areas where I can point to you and say, we have worldwide influence. These are the places that in the Naval War College routinely visits, assists, send support teams to, and graduates go and serve in these items around or bases around the world. Strengthening global maritime partnerships. We had international officers at the college in the very earliest of days. But coming out of World War II, Admiral Arlie Burke then, the CNO, really thought that if we had really understood our international partners better or perhaps even our international adversaries, perhaps World War II would not have been the horrific event it would have been. So starting in 1956, we brought a number of senior officers here to what was now known as the Naval Command College. Many years later, we built the thing called the Naval Staff College for our intermediate level officers. Originally these were standalone courses. They are now fully integrated with our US students. If I were to show you a Zoom session right now of one of the strategy and policy seminars tomorrow, you would see international officers sitting in those classes. So not only do our American students build relationships with our other American students, they also build critical relationships with our international partners. As our international partners also learn more about America and deal with us. More critically, our international partners bring a different perspective to us. A perspective that 15 Americans sitting in a room might miss. And that is extremely important to us. Years ago, when I taught in England, I had a Swiss officer, Rene Chastiné, Lieutenant Colonel. And we would have these discussions and everybody would be talking about kinetic action. And he would stop and he'd say, can I give you the input from a neutral and that would fundamentally change the discussion in the classroom. And our international partners do that for us every day. The international partners value their education here just as much as we value them. And the impact is impressive. So if you look under the numbers at NCC, the specific numbers are less important, but look at the number of graduates versus the numbers who rose to the highest ranks of their services. Almost 50% of those who came to the Naval Command College went on to serve as flag officers. Well, more than 10% became the head of their Navy. If you look at the bottom right-hand corner, the last time I had these numbers pulled a little bit earlier this year, 44 of the serving chiefs of their navies were graduates of Naval War College, either of the NCC or of the NSC. Now some had attended both. So there's a little bit of, you gotta be careful with the math. But 44 heads of Navy have been here, have talked with Americans, have a greater understanding and we have learned from them as well. You can see there quite an impressive list of nations that have been represented over the years. We also on a biannual basis hold what we call the international sea power supposing. Actually, the chief of naval operations holds the international sea power supposing. It's not ours, we host it. It was canceled this year due to COVID, but what this is an opportunity for is to bring together many, if not most of the heads of Navy or Coast Guard from around the world to come and sit with their peers to discuss items of common interest. And this includes the head of the Chinese Navy, People's Liberation Army Navy came the last time. So not only is it the opportunity for friends to talk to each other, it's also an opportunity for those who might be less friendly on a day-to-day basis to begin a dialogue, to maybe begin a friendship or at least a common language that in a time of crisis later on might be resolved without bloodshed. There are nations here, or I'm sorry, there are senior officers today from nations that do not have normal diplomatic relationships who were here together at the Naval War College and have been able to talk to each other in times of crisis. Unofficially, that they could not do normally. We also try to extend our outreach. We try to go back and you can see the places around the world where we go. We try to get back together with our graduates. We try to get back together not only with the graduates but with local or regional US service people. And we try to reestablish and reaffirm and re-forge, if you will, those relationships that we built with the people while they were here at the Naval War College. They've been highly successful and we try to, in a normal cycle, obviously disrupted by COVID right now, we try to build a series of these smaller regional symposia into the next international C-power symposium so that conversations started regionally can now be handled on an international basis. Our newest mission, the one I showed you at the beginning in yellow, was to more formally promote leadership and ethics throughout the force. So the College of Leadership and Ethics has three main lines of effort. The first is to inject and formalize leadership and ethics in the Naval War College curriculum. And you can see the types of things that we do here. Every student takes a leadership in the profession of arms course. The faculty across the college teach ethics electives and there is a senior leader development concentration. The College of Leadership and Ethics also takes a key role in what you might call staff or workforce development. So professors of the College of Leadership and Ethics who have expertise in things like working in difficult or difficult work environments, challenging leadership interactions, they can teach courses on that. They can have you take an evaluative framework like MBTI or one of the other things and then help you understand your personality in a more formalized way. So not only do they teach externally and teach internally, they also work in staff development. The secondary, it's been a growth area for the college as leader development for flag officers. There has long been a one star course. So a captain promoting to one star had a new flag officer course. But as time went on, our most senior flags in the Navy realized that what made you successful as a captain and as a one star might not make you successful as a two star or a senior executive, the equivalent in the civilian side. And what made you successful as a two star might not set you up to be successful as a three star. So what are the tools? What are the insights that could be provided to you as you rose through those elevated ranks? And we have built those courses. They started off slow and now exceptionally well received across the Navy. We also have a flag development strategy where coaching and self-awareness instruments. So individualized instructions for individualized flag officers. So they take a framework assessment and then they spend hours with one of the professors from the Naval War College to discuss the results of that instrument to gain greater insight into themselves. Finally, the third line of effort is there are 17 communities in the United States Navy. And as you would imagine, 17 communities means 17 frogs jumping in different directions all the time. Everybody has their own history. They have their own heritage. They only have that they have their same traditions internal to the Navy, but also internal to the community. So aviators don't think the same way the surface line officers don't think. Submarine community thinks differently. The seals think differently, but they all need leader development. And several CNOs ago said, you need to all align leader development so that certain aspects of developing those leaders are common within the Navy across the 17 communities. That development effort continues today. In fact, I think it was early last week or within the last five or six days was the last meeting of the 17 communities with our leaders here at the Naval War College to continue to align those efforts. So I think I've come to both the end of my time and the end of my slides. Oh, I'm sorry, I have two more slides. We also have, and I put these slides in because these are aspects of the college that are often behind the scenes. And I would be remiss if I didn't highlight those. These departments here serve as the backbone. So when you walk into the college and when you can do that again, you see beautiful buildings. You see nice facilities, you see good classrooms and good, those don't just happen. So behind the scenes we have facilities maintenance folks who keep the lights on, who keep the leaks off and continue to keep the place clean. Events and protocol, the number of conferences and major distinguished visitor visits that we have at this place in a normal year pre-COVID is mind-boggling. And yet behind the scenes, they make that all work. As you would expect for both our distance and for our internal programs, we have huge information resource requirements. So I just wanna give a shout out to our mission support folks. They're often unseen behind the scenes, but we have them. And finally, for those who are interested, sorry, I'm jumping ahead too quickly. We do have accreditation from both a regional body for our master's degree and we have accreditation from the joint staff for our professional degrees. So every student that comes here gets a fully accredited degree and gets fully accredited professional certification. So with that, I am now done and I will stop sharing my screen in case any questions have come in that people would like to ask. So John, back over to you and I will let you MC the rest of this. Absolutely, Jay, thanks very much. And I now know why we have gotten along so well over the last couple of decades because I started as a dishwasher too. And in fact, I see that as a fallback position in cases education thing doesn't work out. So it's a good experience for us. We do have a couple of questions. And first one is, can you give us a peek at any potential changes to the academic program, any areas that we may wanna spin off into if such things are able to be discussed at this point? So I can touch on that, John. So for those who have kept up with Navy education over the last 18 months or so, you would have witnessed a time of incredible turmoil. When I say turmoil, that doesn't mean necessarily bad. Turmoil can be good, change can be disruptive and still be good. But we had a series of senior leaders who put great investment into education and then they departed. And so we're in a bit of a time of uncertainty on how those initial efforts that were developed by those senior leaders will continue forward. So for example, the Navy Naval Community College looks like it has gained purchase and will continue moving forward. Some of the other things that we have looked at which have not come to fruition yet but may come to fruition and these are still under discussion is a series of smaller short courses that might be stackable into a series of certifications. So you could imagine if we get support and funding that we could build a series of three or four or five courses in cyber or some other area. And if an officer or whomever completed those four or five courses, he or she would get a certificate or a credential that said that they had some additional expertise in cyber. You could see a number of opportunities out there. Unfortunately, as we have moved from one set of senior leaders to another, we're in a bit of state of limbo right now to be quite honest. And we don't know where that is going. We are interested in those things. We just don't know if we have the support right now.