 Good afternoon and welcome to this very special event. I would like to thank the Chief of Nail Operations, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, Professor John Hattendorf, and Dr. Nicholas Roger for joining me on the stage. Please have seat. Yep. Today, the Naval War College makes the first award of the newly established Hattendorf Prize for Distinguished Original Research in Maritime History. It is particularly appropriate for the Naval War College to make this announcement here at this international symposium. This new prize is made for world-class achievement in original research that contributes to a deeper understanding of the broad context and interrelationships involved in the roles, contributions, limitations, and uses of the sea services in history. This prize reflects the essence of Professor John B. Hattendorf's professional values and goals for his field during his continuing service here since 1984 as the Naval War College's Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History. To serve the Navy by improving the quality and range of scholarship in maritime history, striving to engage globally with an appreciation for scholarship in different languages and from different national, cultural, and regional perspectives. To see maritime history as a broad field in global history that builds on insights that cut across traditional, academic, and national boundaries. Before we present this award to his first most deserving recipient, let me take a few moments to talk about the distinguished scholar for whom the award is named. Professor John Hattendorf is truly a legend here at the Naval War College and within the international circle of Naval historians. The professional journal US Naval Institute Proceedings has described him as, quote, one of the most widely known and well respected Naval historians in the world. I could not agree more. He earned his bachelor's degree from Kenyon College, his master's degree in history from Brown, and in 1979, his doctorate at Pembroke College, Oxford. The foundation of his knowledge of naval affairs comes from his wartime service as a naval officer during the Vietnam era. He served aboard the destroyer, USS O'Brien, earning a commendation from the commander, United States 7th Fleet, for outstanding performance of duty during combat operations in April 1967. He later served at sea in destroyers, Perty and Fisk. He was a key member and staff member and confidant of War College President Admiral Stansfield Turner during his historic presidency. They called it the Turner Revolution and it reinvigorated the college and set it on the course we followed to this day. Admiral Turner knew just how good Professor Hattendorf was, so he sent the young lieutenant to Oxford to earn his PhD. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than 40 books on British and American maritime history and naval warfare. He's called maritime history, quote, a subject that touches on both the greatest moments of the human spirit as well as on the worst, including war. He has won numerous awards for his contributions to the field of maritime history and literary achievement, including the Navy League of the United States, Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for literary achievement. We are truly blessed to have him here at the Naval War College all these years and on the stage with us here today. The purpose of the Hattendorf Prize is to honor and to express appreciation for distinguished academic research and writing in the field of maritime history. With the intention that this is to be the most prestigious award that any scholar can receive in this field, we hope that it will serve as a permanent beacon to encourage and to promote the new scholarship in this very important and newly reemerging and reinvigorated field of study. By having this award associated with the Naval War College and awarded on an international basis to the world's leading scholars who've distinguished themselves in this field, it will serve to reinforce this college's role as the US Navy's most important link between the sea services and the broader academic community. Equally important, it adds for the college a new and complementary component that highlights and extends the college's interest in regional studies and in international cooperation. In this, it can form as a focal point in the future life of the college that provides broad intellectual stimulation through new historical research and historical insight. While at the same time serving the college's educational mission and helping to promote its role as a place of original research on all questions relating to war and of statement-ship connected with war or the prevention of war. And it's an award that promotes and continues the inspiration that Luce and Mahan laid here more than a century ago when they turned to historical understanding as a fundamental element in the college's educational and research approach. In permanently endowing the Hattendorf Prize, I would like to thank the Naval War College Foundation. Retired Captain John Odegard, the Foundation Executive Director, is here with us this afternoon. Thank you, John. And we want to recognize the great generosity of the donor, Pam Ribby, whose late grandfather, Captain Charles Maddox, was a 1935 and 1939 Naval War College graduate and a faculty member from 1939 to 1941. Her permanent endowment of the prize allows us to present a $10,000 cash prize and a bronze medal designed by Professor Hattendorf's youngest daughter and a Hattendorf. What a great day. Thank you all for being here. I would like to ask our most distinguished group here to assemble their center stage as we present the award. The President of the U.S. Naval War College takes great pleasure in awarding the Hattendorf Prize for Distinguished Original Research in Maritime History to Dr. N. A. M. Roger, Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. The Naval War College is pleased to recognize you as the first Hattendorf Prize Laureate. This award is predicated on your distinguished achievements as an assiduous historical researcher as well as the author of beautifully written and intellectually impressive studies of Britain's naval history. Your scope, embracing more than 1,000 years of naval history, is informed and given depth by an equally broad understanding of your subject. Your impressive command of sources ranging from medieval documents in Latin to modern archives and scholarly works in a broad range of European languages has established a new and more comprehensive approach to writing a national naval history. You have written that the naval historian has to be aware of what other historians are writing to do justice to his own subject and explain its importance to others. To do so, he has to integrate a wide range of knowledge. It goes without saying that this demands a great deal of reading and not inconsiderable literary skills. So it is not surprising that successful naval histories which take this approach are rare. Your works exemplify that description, your excuse me, your works exemplify that description and have themselves become prizes for us to read. This award honors you and your work expressing appreciation for your distinguished academic research, insight, and writing that contribute to a deeper historical understanding of the broad context and inter-relationships involved in the roles, achievements, and uses of navies within the context of both maritime and general history. Presented this 20th day of October, 2011, at the US Naval War College, signed John N. Christensen Rear Admiral United States Navy President Naval War College. Dr. Roger, the auditorium is yours. Well, Admiral Greenit, Admiral Christensen, ladies and gentlemen, my first task, very obviously, is to express my profound gratitude to the Naval War College Foundation, to the Naval War College for the honor they have done me in presenting this prize, this medal. An honor, which as far as I'm concerned, is if possible, increased by the fact that it bears the name of my old friend, John Hatendorf, and I can tell you that nothing that Admiral Christensen said of his merits and achievements was in the slightest degree exaggerated. I've often thought that historians, naval historians like myself, are able to do more service to navies than the navies sometimes realize, and I like to take what opportunities come my way to tell admirals this, but I must say, I never dreamt that I should find myself with an opportunity to say it to all the admirals in the whole world who matter. I do think that history is of value and importance to navies. Perhaps here, actually, is the one place where it shouldn't be necessary to say it. Here in the United States Naval War College, which was the first institution in the world, founded to study history as the foundation of naval policy. We are, after all, only a few yards from the rooms in which around 130 years ago, the then Captain Alfred Thea Mahan was writing the first of his great books, and here, at least if anywhere in the world, the influence of history on sea power scarcely needs to be underlined. And yet, I think there are still things to be said which are worth saying, things worth saying in eight minutes, and actually one of them, you may be surprised if I start by saying one of them is to offer you a caution. What history won't do for you? It certainly won't save you from mistakes, nor must you imagine that historians are infallible. The historian is the prophet of the past, not the future. If you look at Mahan, whose influence is absolutely unquestionable and whose works are still read by everybody, you can see that there were some important things which he did not realize, did not understand. It's very notable that Mahan's naval world is a world dominated by a handful of rival great naval powers, all of them European. For him, there is one successful navy which triumphs in war, in fact, usually in battle, and then dominates the whole world. And of course, that was the picture in the 19th century in his lifetime. But it wasn't, in fact, a picture that was going to go on forever. The world was already changing even as he wrote and he himself had a small share in changing it. The main ways in which it was changing were the rise, at the end of the 19th century, of significant naval powers outside Europe. The British had managed to dominate the seas the world for a long time because they had no rivals outside Europe. And if you could dominate European waters, then by extension you could dominate the rest of the world as well. But this is not a trick you can pull off if there are significant naval powers on the other side of the world because then you need to have a fleet in two places at once, or two fleets at the same time. It's the rise of other naval powers which actually changes the world Mahan described. And of course, one of the principal other naval powers outside Europe was precisely the United States Navy whose rise Mahan devoted his career to promoting. So in a way, he blew up his own world. Or at least he contributed to doing so. And there was another thing I think which is involved in this because the rise of the other naval powers is a function of the tremendous economic success of free trade, as we would say, globalization in the 19th century. In the 1840s, probably Britain was the only advanced economy in the world. By the 1890s, there were at least a dozen. And as advanced prosperous economies with industry and technology developed in other parts of the world, many of them built navies and the more navies they built, the more impossible it became for any one navy to dominate the seas of the world. And the faster history advanced towards the situation in which we live today, the situation which is exemplified by your presence here, a world in which there are very many important navies all over the place and nobody can achieve anything very much in the naval world without cooperation, coalitions, alliances, and so on. You know that, that's why you're here. Mahan, I think, never really envisaged that. The naval world he depicts was one in which this sort of alliance situation has no existence. And it's partly because he seems to have been very largely unaware of economics. Which again I think is something which nobody would say today. All strategy is based on economics. Certainly all naval strategy is based on economics. I think that's obvious, hardly needs elaboration. It must be obvious here, I suppose. It's the reason for behind that very handsome logo that you've been looking at all week with its apparent message that the Swiss Navy rules the waves. At all events, we can all agree that economics matters. And there I think is something that where Mahan actually probably wasn't really aware of what was going on. So don't think that historians can do everything. But nevertheless, you can't get away from history. All our human experience as individuals and as organizations is experience of the past. The present slips through our fingers every second. The future, which it would be very useful to know about is regrettably inaccessible. And in fact, all we know is the past, recent past or distant past as the case may be. And as a matter of fact, you have only to read or listen to the speeches, the writings of politicians, of journalists and indeed of admirals to find that people continually, automatically without thinking it, make reference to past analogies. They draw explicit parallels with events in the past and they use unconscious images and language which betrays the parallels which they're adopting without thinking. But history is always with us and we can't get away from it. The problem is that all too frequently the history which people are using is a history which is irrelevant, distorted or altogether imagined. And this is a bad foundation for policy making. If you cannot avoid the past, it's a very good plan to try basing your plans on a past which really happened and has some relevance to the world in which we live. Rather than an imagined, a mythical or an entirely distorted past which represents as it might be things you have to remember from school, inherited prejudice, things you heard in the pub or whatever the other foundations are for the things which people assume and talk about. History won't solve all your problems but I can guarantee that policy making on the basis of bad, imagined or fantastical history certainly will cause you a very great many problems. And in that respect, historians have I think an essential role in at least clearing the ground and avoiding the most elementary pitfalls which is why this college maintains so powerful history department and continues to keep history in the center of its intellectual activities in support of the United States Navy and of all the other navies whose officers come to study here. I hope, I think, I believe that the same can be said of all navies which take their profession seriously. I wish the same could be said of all other organizations of government but navies I think are probably well ahead of other people in taking history seriously. Still, it deserves to be said as often as people will listen that if we don't pay attention to history, we won't escape history, we'll just become the prisoners of historical myths and on that basis we're extremely unlikely to make the right decisions. So, let me finish by once again giving my profound thanks to the Naval War College Foundation and to the Naval War College for the honor they have done me. Well, I think you'll all agree that we made a fantastic first selection for the first award. Professor Roger, thank you. First sea lord, CNO, Professor Hattendorfall, thank you for joining us on this stage and I'm gonna turn it back over to you.