 Thank you everybody. I appreciate you all coming out on this rainy Thursday afternoon. I want to thank John Kennedy and the professor for having me back for another eight bells lecture. And it really is a great honor to be here and speak in the very spot that we think Mahan gave his lectures from, which is kind of intimidating. So as a bit of pre-flight business, as John mentioned, I am a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy and a Naval Aviator by trade, but today I am here in my personal capacity, and anything that I say is my opinion and my opinion alone and does not reflect any policy or thought by the Department of the Navy or any other entity. As the great American philosopher George Burns once said, the secret to a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending and to have them as close together as possible. So today I am going to try and keep it relatively short so we might have some time for some discussion afterwards or some questions. In 1919, the United States reached a turning point in our nation's history. In the Spanish-American War, we had our first foray into the world's great powers or military powers, but it was after World War I that there could be no doubt that the United States was a great power. As men and ships steamed back across the Atlantic and the halls of power began debating the details of demobilization, a tall and bearded naval officer returned to his home here in Newport, Rhode Island. Admiral William Sims had played an important part in developing the Navy for its newfound place on the world stage. He rose through the ranks after his graduation from Annapolis in 1880, serving during a period of enormous change for our nation and our Navy. And he capped his career to that point as the commander of all U.S. naval forces in Europe during World War I. At the close of the conflict, he returned here to Newport and assumed the responsibilities of President of the Naval War College. He was quite possibly the most well-known naval officer of his age. Besides the obvious importance of his job during the war, in the 15 years prior to the war, he had had central roles in helping to modernize the Navy and bring the fleet into the 20th century. It was in 1901 as a lieutenant that he reached the defining moment in his career and became a force for change in the U.S. Navy. Deployed to the Asiatic Squadron on China Station, he developed the techniques of continuous aim fire which revolutionized naval gunnery. This discovery, or maybe more accurately the theft of this idea from the Royal Navy Captain Percy Scott, as well as his development of it and Sims's attempt to bring it to the fleet started a long and sometimes angry competition between him and the status quo forces of the Navy. It was a competition where Sims's greatest ally and protector was sometimes President Teddy Roosevelt. With the President's sponsorship, he was assigned as the Inspector of Target Practice for the Navy. In that position, Sims introduced this new method of gunnery to the fleet and fundamentally changed the way battleships fought. Sims was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and traveled to visit ships and help crews all across the world. In the span of just a few years, he and his team increased the speed with which American gunners hit their targets by 100% and the effectiveness of American batteries by 500%. American sailors became some of the best gunners in the world and they were on the leading edge of this revolution in naval warfare. Throughout the fleet, William Sims became known as, quote, the man who taught us how to shoot and this was all as a Lieutenant and a Lieutenant Commander. In the years leading up to World War I, Sims continued pushing boundaries in the Navy. He was an aggressive and vocal advocate for the all big gun battleship like the British Dreadnought class and he helped develop the methods of fire control which would come to dominate fleet tactics. He commanded his own battleship, leapfrogging several more senior officers to become the skipper of the USS Minnesota in 1909. In 1911, he came here to Newport to enroll in the Naval War College. After he completed the summer conference, he stayed on for the entire full year course and then he remained for another year as an instructor. During this time, he met and worked with men like Dudley Knox and Pete Ellis, men who would have incredibly outsized roles in the intellectual and strategic development of the Navy and the Marine Corps in the interwar years. After his time as a student and instructor, Sims remained in Newport as the commanding officer of the Atlantic Fleet's destroyer flotilla. In that role, he helped develop the tactics and operating concepts of this new class of warship and he worked closely with the junior officers who skippered these small combatants to help develop their ideas and how they thought the ships should fight. These were men like Lieutenant William Halsey. In 1917, he was selected to be the president of the Naval War College. But before he could settle in here and start his work, President Wilson asked him to go to London to consult with the Admiralty about the war that was raging in Europe. Under an assumed identity, he and his aide got on a ship and went to London to visit his friend, John Jellico, who had become the first sea lord. In the weeks later, the United States entered the war. Sims was promoted to Vice Admiral and he was placed in command of all naval forces in Europe. During the war, he was central to the adoption of a convoy system in which American and British destroyers turned the tables on the German U-boats and won the first battle of the Atlantic. When he returned here to the United States, he again took up the position of president of the Naval War College. And he helped establish the system of study and war gaming that would be used during the interwar years to develop American aviation and submarines. The Sims believed that there were a number of important lessons that the Navy and the nation needed to learn coming out of the Great War. The best way to ensure that American naval officers learned these lessons from their experience was to make sure there was an effective method of professional military education and that a proper mindset which valued critical thinking and innovation came to dominate the fleet. And as 1919 came to a close, having established himself back here in Newport with his family, Sims looked to address the incoming class, the first full class after the war. In his opening lecture here at the college, Sims elected to talk about his vision for professionalism and education in the Navy and Marine Corps. The lecture started out as an homage of sorts. It was titled The Practical Naval Officer, and it was the same title of a lecture given by Alfred Thayer Mahan almost 30 years before. Now, Sims and Mahan had been sparring partners on more than one occasion. It started when Sims was a midshipman in Annapolis, when then-Commander Mahan, the head of the gunnery department, wrote him up one night for being insubordinate to the duty officer. Decades later, the two men would have dueling articles in the pages of proceedings discussing the future of battleship construction and fleet constitution. In that article, Sims concludes by poking the great navalist squarely in the chest, saying, quote, I have attempted to show that Captain Mahan's conclusions are probably in error, unquote. But with another decade and a half of experience and his command experience in the Great War under his belt, Sims had come to embrace Mahan's view of strategic education and how to prepare officers for the highest responsibilities of command and policy. Sims' lecture here at the War College was an illumination of what he believed it took to make a strategic leader, a senior officer in the Navy and Marine Corps, who would be prepared to make the right decisions at the highest levels, both in combat and in the policy decisions that sometimes lead up to war. Sims lays out three elements that go into the creation of this leader, who's able to handle strategic and operational decision-making both in wartime and in peacetime. First, an officer needs an understanding of the past, an understanding of the great strategic thinkers and theorists, and the historical case studies that have helped students learn about the decision-making process. It's important that any professional military education starts as a genuine education, and that means deep reading and thinking and discussion in the classroom. He was a true believer in what was taught here at the Naval War College and still is today. It's vital that the education program here teach strategy and policy in what is an intense, intellectual and scholarly way. A deep reading of classic texts to help build better understanding and discussions that challenge us to think critically is a foundation on which the rest of an officer's career can be built. Referencing Mahan's original lecture, Sims told his students, quote, It shows with entire conclusiveness that the study of history of naval warfare is in no sense a theoretical proceeding, but essentially a practical one that is entirely indispensable as a preparation for actual conflict. He then went on to say, The primary object of the Naval War College is to study the principles of warfare as enunciated by the great masters of the art, to develop practical applications of these principles to war on the sea and under modern conditions, and then to train our minds to a high degree of precision and rapidity of decision in the correct application of these principles. So this quote kind of leads us to the second pillar of his three pillars of strategic education. It's something that he focused on and cemented into the curriculum here as President of the War College, something that he tried to kind of make fundamental to the culture. That's war gaming. After an education in the fundamentals of strategy, naval history, and theory, after learning the ideas and the principles, officers had to practice them. In this regard, Sims brought education and training together. He tells his students that he didn't want the first time they had to make a strategic decision to be in actual combat. As a senior officer, as an admiral leading a fleet, you ought to have approached the different challenges, the threats or attacks already, so that you can start to train your mind and your brain in a methodology of how to think through these challenges. It isn't that this kind of training is going to give you the same answers every time or even necessarily exactly right answers. Instead, by working through problems on the war gaming tables here at Newport, the Navy's future leaders would develop a method, a way to think that would allow them to approach decision making. It would help them think critically, but also make decisions quickly, because otherwise you lose the initiative. In Sims' view, war gaming was a fundamental part of the preparation of the strategic mind. And this is not war gaming in the way that some people in the Pentagon are in Washington D.C. view war gaming. Sometimes there it's seen as a way to derive data for operations research and ops analysis staffers to put into their spreadsheets and crunch in their equations. Because the results of these calculations are sometimes seen as scientific or definitive, the people that participate in the games are filled with senior and retired officers, think tankers and government civilians. The idea here is to run through set procedures and test which doctrine is right and which doctrine is wrong, even if war sometimes doesn't behave per a mathematical equation. This isn't the kind of war gaming that Sims is talking about. Sims is talking about playing out battles on the war gaming tables with lieutenant commanders and commanders who will learn about decision making and will learn about operational and strategical thinking. He's not talking about procedural compliance or doctrinal solutions. He's more interested in what war gamers call free play. There should be winners and there should be losers in the war games and the officers who are assuming those roles of the high command or making the decisions in the games can start to learn what it feels like and how to apply the principles and history that they've learned in the classroom. Hopefully, they'll also develop new ways of thinking and new ways of doing things. New applications of those historic principles based on weapons or new technology that are inserted into the games. The reason to start the war games though is to help the future leaders of the fleet build that thought process and that approach to strategic decision making that will be so vital in combat. Now the third pillar of professional military education that Sims discusses in the lecture is personal professional study. As I mentioned earlier, Sims first arrived here in Newport in 1911 and stayed on as an instructor. During that period, he came to the realization that he really hadn't prepared himself that well to be a senior officer in the Navy. He hadn't been reading, studying military history or leadership or international relations. He hadn't really been studying war in any way. He'd just been doing his day job. He'd been following the advice of his commanders and his department heads that says just take care of your job today, do it well, and everything else will take care of itself. After his experience here at Newport as a student, he realized that it really didn't teach him everything he needed to know. Instead, it gave him the foundation to know that there was still so much to learn and that he had to continue reading. I suspect, actually I hope, that many of the graduates from the War College here today still feel the same way. That pursuit of personal professional study through reading, thinking, talking with friends and mentors, coming together in groups to talk about the things you've read or learned is central to our profession. In some ways, it's suffered in the past few decades with the death of the officer club culture on most of our bases. But that sort of thing is what Sims is encouraging in his third pillar of PME. It has to carry on throughout a career. It has to start as a junior officer and build all the way to the years of command and senior leadership. It should involve mentoring, both up and down the chain of command. And discussion of new or recent developments in technology or international affairs informed by a continued reading of history and theory. After his term as a student and instructor here at the college, Sims wrote a small pamphlet on how graduates of the War College should help develop and mentor strategic thinking in the fleet. He had it printed at his own expense and distributed to all the ships in the fleet. You might arguably say he was an early blogger in this regard. Professionalism then is now, in his opinion, was about much more than the shine on your shoes than your rules of the road exam. It was about how hard we've studied the profession, the art and the science of naval warfare. The practical naval officer is contained in Chapter 3 of my book, 21st Century Sims, Innovation, Education and Leadership for the Modern Era. The book has five of Sims articles and lectures which encompass a wide-ranging examination of professionalism and naval education, as well as military innovation. Collected with the introduction to the book and small essays before each of the chapters to give some context into where he delivered or where he wrote these articles for, I hope that the book can return Sims thinking and writing to the modern discussion and the challenges of the 21st century. In his essay on the All Big Gun Battleship, readers are introduced to Sims early thinking on ship design and fleet constitution. It took a lot of guts for a newly promoted Lieutenant Commander to take on the great navalist Alfred Thayer Mahan to call him out by name and even say he was wrong. But the mastery of the subject which Sims demonstrates in this article can be a great lesson for the junior officers today who want to stand up for their ideas, but they must know that they have to master the subject and they have to do the hard work of searching and writing to back it up. Sims's lecture on military character is a study and leadership that also translates well today. He writes about leadership for the subordinate, leadership for the junior officer and the NCO, the non-commissioned officer instead of from the perspective of the great captains and commanders of the past. In this lecture which he turned into an article he discusses mission command and the need for the junior leader to make his decisions his loyalty to his boss and his organization with his desire to demonstrate his own initiative and make his own decisions. Today as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dempsey preaches the tenets of mission command this chapter is particularly relevant as it casts this discussion with a navalist's eye and from a different perspective. The article military conservatism which began as a lecture here at the war college across the military services even up to the office of the secretary of defense the favored buzzword today seems to be innovation. Now Sims was a vital innovator during his time in uniform and what he discovered was that new ideas new technologies and new weapons are always going to have to struggle against the forces of the status quo. In this article he examines why that is the essentially conservative culture of the military and of the navy and what is needed in order to overcome that conservative culture. He tells us that quote our objective must not be safety first in the sense of adherence to already tested practices and implements but safety first in being the first to recognize the first to experiment with and the first to adopt improvements of distinct military value. Now there's much more collected in the book and as we approach the centenary of our entry into World War I Sims shadow is going to fall widely across the history which we're going to commemorate but his ideas and his thinking and writing have just as much relevance today as they did a hundred years ago. 21st century Sims and my previous book 21st century Mahan were not written to provide prescriptions or equations that will guarantee success today or that will help us face the challenges of tomorrow. Instead from the writing of Sims, Mahan and the other authors and thinkers that we're collecting in the 21st century foundation series readers will see some of what has worked in the past and some of what hasn't. Instead of giving us answers this will help us be better to ask better able to ask the right questions in order to address the challenges we face today. Thank you very much. Sir. How was he received by the British admiral in that first war? He was very well received. Was he really? Sims was a bit of an angle of file like Mahan in that way and got along very well with the British. In fact that's why President Wilson sent him there. It was known that he had good relationships with the admiralty and with the senior leaders of the Royal Navy so when Wilson realized look we're going to enter this war it's going to happen. They turned to Sims to send him over there to start gathering the intelligence and getting us up to speed because they knew he wouldn't have to introduce himself. He already had a trusting relationship with them. In fact he got himself in some trouble as a commander at one point. He was on a port call visiting London and there was a dinner at Guild Hall anyone's ever been to Guild Hall in London they had a dinner there for the officers of the ships that were visiting and he got up and gave an impromptu toast slash speech all about how the Americans and the British should be allies and this was ten years before World War I when we were still developing war plans for a war with Great Britain. So this was a big deal he was way out on a limb he got himself in a little bit of trouble for it but when it came time to send someone to go talk to the Admiralty he was obviously the right man for the job. There's a bit of a follow under that how much insight did he provide in the way of knowing your enemy or go perhaps to Pan or was he a little bit ahead of that time? So he was a little bit ahead of that time his influence in that regard his influence on World War II like I said is this idea of how you structure military education that he solidified and cemented here much of the things that he did war gaming the curriculum, the study of the great strategists was stuff that was done at the war college that he did as a student at the war college and coming out of World War I of a great conflict, a great experience you can either double down on the system make some improvements to it but make sure it keeps working or you can scrap it and try something entirely new he doubled down on the system he wanted to make it solidified and so there's actually a picture over there with his uniform which is in the display case of the class of 23 which was the last class that he oversaw as president and just kind of above him in the picture is Captain Nimitz who was a graduate of that class and so Commander Stark was also in that class so most of the major figures of World War II learned from the system that Sims solidified here as president of the war college what effect did the steam turbine have on the development of the Navy ships and fulfilling with higher pressure boilings? well obviously the technical elements of that were hugely important in the battleship development of those years admittedly in the book I try to avoid the technical there is some of the technical stuff in the first essay which is about the all big gun battleship and the tactical elements of that but the problem is if you get yourself too steeped into those historical technical elements it's going to be a lot harder to pitch to modern readers and officers like myself why this is important to them today so I tried to focus on the work that he did that was more of the strategic or even professional and philosophical nature ma'am I'm interested in Sims the innovator I'm thinking about him being in the 21st century with unmanned systems and he was doing the strategic thinking and looking for today how do you imagine this issue? I suspect he would be the biggest proponent of unmanned systems because in his day he was probably the biggest well not the biggest amongst the biggest naval proponents of air power coming out of World War I air power was still not a foregone conclusion especially naval air power and Sims and his friend Bradley Fisk and Washington chambers were central to at those senior levels getting out there and saying look this is the future we have to get our minds wrapped around this in fact in his years here in the early 20s as president he wrote a letter to Bradley Fisk who was a fellow admiral and innovator in the Navy in which he Sims the battleship guy his entire career was based on battleships he wrote in the letter that the battleship is dead aviation is going to kill the battleship and I think it was either 21 or 22 that he wrote that letter so he was very much on the forefront of that discussion in fact in the military conservatism essay that's in the book at the end of it he explicitly gets to the discussion of both submarines and aviation and how the Navy is screwing up the way they're looking at it at that point in the early 20s because the Navy's conservative culture is fighting this change sir yes I also enjoy your talk addressing the issue of the inertia overcoming inertia of safety I'd also add comfort and safety in there we see this throughout society education not only the military religious institutions do you have any specific thoughts of how to sort of prick that bubble of comfort and safety yeah he gets to it in a roundabout way in his kind of preaching of professionalism or what he viewed as professionalism you know he says that it's it's our job as naval officers as military officers it's our job to be looking for the new or the different to take ourselves out of our comfort zones and as you point out that's not necessarily a very common belief now one of the essays it's collected here towards the end of the book is one that he wrote an article he wrote about the promotion system at the time and the promotion system at the time had just changed in 1916 the naval personnel act is passed and it introduces the idea of promotion by selection everything else up in that until that point was known as waiting for dead men's shoes someone retired or died everybody moved up one position and the act of 1916 introduces promotion by selection where a promotion board sits down and picks the best candidates from promotion to higher ranks so he writes this article about 15 or 16 years later because it doesn't really get implemented until after the first world war because as you run into a mass mobilization of world war one you promote everybody and so it's after world war one that it starts to get implemented in the early 30s he writes this article about the problems that this system creates and one of the things he discusses in it is you're going to have a certain element of the naval officer corps that's going to fight this because they want to be comfortable they like the security and the comfort of knowing that waiting for dead men's shoes means they will eventually promote and so he does talk about it but it's usually in a kind of a philosophical way when discussing other subjects he's obviously written for the professional naval officer but he was there for the expansion during world war one and I assume it applies to world war two where you're expanding you just mentioned that how did he feel about the training of people who are coming into a new expanded Navy? yeah that's actually so the article or essay on military character which I referenced before is explicitly about that so he was invited in and I'm drawing a blank I think it was 1915 as a captain to provide this lecture on military character and it was it was based well it was 15 because it's 100 years ago because it was arguably the birth of the naval reserves the naval volunteers were put together during this time period when the US saw the war in Europe and kind of knew that there's a good chance we're going to get sucked into this but we weren't mobilizing yet and so the department of the Navy put together this group to try and introduce people who were interested in naval service the basics of what it was and it was really a lecture series they took some folks out on a ship for a week or so to let them see what it was like but Sims was asked to deliver this lecture on military character to this group of people who were going to be junior officers maybe relatively mid grade enlisted if a mass mobilization happens and so that's why his essay is very much targeted at that audience not the audience that are going to stay in the Navy and promote up and become admiral someday but the audience that is going to have to do their job and do it well for a few years during the war and what are the kinds of things that they need to know about leadership and about professionalism kind of from that angle and through that prism so it's an interesting study in that regard that he's taking his to that point 30 plus years of experience in the Navy as a career guy and realizing that not everybody is a career guy and that there are still lessons that need to be passed on the interesting dynamic of that is if you're a civilian and you read that essay it's an essay about leadership and character period military or otherwise there are a lot of great lessons in there that folks in industry in the commercial sector in civilian elements of government can learn from as well just out of curiosity one thing how tall was he clearly above average the seams in the picture professor do you know his actual height? I don't no but he was pretty small I was his uniform the uniform actually looks relatively small over there probably there's a relative issue with sizes of the average population 100 years ago as well the other question is I was never in the Navy know nothing about boats what were the specific steps that he instituted that made the artillery so much more effective that hadn't been done before so arguably gunnery hadn't really changed much since the age of sale to that point in terms of technique you had rifle guns so they shot further you had shells now so there were improvements but the actual techniques of gunnery hadn't changed that much which is why Nelson always fought at pistol shot the technique at that time was you'd set the gun elevation the gun director would make a guess as to how far away you know they'd measure how far away the enemy ship was he'd set the elevation of the gun and then you basically kind of time the role of the ship to shoot and try and hit them it's where the phrase firing on the up roll comes from right if you're firing on the up roll you're trying to get it as far as possible so that's where that turn of phrase comes from so what Percy Scott was doing in the Royal Navy that Sims did frankly steal was the guns at the turn of the century had much greater ranges that would be far more effective if you could actually aim them and so he changed the gearing that controlled the elevation of the gun and he made the gearing as small as possible so that the gun director could turn the wheel and constantly be changing how the gun was situated relative to the deck of the ship and as the ship rolled he's constantly changing the gun now it's staying pointed at the enemy the entire time instead of rolling with the ship the guns now aimed at the enemy ship continuously continuous aim fire so now the gun crew can shoot as fast as they can reload and they added a telescopic sight to the gun so now they can see far enough to match the range of the weapon by doing those things and there were some training devices called daughters that went into it some other techniques but that was the fundamentals of it was changing the gearing of the gun and teaching the gun director to continuously aim at the enemy and then his gun crew they could shoot as fast as they could reload one thing you didn't mention is the Tower of Annapolis you wouldn't in the Navy when I was in the Korean War I was told by one of your officers that I might get to be a lieutenant commander after 30 years and I figured why am I restricted and he said you went to the wrong school well so in those days though there was no other school in sims day the naval academy produced all of the officers so there was no ROTC there really wasn't any OCS until after world war one in that period is when those systems started to develop so in sims day in mehans day everybody who kind of came up in the 19th and late 19th century there everybody was in anapolis grad and that's kind of part of the reason why everyone seems to know each other also and you get these animosities that date back to when they were midshipmen together that are still showing themselves as admirals they're still arguing over fights that they had 40 years ago in anapolis but you raise a good point that as the officer corps commissioning sources changed the culture in the navy did have adjustments to be made but that was after this in terms of the historical part sir he did in fact the one picture back here is of him and FDR when assistant secretary the navy Roosevelt came to visit him in London so they did know each other they did work they never really worked together because while sims was on the short list for cno when he came back from the war he also was a bit outspoken and managed to get himself into a little bit of trouble when he spoke his mind in congressional testimony and directly challenged the secretary of the navy on some of the decisions he had made so sims was not in line to become the cno after that but yes they certainly knew each other and at that senior level of navy decision making worked in the same halls did he affect Roosevelt's thinking at all other than losing the job so I don't know that from my limited admittedly limited reading of Roosevelt's experience as assistant secretary of the navy Roosevelt came out of that experience having been the middle man so to speak he was the peacemaker between the secretary Josephus Daniels who had his very specific ways of wanting to do certain things and not carrying what the uniforms thought all the time and the uniforms who thought this crazy civilian had no right telling them what to do both of which probably in the end turned out to be a little bit wrong in both regards but FDR was in the middle and so he was the one who got to know these officers now sims himself and his cohort, his peer group probably didn't have that much direct impact it was the guys that were their subordinates folks like Dudley Knox who I mentioned before who becomes very close to FDR in the interwar years he worked for sims on the staff in London when he was a captain and he had studied here at the war college with him now Knox goes on to a very significant advisory position to FDR in those interwar years as he runs the navy library and the navy historical center but it's those kinds of people it's that generational mentorship and leadership that has the most impact I think probably we have time for about one more BJ's got to get back across the way they're having a conference so one more question anybody thank you so much for coming