 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. Well, good afternoon and welcome to one of our final issues in national security lectures for this academic year. After tonight, we will offer two additional lectures. I'm Professor John Jackson. I'll serve as host for today's event. I'd like to note that we have people gathered here in the auditorium and also on Zoom, and we welcome both audiences. Admiral Chatfield is on travel and is unable to join us this evening, but I welcome you on her behalf. Over the 2022-23 academic year, we have so far offered 12 lectures from some of the best scholars in the world from our resident faculty. This was intended to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic program with the spouses and significant others of our student body. We also welcome participation by 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 members of the military spouses of Newport. The college will be pleased to offer certificates of completion to all participants who attend at least 70 percent of the offered courses or 11 of the 15. You can participate here in the audience via Zoom or even by watching the lectures when they're posted on YouTube. We ask you to keep track of how many you have participated in, and we'll ask you to self-certify your completion towards the end of the series. Looking ahead, next week, and I note not in two weeks, but next week on the 2nd of May, I will present a lecture I call Robots that Fly, Swim, and Crawl. A look at how drones and robots are helping changing the world lives and fights. And on the 16th of May, our final lecture will be a retrospective on Operation Iraqi Freedom by a team of faculty members that were there planning and executing shock and awe two decades ago. Okay, on with the main event. During the presentation that follows, our virtual participants should feel free to ask questions using the chat feature of Zoom, and we will welcome questions from our audience at the conclusion of the prepared remarks. We ask that you use the microphones located at each seat, so all of us, including our virtual participants, can hear the questions. Tonight's speaker has said the Naval War College buildings and other historic surroundings of Coasters Harbor Island are analogous to other global historic locations and are incomparable to the importance to other landmarks such as the Vatican, the Kremlin, the pyramids, or perhaps Tiananmen Square. These are bold statements, but Dave Conan is always willing to back up such statements with facts and stories from the past. His presentation will highlight how the Naval War College has a unique historical capacity to inspire service practitioners and the public at large to understand longer historical trends as we collectively seek to anticipate the challenges of the 21st century and beyond. David Conan completed doctoral studies with the Lawton Professor of Naval History at the University of London, Kings College. As a historian and museums, he produced the award-winning exhibit surrounding the captured German submarine U-505 in Chicago and the battleship USS Wisconsin BB-64 in Virginia. His past published works include 21st century Knox, Influence Seapower and History for the Modern Era, and Commander's Win and Knowles, Winning the U-boat War with Intelligence. Looking to the future, his upcoming book, King's Navy, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King and the Rise of American Seapower, 1897 to 1947, will be published next year. Dr. Conan, over to you, sir. Can you hear me? Are we on? All right, let's do an op test. Okay, so I'm not going to read notes. I like to do the free form approach. In this presentation, if we have time, I'll even show you a picture of Johnny Cash standing right about here in 1975. He played a concert in 1975 St. Patrick's Day from this stage, which is pretty interesting. Now, when we think about the Naval War College as being equivalent to the Vatican, I mean, it's kind of an interesting statement, isn't it? I mean, the Vatican is a symbol of a philosophy, isn't it? There's a lot of symbols of a philosophy on planet Earth. And I'm arguing that this institution, the Naval War College, is also a symbol of a philosophy. Seapower is a concept. Who came up with it? I mean, we can do the Socratic thing. I can ask you, you know, who do you think? You're not going to have a single answer to that question. So today, what I'm trying to do is sort of introduce you to the institutional history and how it inspired people who came here to study questions of strategy and command, whether in peace or war. Now, if you're doing a job well as a naval historian, as a naval thinker, you're not going to focus on the wars. Wars are the failure of strategy. When you think about a war, what's the desired end state in a war? Is it to fight the war or is it to win the war? These are the types of questions that were being asked in the classroom setting of this institution, and not just in these days, back in those days. Now, this is reportedly, this is the oldest image that we have of the Naval War College. And if you look, this is an original print from the early part of the 19th century. And you can see by the caption of this image, what the building was built to do. And can y'all read it? The asylum for the deaf and the dumb. That's what it says. This building was built to house local population. Eventually, it was used for debtors. So if you couldn't pay your taxes, they'd send you to this building. So as you're driving out later on today and you're going past the tennis court, if you couldn't pay your taxes, well, sometimes, you know, you'll end up dying and you can't pay to get buried either. If you go by the tennis court, that's where the graveyard is located. So there's a lot of interesting history here, right just within walking distance from where we are now. And I've always been sort of fascinated with these types of things. When I was working on battleships and German submarines, you know, there's always a human story to these places. And to me, the Naval War College is right up there with the Vatican and other landmarks around the world. For those who come to the Naval War College, you are following in the wake of some very serious thinkers. And I always like to show this slide to students in the classroom setting because what it shows is what I'd like to call the five-star thinkers of the Naval War College, the ones who have ships named after them, the ones who are depicted in all the movies of the Second World War. Well, they were younger once, and a lot of them came to the Naval War College multiple times in their career. I mean, my favorite example, and I'm not trying to sell the book that's coming out with Schiffer Publishing next year, King's Navy. But Ernest King graduated formally this curriculum three times in his career of over 55 years in the Naval Service. So obviously it was an important place for him. Harold Stark is somebody who I'll talk about in this presentation a little bit later. He graduated 100 years ago from the new curriculum of Sims in 1923. His classmate at the Naval War College in the class of 1923 was none other than Chester W. Nimitz, who's depicted right there in the middle. Admiral Halsey, William F. Halsey Jr. came here in 1934, and he came again in his career. Spruance, of course, is another one that we'd like to talk about. All of these personalities came through Newport. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, if you look at the Naval Register, there are 84 admirals on active service. Only two of them were not certified for Naval War College coursework. One of them was a medical doctor, and the other was an engineer. So obviously if you wanted to be a flag officer in the United States Navy, the Naval War College was an important place to try and find a way to get there. That's a bigger conversation that I like to have in the classroom setting and usually not in a didactic way. I usually like to engage the audience in these discussions because I think that the more we explore the maritime dimension of strategy, the more we start to recognize that it's an open question. There's no single answer. And that's one of the reasons why the Naval War College is still one of the most important institutions of its kind on the planet because it's always been a forum that is international in focus. That's what it was established to do. This is how you're supposed to look at the world. By focusing on geographical territory, the green parts of the world, that's what most human beings focus on when they talk about strategy. Rarely do they really think about this area of the world that's essentially ungoverned known as the oceans. But it's all interconnected just as much as the air is interconnected. And so Stephen Lewis, when he came to the Naval War College and said, look, we're going to talk about this stuff, he really had a fight on his hands because Army guys tended to want to talk about the range of guns, how many trenches we can dig, how we seize and hold. Obviously war is the big task at hand. Stephen B. Lewis said that the oceanic landscape is different. We have to think about how to utilize the oceans as much as we think about utilizing land and other areas of human interest. So the Naval War College is kind of an experiment that is still ongoing and you're part of it. Those of you out on the internet, you're part of it too. So when we think about Stephen Lewis' world, Imperial Federation is a concept. Now when I'm saying Imperial Federation, a lot of times people are like, what is that? What's that all about? It's a British concept actually. And if you're an empire and you've been building an empire for like 300 years or so and eventually people get a little bit annoyed with your empire, you start saying to yourself, maybe we need to rebrand this. And so they start talking about Imperial Federation. And when you start thinking about how we got to be here in Newport, this is an original map depicting where you are now during the period when the British were in control in these neck of the woods. So by picking Newport as the place to eventually build the Naval War College, you're already tapping into the history that connects directly to this thing that the British are calling the Imperial Federation in the 19th century. This is a depiction from the 1870s, I'm sorry, 1886 of what the British were talking about. You can see at the bottom of the map it says Imperial Federation and it goes on to the talk about the British Empire. And you can see the cosmopolitan sort of flavor that the British were trying to portray in thinking about their global domain, the British Empire. Now I did mention that we're not part of the British Empire. Did I not? At the beginning of all this, there was a little fight between a guy named George and another guy named George. One of them called himself a king. The other one said I'm just George Washington. And there was a little bit of a conflagration that we call the American Revolution. The British prefer to call it sort of the American succession, I think. But there's different ways of looking at that period when George Washington said I don't want to pay your taxes anymore. There was a lot of history there. Now usually what I like to do to the audience is I ask where are these statues located? And then I usually see a big debate happening about where these statues might be located on planet earth. Well I'm going to give you the answer today, all right? They're located in London. And what's interesting of course is that George Washington in his time declared I shall never step foot on English soil again. And yet here we have a statue of George Washington in downtown London, in Trafalgar Square of all places. Trafalgar Square being the place where we're celebrating the mythology of Lord Horatio Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar 1805, the defeat of Napoleon, all that good stuff, British Empire stuff. Why is there a George Washington statue in downtown London? It's about seapower. That's why. That statue was put there in 1923. And just to honor George Washington's statement, the people of Virginia actually boxed up soil from Virginia and they shipped it over with this statue. And in 1923 they put the soil down as the foundation for the statue and then they put up the statue of George Washington. And people like Winston Churchill were there to dedicate this new statue in Trafalgar Square. And it was declared that we may have lost an American dominion, but we gained a new empire. Now that's pretty racy stuff. Are we an empire? Is the United States an empire? We don't like the word empire in America. We don't like to use that word. We don't like to even think that we're part of that word. But it's an interesting question, isn't it, when we think about what the United States does in the 21st century context. This history is very complicated. And the more we explore it, the more I think we can think about where we are in the contemporary context. Now when we think about history, one thing I will tell you as a practicing historian, number one, it's great to have a job. But all of you are historians. Every single human being on planet earth is a historian. If you have a job where your business card says you're a historian and you teach history, I will tell you it's almost like being cursed. It's hard to have a social life when you're a historian because you'll get into a conversation, right? You'll get into a conversation and you'll start talking about some historical subject and everybody knows something about something. But being a historian, you tend to know, you know about stuff to the extent that you're actually, you can't relate to people. And that was something that Stephen B. Luce recognized as well. Stephen B. Luce being a naval officer, you have a lot of time on your hands. There's no TVs. There's no radios. So what do you do? You read a lot of books, right? And some of the books that Stephen B. Luce used to love to read are books about Horatio Nelson. Horatio Nelson. Now that's a seagoing commander I want to be like. Stephen B. Luce thought that Horatio Nelson was somebody you could learn something from. And of course he goes through the Civil War. He comes out of the Civil War. He's still reading these books about Stephen B. Luce. Well, a lot of these books are being written by a guy named Sir John Knox Lawton. And John Knox Lawton is at King's College London and he's teaching history. He's teaching about Nelson. He's teaching about empire. And at King's College London, he's saying, look, you know, seapower is an idea that we need to continuously revisit and think about how we can harness that, you know, control it, influence it. And Stephen Luce is reading it all in these books. And so he develops a correspondence with John Knox Lawton. And these exchanges are interesting because not only is Lawton inspiring Luce's ideas of seapower, but he's also saying, you know, don't you guys in America have a place where you talk about these things? And Luce would say, well, yeah, we hang around the officer's club and that kind of thing. And sure enough, in the 1870s there's a Scribner's Magazine article where they talk about Stephen Luce teaching officers about advanced concepts of strategy. That's long before 1884. So the activity that Luce is sort of at the center of is something that is sort of growing in an organic way. And eventually it becomes what we now think about as the Naval War College. But it's not a straight line. And certainly it's not only Stephen Luce. There's a lot of other people involved. But eventually he says, you know, we need a place to sort of harness all these discussions. We need a roof over our heads. We can't just always do this on a ship. Why don't we pick a place that's near the fleet ashore and we'll converge there once in a while and we'll have these lectures and discussions and maybe we'll break out some toys and play with the toys on the floor and, you know, have a war game. And if we can't do that, we'll just play chess and, you know, smoke pipes or something. I don't know. This building was vacant. It was right over here on Coaster Harbor Island. And Stephen Luce said, that building looks like the exact place that I want to go to establish my Naval War College. And so he did. And he pulled some strings. You know how this goes. You can't just go up and knock on the door and say, hi, I'm Stephen Luce. He had to work the angles. He had to get congressional support. He had to get permission from the Secretary of the Navy. And eventually in 1884, sure enough, SecNAF said, go ahead, open up your Naval War College. Now, at the time, I will tell you, the U.S. Navy said, why are we doing this? How much is this going to cost? Why are we assigning people there? That's not a ship. That's an island. Why am I putting Navy people on an island in Newport? And Stephen Luce was constantly fighting that battle. And that's a sub-theme of the institution itself. But if you look in the early documents, when Stephen Luce is sort of mapping out what we're doing here on Coaster Harbor Island, and obviously, I am running for office. I'll take your vote. History is the key thing. One of the key things. It's right there next to law. Law is just like history. It's open to debate. Who gets to write the law? There's this thing called admiralty law. Where's the admiralty located? It's not Washington, D.C., right? It's over there in London. So somebody's writing the law, but we're not the ones writing it. And Luce, of course, is saying we should study this and understand it. Let's look at the history as well. There's this guy Nelson. He was somehow able to promulgate an order to people to tell them what he wants them to do, and he didn't have radio communications. He was able to convey what he wanted done to his subordinates in a clear enough manner that he knew that his subordinates could get the job done without his close supervision. That's an art. How do we master that art? Those are the types of questions that Luce was asking when he says history. He was basically saying, the answers are all out there. We just got to talk about it and understand it. Now, when Luce was trying to build the Naval War College, basically from scratch, one of the things you need are people to teach at the Naval War College. And there was this guy who was actually operating off South America at the time, and he had written this book, The Son of a West Point Professor named Dennis Hartmahan. His son is Alfred Thayermahan, and he wrote this book called The Gulf in Inland Waterways. It's about the Civil War and how controlling the Inland Waterways was critical to the Union victory in the Civil War. And Stephen Luce is like, that's a great book. I want him to teach here at the Naval War College. And that's sort of the genesis of how Alfred Thayermahan starts evolving as Luce's protégé into what we now remember as Alfred Thayermahan. And we talk about Mahan as though he knew all the answers before he woke up in the morning. It's just not the case. There's a much longer historical education that comes with all of these figures, and that's something that I really want to emphasize, is that the human dimension is always evolving. But sure enough, the Naval War College provided that sort of venue that Luce was looking for, the forum for discussions of sea power. But to what end? It's one thing to have a discussion. It's one thing for you to sit there and listen to Dave Conan talking about all these guys. But what's the purpose of it? What's the purpose of the discussion? There's got to be a discussion of what the purpose is. So what they start thinking about is what's our policy? And in the 19th century, the United States policy was basically it was the Monroe Doctrine, which was we're part of the planet earth. We recognize that there are all these other empires around the planet. We'd like to do business with them, but we're going to focus on building the United States into the United States. We got railroads to build. So 1832, the Monroe Doctrine is what defined essentially what defined American policy during the 1800s. Once you start getting into the early 20th century, things are starting to change. And Luce recognized that. And we weren't part of the British Empire. At the same time, the British Empire was still sort of part of us. And Luce was talking about this stuff. We were right there on the cutting edge of technology. And Luce and Mahan were talking to practitioners about that technology, that technological advantage. Does that sound familiar, by the way? I always find it interesting when flag officers have said to me, well, those were simpler times. It was much easier back then. No, it wasn't. It was far more complicated by comparison with our situation on planet earth today. When you think about the transition from steam, I'm sorry, from sail to steam, and from coal fire to oil, and then you think about airplanes in 1903. You have the first transatlantic signal from Marconi. You've got submarines. That's pretty complicated stuff. Do you know how to use all this stuff? No. So the naval war colleges is starting to track all the new technological innovations. They're looking at Nelson's writing style. How do we apply Nelson's principles of command to wireless communications? That's an interesting discussion. Those are the types of things that they were talking about here at the Naval War College. Mahan continuously writes. There's a whole shelf of books that you can read. And if you read them with an applied view of what it all means for the contemporary discussion, you're going to find a lot of really interesting ideas in those books, even though it's written in this sort of flowery 19th century prose. I always like to trot out this pamphlet that Mahan wrote in 1910. Mahan's looking at the world he's in, and he's saying, you know, there's this British sea power over there. They control planet Earth. The sun never sets. Blah, blah, blah, blah. It's an empire. And then there's this up-and-coming, technologically very interesting country that was just really sort of glued together through war. And they wear pointy helmets. And, you know, their boss is called the Kaiser. You know, they're really interesting people, too, because, you know, they gave us frankfurters. We'll call them hot dogs at the baseball game. But Mahan was really worried about what was going on over in Europe, because the consequences of this rivalry between Britain and Germany extended all over the planet Earth. If that became a war, Mahan said, we Americans are going to be stuck in the middle. And, oh, by the way, the majority of Americans are the British. I mean, most of the loyalists ran off to Canada after Washington won, right? Are the British our friends? Eh, maybe? Are the Germans our friends? I mean, a goodly number of Americans are recent German immigrants, so maybe they're, I mean, which side are we going to be on if these two parties have a fight? If you take the text, I think it's only like eight pages or so. If you take the text of this pamphlet that Mahan publishes, I think it's two pennies? Anyway, I can't remember. It's really cheap. It's a pamphlet. If you take the text and you put, I don't know, America and China in the places where Britain and Germany appear, it's an interesting intellectual exercise. Now, historians will tell you you shouldn't do that. But here at the Naval War College, you have to do that. That's applied methodology. It's the so what that admirals always want to hear. That's why we need to study this stuff consistently. Now, we're doing okay. We're about halfway there. Has anybody ever heard of a guy named Theodore Roosevelt? I mean, he was very bombastic. You couldn't miss him. Like, if he was walking down the street, you'd be like, oh, my God, that's Theodore Roosevelt. Definitely. He was one of those guys. He had a way about him. And when he was assistant secretary of the Navy, that means he's not the secretary of the Navy, but don't tell Teddy because he thinks he's in charge anyway, because he's Teddy. When he was assistant secretary of the Navy, 1897, he came here to the Naval War College and he gave an address just like I'm giving you an address, except he used notes. He was much more articulate. One of the things that Teddy Roosevelt said is, we need a Navy. We need a big Navy that can go toe to toe with any Navy on the planet Earth. And we've got to be friends with everybody on planet Earth because I don't want to have a fight. I want to speak softly and carry a big stick. But if you mess around in the United States, me, Teddy Roosevelt, I'm not okay with that. Okay, Britain? Did you hear me, Japan? That's what Teddy Roosevelt's saying. And he gives a speech over and over again. Eventually it gets published in the New York Times. This speech is really great because what Teddy Roosevelt says in this speech, he ends up calling it the Navy as peacemaker. Now, I always like to trot this one out for my students because when I say peacemaker, what do we usually think of when we say peacemaker? Oh, hit peace. Peacemakers, guitars, Grateful Dead? No. Not in Teddy Roosevelt's world because there was this handy thing called the Colt 45, peacemaker in Teddy Roosevelt's world. So there's a double meaning to the word peacemaker in Teddy Roosevelt's time. And one of the things that Teddy says, and I think is useful for us to think about as we look at our Navy of the future, is the Navy of the United States is the right arm of the United States and is emphatically the peacemaker. So here's my peacemaker. I guess this is my left arm for everybody looking. And then he goes on to say, whoa, be to our country if we permit the right arm to become palazed or even become flabby and inefficient like mine. So in other words, what he's saying is if you have a weak Navy, you don't want to be on planet Earth because it's dangerous out here. I think it's an interesting speech that Teddy gave. And he gave it over and again. Now, this is Teddy welcoming home the Great White Fleet. And I love this picture because there's a lot of interesting people in this audience. This audience, not that one. I'm serious. There's a lot of interesting people in this audience. Now I'm talking about the picture. All right, Teddy gives this speech. He says, hey, guys, look, you know, we didn't have a war and good job getting home with those coal-fired ships. I know you barely got home, but you did a good job going around the world having a great time. Show me those tattoos later on that you got in Hong Kong. You know, join the Navy, see the world. It's a recruiting tool in those times. Well, in this audience, when the Great White Fleet came home, are two very, very interesting people. One of them is the guy with the awesome goatee, William S. Sims. And the other is this young lieutenant standing slightly behind him right here, Ernest J. King. Now, Sims would go on to become the commander of U.S. forces in Europe. And Ernie King would be the one who would command global forces in the Second World War, not too long after this, just about 30 years later or so. And when you start looking at the human connections, the human experiences, you start to see history bleeding through. So you remember I said this place is a lot like the Vatican? It is for American seapower from that standpoint. When we think about the people and trying to understand what this institution is supposed to do, there's a big debate that still happens about what it is. There are other war colleges. There are other staff schools. Heck, there's an army, there's a Navy, now there's an Air Force. They all have an institution that they call a war college, more or less. But this is the original. This is the original naval war college. It wasn't even called the naval war college at the beginning. It's just war college because it's a forum. It's still a forum for discussions of seapower. And by the way, we're not here to be right. We're just here to inform each other about what we think. There's no actual answer to the question. That's not me saying it. That's what this guy, William S. Sim, said. Cheer up, Navy. When you're sending people to Newport, they're not wasting their time. Cheer up. They're not wasting their time. There's no naval war college. They're not just sitting there reading books. They're actually busy. They're thinking about the future by looking at the past in order to anticipate what the future might be. It's like predicting the weather. So cheer up, Navy. Go ahead and keep sending people to Newport. He wrote that. It was published in the proceedings. It was very provocative at the time because at the time they wanted to shut the place down because it's expensive. It's interesting. Now when you look at Sims, he ends up coming to Newport as the president of naval war college and then his phone rings. By the way, he was a captain when he came here as president of naval war college. His phone rings and the United States decides to go to World War I. And you know how this goes. There's only so many billets in the U.S. Navy. Who do we have available to send to London? So Sims' phone rings over here in quarters AA. Hey, can you come down to Washington? Don't tell anybody you're coming there, especially don't tell your wife. I know you have five kids, but we need you in Washington right now. II. He takes the train to Washington, meets with Admiral Benson, meets with Secretary of the Navy Daniels. Hey, President Wilson thinks he's going to declare war, but he hasn't decided yet. Can you get to London and figure out who we need to talk to, captain? Oh, by the way, when you get to London, you can call yourself an Admiral. So when Sims goes to London, without a uniform, by the way, he gets to London. He's a captain, technically, but he's been selected for promotion to Admiral. When he gets to London, he calls himself Admiral Sims. There's no uniform. So they take him down to Savile Row and they fit him out with a uniform. And that uniform is currently on display in the Naval War College Museum. If you go see that uniform, it's got two stars on it. Now, if you're the chief of naval operations and you're thinking Captain Sims is over there in London, figuring out who we should be talking to, are you ready to see the newspaper headline that says Admiral Sims is there and he's now the commander? That's how we ended up in World War I, trying to figure out how to do this type of stuff. Sims was sent over there in April of 1917 and he basically had to build the headquarters from the bottom up. Now, when the Americans arrive in London, it's pretty radical because a lot of Americans had German and Irish names and from a British point of view, it's like, you're the enemy, right? From an American point of view, we're looking at the British, it's like, well, we had this guy named George Washington and I guess we're friends now? We're not quite sure what we are. And so when the Americans get to London, the one place that they could sort of converge and have a nice discussion over drinks and cigars over at the In-N-Out Club or wherever they were hanging out in Piccadilly, history became sort of a place where they could go and start gluing together the alliance. And that this time, Sir Julian Corbett was introduced to Admiral Sims. And Corbett said, look, I've got this thing called the historical section. It's kind of like we do a lot of intelligence analysis. We've got these long-haired hippie historians who work for us and they produce strategic assessments of what's going on. You guys could do the same type of thing and you already have the personnel over here to do it. Tracy Barrett Kittridge, this fine gentleman here, this guy. My laser doesn't work. This is Kittridge. He was already in England. He was working for Herbert Hoover for the Belgium Relief effort. But he had gone to Oxford and Cambridge so he had all these British friends. And Corbett introduced Kittridge to the American headquarters staff under Sims. And Kittridge became the de facto intelligence officer. So if you weren't a naval officer the day before, Sim said, poof, you're my intelligence officer. Go get a uniform. That's how that worked. Captain Dudley Knox arrived at Christmas time 1917 and he took charge of the planning section of the American naval headquarters under Sims. Within the planning section, there was an intelligence section under Kittridge. Kittridge created a historical section as an adjunct to the intelligence section. And that's the genesis of the American historical section, which was based completely off the model that was provided by Sir Julian Corbett. And why am I waxing poetic about this? The reason I'm waxing poetic about this is because this model of a historical section, as you see, it reports all the way up to the cabinet. The British, that's sort of like the Joint Chiefs, I guess. That's not quite right. But they have influence. These historians have influence on policy and strategy. And when Sim sees this, he creates the same thing. And guess what he does with it when he comes back to the Naval War College in 1919? He creates a historical section here at the Naval War College. And the purpose of that historical section was to learn the lessons. One of the first products that these Americans end up producing is the American Naval Planning Section, London, which is sort of a collection of original documents. And ultimately, it becomes the lessons learned manual for things not to do if ever you find yourself in another World War. So if you're in World War I, this is kind of the manual of things not to do if you find yourself in World War II, right? So when you start thinking about how this applies from a historical standpoint, you can't really understand World War II unless you have taken a little bit of time to study the First World War and how people were thinking. Alliances. It ain't pretty. I mean, they call them allies, but a lot of these folks really didn't like each other that much. They all sort of worked towards a common end. That common end was the defeat of the central powers of Ottoman Empire, Austria, Hungary. And of course, Kaiser Wilhelm was not somebody that we thought very highly of in Germany. And eventually, they defeated the central powers. The question now is, what do we do? We've won the war, but have we won the peace? And so they all go to Versailles, which is in France, Paris. And they have a huge fight in the Hall of Mirrors with each other. One of the things that the British wanted to do is create the League of Nations Navy, which was sort of a new idea. It's a build off of the Imperial Federation concept that I was talking about before. Basically, what they wanted to do is create a consortium of naval powers to preserve the peace. And it just didn't work out. It just didn't work out. These ideas for creating these multinational alliances just, it was too hard a century ago. Now, you can see this picture. I'm gonna, sorry, you're never supposed to turn your back to the camera. But anyway, here's Admiral Sims with this gentleman here, Winston Churchill. And the day before they go down the street to Stanford Bridge for an American baseball game with Army and Navy. Churchill gives this great speech in which he says the Declaration of Independence is not only an American document, it follows on Magna Carta and the Petition of Right as a third of the great title deeds on which the liberties of the English-speaking, I'm saying it, race, that's Churchill talking, are founded. Buy it, we lost an empire and buy it, we also preserved an empire. That's Winston Churchill. Now, obviously I didn't deliver it nearly as dramatically as I could have with Winston. But these ideas that America is really a British invention are sort of defining for how the British were talking to us. I'm not gonna talk about this too much, but one of the things I'll say about World War I is you see these junior officers doing great things together, such as underway replenishment using oil. And this is actually the sketch. We do underway replenishment the same way, more or less, in the contemporary context. These are just two junior officers figuring out how to make it work. And they did it 100 years ago for the first time. When we think about the Naval War College, what I want you to remember today is that this has always been a global forum. It's always been a global forum. The first foreign graduates were as early as the 1890s. And loose, when he established the place, didn't think it was really a college in the sense that it was a place where you have professors and students. He was trying to say that it's an institution where we gather for practical strategic reasons to develop our ideas for application in the future. And history is the foundation for doing it. Now, you're in a very historic part of the planet Earth. And I don't know if I've convinced you that the Naval War College is equivalent to the Vatican or anything like that. But I argue that it is. It's a place where concepts of sea power really matured and became real for the American. And the Second World War is something that we can talk about in the future. But I hope today I've introduced you to some interesting things to think about as we consider the future of history, not only at the Naval War College, but in the global maritime arena. And I'll close it with this picture. This picture of Lord Beatty who commanded warships at the Battle of Jutland and charged right in for the fight at Jutland. And a lot of ships got sunk and people were killed while he became the first sea lord towards the end of the First World War. And one of the things that happened in 1918 was the Grand Fleet exercises of 1918. And these things were designed to keep the German fleet from coming out, you know, basically a show of force. Here's the flag. Look at the American and British warships. Oh, there's a French warship. And basically saying, Germany, stay in port. Don't come out here for a fight because we'll sink you. So during the Grand Fleet exercises in 1918, Beatty was in command of the Grand Fleet. And King was standing behind Beatty on the bridge of HMS Iron Duke, just quietly standing there watching Beatty in command. It was a foggy day in 1918. And out of the mist came Admiral Sturdy. And Admiral Sturdy crossed the T of Admiral Beatty. Now when an adversary crosses your T in a battle line, that's not good. That means you lost. Well, when Admiral Sturdy humiliated Lord Beatty during the Grand Fleet exercises, Beatty did this. He cinched his hat down very dramatically and he stuck his hands in his pocket. And he said, excellent, good, good work. Excellent, good work, gentlemen. And then he walked off the bridge as though he won. And Ernest King noted that. He said, that's how you need to look when you lose. Now King struck the same pose later on for his official portrait when he was a five star Admiral in command in the Second World War. And Samuel Elliott Morrison wrote a letter to another of King's friends and said, why has he got his hands in his pocket like that? And Dudley Knox responded, well, that's King doing his Beatty because he always thought that that was the look of a winner. And with that I'll close. I hope you've enjoyed my presentation. Thank you out there. Okay, we've got time for a few questions. Does anyone here in the audience have a question? Any takers, please? If teaching naval strategy is so important to the U.S. Navy, how come that not all flag officers of the U.S. Navy come through the the Naval War College? I really can't respond to that. I wish that flag officers come through just as a matter of course. Primarily because that's what Stephen Loose would have wanted, I think. And others. I mean, I think Ernest King would say that you when Ernest King was the chief in naval operations and something they called the synchus back then or commander in chief U.S. fleet are equivalent today of fleet forces command. Ernest King would have said, you can't be a flag officer in my Navy unless you've completed war college in some way, whether it be resident or correspondence course. That rule, you know, was an informal rule and even back in King's day it was difficult to get orders to the Naval War College. But it was sometimes easy. So in King's case, I'm just using him because he's useful for the moment. He took the staff course in 1916 as a lieutenant commander. That would be an equivalent to the course that we offer here at the college today known as MSOC or Moz is also a course that I think is kind of analogous to the 1916 version of the staff course. And you could not be assigned to a fleet staff as a mid-grade junior officer unless you'd completed that staff course. So King, when he was based here, he walked up the hill and said, hey, I'd like to take the staff course. And he did. Then in 1924, he completed the correspondence course while he was in command of a ship, the bridge. He was in command of a logistics support ship. And he told the wardroom, I really believe that we need to do war college courses. And he did the whole, what they call the war college afloat curriculum. So as the commander, he expected you, if you were on his ship, to enroll in the correspondence course. And he would be the professor. So, you know, if you want to get a good fit rep from Ernest King, you would have wanted to take correspondence course with him, right? Later on, when he completed command on the Lexington as a aircraft carrier commander, Admiral Pratt and Admiral Schofield basically said, well, it looks like you know how to handle these brand new platforms that we don't know how to handle. So, Ernie, you're probably going to make flag pretty soon. You're a captain now. Your board is convening in 1932 and we think it'd be a good place for you to go resident course as a senior officer. And King said, aye, aye, I'm all over it. A lot of other officers would have said, well, I'd prefer a battleship. I've already done that, that war college stuff. King said, oh, no, I'd like to go there. And then Admiral Pratt actually wrote a letter to King. He said, you know, if you do happen to pick up flag, we'd like to keep you there as the president of the Naval War College. How does that sound to you? And King said, well, that'd be great. He actually bought a house at number 24 K Street. And that's where the King family was living when they were here. And I've done, there's a totally separate project where I've mapped out where key people were living when they were here in Newport. Loose Hall used to be the barracks until 1914. So if you were assigned here, you would actually live in Loose Hall. So there was no escaping your homework. You were there. David, someone has said, you tease us a little bit about Johnny Cash. Okay. Tell us how that came about. Sure. Yeah. When I was a student here at the Naval War College, this tells you something. I was working in the archives with Evelyn Cherpac, John Hattendorf and a few other folks. And I was doing advanced research for my war college stuff. And we were going through and it was interesting, all the stuff that we have in the Naval War College archival collections. There was a pretty extensive audio library in our collections. And there was a tape of Johnny Cash's concert. So there was a lot of folklore about what happened here. And I heard stories that Elvis came here and others. And so we have a recording. Oh, there it, thanks. Thanks, brother. You always have a good sound, man. You're gonna be okay. Anyway, I also play guitar. And I'm a really big guitar music kind of guy. And I was very curious it said Johnny Cash in the Tennessee three or something like that. And I'm like, wow, that's interesting. So this recording has always been out there in the ether. This picture of Johnny on this stage has always sort of been around the college. You know, there were some old folks at the college who had this picture. I shouldn't say old folks. I mean, but there were people who were aware that this happened on St. Patrick's Day 1975. Well, COVID happened. And you know, there's Dave sitting at home with his daughters running around and I'm playing guitar and I'm like, ah, you know, that there's a project for me. And I what I asked was how did this ever happen? Why did it happen? And I found out there was this guy named Captain Roy Cash who came here to the Naval War College and was a student 1974 1975 call sign outlaw. So I'm like, okay, Roy Cash was a student here that that must be it. So I go out on the LinkedIn and I should be careful about how I sourced all this. I ended up contacting Roy Cash. And, you know, I left a message. And by the way, I got I got to him through his daughter and I'm not going to get on to all of that detail. But one day I'm there at home and COVID had been over. I think this is last year or something. I forget now phone rings and it says cash Roy. I'm like, I answer it. And it said, is this commander Dave Conan? And I said, yeah, sure is. And I'm like, is this really Roy Cash? He's like, it absolutely is. You can call me outlaw. I mean, and I had a great conversation with him and I he told me about how the concert happened. They actually had dinner. I'm sorry, they had lunch at quarters a a. And there's a great picture of them in quarters a enjoying the hospitality of the college. And then after they had lunch, they rehearsed in Mahan Ratunda with acoustic guitars, the Tennessee three being the band with June Carter cash and Carly Perkins who did, you know, blue suede shoes. And gosh, I wish they were to recorded that the acoustic set in Mahan Ratunda. That must have been just brilliant. But then the band was doing the sort of, you know, preamble here, you know, the pre music. And then Johnny would have come through one of these doors and he would have stood problem. Well, he would have been right about here, I guess, playing guitar for you. And it's it's almost three hour show. It's a great show. My brother, Dan, who's a Naval Academy graduate actually cleaned up the recording. And I've been working with Roy and the cash family to, you know, re-release that as a new, you know, remastered recording. And it's a it's a real gem. It's a real piece of American history because the audience being Naval War College audience fresh out of Vietnam, Roy Cash, by the way, is one of the guys who got a silver star for shooting down a MIG. He commanded Top Gun. So he's a real Naval aviator. And they were asking Johnny questions like, Hey, Johnny, what was it like hanging out, you know, smoking things with Bob Dylan? You know, and what does it all mean? And Johnny was answering these questions. And there's a great little tidbit in the exchange between Johnny and the audience where he says, you know, I was in the Air Force. And I was a radio intercept specialist in the Air Force. So me being the historian, I pulled the string on that and through my friends at National Security Agency, Cryptologic History Branch, I was able to get Johnny Cash's service jack, the class, the declassified version. And sure enough, he was the guy who was meritoriously promoted for being the radio intercept guy who intercepted the message that Joseph Stalin had died in 1954. And he got meritorious promotion to Staff Sergeant in the Air Force. And then the Air Force said, Johnny, we'd like to keep you in the Air Force, maybe even make you an officer. And Johnny said, you know, I've just written this song called Folsom Prison Blues. He wrote it in Germany. His band was called the New Bavarians at first, and they were singing German folk songs. And then they became the New Barbarians because the Germans were always laughing at them. And they were, it's just a great story. If you ever wondered how Johnny got that sort of interesting guitar strum, that's Morse code. And I learned that in the process of writing this article that Roy Cash and I have written, and it will be coming out in the Northern Mariner maybe later this year, perhaps next year. But I'll let you all know. You know, here's the great thing about history. It's never written. The great thing about history is never written, but it already happened. So you don't have to worry about it, right? All right. Well, David, super job is always we went from the Naval War College to the Vatican and the Pope to the king of country music. So I think we pretty much covered the territory here tonight. So thank you, David. I'll take you to the moon. Thanks. I'll take you to the moon next time. There you go. Thanks. All right. Well, that concludes our session. We'll see you next week. Good night.