ADDRESS BY VADM STANSFIELD TURNER, USN PRESIDENT, NAVAL WAR COLLEGE TO CHICAGO COUNCIL NAVY LEAGUE OF THE UNITED STATES LAKE SHORE CLUB

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01554R003500280001-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 54
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 18, 2001
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 9, 1973
• Content Type: SPEECH

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Address
by
VADM Stansfield' Turner, USN
President, Naval War College
to
Chicago Council
Navy League of the United States
Lake Shore Club
9 March 1973
Navy Declassification/Release Instructions on File
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Thank you. Distinguished guests, members of the Chicago
Council of the Navy League.
It's a pleasure to be with you tonight and to participate
in the annual winter meeting of the Ninth Region's largest
Navy League Council.
I want you to know that my visit to Chicago this week is
also a real homecoming. I spent my childhood days through
graduation from high school in Highland Park. My folks lived
here in the area until just recently when Dad retired and they
moved to Charlottesville, Va. It's a wonderful opportunity
for all of us to get together and to see old friends again and
I am grateful to you, the Chicago council, for helping
-Co make it all possible.
I'd like to talk to you -today about higher education in
the Navy. Obviously, this kind of education is of interest
to me, but I think that it is also of interest to all of you.
In my opinion, what we are doing in higher naval education
mirrors the changes and trends throughout your Navy today.
Let me start by describing what we are attempting to
achieve at our highest Naval educational institution, the Naval
War College, at Newport, Rhode Island.
We work at Newport with hand-picked officers at mid-career,
largely LCDRS & Cdrs. Most of them come to us with a back-
ground of education, experience and training which inculcates
in them a view of a rational, Newtonian Universe, one in which
there are precise, right and wrong answers for almost every
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problem. This is in part because an officer's vocational
experience is in an authoritarian chain of command. The obli-
gations of responsibility and authority are to make decisions
quickly and correctly. It is in part because we live in a
technical environment, one which demands particular skills
which can be performed only one way, the right way, not the
wrong way.
Now there is nothing wrong with this. We are a very
technical service, but what I am suggesting is that as officers
move up the ladder, they must be able to deal increasingly
with situations like strategy and personnel management that
are not simple and direct, are not susceptible to precise
right or wrong answers. My job at the Naval War College is to
educate people to deal with such issues; to get officers to
recognize the subtleties, the uncertainties and the inexact-
ness of the decision process of being a senior naval officer.
Now at the War College we are trying to approach this
problem through a new curriculum that we have instituted this
year. Let me start by illustrating how we tackle the ques-
tion of broad national strategy, the issue of what the Navy,
can contribute in the post-containment era, or multi-polar
world, or whatever one calls.the new international arrangements
that are emerging today.
We have put Strategy into our curriculum through the
device of military history. We have asked the students to
dissect the decisions of strategists of the past. For instance
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we began this year--and it was something of a shock to the stu-
dents, I.must admit--by reading Thucydides' History of the
Peloponnesian Wars. Now these wars were nearly twenty-five
hundred years ago. Many of the students asked, "How in the
world can this be relevant to what.1 am doing in the last
part of the twentieth century?"
Well, the wars between Athens and Sparta were wars
between a seapower and a landpower; they were wars in which
the seapower, Athens, decided to send an expedition across
the seas to as far away as Sicily. The expeditionary force
became overextended; it became bogged down. The people of
Athens refused to continue supporting what was going on so
far away from home. The consequences were severe.
The analogies are obvious. So we tried having the
officers look at the factors that influenced the decisions of
the Athenians and of the Spartans. This made them realize
that the issues of whether to send a campaign overseas or not,
whether to follow a maritime strategy or a land strategy, are
issues that people have grappled with for many years. They
are issues that are not easily resolved, but many of the funda-
mental considerations have not changed all that much, over
these years.
Next we looked at other cases of. military history:
the Napoleonic Wars; our Civil. War; the Spanish-American War;
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asking questions like: "Were we imperialistic in 1898? Have
we been imperialistic since then?"
Now we don't believe that history is going to repeat
itself. We do believe that today's officers must be able to
cope with the principles behind history and be able to answer
questions like, "What does it mean to be moving into a
'Multi-polar' world?" and "Where in this kind of complex
situation does the United States fit?"
In truth, there are-no precise, easy answers to ques-
tions like these. Therefore, what we are trying to do in
higher naval education today is to help our mid-career offi-
cer students emerge into this world of the social sciences
from the precise world of the technical sciences. We want to
do this by giving them an experience in intense thinking, in
reasoning and logic and familiarity with the historical per-
spective.
We are emphasizing the thinking process, not the absorp-
tion of facts. How do we do this? We do it primarily by
making the student think it out for himself. For instance,
our students were only required to be on the campus five hours
a week during the strategy course. They had two required
lectures and a three-hour seminar. Now the rest of the time
wasn't exactly leisure. We gave.them a thousand pages of
military history to read each week. We required them each to
write an essay every third week and an examination every
fourth. What we were trying to do, though, was to give them
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enough latitude to explore many facets of these particular
problems; to look at many of the various issues that impinged
on the decisions of military leaders in the past. We wanted
our students to be forced to do their own digging in their
historical case studies. In the future they are going to have
to dig out for themselves what lessons are applicable to the
particular cases in military decisions that they will be deal-
ing with in 1974 or 1978 or whenever it may be. The facts
that are relevant to our strategy today are not likely to
remain so, four, five or ten years from now. But the princi-
ples, the process of thinking and reasoning will be, and that
is what we're trying to get across.
Strategy is not the only thing that we teach. Naval
officers today, more than ever before perhaps, are managers.
They are continually faced with difficult decisions of choice,
because we never have and never will have as much money as
we think necessary. They are faced with issues like: if you
had a billion dollars in the Navy budget, would you spend it
on four nuclear-powered guided missile frigates or on twenty
destroyer escorts? Now almost anyone would prefer the nuclear
frigates, and there are some situations where we absolutely
can not do with less. Nothin5 less would survive. There are
other situations, however, where four or five of those fri-
gates just. would not go far enough around. We might have ten
or twenty places where they were needed. Obviously we are
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going to end up with some compromise, perhaps a mix of two
frigates and ten destroyer escorts, or one frigate and fifteen
escorts. How,do we decide on that mix? It is difficult.
Here, again, it is not as precise as solving technical problems
such as, how do you put a missile together, or how do you run
the engineering plant of a destroyer?
What we are doing is teaching the students to approach
these complex problems by first asking, "What is the objective?
Why do you want a frigate;-why do you want a destroyer escort?"
These are very imprecise questions; they are answered much as
we do in strategy by looking at the broad ends that we are
trying to achieve and making a judgment as to what our objec-
tive should be. We are trying to make the students appreciate
that setting objectives is an important, but not a precise
step that they must take.
Then we go on to the controversial field of analysis and
systems analysis. We say that having established an objective,
you can use tests, or analytic techniques, to help you to make
your choices between the escorts and the frigates or whatever
it may be. But then, we caution the student that in the long
run, having done the very best analysis and made the very best
decision, if you can't get the Congress to buy it, you haven't
accomplished a thing. Of if you can't get industry to build
it for you at something like the cost that you estimated, you
haven't accomplished a thing. How then do you get a decision
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executed? It is again, a very. imprecise process. It is a mat-
ter of judgment; a matter of your feeling for public opinion;
your feeling for the state-of industry and their attitudes;
your feeling for the opinions and rigidities within your own
bureaucracy.
So here again, in the management field, what we are
attempting to produce. in higher Naval education is officers
who understand that they must combine the techniques of the
physical sciences with which they are familiar and comfortable,
with the inexactness and approximation-of the social sciences.
Finally, the last part of our curriculum at the War
College concerns what we call Tactics. With the diminished
size of the military establishment, we must be able to get
the very most from every unit that we have. We must employ
our forces tactically in the best way possible..
Here, in Tactics, the methodology of the scientific
approach is very much with us. After all, in any tactical
interaction, there are mathematical-estimations that can be
made. A radar has a certain range, acertain probability of
detection and certain errors that you can anticipate. Theore-
tically, you can work out quite precisely what to expect under
certain circumstances.
There is one hitch of course. Sometimes we do not really
know what numbers to put in these mathematical equations. We
do not know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow
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afternoon; and we are not even sure when the weather is bad
what effect this has on the radar. We are not too sure whether
the radarman is going to be inattentive tomorrow morning,
because he did not get enough sleep, or whether he is going
to be highly motivated because he recognizes the importance
of what he is doing. Officers must be willing and able to
make their own estimates on how well a radarman is going to
perform, and combine that with an exact calculation of the
characteristics, frequencies, ranges and other details of the
radar.
So the tactics part of this course is systematic. It
.ends up with probabilities, rather than preciseness. There
is a probability that under circumstance A you will do well.
There is a probability that under circumstance B you will do
poorly. You, the tactical commander, must do calculations,
using intuition, guesses or whatever to fill in the missing
numbers, but somehow you must decide how you are going to play
your forces in any given situation.-
If we can just teach the students to be systematic and
logical in their approach, their guesses will be more than
that. We want them to understand that even if tactical choices
cannot be calculated precisely, it is a big help to identify
your choices explicitly and to know what estimates and guesses
you must make.
Now this process of developing leaders who can deal with
the uncertainties of Strategg, with the combination of precise
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analysis and judgment in Management and with the probabilities
of Tactics means several things to us. One is that there will
be more emphasis on mid-career War College education in our
new Navy. There has been, of course, a marked increase in
mid-career executive development programs since World War II.
The Harvard Business School was one of the first to move into
this field in 1943. Today over 50 universities conduct full
time executive development programs. A number of large cor-
porations such as General Electric and Motorola have their own
in-house programs. So does the American Management Association,
the International Marketing Institute and the International Bank
for Reconstruction and Development. Our program in the Navy,
though, is placing emphasis on two particular directions that
are significant.
First, we are setting truly demanding academic standards
and making the student-officer measure up. Our course is, I
believe, academically equivalent to the master's degree programs
at many of our universities. We require written reports. We
test our students with written examinations. We are breaking
away from the comfortable tradition that business/military
executives at age 40 or thereabouts, are above this sort of
thing and should not be subjected to the embarrassment of
public competition. As I will explain in a moment, the stakes
are too high in my business to be that gentlemanly any longer.
At the same time, I would acknowledge that there are
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risks in this new approach. Mid-career student-officers are
fiercely competitive. Too much emphasis on measuring their
performance could distort their efforts from learning to
winning. There is also, frankly, a risk of breaking the spirit
of some who cannot make the grade. That might just be viewed
as Darwinian in civilian life. In our walk of life we must
be careful that we do not by-pass a man of exceptional leader-
ship and fighting qualities, such as a "Bull" Halsey, even if
he were not a star in the classroom.
Our second point of emphasis is on deliberately attempt-
ing to reshape the habits of thinking of our student-officers.
We are not imparting information or updating factual data
banks. We inevitably acquaint: the student with some new know-
ledge, but that is a by-product. Reshaping habits of thinking
at age 41--the average age in our senior course--is not easy.
It is not even a cinch at the average age of 33 in our junior
program.
We are debating whether our emphasis should be on the
younger or older group. It may be more difficult to get this
new approach to take with the over-40's, but if we concentrate
on.the more malleable men in their 30's, we may not select the
right ones. That is, the ones who will rise by their 40's and
50's to positions that truly require this enlarged mental outloo
More than all this, this whole idea is risky business.
Some men may simply lose their bearings in a new world of
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uncertainty and inexactness. We may deprive them of their
confidence that there are right answers without developing a
competence to cope with uncertainty.
Why are we accepting all of these risks in demanding
high academic performance and in attempting to restructure
thought processes? In part because we are proud to have been
in this mid-career education business at Newport since 1884,
60 years before it began to catch fire in the business world.
We are willing to experiment and to see whether new approaches
and emphasis are appropriate to the changing times. Whether
these may also be appropriate to, the business world, I am not
qualified to judge. I am persuaded, though, that in the world
of the military of the 1970's and 1980's there will be demands
for higher intellectual standards and for greater competitive-
ness. The gentlemanly fraternal spirit is waning. Why?
First, because we in uniform simply must be able to pre-
sent our case in a more convincing manner to a more sophisticated
audience. We are, quite properly, under closer scrutiny today
than perhaps ever before. If we do not or can not make our
case well, this criticism could possibly lead this country into
a repetition of its rejection of military preparedness as in
the 1920's and 1930's. Lack of preparedness today would have
more serious consequences than it.did then. Our position and
responsibilities in the world are vastly different. With
intercontinental nuclear weapons abroad in the world, the con-
sequer l 'o d C g iee /9 /0 CI QP i@ 4~4Q ~Q ~ ? and
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they spill over into the other military areas.
Moreover, it seems to me that the peace time balance of
military forces has greater impact on world events than in
days past. Modern weapons-present an image.of swiftness.
Other nations look to what we could do for them today, not
just what we could do after a long-period of mobilization.
Although it places an increased burden on us, we in
military uniform should be pleased at the increased attention
and interest today in what we are doing. It is forcing us into
the hard thinking which will enable us to answer our critics
in comprehensible terms. It is forcing us to define explicitly
what we need in order to.achieve whatever the nation sets as
.goals for deterrence through preparedness. It is forcing us
not to ask for 2 airplanes or 2 ships or 2 tanks when one would
have sufficed, lest in a loss of credibility we get none. I
welcome this increasing interest in and awareness of our mili-
tary purposes and requirements. This is one of the factors
that is forcing us to develop officers who are articulate
rational thinkers, men who will think through our broad military
purposes clearly rather than rely on cliches; who will prepare
to deter the next war rather than the last; and who will ask only
for hardware that we need not what technology can produce.
What size and shape of military forces we require in the
1970's is not for me to say. It is for you, the citizens of
the country, through the Congress, to determine. But, there is
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great responsibility on military leaders today to present the
military picture lucidly, lest you make your decision based on
only one side of the equation. it is. from this that my
feeling comes that we must be more demanding in cultivating
the intellectual capacity of our naval leaders of tomorrow.
I am excited about this prospect. I am excited about
today's Navy, and the future of the Navy. I think that it
is more stimulating and challenging than when I came in. I
see it growing increasingly that way. I know that with the
support of citizens like you, we will find and we will develop the
leadership that will keep your Navy and your country strong
and safe!
Thank you.
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