With the explosion of technology, many businesses have found it necessary to develop their own "corporate universities." For nearly 100 years, the Navy has had its own—the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). As both a corporate university and leading research institute, NPS realizes that it must respond rapidly to the changing needs of the Navy and the Department of Defense (DoD) while maintaining programs of the highest quality. It is doing just that as it redefines itself to take on priorities set forth by the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Admiral Vern Clark: manpower, current readiness, future readiness, quality of service, and alignment.
The Navy's corporate university must contribute to efficient use of manpower by being agile enough to support the Navy's needs as it adjusts to a rapidly changing security environment. Further, it must continue to create programs that educate officers for their primary jobs—not just one or two tours in a subspecialty. The staff and faculty are scrutinizing the duration and content of all curricula to ensure they are efficient with respect to resource and career path requirements, and in sync with the future needs of the Navy and the broader joint arena.
National security programs will be 18 months in length and include joint professional military education (JPME). They will incorporate a strong strategic planning core supported by robust regional concentrations, to include basic competence in the language of the region.
Business programs are responding to the need for critical, analytical assessment of today's complex defense problems. The NPS is developing an 18-month master of business administration (MBA) program (including JPME) with a strong analytical core and disciplinary concentrations to satisfy specific subspecialty demands.
Operations and information programs are being transformed to ensure there are long programs rigorous enough for those who will be department specialists, and short programs substantial enough to provide significant exposure to warfighting tasks. Programs oriented to systems engineering will prepare officers for the increasing complexity of the system-of-- systems world. The overall goal is to provide officers the fundamental skills needed to excel in all aspects of their naval careers.
Academic programs should be especially relevant to current readiness of the organization. In this vein, the NPS has embarked on two new programs that support readiness of the operating forces directly. For years, the Navy has called its sailors "ambassadors" as they deployed to all corners of the world. Ironically, not much was done to teach them about those regions. Recently, a pilot graduate-level education program for sailors deploying to the Western Pacific and Persian Gulf presented them with essential regional-situation awareness. The program was well received; the initiative is expanding to provide education to sailors and Marines in other carrier battle groups and amphibious ready groups. The NPS will tailor the curriculum for each program to meet requirements specified by the operational commander and by the guidance of regional commanders-in-chief and fleet commanders. Sailors and Marines will gain real-time regional expertise relevant to their deployments and also be able to receive credit toward an NPS graduate degree in regional security studies—completing their course work via web-based distance learning—or receive an NPS certificate of completion. In addition to these contributions to current readiness, the NPS educates all National Guard units prior to their peacekeeping deployments to Bosnia. Efforts are aimed increasingly at directly supporting the needs of operators by giving them the most up-to-date information.
Uniqueness is a defining characteristic of any corporate university bent on positively affecting future readiness of the organization. The NPS wants students and faculty to concentrate on research projects that support the unique needs of the Navy as well as DoD in general. Three new research and education institutes are being established to guard against academic blinders and to augment individual research programs of the faculty. A major goal is to immerse students and faculty in futuristic DoD programs alongside researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government. Each institute will have a board of directors made up of senior officers and civilians that will help the institute director keep focus on future needs of DoD. Clearly, it is best to have officers well schooled in theoretical tools and centered thoroughly on the application of those tools to the thorny defense problems facing the nation.
Supporting quality of service—i.e., having a work environment that supports personal and professional growth—means that the corporate university must provide a continuum of educational opportunities. Education traditionally has been a one-shot deal for officers; if lucky, they got one chance to go to graduate school. Today, the NPS is promoting an educational experience that will continue throughout an officer's career. It is actively pushing educational opportunities out to the fleet. Opportunities such as distance-learning courses will improve eligibility for NPS curricula. On commissioning, each officer will be afforded graduate education opportunities that take advantage of voids in training pipelines to meet a variety of educational desires and stimulate professional growth. Where possible, efforts will be made to upgrade service-school curricula by providing increments of graduate education along an officer's career track.
For example, this summer the NPS offered a graduate systems engineering course to ensigns during Surface Warfare Basic School. The course emphasizes the importance of graduate technical education, introduces a systems context for future education and training, and gives graduate credit toward a future degree. Most important, it adds course work to assist surface warfare officers in handling technical work situations. Providing more technical education to officers earlier in their careers—coupled with educational partnerships that will produce executive MBA opportunities and a broad array of executive education experiences later in their careers as they face high-level staff tours—will do much to meet the goal of producing an educational continuum that exists throughout an officer's career.
A corporate university must institutionalize change rapidly if it is to remain aligned with its customers. In this regard, the NPS is reengineering to exploit and be part of the ongoing revolution in educational affairs. It has organized four graduate schools that are aligned closely with major Navy subspecialty groupings:
- Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
- Graduate School of Operational and Information Sciences
- Graduate School of Business and Public Policy
- School of International Graduate Studies.
The NPS also set up three research and educational institutes; each is built around an area of NPS expertise and focuses on a significant military need:
- Institute of Systems Engineering and Analysis
- Institute of Modeling and Simulation
- Institute of Information Superiority
These seven arms of the NPS form a matrix organization in which the schools provide the academic structure necessary for students to cope with their future challenges and the institutes guarantee that academic tools acquired in the schools are applied to the military challenges of today and tomorrow. Figure I illustrates the relationships between the schools and institutes.
The Naval Postgraduate School's strategic planning model emphasizes teaching, research, and executive education to produce technologically competent war fighters, analytically capable decision makers, and critical thinkers. It has graduated more astronauts than any other college or university and more than 27,000 officers from 70 countries. As to its ability to produce leaders, two of the new service secretaries—Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White and Secretary of the Air Force James G. Roche—and numerous senior flag officers are NPS graduates.
I encourage each of you to learn about, support, and—above all—attend your corporate university. Its superior educational opportunities will advance you and the naval service.
Rear Admiral Ellison is superintendent of the Naval Postgraduate School. See Proceedings, January 2001 (pp. 89-91) for his professional note, "Naval Postgraduate School Is in Sync with Fleet."