In his first message as Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, Vice Admiral Jeffrey Fowler declared "we are a nation at war," a war the admiral believes will "last for the entire commissioned careers of midshipmen . . . currently at the Academy." From that statement and the rest of his message, one expects much to follow.
But will it? Or will Admiral Fowler's vision be reduced to empty rhetoric by the combination of inertia, disagreement about what should go into the four-year program to mold midshipmen into "capable mariners," and growing negative public sentiment against the war in Iraq.
A word of disclosure? I am a Naval Academy graduate of long ago and more recently, in 2004, I served as chairman of a panel set up by Secretary of the Navy and now Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England to assess education for the Department of the Navy.
Further, I have been a critic first of the rationale and case made by the Bush administration for toppling Saddam Hussein and then of the subsequent management of the occupation.
That said, I agree with Admiral Fowler that the conflict he portrays is for the long haul and regret that, despite his passionate argument, the United States is anything but a nation at war. Our military is at war. Slices of our government are at war. But the nation as a whole is not at war. Those points form the basis for a few reflections of what that could mean for the Naval Academy and the years some of our nation's best midshipmen and faculty will spend there.
Certainly for the past hundred years the strategic and military environment midshipmen faced after graduation principally arose from preventing, preparing for, or waging conflict between states with relatively well-defined armies and navies. Today, conflict is of a far broader and more complex nature in which the likely enemy has no army or navy.
These broader geostrategic challenges arise from several revolutions. One is the revolution in knowledge and information. Literally every year the sum total of mankind's knowledge increases geometrically. Access to most of this knowledge and information is ubiquitous and often instantaneous to friend and foe alike.
The two other relevant revolutions have been largely obscured by our preoccupation with waging the so-called global war on terror.
The first is a revolution inside the Arab world. The second is a revolution in Islam. Both have many similar causes. Humiliation, desperation, isolation, injustice, and inequality are intertwined. And both revolutions in essence pit old against new.
In the Arab world, where virtually all states are subject to autocratic rule, "old" represents the entrenched regimes wanting to keep power. The "new" want greater access, enfranchisement, and a larger say in politics. Some of the new such as Osama bin Laden want to overthrow the old.
Similarly, in the world of Islam, it is another form of old versus new. In this case, the fundamentalists are the "old" who wish to turn or keep the clock permanently turned back to a radical view of Islam incomprehensible to most. The "new" are progressives who want to modernize Islam. These clashes between old and new are occurring from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan.
As a consequence of these revolutions, the traditional need for a large army can find surrogates in terrorism, insurgency, and disruption as the engines for seizing political power. And in a part of the world where terrorism, oil, nuclear weapons, and instability commingle, these revolutions can have catastrophic results if mishandled.
In the past, and surely since World War II, service academies have had the luxury of preparing midshipmen and cadets for operational environments that by today's standard unfolded in slow motion as the threats were ponderous. That world is long gone.
Three years ago, our review panel found that the course of instruction at the Academy had not digested the impact of this changed world and the revolutions that were altering it. In future messages, perhaps Superintendent Fowler will provide specific steps that must be taken to prepare young leaders for this dynamic, dangerous, and very different world.