Source: United States Navy
Greetings to the staff and esteemed members of our Naval War College family.
Admiral Walker, thank you for your years of distinguished service in the United States Navy, and for your stewardship of the Naval War College.
And I welcome the Education for Seapower Advisory Board—thank you for being here today. Thank you for the significant successes you have achieved in our Naval Education Strategy. Your insights and recommendations to the larger Naval University System have paved a clear path forward for our Department.
It is an honor to address you today I bid farewell to a role, a mission, and a calling which have profoundly shaped my life.
I am sorry I could not be with you in person today, but time is not on my side.
As a Naval Officer, I too had the opportunity to study and learn at the War College—I earned my master’s degree in National Security Studies and proudly attest that this is the place I really learned how to first think, and then write.
I am proud to be the first ever graduate of the Naval War College to serve as Secretary of the Navy.
As I close out my time in this role, it is only natural for me to return to this institution which was so crucial to my own professional development.
As I reflect on everything we’ve accomplished over the past three years, I’d like to share a few parting thoughts on some of the enduring precepts of seapower that I hope you will bear in mind as you prepare to face challenges to come.
As you likely know, we at the Naval War College just celebrated our 140th anniversary.
Let me anchor here for a moment and tell you briefly about the context of how our institution came to be.
The era of our institution’s founding is one I have thought about often as Secretary of the Navy. I think there is a lot we can learn from this period, and you can tell me if any part of this story sounds at all familiar to you.
In October 1884, Secretary of the Navy William Chandler issued General Order #324, directing Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce to establish the Naval War College.
At the time, the United States was coming off a two-decade period of underinvestment in the foundations of its seapower.
During the Civil War, a large percentage of the U.S. Merchant Marine had been either sunk by Confederate raiders or preemptively sold off to foreign flags to avoid destruction.
Similarly, after the highly successful fleet expansion to meet the requirements of the Anaconda Plan in the Civil War, the U.S. Navy decayed as the nation turned inward to pursue westward continental development after the war was won.
This neglect led to a rude geopolitical awakening in 1882, when the U.S. government was forced to abandon an attempt to pressure Chile to the peace table in its War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia.
Washington suddenly recognized that the Chilean Navy far outmatched the U.S. Navy’s outdated force of 20-year-old Civil War leftovers.
That reckoning led to a national, multi-decade effort to rejuvenate the nation’s seapower.
Within a year, the Department of the Navy ordered its first steel ships and created the Office of Naval Intelligence to collect insights on new technologies and best practices from foreign navies.
And so it was in that context, two years after we realized that we had a problem, that we founded the Naval War College.
Over the years that followed, visionary naval thinkers and leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, Stephen B. Luce, and Alfred Thayer Mahan came together in Newport to conjure and plan America’s new steel battlefleet.
Thanks to their work, the U.S. Navy was able to dominate in the Spanish American War, deter the Imperial German Navy from coercing Venezuela at the turn of the century, and then steam around the world in a show of might and logistical reach.
Once we committed ourselves to the task, it wasn’t long before we had built “a navy second to none.”
The Naval War College, and indeed seapower itself, has never been so urgently essential as it is today.
The 21st century is a maritime century. When economists talk about how the world has never been more interconnected, they are talking about humanity’s use of the sea.
There are more ships on the world’s oceans today than there ever have been in recorded history.
The number of ships larger than 1000 deadweight tons has more than doubled just in the past 25 years, to nearly 60,000 ships.
In that same timeframe overall world fleet tonnage has quadrupled to more than 2.3 billion tons.
For perspective, 100 years ago, the entire world fleet would be a rounding error of the world fleet today.
More than 90% of global trade volume travels by sea.
And while we refer to the internet as “in the cloud,” in reality the internet is in the water—over 95% of global communications pass through undersea cables.
As British Rear Admiral Chris Parry observed at the Current Strategy Forum a few years ago, the ocean is the original, physical incarnation of the internet.
This is to say, with sufficient fuel and supplies, a ship can put to sea and travel to any other continent.
America in particular depends on freedom of the seas for economic and military access to the overwhelming majority of the world’s populations and markets.
The United States is effectively an island. You all know how to read a chart, so you know more than most that if we want to go anywhere beyond Canada or Mexico, we must travel on or over the ocean.
This is why the freedom of the seas has been a foundational American national interest since the earliest days of our republic.
Our Navy and Marine Corps exist to defend free seas and protect our interests abroad.
And our Navy-Marine Corps Team is the single most versatile instrument of national power we have.
By virtue of the physical properties of buoyancy, warships can bring a greater volume and sophistication of combat capability faster, more cost-effectively, and with greater flexibility and persistence than any other form of military force.
Combat effectiveness remains the fundamental prerequisite for the exercise of naval power.
We see this in the Red Sea again today, as the Houthis continue to launch indiscriminate attacks on civilian merchant vessels of all countries, as well as unprovoked air and missile assaults on U.S. warships.
And our Sailors and Marines continue to demonstrate incredible skill in taking their ships and aircraft into battle.
These Houthi attacks are not routine by any measure—in the Red Sea, we are engaged in the longest sustained naval combat operations we have faced since the Second World War.
At the same time, we must not forget that our role does not begin and end with combat. Navies have an enduring function in peacetime competition as well as wartime.
The Navy’s Title X mission codifies our enduring role in “the peacetime promotion of the national security interests and prosperity of the United States.”
Naval forces are unique in their ability to achieve positive political and economic objectives—enabling us to prevail without ever having to fight.
This is particularly important in a world where we have multiple adversaries employing strategies designed to advance revisionist objectives without triggering a conventional armed response by the United States.
The People’s Republic of China is one of the most notable examples of this approach.
The PRC is pursuing a dual-track strategy, both preparing its military for a possible future war while working to “win without fighting” today through its coercive maritime insurgency in the South China Sea.
The disparate nature of these challenges mean that our forces must be both combat credible and competition-credible.
The requirements of combat and peacetime competition stress different aspects of what naval forces bring to the table.
For example, while combat credibility depends primarily on our ability to bring decisive firepower to bear on a target from range, competition credibility depends at least as much on our ability to persist on station in contested waters and at close quarters in support of our local allies and partners.
As the Naval War College’s own Professor James Holmes put it—“want to compete? You have to be there.”
Our continuing operations shoulder-to-shoulder with our Philippine partners within their Exclusive Economic Zone, including through Multilateral Maritime Cooperative Activities alongside the navies of the Philippines, Japan, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are good examples of us showing up for our partners when and where it counts.
To this end, it helps that navies are different from other kinds of forces in that we can be persistently present at sea, fully ready for any contingency, without the need of the hospitality of a host country.
And at the same time, navies are welcomed into other countries in ways that different kinds of forces are not.
Similarly, consider the effect of a port visit by a carrier strike group or an amphibious ready group—something most of us are familiar with.
Port visits are an essential tool of naval diplomacy which we have used to strategic effect during my tenure.
Not long after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the USS Kearsarge and her group played a key role in reassuring our partners in the Baltic of the U.S. commitment, while deterring opportunistic aggression.
This was particularly salient in the case of Sweden and Finland as they finalized their entry into NATO.
Moreover, port visits have a profound impact in deepening the bonds of our alliances.
Our Sailors and Marines heading ashore on liberty and interacting with the local community infuses direct, personal goodwill into the bilateral relationship.
It injects tangible stimulus into the local economy that continues to help build local prosperity long after we slip our moorings to get back underway.
No other form of national power can have that unreserved positive impact on our friends, in addition to the deterrent signal it sends to potential adversaries.
An armored division rolling through city streets or a bomber wing flying overhead send rather different political messages than ships sailing into the harbor for a port visit with flags flying.
This is yet another reason why I have advocated so forcefully to strengthen our maritime power as your Secretary of the Navy.
Naval diplomacy is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal to not only navigate, but also calm troubled waters around the world.
My role as your Secretary of the Navy is to man, train, and equip our naval forces so they can be ready and available to our nation’s leaders.
And as I suggested earlier, the situation we found ourselves in during the crisis with Chile back in 1882 probably sounds eerily familiar to most people in this audience.
After I entered office as Secretary of the Navy, it was clear to me that our country is once again recovering from a multi-decade period of underinvestment in the foundations of our seapower.
Following the shortsighted decision by then-President Reagan to cut off government support to our maritime industry in 1981, our merchant marine and commercial shipbuilding sectors dwindled.
Post-Cold War defense consolidation eliminated much of the competition that’s necessary to have a healthy domestic shipbuilding marketplace.
These twin developments are existential for those of us in the Navy, because history demonstrates that no great naval power has long endured without also being a great commercial maritime power.
And as British naval historian and geostrategist Sir Julian Corbett opined, “It is upon the navy that the military position of a country primarily depends.”
For the first time in a century, we face in the PRC a comprehensive maritime competitor.
This has framed my approach to my time in office as Secretary of the Navy.
We began moving out on an aggressive and innovative strategy to reinvest in the sinews of our maritime power beginning with my speech to Columbia University in December 2022.
And in September 2023, in my speech to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, I officially introduced this strategy by its formal name: A new National Maritime Statecraft.
Our National Maritime Statecraft encompasses not only naval diplomacy and maritime competition, but a whole-of government effort to build comprehensive U.S. and allied maritime power, both commercial and naval.
Our National Maritime Statecraft depends on a strong Navy and Marine Corps as well as active engagement in areas of economic development, trade, education, science, innovation, and climate diplomacy to enable us to compete on a global scale.
Making naval shipbuilding more cost effective requires that we restore the competitiveness of U.S. commercial shipping and shipbuilding, reversing the decline of those industries since the 1980s.
This is why I have mounted a comprehensive advocacy campaign outside the lifelines of the Department, meeting with cabinet leaders across this administration.
The goal of this effort has been to build awareness and understanding that the long-term solutions to many of the Navy’s challenges requires we renew the health of our nation’s broader seapower ecosystem.
I drove the creation of the Government Shipbuilder’s Council, which brings us together with MARAD, Coast Guard, NOAA, and yes, even the Army, to tackle common challenges in ship construction and maintenance.
We catalyzed multiple White House-led interagency processes on both naval and commercial shipbuilding, bringing together the National Security Council, National Economic Council, and departments across the Executive Branch.
My staff and I have been working in close support with the Maritime Administration to deliver a new National Maritime Strategy.
And we have worked very closely with partners in Congress on both sides of the aisle to reinvigorate existing but unfunded authorities and craft new incentives to build and flag commercial ships in the United States.
The result of this extensive bipartisan, bicameral collaboration is the SHIPS for America Act—a critical piece of legislation announced in September and officially introduced in Congress last month.
This bill is a major milestone in our Maritime Statecraft, and I look forward to the day it is signed into law.
We expect these efforts will offer significant returns to Navy shipbuilding and sealift.
And I am pleased to say that Maritime Statecraft has gone global.
In February, I traveled to the Republic of Korea and Japan where I met with top executives of some of the world’s most technologically advanced and prolific dual-use commercial and naval shipyards.
These companies are recognized leaders of the global shipbuilding industry, and their presence in the United States could introduce new competitive dynamics, renowned innovation, and unrivaled industrial capacity within the domestic shipbuilding market.
During each of these engagements, I brought to the table a simple, yet profound opportunity and message: invest in America.
In June, Hanwha announced they had reached an agreement to purchase the Philly Shipyard.
You may have also heard the good news that Hanwha successfully closed the deal and completed their purchase last month.
Hanwha has declared their intent to expand the yard’s facilities, update its technology, double the size of the workforce, and quadruple the output to compete for both commercial and naval shipbuilding contracts.
I am hopeful that Hanwha will be just the first of many world-class shipbuilders to come to America and take part in our country’s maritime renaissance.
We are also working on several initiatives to leverage the shipbuilding intellectual capital of our allies and partners.
In June, the White House announced the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort or ICE Pact—an enhanced trilateral partnership amongst Canada, Finland, and the United States.
ICE Pact will leverage shipyards in these countries to build polar icebreakers for their own use while also working closely to build and export polar icebreakers for the needs of allies and partners.
And to rebuild our cadres of naval architects, we facilitated a new educational partnership with the University of Michigan, Seoul National University, and HD Hyundai Heavy Industries.
As our long-term strategy kicks into gear, at my direction, we are moving out aggressively on measures to make our current fleet more formidable.
Rear Admiral Henry Eccles, “the Clausewitz of Logistics,” namesake of the Naval War College library, and mentor of my own mentor John Hattendorf, wrote that “the essence of flexibility is in the mind of the commander. The substance of flexibility is in logistics.”
This is why I have prioritized a series of logistics innovations to make our ships more present, available, and lethal.
At my direction, we have successfully demonstrated the Transferable Rearming Mechanism, or TRAM, which will enable our warships to reload their Vertical Launching Systems through connected underway replenishment.
TRAM surpassed expectations, including successful operations in Sea State 4 from its very first day of at-sea testing onboard USS Chosin (CG 65) and USNS Washington Chambers (T-AKE 11).
This represents a revolution in contemporary naval logistics.
Up to now only our carriers and big deck amphibs could fully rearm their main batteries at sea.
TRAM will enable all of our surface combatants with Vertical Launching Systems to do the same.
This will allow our destroyers to relentlessly pummel any adversary with an overwhelming volume and tempo of long-range strikes.
Studies show that a true VLS at-sea rearming capability increases the effective size of our fleet by as much as 40%.
Once fielded across the fleet, TRAM will be an investment that provides tens of billions of dollars in value to the taxpayer.
The TRAM revolution holds significant implications for future naval force design.
The Naval War College will have a major role to play in fully exploring how the composition of the future fleet should evolve to take advantage of this technological breakthrough.
You at the U.S. Naval War College are the architects of our nation’s maritime strategy.
Maritime Statecraft must continue to evolve as a long-term vision for our maritime power—one that considers the interplay of political, economic, technological, and environmental factors.
I urge each of you to take ownership of the idea of Maritime Statecraft. Continue to iterate on it. Take it to the next level.
We need a robust analytical framework to assess risks, identify opportunities, and develop innovative solutions.
This means investing in education and training programs that develop the critical thinking, analytical skills, and foresight necessary to navigate the complexities of the 21st-century maritime environment.
This is why I am proud to share that the Naval War College has gained the support of the Naval War College Foundation in aligning $91,000 in grant money for faculty and student research on questions pertaining to Maritime Statecraft.
We must continue to encourage intellectual curiosity, foster open dialogue, and challenge conventional wisdom.
Now, more than ever, our maritime services and our Nation require officers who will think strategically about how to lead naval forces in an increasingly contested maritime domain and amidst intense economic, technological, and military competition.
And we need to create institutional opportunities for naval strategists to contribute directly to the work of our leaders.
One opportunity includes the establishment of the Naval Strategic Studies Group, which I announced this past year, modeled after the renowned Cold War-era Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies group.
This new Naval Strategic Studies Group will have a mission which serves two purposes: train future flag and general officers in strategic leadership and conduct new research on pressing strategic challenges of importance to our most senior decision-makers.
The first cohort will include both uniformed and civilian members from our Navy and Marine Corps and will further our work on Maritime Statecraft.
They will anticipate future threats, identify emerging opportunities, and develop long-term strategies to ensure our Navy remains a globally dominant force.
The problems the NSSG will examine are not solvable with a new whiz-bang piece of kit.
Instead, they are conceptual in nature—and expansive.
How can the Navy and Marine Corps most effectively support our allies in standing up to Beijing’s coercive maritime insurgency in the South China Sea?
As AI-enabled sensors proliferate, how can naval forces continue to hide, deceive, and maneuver at sea?
This level of thinking requires strategic foresight that surpasses the traditional confines of operational planning.
It demands a dedicated space for scholars, strategists, and policymakers to engage in rigorous debate and critical analysis, free from the immediate pressures of operational demands.
The Naval Strategic Studies Group is that space, and a generational reinvestment in creating future Navy and Marine Corps strategic leaders.
The future of the Navy is now. We must continue pushing the boundaries of strategic thinking, just has the Naval War College has for over 140 years.
Strategy—at its core—is the art of marshalling finite resources to achieve prioritized objectives under conditions of competition and uncertainty.
It is a concept often invoked and too little understood.
Without a serious rival, the purpose and urgency of strategy can fade, leaving leaders with dulled instincts for effective decision-making—which can have grave consequences when a new adversary emerges.
Today’s era of renewed strategic competition demands a renaissance in America’s maritime power and maritime strategy. The Naval War College must lead it once again.
The Naval War College is a national treasure. For 140 years, this beacon of learning is where the sharpest minds in maritime strategy have honed their craft.
This institution continues to serve as the strategic heart of our maritime services—where theory and practice converge to ensure our maritime superiority.
Extraordinary thought leadership in Newport made the nation a global power at the dawn of the 20th Century.
Luce, Mahan, Sims—icons of this institution—changed the world with revolutionary works on sea power.
They recognized then, as now, that for the United States, maritime strategy is grand strategy.
There is no institution better suited to build the intellectual foundation of Maritime Statecraft. It is in your DNA.
I again emphasize that no great naval power has long endured without also being a maritime power.
For the last forty years we have sought to defy that maxim—completely outsourcing our commercial shipping and shipbuilding to other countries.
Is that still tenable today? When 99.6% of our seaborne commerce travels on foreign flagged ships what are the risks to our economy in times of crisis?
All of you in the audience today have a tremendous opportunity to lead the way on groundbreaking research we need to guide our actions and policies.
You are writing the future of our maritime strategy.
It has been the honor of my life to serve as your 78th Secretary of the Navy.
I close my remarks today tremendously grateful for the opportunity to lead the nearly one million Sailors, Marines, and Department of the Navy civilians who proudly serve the greatest nation on earth.
Please know that my wife Betty and I will always carry you in our hearts and prayers till our dying days.
May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.