Our presenter today is Lieutenant Commander B.J. Armstrong. He's a 1999 graduate of the Naval Academy, one year ahead of my son by the way. He holds a graduate degree in military history from Norwich University and has published numerous articles. His recipient of the 2013 Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Literary Achievement as well as the Samuel E. Morrison Naval History Supplemental Scholarship. He's also a Naval Aviator. I give you B.J. Armstrong. Thank you John for that two kind introduction. I know that you guys frequently have college professors, thinkers, naval specialists who come here to give talks so having a junior officer who's never even been to Newport before I want to thank you John and Dr. Hattendorf for inviting me up and thank the Admiral for being here today. No pressure. Yeah, absolutely. I get to finally come to the former home of two of my favorite naval officers, Alfred Thayer Mahan and William Sims so thank you for having me. As was said in the introduction, I'm a helicopter pilot by trade and I currently work in the Pentagon but as you can see from my uniform of choice today, I am not here in any sort of official capacity. Let's see if we can get this to turn on. I think. On the top right. Top right? There we go. So, as I'm not here in any official capacity, I must remind everyone that the opinions and views expressed are mine alone, presented in my personal capacity. They do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy or any other agency, my wife or my St. Bernard, no matter how many times she and I have talked about Mahan while wandering around the backyard. So today I want to talk to you a little bit about a time when the world was experiencing something called rapid globalization. There were rising powers in Asia that were changing the balance of power in the world and there was an increase in naval spending in countries that you wouldn't expect. In the United States, parts of the political class said we should, quote, focus on the problems at home, unquote. And others feared that limits to defense spending would result in cookie-cutter approaches that ignored strategy and instead looked at slicing of the pie. Sounds familiar to us today, but the decade at the turn of the 20th century was a challenging time for the United States of America. Now over 100 years ago there was a naval officer, strategist and historian, who recognized these things and he wrote about them. He developed some of the strategic approaches that led to what some have termed as the American Century. And despite the vast writings on numerous subjects including international economics and combat leadership, today Alfred Thayer Mahan is frequently pigeonholed as someone who only cared about battle fleets and battleships or colonies in the Panama Canal. He wrote about much more, though. Mahan was born in 1840 on the banks of the Hudson River at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His father, Dennis Hart Mahan, was a respected instructor in military engineering and strategy there and he would become the Dean of West Point. Now growing up, his father, as Mahan grew up, his father taught almost the entire generation of generals who would lead the Civil War. His father wanted him to become a lawyer and his mother wanted him to follow in his uncle's footsteps and become a man of the cloth and eventually an episcopal bishop. Young Alfie, on the other hand, sat around the family living room reading novels by James Fenimore Cooper and Frederick Marriott and watching the steamboats go down the river towards the sea. As military children sometimes do, Alfred Thayer Mahan rebelled against his father in the most dramatic way possible as the son of an army man he decided he wanted to join the Navy, something that I think we can all appreciate during Army Navy Week. So he spent about a year, maybe almost two, studying law at Columbia but didn't agree with him. So he used some of his father's connections with his former students, in particular a guy named Jeff Davis who happened to be Secretary of War, would go on to be President of a certain country, to get himself an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. So after Annapolis, he served as a junior officer on blockade duty during the Civil War and he rose up through the ranks and he eventually commanded the European squadron's flagship. But today I don't really want to talk with you about his record at sea. Likewise, I'm not going to talk with you today about his views on naval strategy or grand strategy. As we said, I'm a naval aviator and it's a lot like spending the night in a Holiday Inn Express every single night. But even I don't have the nerve to come lecture at the Naval War College on the strategic thinking of Alfred Thayer Mahan. Some of you can probably quote sections of the Influence of Sea Power back at me so I don't think I'm going to mess with that. Instead today I want to talk about some of Mahan's other writing. That's right, I said other writer. There's much much more than that classic The Influence of Sea Power in the story of the naval war between France and Great Britain. As the naval historian Geoffrey Till has observed, Mahan sometimes suffers from having written more than most people are prepared to read. Because of this, the Mahan known to most students of naval affairs is either a caricature made up from reading lecture notes or an incomplete picture from very limited readings. He wrote over a dozen books and hundreds of articles. And a lot of his writing, yes, deals with strategy and international relations. But almost as much of it deals with leadership and what it takes to be a professional in the naval service. Starting with this time as an instructor at the Naval Academy and as president of the Naval Institute in the 1870s. And then his time as one of the founding faculty members here lecturing in this very space and twice the president of the Naval War College. Mahan wrote and thought about what it meant to lead a navy and to lead sailors. Now much of Mahan's writing today appears to have fallen out of favor. And there's really kind of two primary reasons for that. The first is the traditional navalist tendency to be worried about technology and the future. Because Mahan wrote about battleships and he wrote about the past, he doesn't automatically translate to a naval officer corps today that's really only worried about the wis bang new weapon or the buzzwords of the future. The second reason is that Mahan's writing style isn't particularly modern and it's not very easy to read. This is especially true of his books and the longer works of history including the influence of sea power. His own son admitted that it was almost impossible to read his father's writing. And in his autobiography from sail to steam, Mahan himself said that his attempt to clarify every assertion and qualify every statement tended to make the work thorough but difficult to read. So the purpose of my book 24th century Mahan is to help return the discussion of Alfred Thayer Mahan to our time. And to point out some of the importance of his writings and the principles that he developed while approaching the issues that we face today. The five essays from Mahan that make up the bulk of this book have been selected in order to address those two challenges, relevance and readability. Many of them come from magazine articles that he wrote for the general public, in which case he didn't really feel the same need to qualify and caveat everything because he was writing for a non-specialist audience. Makes the reading a little bit easier and maybe he had some more editorial help we can hope. In these essays readers will be introduced to Mahan's thoughts on issues that are central to the challenges and the opportunities of the 21st century. Now the book's subtitle which is sound military conclusions for the modern era comes in part from a quote in Mahan's book armaments and arbitration from 1911. He wrote that quote, the study of military history lies at the foundation of all sound military conclusions and practices. Looking at the history that he wrote and the legacy he left through his works will help us today just as his works helped over a century ago. Now in 1859 Alfred himself when he was a midshipman at the Naval Academy wrote to a friend that lectures as a rule are a grand bore. And with that in mind I'm going to try and follow Mark Twain's advice that he gave to his preacher and that is that no souls are saved after the first 20 minutes. So I'm just going to focus on three of the essays that are in this work. That way we can have a little bit of time afterwards for maybe some Q&A and some discussion. The first essay is entitled Naval Administration Historically Considered and it speaks to a central question that we face today in the Navy in the Department of Defense because of our budget challenges. Today we're debating the scope of organizational reform and cost savings in the bureaucracy in the Pentagon and Mahan tackled these very issues. The question is how do you best organize a military bureaucracy and what are the key principles that we need to focus on to ensure its success. And the essay Mahan has two primary purposes. The first is to look at the individual naval officers roles and responsibilities within a bureaucracy and his interaction with the administrative functions of a Navy. The second is to study the different ways that naval bureaucracies have been set up throughout history in order to determine the things that we today would call best practices. The first part means that he writes about what it means to be a good staff officer. How to set priorities and he compares the ways of organizing the essentially bureaucratic tasks of manning, training, and equipping a Navy. He believed that the distinctly naval or military functions of a service and the administrative needs of a bureaucracy were fundamentally in conflict with each other. But like all conflict it results in a competition that can be a positive thing if it's properly channeled or managed. Otherwise the need for an administrative system to be efficient in peacetime will dominate over the need for a military to be ready to go to war. So that constant struggle between the military needs of the service and the essentially civil elements of a bureaucracy was something that Mahan felt naval officers must constantly be paying attention to when they're on staff duty. Because officers frequently fill those essentially civil or civilian jobs in much of the naval bureaucracy if they're not always taking care to keep warfighting and capability at the front of their priority list it's likely that efforts to introduce efficiency will result in a downgrade of essential military capabilities. He warned officers to beware because quote, the habit of the armchair is easier than the quarter deck. It is more comfortable. So when studying the organization of the department of the Navy, Mahan focused on two things, responsibility and accountability. In the essay he compares the different organizational models that the U.S. Navy has used throughout its history and then he also looks at the different ways that in Britain the Royal Navy's bureaucracy was organized. Now a central tenet of Mahan's study is that an organization must keep accountability as a fundamental part of its design. Decisions by committees tend to limit the ability to keep the decision maker accountable for any mistakes he might make. Therefore committees should be avoided. However today frequently in Washington DC we see special boards or blue ribbon panels as knee-jerk reactions to most problems, whether we're talking about the littoral combat ship or military compensation today. Besides the organizational ability to have accountability, Mahan also points out that leaders have to be willing to use that ability. They have to be willing to hold people accountable. If mistakes are made and no one ever recognizes them and quite frankly heads never roll, the organization itself will continue to suffer failures. So the third chapter in the book is Mahan's essay Naval Education. It was written as an entry in the U.S. Naval Institute's very first general prize essay contest, which was in 1879, and Mahan won third place in the contest. It was the very first thing he ever wrote for publication. He attempts to answer the age-old question, what are the skills and habits of thought that we need to teach our junior officers and our sailors to have a successful Navy? At its heart this is about the struggle between the defined science of technology or what we today call the STEM subjects and the messy and decidedly nonlinear reality of war which frequently is best described by studying history, culture, and the humanities. Now Mahan recognized that both naval strategy and naval leadership were art and not science. In his book, Naval Strategy Compaired and Contrasted, he made this comparison directly. He wrote about how naval officers are like artists because artists, they have to learn certain techniques. They study different mediums and different elements to develop their craft. But that's not what makes an artist, right? What makes an artist is when they take those elements, those techniques, that craft.  It's that mixing and matching that makes the artist. Mahan believed that history for the naval officer was a fundamental part of that mixing and matching. Now history helps us understand that frequently there are no right answers to military questions of leadership or strategy. There are only sound conclusions like we heard about before. And those are two different things. Those words mean different things. A right answer is perfect. A sound conclusion is not necessarily perfect. And by studying our craft and history, we can come up with those sound conclusions. So demonstrating this great truth to midshipmen very early in their careers was part of what Mahan was advocating in this essay. He lays out a course of instruction at the U.S. Naval Academy which does not ignore the technical needs of a naval officer. He talks about mathematics and physics, the basics necessary to know how navigation works. And he talks about studying chemistry and ballistics, the basics of which you need to know how gunnery works. However, the vast focus of his redesigned core curriculum at the academy moved away from more advanced studies of engineering and focused on a wider understanding of history, languages, and the world that naval officers would have to face when they graduated and sailed off across the seas. Now recently I heard the director of naval history, Captain Jerry Hendricks in Washington, point out that over the last 50 years the ideals of Rick Over have come to dominate the U.S. Navy. This drives a focus on systems and checklists, equations and engineering. By regulation, at least two-thirds of the midshipment at the Naval Academy must study engineering or hard sciences. And frequently it's much more than that. In our ROTC programs it is very easy for an engineering major to get a scholarship, but there is very little support for someone who's studying history or regional studies. Our graduate education programs really aren't that different in the Navy. From the GRE or other funding sources that will help you pay to get a graduate degree in the technical fields or any of a myriad of MBA and financial degrees. But if you try and find a degree in history to have the Navy pay for it, you're probably going to be out of luck. Maybe it's time that we give Mahana a voice again in the debate and recognize that subjects like history, international relations, and the humanities help us to learn how to make decisions when the equations don't work or when there simply isn't one. And the third and last essay that I want to talk with you about today I want to highlight for you today is the Strength of Nelson. It's the fourth chapter in the book. In this chapter, readers hopefully will come to appreciate that the roles of risk and trust are an important part of military leadership. Today on blogs like Best Defense or online journals like Small Wars Journal, we see junior officers chafing under perceived micromanagement and issues like that in the military, no matter what the service. Information technology has continued to expand the minute detail that flag officers and general officers can exercise over their forces. But it also creates something that Peter Singer at Brookings has labeled as the rise of the tactical general. Now mission command has become a talking point du jour today and Chairman Dempsey talks about it a lot. We've even had some doctrine written about it. But over supervision and corrosive leadership come up again and again in conversations about talent management and the retention of our best officers. Mahan's study of Lord Admiral Nelson, who is one of Neptune's greatest warriors, provides a relevant discussion on the balance between risk and trust. Trust was a central part of Nelson's leadership style and something that he passed on through his mentorship to an entire generation of officers in the Royal Navy. Now these were the officers that went on to basically create the Pax Britannica operating all over the world making their own decisions because of the ability to trust. How and why Nelson established the cultures within his wardrooms or the ways that his squadron commanding officers worked together is fascinating and certainly relevant for discussion today. The essay also talks about Nelson and Mahan's understanding of what risk is. Risk and trust go hand in hand for leaders. Mahan wrote that in combat risk is as much its opportunity as its danger. He also warned us in another essay that's included in the book that quote, it's necessary first and for all to disabuse the mind of the idea that a scheme can be devised, a disposition imagined by which all risk is eliminated. So today we commonly hear about risk averse decision making or leaders who micromanage because they can't seem to trust their people. Reading about Nelson and Mahan's analysis of his leadership methods and also of Nelson's personality can help us illuminate the fact that while a lot of what we talk about today sounds new and modern in 21st century really much of it is based in the foundation of naval history going back across centuries. Understanding these foundational principles will help today's leaders be more effective into the future. So there's a lot of other material in this book including two other essays by Mahan. As I talked about the leadership lessons are there but there's also plenty of strategic or operational things to think about in the book. Those other two essays include discussions of what it means to have a balanced fleet or how and when and where to deploy your forces during peacetime and the role of small warships detached and serving all over the world all of which are certainly relevant to our 21st century naval discussions. Rising powers around the world have taken to studying their translations of Mahan. Professors Jim Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara from here at the Naval War College have shown it in their studies of Chinese and Indian naval affairs. There are broader reasons to study Mahan's work besides just the fact that Pacific powers are setting up some of their systems based on it. As China makes increasing claims in the South China Sea into the resources on the seabed as Iran continues to develop sea denial capabilities at critical choke points and as the nations of Africa struggle with piracy and the realities of economic insecurity in the maritime domain Mahan's writing appears to start gaining relevance again well beyond battle fleets in a Panama Canal. Now, reading Alfred Thayer Mahan is not going to provide a prescription to solve our problems in the 21st century. One of the other great myths about Mahan was that his purpose was to provide a step-by-step method to gaining naval superiority or great mastery. A checklist, a la rick-over if you will. He's frequently called the Jomini of naval strategy but Mahan didn't believe in checklists and he didn't believe in hard and fast rules. When he used words like principles or maxims he was describing historical precedents that would give strategists and naval officers a starting point. The purpose of studying and learning these historical precedents isn't to tell you what to do or what to think. It's to give you a hint when you're about to do something wrong. It's to help make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. As he once wrote, the instruction derived from the past must be supplemented by a particularized study of the indications of the future. Mahan's great value is not in telling us what to think and do. It's in helping us to ask the right questions. And that's my hope with this book. Nothing I've written in the beginning of the book and the introductions to the individual essays is going to make you sit up with a light bulb over your head. Don't get me wrong, it would be great every author dreams of that. I get it, but I don't think it's going to happen. I see this book as a success if you read it and the things that Mahan says makes you rethink the way you ask some of your questions about the Navy and how the Navy works. If you come away with more questions than answers it's okay, it's kind of part of the point and there's plenty more reading that we can do. By studying his work today's naval officers, policymakers, thinkers and people like you will be better prepared to ask the right questions and ask them in the right ways that can help determine a proper course for the 21st century and for our Navy. Thank you very much. So as I said, I kept it kind of short so there's plenty of time for questions or discussion, please. I'm happy to with the original disclaimer in mind and retain any questions you might have. Sir. Did John Paul Jones was he quoted or did they have different opinions? That's an interesting question. I've done some reading on John Paul Jones and I think that there probably is a lot of parallel. The issue that you have between the two of them is they were facing a different America. Alfred Thayer Mahon was writing for an America that was ascendant that was about to become a world power. John Paul Jones was talking about America that just needed to exist. There's a fundamental difference between thinking about how to get the country to exist and defend its shores close in and how to become a world power. But there definitely are some parallels. John Paul Jones wrote about the idea that you need to take the fight to the enemy. That's what his crews on board Ranger and Bono Machard were all about, right? Taking the fight to England. Mahon writes a great deal about the need of a Navy to be forward and to have the fight far from our own shores. So there are definitely parallels but it's more of a progression, I think, in my mind. PJ, good to see you again. Do you think, in the circles where you are right now we're getting to a point where the Navy is going to embrace moral brick and mortar education because we've had this discussion in the past where I got my EMBA through the Naval Boys Graduate School but they don't offer a history or strategy equivalent. I understand that they have more of a technical aspect to that institution. The other services, just talking to the other classmates here at the War College, they encourage this throughout their careers that you have to come to a brick and mortar institution for these studies. From our experience, I just don't get that in the Navy. It's like, you know, do it on your own time. Learn about joint operations and good luck with the strategy and history portion. I think that what you're asking about is kind of a fundamental Naval culture issue. The reality is, that question, not necessarily phrased in that exact way but the idea of, okay, Naval officers, are we going to study or are we just going to read our TAC manuals, goes back centuries. John Paul Jones wrote about it. He wrote about the needing to educate officers. Mahan himself was, as he rose through the ranks and started to write and publish, was kind of the quintessential example of this. So I'm going to read the epigraph at the front of the book for you. You know, the epigraph is that cute little quote that people put at the front of their books. So right here it's at the front, right before the title page. It comes from the 1893 fitness report for Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan from Admiral FM Ramsey. And the bullet was, it is not the business of Naval officers to write books. So I think that the reality is that this is a long-standing Naval culture issue and debate. You know, what is the role of the technical versus the role of education, training versus education? I think that a lot of today people would say, well, the war colleges, right? I mean, here we are at the war college. The war colleges are what teach us the history and the strategy. Except the war colleges, and this is my two cents, right? The disclaimer from before. The war colleges are saddled with this thing called the Joint Professional Military Education System. It has certain requirements that, look, I've done my studies outside of the Navy system. You know, I got my graduate degree from Norwich University on my own time and my own dime, and I'm getting my PhD from King's College London using my GI Bill. So I've been taking the CD-ROM and online versions of PME. It's as much about training as it is about education. It's giving me step-by-step ways to develop warning orders and things like that, which is important stuff. I'm not going to say that's not important. We need to learn those sorts of things to be good staff officers and to help lead wars in the future. But that's not really education. And I think that's fundamentally kind of what you're getting at. Is the Navy going to change? Is the Navy going to move forward? I think we've seen some movements towards reform within the war college systems and within JPME. There are hints of a positive light out there. But then again, Navy culture is strong. And just last weekend, Admiral Harvey was on the Internet Radio Show Midrats telling us all about how we must have engineers and we must have technical degrees.  So I think it's still strong. It's a conflict that will continue. Sir? So I'm going to turn to this section. We discussed the education military officer as the Secretary of the United States. There's a little bit of a false dichotomy that you presented also in Mahan because it contrasts the technical with the history with the history and humanities with the technical and all that. There's another dimension at least in modern education which is the social sciences. And particularly when you look at classic naval strategies they spent a lot of time on cases like from the Napoleonic era. And they did a lot of the principle of finding and research on that period. But that's only a very limited case. And the social sciences was to say, hey, look at a wider range of examples of naval influence in the world. And generalize and think about those rather than just these particularly unique periods in history. So my point is, I have no problem with history. I have no problem with the technical and the engineering. But there's more to it than that. And we seem to always fight the fight between a engineering reactor maintenance, da, da, da, and studying the Napoleonic period or Jackie Fisher or whatever it is. But really it's about getting a set of, in my mind, it's about having a set of tools to think systematically and systemically about a set of problems in the naval base. Not just in the past, we're going forward. So that's a little bit of a speech So I think you raise an interesting point and a good point. You know, when Mahan was writing, especially when he started in the 1870s, what we know of as social science did not exist. Right? And in fact, by the time he died, what we know of as social science really didn't exist. So I think, you know, saying that, you know, him leaving out social science is kind of unfair to him. It didn't exist. And I think that your methodology statement is something that he would support. He would probably agree with the idea that, yes, we need to study as much stuff as possible. He chose to primarily study the conflicts between England and France. Nobody had really studied that in the systematic way that he did previous to him. So the fact that he chose to do that and he didn't do other stuff or other stuff wasn't being done at the same time while other people weren't doing this. You know, in England, they were just starting to follow that same methodology. And so there are naval historians and authors from that period that are all starting with the same idea that's very similar to what you bring up of trying to find systemic ways to view this history and to find from the case studies themes and reasons why things worked out the way they did. But this is very nascent. It's very early on in even the idea that people could study things in this way. History previous to that was just names and dates kind of stuff. So on the one hand, I think you make a really valid point for today that social sciences, I think the Navy today, naval culture today, would lump that in with the study of history and the humanities. I mean, we do at the Naval Academy, right? Political science is part of the humanities at the Naval Academy. It's all group three. Yeah. And in ROTC scholarships and the three tiers of ROTC scholarships, tier three lumps all that stuff together too. You know, they follow basically the same model the Academy does with tier one being engineering and tier two being hard science and that's where the scholarship money goes. So saying that we should study history and the humanities, should I have said social sciences? Well, yes, I think I probably should have because the Navy thinks of it that way. And all of those things should be brought more into balance in my opinion today. In leadership, why didn't the Benghazi affair then settle by the admin charge of the fleet in the military? Well, I I'm really not going to talk about current events, if you will. You know, I will say that distance today means different things to different people. And I think that's an important thing for us all to remember is that with the, everyone does this, right? I've got a computer in my pocket with a touch of a button I can contact people all over the world. It doesn't mean they aren't far away from me. It doesn't feel like they're far away from me. But they are. You're getting to a situation where everybody has to go through a life and make a decision. And I think that's something that Mahan wrote about, something that we should probably consider today, irregardless of current events. Sir. Hey, P.J., I saw your speech on death on Sims. There's much to know. It's been a great presentation. Thank you. I hear what your goal was to write this book. So what has been the result? Has anyone that, you know, any of our decision makers today are they getting this? Are they talking to you about it? Or have you come to talk to the War College? That's certainly a step in the right direction. But what has it also been the result? I received a very nice royalty check for $48 from the Naval Institute. And I've been invited to come to wonderful places like this and to talk in the spot where Mahan gave his lectures. But I can't tell you if people are reading it. I can't tell you if people are paying attention to it or not. I would like to hope so. But the reality I think of the written word is a lot of times that's a personal relationship between the person doing the reading in the book and no, the author doesn't find out about that necessarily. So I don't really have a good answer to that question. Admiral, sir. I know this is not necessarily part of what you did in this book. Obviously, you did a lot of study of what he did here in Newport. Can you talk to this audience here a little bit about his evolution and revolution of what he did to go from what really was a very tactical Navy at the time when he came up with this concept about a school for the study of war and what his challenges were because it wasn't all that well received for a while. A lot of it under his watch. And then what did he get to see before he left us? We're going to go to this slide as I talk because Dr. Hattendorf is probably going to correct me a little bit here. I'm really brief across the wave tops. You know, Stephen Loos was the founder of Naval War College, obviously, and he had his own fight to get it established and even found it to begin with. And he turned it over to Alfred Thayer Mahan as the second president. And in order to get it established, they had kind of gamed the system. Parts of Congress didn't want it. Big Navy didn't seem to really want it. They snuck money in to a different spending bill. Those kinds of tricks that we know about today just to get this place established. And then the Navy would fight back by not assigning officers to come to school here. So Mahan stood here to give his lectures with an empty classroom for a time. So the discussion we had earlier about the Naval culture and the idea of learning and education as opposed to training was alive and well during that period. And he fought hard. There's the quintessential moment in his career after his first term as president of the Naval War College when he's offered command to go back to sea to command the European flagship. And he went back to the Bureau of Navigation at the time were the detailers. Sends a letter back to the Bureau and says, I really think what I'm doing here is important. I'd like to stay. I'd like to keep doing this. And he got your standard Navy response. Sailors go to sea. What are you talking about? And so he was ordered to take, you know, they were orders. Go do it.  Now it ended up being kind of a positive thing for him because by going to Europe he ends up in England where they laud him as a returning hero because he wrote about how great the Royal Navy was in England and, you know, he gets his honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge and all that kind of stuff gets to meet with the royalty. So he ends up having a very positive experience meets John Lawton and things like that and then comes back but continues to have to fight during his second time as president here just to keep the place open. And at that point you're talking about very small class sizes, very small numbers of officers getting the training who all leave and say this was a positive experience we're glad we did this but wow it's completely different than anything the Navy's ever done for us before. You go back to the fleet, they try and talk it up but, you know, someone's talking about reading the next TAC memo and how you need to study it, memorize it and give it to me line by line and it falls away. And it took many, many years before it really took off. One of the other people I study was brought up earlier as William Simms who comes back here right before and right after World War II or World War I, sorry. And it's after that World War I and his return his second time here at the War College that you really start to see the Navy embracing the War College and this idea that something valuable is done here. So, I mean, that is a 30 years span. It took three decades for the Navy to recognize that something might be valuable. So, I think that speaks to the cultural element. Changing culture is hard. Sir. One of the things I would say also about Bruce Mahan is that he finds that the Army did not have a war college until the turn of the century when the Helian Woods reform was known because the Army and the Spanish militia really performed terribly in the Spanish-American war. It would be a more professional Navy. So, as bad as we think the Navy has the Navy has had a 30 year at start. Yeah, the Navy is a really great point and that kind of goes back to the idea that we were talking about with the social science that this is all new. This is all new. We look back on this a century later with a lot of Monday morning quarterback, with a lot of what we know today but you got to remember these guys were starting something from scratch. A new method of studying naval history. A new way of teaching it. A new way of getting the Navy to pay attention to it. All that stuff was new. So, if we're looking for the right answer or perfect answers we need to be looking for the sound conclusions that they were making. Because, I mean, in reality this is the foundation on which all the things we worry about today is built on. Would you like to add more? Please. One of the things that I think my dad was a kind of technical person when he started. He looked at his first books on the water. The Civil War book, yeah. Interesting quotation is this introduction to the second sea power which was the second series of lectures which he did in this building. And he said, I never would have done this if it had not been for the college book to me to loosen the ideas of the college that were fighting it out. And to dress up here, when he started people at the time, the commentators at the time, saw that there was a direct parallel they saw at the time. So that was one of the reasons why he took that. That was one of the reasons. But he moved on from that as he saw in later in his career. He saw that this parallel of a battle empire was not in the smaller wars that it was. It's like the war in Japanese war. And Dr. Hattendorf kind of comes at the point of the purpose of why I put this collection together. And that is I've done my strategy and policy reading. I've read the influence of sea power upon history. There's so much more that Mahan got to later in his career and talked about later in his career that really doesn't come up in discussions of strategy and policy today, while he has he has almost direct lessons for a number of things. So really this is as they say in the book publishing industry this is an approachable book. It's not big. It's not big. The idea is it's a starting point. I think John's going to come give me the hook. Thank you very much and I'm happy to sign books or whatever.


I am an avid Roblox player, and have been so since 2014. Recently, one of my favorite games has been one called, Data Brawl, especially its spin-off game, Data Brawl Roleplay. I consider myself to be heavily involved in the community. However, a few months ago, odd and frightening things started to happen. It was May 17th, 2019, and I logged onto Roblox, and entered Data Brawl Roleplay as usual. When I entered, the menu was completely broken. I had never seen any glitches like this before.  The screen was also covered in red text, which repeatedly said, in capital lettering, mesmerize, which had been misspelled with another Z in place of the S. The program's face was also replaced with a strange image of another face. After a few minutes, the game started to work normally again. I was able to join the game and select my character. Thornware has always been one of my favorite characters, so I decided to play as it. I decided to head over to the box dimension, which has always been one of my favorite spots to roleplay ever since it was added. I looked in the chat, and I saw a message. System, your friend Tower of Dust and Decay has joined the game. Toted, T-O-D-A-T, as I'll call him, was one of my closest friends on Roblox. We loved playing Data Brawl together, so I was excited to see that he had joined the game. I told him to come here, so we could roleplay together. After a bit of waiting, he arrived. He was playing as his favorite character, Jerusalem. It was about this time that I noticed that I was experiencing a bit of a graphical error. My entire screen was tinted orange. I minimized the screen and went on my web browser. The tint was gone, meaning that this was likely an issue with the game, not my monitor. I decided to take a screenshot of it, so that I could report it on the game's Discord server. I decided that I would report it later, as it wasn't that big of a deal, so I continued playing. Toted and I decided to head over to the file library building. When we got there, I noticed that there were staircases on the first floor, that looked like they went down somewhere. This was unusual, as there had never been a basement in the library. Toted and I decided to head down where we came to a room, that looked like the first floor, but was noticeably darker. Sitting at one of the tables was a group of three players. One of the players, Solismophobia, a name I know, welcomed us, and we sat with them. Solismo started to talk with us. Solismo, this room is new. Haven't you heard of the new update? Toted, no, I can say that I have. How long ago did it come out? Solismo, just earlier today actually. They added a bunch of new things actually. The update introduced some glitches though. Me, like what, may I ask? Solismo, sometimes, when you enter an area, there's this weird audio that plays, when there's supposed to be music. It happens a lot in the program apartments. Would you like to come and see? Toted, oh sure. Solismo and the others took us to the area known as program apartments. On the way there, I noticed that the other two players' usernames were scrambled and unintelligible. They looked this way on the leaderboard too. This is when I started to become suspicious. When we arrived, I decided to enter room B3. Sure enough, as I walk in, I hear this awful distorted noise. I look at the television screen in the room, and it's a bright red. I decided to take some screenshots and an audio recording. I told everyone that I need to go AFK, and I went over to the Data Brawl Discord. The Data Brawl Discord server has a channel named, Support Help Bugs, with its use being quite obvious just from the title alone. I hopped in the channel, and posted my findings. B and a few other members, LOL, Speedy, and Orlando, had a discussion as to what was going on. One of the members, LOL, tells me that they had the exact same thing happen to them, along with a few other things. They start talking with B in the DMs. LOL, so, don't you think there's anything odd about this? I mean, the update changed anything other than adding the basement and now there's this weird audio issue. These changes only showed up today, but the page of the game says it was last updated a week ago. B, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this is all a bit strange. There definitely is something going on, but I don't know what. LOL, that's not all. Have you tried entering the box dimension recently? B, no I haven't. Why do you ask? LOL, this morning, I tried entering it, and I was taken to this weird game called, Question. It was a giant maze, and that audio was playing the whole time. I tried finding my way around for about 10 minutes, but I got nowhere and I gave up. I tried about 15 minutes ago to look in my recently played section to try and enter the game again, and figure out the maze, but it wasn't there. I tried entering it again to see if anything would happen, but it just took me to the box dimension again. Could you possibly try? B, no problem. I'll tell you if I find anything. I hopped back onto data brawl roleplay, and toted, Solismo and the other two had left. I suppose they got tired of waiting. I decided to try entering the box dimension, and sure enough, I was taken to the Question game. I realized that the name felt familiar to me, but I couldn't quite figure out where it was from. But, as LOL had described, was a maze, with the degrading audio playing on loop. I decided to try randomly walking through different pathways to see if I would stumble upon anything of interest. As I traveled deeper through the pathways, I started to hear random sounds and phrases at equally random intervals. The further I went, the louder and more aggressive they became. I wasn't able to make out all of them, but I wrote down what I was able to. Are you dreaming? And are you happy? Come on. I'll work for thee, unintelligible. Photographic relapse. So, you want the world to stock? Elegance belongs to thee, unintelligible. You must now face, unintelligible. You're nothing like me. Liar, killer, demon. After about 20 or so minutes of exploring, I finally discovered something of interest. One of the pathways led me to what seemed to be a very large forest, with no end in sight. When I entered, the horrible audio stopped. I became nervous, but nevertheless I decided to venture further. The area ended up being even larger than I expected, taking me over 30 minutes of walking to reach the center. When I arrived there, I came across a large stone circle surrounded by many berry bushes. In the center of the circle was a person in a crimson colored cloak standing in the center. Surrounded by him were four programs, chained to the ground. I hid behind one of the trees so I would not be seen, and watched to see what would happen next. I watched with horror, as I saw the cloaked figure brutally murdering one of the programs. It screamed in agony, before its life was finally ended. Seconds later, he ripped the heart out of it, and lifted it up. The heart then floated up into the sky before disintegrating into dust. I got over excited and careless, and I was spotted by the cloaked figure, who glared at me before leaving. They had left the programs, including the recently fallen, at the circle. Suddenly, my computer screen started rapidly flashing different colors. I quickly looked away. When I checked back about a minute later, I found that I had been disconnected from the game. I went back into data brawl role play to try and re-enter the maze, but I wasn't able to access it. I would need other people to go in for me. I rushed back to the discord server to report my findings. I posted the screenshots and videos in the channel. However, the majority of people were skeptical of me, and claimed that I was faking the whole situation for attention. I messaged LOL about it, and he told me that he was once again able to access the game. He would let me know if he encountered the same thing. I checked back after a few days to see what happened, but there was no response. A week or so later, I asked again, and there was still no response. I realized that they had changed their profile picture to this odd image. Something was obviously very wrong. Despite the backlash I received, a few people, Speedy and Orlando, as I have mentioned before, took what I said seriously, and agreed to help me try and figure out what was going on. We decided that the two of them would head into the game as a team, and see what they could find. They would stream the whole thing to me, and I would watch. It took about 30 minutes, but both of them eventually managed to find their way to the wooden area. Again stood the cloaked figure, standing in the stone circle with the three remaining programs. The figure murdered two programs this time, but other than that, the procedure was no different than the last time. Speedy and Orlando managed to stay out of sight of it, and it walked away, leaving one program remaining. I instructed them both to wait and see if anything would happen. After a few minutes, two ghost grams rose up from the bodies of the recently deceased programs. They beckoned Speedy and Orlando over, and I told them to go with the ghosts and see what would happen. They followed the ghosts along a dirt path, deeper and deeper into the first. Well, they were actually going out of the forest, the stone circle was the center. A while later, the dirt path turned into a road, and the forest disappeared. It was another hour before they reached anything, a destroyed city. There was something oddly frightening about the ruins. Glass had shattered, walls had crumbled, and there was an eerie silence. One of the ghost grams gestured towards an abandoned house. Speedy and Orlando looked, and then looked back. Both of the ghost grams had gone. After a minute or so of discussion on what to do, they decided to explore the building. They entered the house and made their way to the kitchen, when they encountered a grisly sight. At the kitchen table were the lifeless bodies of a family of programs, all seated in their own chairs. The most frightening part was that they were all missing their heads. On the table was a small blue computer chip, with the word private on it, which Speedy took.  Then, there were footsteps. They were coming downstairs, approaching the two. They quickly hid behind a couch in the living room. Peeking out from behind, Orlando saw a mysterious figure from before. It caught a glimpse of them, its singular black eye staring deep into their soul. Seconds later, the screams of both Speedy and Orlando started flashing rapidly. I once again looked away. I glanced at my keyboard, and mashed the buttons to take a screenshot. I should mention that I looked at the profiles of Speedy and Orlando following the incident. Both of them had their profile pictures changed to two different odd images, and I haven't seen any trace of them since. Nothing noteworthy or even remotely unusual happened after that incident, until November 22, 2019, which is when I'll be fast-forwarding to. I had thought it was an ordinary day. After all, the incident was a half a year ago. I once again logged on to data brawl roleplay as usual, getting ready to roleplay with Toad and Silasmo, who I had befriended since the whole ordeal. I got into the game, and what do I see? The menu is once again an utter mess, just like last time. The main difference however, was that the screen was now covered in blue capital text that stated, hypnotize. The face was also different from last time. I finally managed to get in the game, playing where hybrid this time, instead of thornware. I joined the game, and my controls are completely messed up. Pressing W makes me go left, A makes me go down, it was terrible. Out of frustration, I got up from my computer, and went over to the kitchen to soothe myself with a tasty snack. As I walked in, I turn over to the kitchen table. It was the blue chip. It wasn't a chip however, it was a USB stick, for some reason. I noticed that it even had the word private written on it as well. How it got here, I simply couldn't explain. I forgot all about my snack, and picked up the stick. I then carried it over to my computer desk, and sat down to think for a moment. Should I plug it in? I decided that I'd think it over later. I turned to my computer, and continued to try and play the game. It was so broken, with visual glitches, and it was rendered unplayable, and I gave up and quit. I took a break from playing, and decided to catch up on some homework. It took a good two and a half hours, much longer than I expected. When I came back, I saw that I had missed a message from Totod about two hours ago. Totod, me and Silasmo found this cool maze area, when we tried to go to the box dimension. We are in a forest now. It's pretty interesting. I'll let you know if I see anything cool, and maybe you can come check it out for yourself later. The dreaded realization hit me as I read the message. I had to warn them. Unfortunately, it was much too late now. I checked Totod and Silasmo's profiles. They were both offline, and both had their profiles changed. I haven't heard from them since either. That's made five people. Five people had disappeared because of whatever that thing was. I don't even really want to think about it. Now it is February 29th, 2020. May 17th, the anniversary of the first incident will be coming up soon. Needless to say, I'm quite worried. Today, I finally decided to plug in the blue USB stick. I figured that there was no point in waiting even longer. The thing contained tons of files, of which I've only looked at one so far, I need to get to the rest. It was an MP3 file, and I excitedly opened it up. I gave it a listen. Oh, I remember this song. It was made by a metal band group, known as System of a Down, and it is from an album called, Mesmerize. The song was called, Question.


What's up you guys so I posed a question for you guys last week asking you what you wanted to hear more of on my channel and the top rated comment on the channel was Basically this question that I'm going to answer on this video Which is how to figure out and identify if the girl wants to be in a committed Relationship and wants to be monogamous or is just playing around and wants to spend time before I end up in bed with her Okay, so basically that this guy's wondering is how to know if the girl wants like a more committed serious monogamous relationship or she just wants to hook up, okay? Yeah, there are women who want to do both so basically I'm gonna answer this guy's question But I think the place that this question is coming from is Something that I would I would try and shy away from and do I would do something else Okay, rather than be thinking about this question all the time There's something else that you should be thinking about basically a higher value mentality that I would invite you guys to do So first I'll answer this guy's question and then I'll get into that Okay, well, dude you could to answer your question you could just ask her you could say hey What are you looking for and a lot of times people surprisingly tell the truth If she really really likes you probably what she's going to say is oh, I don't know like Just kind of seeing where things go Usually women if they've been seeing you for a while They're gonna want something a little bit more like they don't want to just hang around a dude for three or four months And have it lead to nothing. Okay that for a lot of women. That's kind of a waste of time Some women are fine to hook up with guys But I would say more often than not like kind of that's what they're looking for if that if it does come down to that Now if she is just trying to hook up which is definitely possible I would say that she's probably gonna be hitting you up around party time, you know She's gonna wonder hey you go into this event or something like that or you'll hit her up and she'll you'll guys will meet up when you go Out late at night Basically, you'll run into each other in those kinds of situations or maybe she'll come over and you won't really do that much and And that's pretty much it But if she's looking for something more and you can kind of tell by the way they talk to you as well too Is if they are asking you more questions about yourself. They're wondering what's going on with you They like to talk on the phone during the week and stuff. Yeah, that girl probably wants a relationship You know and if you what you have to decide at this point and this is really what you should focus on and so Advancing your question.  So I should act like what she wants But then not give it to her So a lot of guys will act like they're the girl's boyfriend or something like that because they think that's what she wants And that can get you into a lot of trouble.  I didn't really pay attention to what I was I always thought the girl wanted a relationship and so I would act that way and some of these girls didn't even want a relationship But the fact that I acted that I scared those girls away And then the girls that did want a relationship would stay and then I would have drama with them because I was not Acting the way that I should have been acting Okay, so a high-value guy and that's ultimately what I want you guys to be He doesn't think about it that way Okay, I act the way that I want to act Okay, if a girl comes into my life and I like her, but I don't want to be in a relationship with her I don't act like I want to be in a relationship with her. I Call her, you know, sometimes when I want to hear from her. Yeah, sure I do enjoy keeping up with girls like that, but I maintain a certain sense of boundaries when I'm doing it Okay, and if the question comes up, I don't tell her an answer that I think she wants to hear I tell her the truth and That you know, I'm pretty good at talking about it in these ways now or I don't hurt their feelings too bad but usually it's not a Usually it's not something that like they want to hear outright Don't act the way you think the person wants you to act act the way that you want to act first and see who sticks around you And the girls that stick around you are Ultimately going to be the best people for you anyway because that matches up with your lifestyle You want people that contribute to your lifestyle not not better people are gonna make you sacrifice and do things the wrong way If you're not ready to get into a relationship, don't act like it. It's very very simple Okay, and there is also a very brief part of his question where he was wondering if she's just hanging out before they hook up I mean look if the girl is going on Several dates with you and not hooking up with you. Okay. She probably wants to think a little more serious than just hooking up That's why she made you wait for so long Okay, so if you want a girl who wants to hook up then it should probably happen pretty quickly like first or second date or something like that That's you know, it's somewhere around there. I think that would be it But again be going and doing what you want to do and find women that are down Okay, if you if they're not down for what you're offering then they'll leave and it's not your responsibility really to You know predict their destiny and figure it out for them. That's for them So don't be pressuring them or doing it any that sort of stuff But have them figure it out for themselves and be honest and communicate with them too if you feel like something's up talk to them about it Okay I think sometimes you can talk a little too much and that can kind of like you know kill the mystery or kill the fun that you Guys are having too But I think talking every once in a while and just being truthful to each other about what you guys want We'll solve most of these issues too. So that's what I invite you guys to do if you guys made today Subscribing I come out with videos like this every single week And if you have other questions you want me to answer do just put them in the comment section below I'll make sure I bang them out really quick. All right, and also too guys if you want to join my mastermind program I'm looking for five new guys in it as well So if you like learning from me and you want to get taught by me personally About this sort of stuff gets smarter in your dating life, you know during quarantine This is a great time for you to grow There is a form in the description box below click on the form fill it out if you're gonna fit We'll get back to you. Thanks a lot you guys. Good luck out there