NEWPORT, R.I. — Twenty-nine students finished their studies at the U.S. Naval War College on Friday, Nov. 13, in a ceremony held at Naval Station Newport for the Colleges of Naval Warfare and Naval Command and Staff.
The class drew from four branches of federal service. Graduates came from the U.S. Navy, the Army, the Marine Corps and the Department of Homeland Security.
Rear Adm. Darryl Walker, the college president, presided. The students picked Tim Schultz, an associate dean of academics and a retired Air Force colonel who holds a doctorate, to give the keynote address.
The school dates to 1884 and calls itself the Navy’s Home of Thought. Over the years it has trained more than 24,000 American and international military officers, along with hundreds of federal civilian executives, through its colleges and research centers.
Resident students typically spend 10 months on campus, and the coursework mixes faculty-led study with field work and wargaming. The college’s wargaming department goes back to 1887 and now sits inside its Center for Naval Warfare Studies, which also helps shape defense plans for commands and agencies.
Those war games run from scenarios at sea to fights in space and cyberspace, and they are meant to sharpen how officers analyze problems, build strategy and make decisions under pressure. The same center houses research units that study war and how to prevent it, and its work feeds plans and policies used across the defense world.
The college describes its job as informing the people making decisions now and educating the ones who will lead later. Its stated aims for graduates include innovating constantly, fighting in a distributed way, delegating with confidence and commanding clearly in complicated settings.
For Newport, the ceremony was another reminder of the military campus on the city’s waterfront at Naval Station Newport, where officers from across the services and partner agencies arrive each term to study and leave as graduates.
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