profound thanks

reflecting on two leaders

We will drive to Rockville, Maryland for a funeral this afternoon. The deceased made an indelible mark on both my and my husband’s life that we want to honor him on behalf of many people who either won’t be aware of his passing or are too far to attend. We will celebrate Bob Hughes, the Dean of Faculty at the National War College between 1992 and 1995.

In a twist of fate, Bob’s predecessor, Roy Stafford, similarly a retired Air Force officer with a doctorate who was Dean from 1985 until 1992 and again briefly in the mid-2000s, passed away in June. I did not hear of any service for Roy but he decamped to Oregon upon retirement so I was lucky to hear anything at all.

Bob and Roy were the bedrock for creating the academic environment where I thrived for thirty years, my husband for twenty. People rarely understand why Joint Professional Military Education (JPME) in the United States separates us from anything offered elsewhere and empowers those who experience it. I think often of their impact. Both served elsewhere in our Air Force before arriving at Fort Lesley J. McNair. Most other military education systems employ a cadre of faculty who do nothing other than teach so the melding of theory and practice in our institution is one of the greatest attributes of what these men led. But the signature value Bob and Roy (and those successful in that job) brought was an ability to balance the emphasis on an operator’s experience with broader academic material to enable people in the prime of their careers to reconsider how to approach their missions on behalf of those they serve. Sounds easy and trite but is much more difficult than one might expect when you recall we are all pretty set in our ways by our forties, the age when the average War College student enters the program.

Walking across the campus at a Midwestern Catholic university in May 1992, I saw an advert (which I saved for years) in the Chronicle of Higher Education for a three year, renewable position at the National War College. It sought someone to teach on third world militaries and economics, and required the candidate have government experience. I almost stepped in front of a car as I was so absorbed by this opportunity.

I was Assistant Dean for Social Sciences and had been teaching as an “International Relations” faculty member in a political science department that cared not a whit about anything other than political theory (Catholic schools excel in this field, of course) and U.S. politics. IR was an annoyance for a department fractured between faculty members who avoided and opposed Vietnam and two guys who had served in uniform (one of the U.S. politics guys served his ROTC obligation in uniform but gaave up his commission when he was got orders to Korea but the bulk of the department conveniently forgot that). One of the faculty was a renowned retired Army Special Forces colonel and Columbia PhD who wrote about irregular warfare before it was seen as a cool field. He had served in Korea and Vietnam so the anti-war faculty at this university (including the Sociology faculty across the hall) barely tolerated him and were suspicious who didn’t treat him with disdain (you can’t make this up, people, even though he had retired years from active duty status earlier). This well-published scholar was a gentleman who in my years at the institution was my greatest supporter yet never once—not a single time—asked me about my politics or pushed me to adopt a position in alignment with his rather conservative views, even when he wife ran unsuccessfully for a Congressional seat. He was happy that I found civil-military relations and international relations worth teaching to a new generation of kids.

I had visited Roosevelt Hall once for a reception in the summer of 1987 but knew nothing about the National War College. I note, by the way, the job advert was for the National War College rather than the National Defense University since the College’s autonomy was central to its identity at the time. National was keen to retain its original responsibility of national security strategy across the federal system. In the pre-internet days (yes, young people, there were days when googling required going to the library to open a hard bound book to gather information), it took me a few hours to find out any details about this place established in 1946 but not much more. I decided to apply, though I didn’t even know if they would hire women.

I received a phone call 36 hours after I dropped an application and curriculum vitae in the post. Would I interview the following week at the College? Of course, though in retrospect the decision to fulfill my bi-monthly commitment to give blood during the intervening period was a poor one when the phlebotomist missed my veins so my arm looked like an IV drug user having a bad day. I flew out ready to see what they really wanted, a long-sleeved shirt covering my botched blood donation reminder.

The interview was far different from any traditional academic interview as it was direct rather than the repetitive “gotcha” meetings with each and every member of the faculty so characteristic of my prior jobs. Academic positions, as a colleague had noted to me only the prior year, are marriage contracts if tenure is involved. Everyone wants to judge the potential partner, then the majority decides yes or no on the marriage. The National War College has never granted tenure so it’s always been different environment. Generals Eisenhower and Marshall along with their Navy colleagues created the institution to infuse practical knowledge into each and every single seminar while addressing the development of overall strategy. Marshall and Eisenhower sought a remedy to some of the failures we experienced negotiating with our British counterparts during World War II. Leaders needed knowledge across the entire national security community which they lacked in the Joint Staff Talks with Britain. Additionally, the Cold War was fluid, requiring intellectual agility. This is what the College demanded for those on the faculty.

That was completely clear to me when I finished meeting the first six members of the search committee, some in uniform—including Bob—and others in suits. Again, differently from civilian jobs, the focus of the interview was how would I handle facilitating seminars with people who might well be senior to me, definitely had expertise I could never match, and who would I be leading in getting us to an individual topic objective about this evolving, post-Cold War world. One of the guys asked repeatedly how the end of the Soviet Union affected the Third World. This was less than a year after Mikhail Gorbachev turned the lights off on the Soviet Union, less than eighteen months after Desert Storm kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and as the public was salivating at Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney dangling a “peace dividend” for the country. My job, it was utterly clear, would be to push students to process all of these changes on a real time basis as they got to know one another and explain ins and outs of their individual service. That was the National War College in a nutshell.

I met with Roy, the only time I saw him in uniform, who acknowledged he was about to retire following thirty years’ service (He did not mention he would become a civilian colleague as well but hiring him was brilliant as Roy was a gifted seminar leader of the highest caliber). The interview seemed about as pro forma as most conversations with administrators in any civilian institution but I later realized how profoundly the College morphed under Roy’s tenure as Dean. The Congress, or specifically Missouri Democrat Ike Skelton, wanted to assure we produced more George C. Marshalls rather than people on a year-long golf jaunt. Skelton demanded, the Department of Education evaluated, and ultimately the services responded by mandating that JPME would improve through stresing greater academic content under an expanded and skilled civilian teaching component of the faculty to assure greater intellectual rigor. Congress expected this move, in conjunction with forcing the services (read the Navy which was most independent in its operating principles) to embrace (ok, tolerate) “Jointness”, could preclude the disasters of Beirut and Granada in 1983 or the 1979 Iranian rescue mission. Roy had to assure joint education, rather than training, enabled the Goldwater-Nichols Military Reform Act of 1986.

The College was firmly committed to the Socratic method of small seminars with a dedicated faculty seminar leader to work through a manageable amount of reading almost every day of the week. In the years right before I arrived, Roy and others at the College realized that if students were to absorb this better quality reading, then we had to select the material more carefully while providing time to ponder what they had read. A forty hour work week couldn’t be forty hours in the seminar room, no matter how good the seminar leader if we genuinely sought intellectual rigor.

I didn’t know all of this background when I departed back to the Midwest but knew I was a hell of a teacher and that the interview enthralled me with what they were going. I would get to teach a range of issues I had studied for my entire career rather than two sections of US politics each term with an single IR course. I had always run my classes, undergraduate or graduate, as seminars so I loved this method. In truth, I knew they had written for my skills and background. It took, however, almost two months for Bob, now ensconced as Dean, to offer me a position. He did not call until last week in July so our discussion was pretty pointed: could I start the following week as new faculty orientation would begin Monday?

Next week? I was doing a credit articulation as Assistant Dean to get transfer students into my Midwestern university but figured the school could suck it up. I went in Wednesday morning to ask for an appointment with the Dean as soon as possible. Peggy, her steely-eyed but smiling gatekeeper, asked whether it could wait as the dean was only back from her summer holiday. No, I needed see her that morning. Regarding what? My answer stunned Peggy: I need notify her of my departure (which she assumed to be the following summer since this conversation was occurring less than a month before the new academic year commenced). When I saw the dean, I clarified that no, I was leaving effective the end of business the following afternoon. My holiday for that summer was an International School of Bangkok reunion in Seattle that weekend so I had decided I would depart my job, go to the reunion, then fly directly to D.C. Shock does not describe the conversation but I drove onto Ft. McNair early Monday as I wanted to play fully in this place.

In the pre-9/11 world, we had two lovely gentlemen who sat as reception at the tunnel level (Mr. Foster, I believe, but he was a Korean War veteran who I never knew that well) and the main entrance to the Rotunda. I walked up to the latter door when the building opened at 0600 where Mr. Daniel Lester greeted me with an observation. “Doc, welcome. We don’t have many women but I think it will be good for Dr. Kass to have someone else”. I had no idea who Dr. Kass was nor how many women he meant but I was delighted to go upstairs to the newbie orientation.

Bob welcomed the new class of faculty, the largest I think the College ever welcomed after 1946. Most were uniformed, including a rabid Washington Redskins fan/ Gettysburg buff from the Army, a fighter pilot from Vietnam and another from the Gulf War. We had a couple of faculty on loan from the CIA, one an economist who saved me in teaching economics for strategists and the other a guy from the covert side who later claimed he had been under cover with us the whole time. There were a few other “loaned” folks from the federal system; we called these “agency” faculty but that meant all agencies rather than merely Langley and the spooks.

There were several civilians like me who recognized immediately we weren’t in an academic Kansas anymore because we were part of a whole of college effort. Several of the new civilians had Hill time. A single “pure academic” who was never fit over the years was among us (curiously he and I knew each other slightly as we had been at a two week seminar several years earlier). We were there to facilitate rigor. Our career experiences in various fields as well as doctorates were invaluable to the institution. We most definitely were not there to pursue our particular interests or publishing highlights. We were there to educate the future leaders of the national security community with anything else as a secondary or tertiary objectives—that message was abundantly clear.

One other newbie was a woman I had spoken with by phone as we awaited potential offers of employment. She had worked on Capitol Hill for many years so the College went from one female faculty member to three (out of more than forty) in one morning.

It was Bob’s show because he had the lead in every way, despite having a uniformed officer as commandant. To this day, I recall some of the exact words Bob and the Executive Officer, a wonderful Army guy named Kirk who also passed away with in the past few months, gave us: these are professionals so never forget that around any seminar table. They have more experience in their particular specialties than you can ever replicate but you are there to help others learn from them as well as from you. You are not here to lecture but you’re here as a faculty seminar leader. Educating these individuals selected to go to the highest levels of their services matters but we will approach it through an array of methods while employing a variety of measures to assess how well we’re doing.

Ground rules were vital for every single one of the faculty: Do not alter the curriculum because we have developed it carefully and collaboratively to assure we meet the needs of the students (a concept foreign to traditional academics who largely see themselves as autonomous) while answering to the taxpayers who facilitated this year with us. Do not run over the time allocated on the absolutely sacrosanct “yellow schedule” circulated biweekly. Do not try to be what I later heard called “the sage from the stage” but function as a seminar leader to facilitate respectful conversation among colleagues. Recognize we have additional unstated objectives such as allowing them to learn about the other services and to get to know as much of the student cohort as possible because these people will work together for the remainder of their careers. In short, this was truly a student-focused mission. Much of the Gulf War leadership had met each other during their War College time more than a decade earlier so they knew a bit about each other.

One additional note that endures strongly to this day: we are a collaborative institution so help your colleagues should they need it. Our students come for one year and one year only as part of their profession. If we do a crappy job teaching because we are fighting about something insignificant, then we deprive them and the taxpayer of any value. We teach because it’s what we can offer these students, everything else is gravy when and if we have time to provide it. We had to be there for the students, not off flacking our books or arguing some conference was more useful for showcasing our knowledge. Each and every one of us was expected to be engaged thoroughly with our subject matter whether prepping for class, publishing as such, updating our courses and individual seminars. Our students were aware of current events as much as were and desperate to offer more useful strategies. It’s a myth we never cared about anything else like policy conversations or publishing but we were hired clearly as faculty seminar leaders, evaluated on that criterion. If we could help someone else succeed, the students benefitted.

Whoa. That never happened at my former institution where backbiting, casting doubts about motives, and so many other negative behaviors were the norm. When Bob saw some backbiting later that year, he and the two star commandant raised it with the faculty to demand it stop—punto final. They advised us to model jointness, cooperation, collaboration, and trust much as those in the national security community did when deployed in a war zone. It was one of the most refreshing aspects about my thirty years there, something I fiercely protected when dean. If someone needed help with a seminar topic, help the person rather than drink your coffee or check email messages. Contribute to everyone’s success rather than focusing solely on your own.

Bob deftly led us through all of this as he increasingly received direction from our civilian overseers about the focus of our institution. The War College, like the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) across the street, began before an additional layer of administration, the National Defense University, absorbed these bodies in 1976. Unsurprisingly, neither NWC nor ICAF felt it needed outside supervision but the world changes. Bob navigated that evolution gracefully, at times forcefully, but always driving us to remember that the students had a single opportunity to learn about national security strategy. There were no “stay behinds”, “do overs”, or re-attacks on their time in Roosevelt Hall. Bob demanded and gave us the space to excel at teaching, making it absolutely clear that was our primary obligation.

JPME long ago entered the realm of “we need look like every other academic institution”, I suppose to make academics feel better about not being on a tenure track (just guessing), which National fought under Bob’s (and others’s) tenure, thankfully. Unlike our brethren across the street, we opposed letter grades as for fear they served no purpose in learning. Instead of increasing rigor, it was expected to exacerbate competition between these highly successful, “go getter” students who would come in to push for an A regardless of the learning involved. That was exactly what happened once we had to acquiesce to grades. Bob instead introduced our signature “oral exams”, one student with two faculty members for an hour twice yearly. I dreaded them in the beginning because doing that eight times gets, um, mind-numbing but came to love orals as they did precisely what we had hoped—provide us evidence of how well we were getting our material across to students. What a great device for people at this point in their careers.

During his tenure, we underwent our first evaluation by the Joint Staff on whether we were teaching enough joint material, a dramatic shift from the first decades of the College. We satisfied the evaluators but they were not wild about our defiance that our mission still obligated us to teach national security strategy rather than operational level material as done at the other war colleges. Bob also oversaw our initial foray into granting a master’s degree as Congress wanted, to the horror of most of our faculty who knew it would alter the focus on so many aspects of the War College experience available to these professionals. Contrary to much of the criticism of the federal government of late, Bob assured we did what our civilian masters mandated while trying to retain as much of the unique War College experience we had developed over the decades. He gave us leeway in doing our jobs but held each and every one of us accountable through the feedback he received from students.

He gave me the opportunity to reorient dramatically the geostrategic portion of our curriculum from Soviet-focused. I did not know for years that was really why they hired me. I introduced Asia as our first block while also focusing on global themes, such as fundamentalism in religion six years before 9/11. It wasn’t that I was so smart but I knew we weren’t discussing it as we saw places like Sudan popping in the news. It wasn’t always easy to convince the faculty to do this, but BoB backed me all the way.

Not everyone liked Bob’s leadership style as Roy had been the dean for seven years. Humans find change scary most of the time. The War College is a place where, as noted earlier, people serve as long as they offer relevant, highest quality teaching rather than because they have been in place—or until they hit mandatory retire if in uniform. Bob held some of the more senior faculty accountable to assure they remained current, even when it annoyed some of them.

Bob retired in the summer of 1995 when he reached thirty years’ service, as had been true for Roy in 1992. The late 1990s were a new era with the master’s degree in force and the next iteration of Joint Staff evaluation of our curriculum, always offering “helpful” criticism. Six years after Bob retired, we began hiring far more traditional academics which changed the institution markedly because they were hired for expertise rather than teaching under a newer regime. At the same time, greater intervention by both NDU for Middle States reaccreditation and the Joint Staff concerns seeking to homogenize curriculum at the operational level across JPME further eroded our 1990s experience.

One of the most pivotal hires made Roy or Bob made was in academic assessment, a field growing in importance over my years at NWC. The woman who led us into assessment between 1991 and her retirement in 2013 was the first person I notified about both Roy’s and Bob’s passings. She and I still kibbitz by phone every few days as she taught me so much and is an amazing friend. She was profoundly saddened by both of these passings, referring to their leadership as the “golden era of the National War College”. I have a hard time finding any better description because we had a unique team of dedicated, skilled facilitators who appreciated the College’s mission was to advance the thinking of those asked to lead our nation in peace, war, and everything in between that constitutes national security strategy.

When Roy Stafford interviewed me in early June or Bob Hughes called in late July to offer me a position, I never expected I would follow them as Dean of Faculty and Academic Programs decades later. Yet, I reached back more twenty-five years to call upon some of their adept techniques, skills, urgings, and prohibitions to refine my own tenure in the job. I long served (and followed as Dean) with someone else who began at National in 1992; he obviously left an impression on me as well as I used to refer to us as the “brother and sister” on the faculty because our tenure was so long and we worked well together over those years. The point for all three of these predecessors as Dean of Faculty & Academic Programs—and anyone who served in between—was that this unique place thrived on and existed for the purpose of educating the future leaders of the national security community here and in allied and partner nations. Publishing, public speaking, playing softball, or anything else was clearly relevant but secondary to meeting a mission for this incomparable professional school replicated no where else.

Bob came to an event in early November 2019 where two of three faculty co-authors members discussed a National War College Primer they had written for use in the classroom. I had not seen Bob in twenty years so it was truly a joyful evening. He emailed me within the last year to ask how retirement was going, urging me to keep writing and fighting for the College. It was our last direct exchange. I will never think of the place without calling to mind Bob’s and Roy’s impact on me, on my colleagues, and on several generations of national security leaders around the world. Hardly an insignificant legacy, is it?

Roy William Stafford, Jr, 1940-2024, Colonel, USAF retired, PhD The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy—Dean, 1985-1992 and 2006.

Robert Charles Hughes, 1941-2024, Colonel, USAF retired, PhD Catholic University of America—Dean, 1992-1995

I welcome your thoughts as several of you knew Bob and Roy. I appreciate hearing your questions, criticisms, and thoughts about the National War College, professional military education or any other topics. Please feel free to circulate this column if you find it of value. We are, after all, your National War College.

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Be well and be safe.