Candidates and Prospective Candidates,
You are aware that we live in tumultuous times. You are aware that by entering any of our United States Service Academies you are engaging to serve our nation by offering your life to protect our nation's welfare.
Probably you have awareness that by engaging to serve our nation at this time in world history, you are offering to help extend the benefits of life subordinate to human values -- benefits that our nation, among others, has secured -- to peoples and nations compelled to live without those benefits by individuals who abominate human values.
Finally, probably you have awareness that there are individuals in the world, and regimes they have constructed, who will fight to prevent any establishment of human values anywhere in the world they feel they can successfully prevent that from happening.
Military people are professionals. The bearing of arms is a professional responsibility and our nation's armed forces personnel are unexcelled in the world for professionalism in the application of military strength to upholding human values.
While I am not a military professional, I love our brothers and sisters who are military professionals and have dedicated my life to supporting their needs, especially in the field of education, which is my professional calling.
Our United States Armed Forces, and especially our United States Army, are the most open-minded, broad-minded, strong-minded and fair-minded institutions in our nation. I say that downrightly from a life of experience with institutions in our nation. Our Armed Forces are without peer, and especially our Army, in their dedication to professional and correlative learning and the fostering of "intellectual horsepower," among both enlisted personnel and officers.
This dedication to learning enables our Armed Forces to win our wars. To illustrate the point, I invite your reflection on a collection of links pertaining to military and security strategy considerations, apropos understanding our tumultuous times.
In particular, I invite your attention to this webpage treating of Fourth Generation Warfare, this professional military study of Fourth Generation Warfare dating from 1989(!) and the National Security Strategy of the United States of America.
At any one of our National Service Academies, and especially at West Point, you will be challenged to think through and develop solutions -- military, diplomatic, moral, political and spiritual -- for our nation's and our world's most difficult problems.
That effort you will make is key to your military professionalism and will enable you to experience satisfaction with your career and to defeat in battle those who have chosen to make war on us because of our allegiance to and promotion of human values.
