National Defense University
COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY

June 11, 2009

Fort Lesley J McNair, Washington D.C.

Remarks by Dr. R. Joseph DeSutter
Director of The College of International Security Affairs

Good Morning,

General Wilson, Senator Warner, Admiral Mullen, Ambassador Roth, Dr. Deegan, NDU Senior Staff Colleagues, and Graduates of the NDU Class of 2009.

Will the faculty of the College of International Security Affairs please stand and be recognized?

We congratulate Rear Admiral Garry Hall, Major General Bob Steel, Brigadier General Kate Kasun–Commandant of Joint Forces Staff College, Dr. Bob Childs–Senior Director of the IRM College, and the faculties of their great colleges for another successful year of national security leadership development.

It is an honor for me to address you on behalf of NDU’s newest College, and especially to represent the superb faculty that has recommended conferral of our Master of Arts degree on 39 outstanding men and women.

•They are the first class to graduate from our College under its new name.

•They include 34 members of NDU’s 12th International Counterterrorism Fellowship class from thirty-one partner nations.

•They include one member of NDU’s 5th CT Fellowship class, who completed the program before we had degree-granting authority, and then, returned to complete the degree by attending evening classes while serving as his nation’s Defense Attaché in Washington.

•They include NDU’s first Counterterrorism Fellowship graduates from Botswana, Macedonia, Taiwan, and the United States of America.

•They include our first graduates who attended classes in our wonderful new facilities in Abraham Lincoln Hall.

•And they include the first graduates in NDU history to complete the requirements for this or any other degree, while enrolled on a part-time basis.

In recent years, it has become common knowledge, if not cliché, that interagency national security education is an essential response to the strategic challenges of our time. But unlike the military services, our national security agencies do not devote thousands of manpower positions to full-time professional education. On the contrary, for each non-military member of your graduating class, there is an empty desk at their home agency. What that means is that full-time national security professional education can only be part of the answer to what everyone considers essential. A larger part of the answer is represented by the men and women from DOD, the Marine Corps, the Intelligence community, and the State Department who will traverse this stage after spending two or more years in our seminars without leaving an empty desk behind. They did it one course at a time, primarily on their own time, blazing a trail that will be followed by many.

Another near-cliché is the observation that the U.S. cannot defeat terrorism and violent extremism by itself. As two insightful authors put it in 2003 after the successful 21-day OIF invasion, every new weapon and every tactical and strategic concept may have functioned as envisioned, but these successes would be diminished – if not negated– by our cultural ignorance. We have asked ourselves, how we can prevent that in the future? A wider and deeper study of languages is certainly part of the answer. But threats tend to emerge in places where we are least prepared and we do not even know how many languages there are in the world today. I mention that because we are about to introduce 34 counterterrorists, who are discernibly not culturally ignorant, who do not need translators to communicate in their cultures, or to communicate with you. They have enough facility with English to write Masters Theses. They have acquired an intimate familiarity with the more relevant common language of strategy and they have taken the trouble to know more about us than just our language. They have dined on our finest fast food cuisines, commuted in our rush hour traffic, escaped in our mindless television shows, followed our media’s portrayal of the news, and debated the issues of our time with us and one another. Having invested wisely in these professionals, the American taxpayer should have no patience with our failure to appreciate the wisdom they are equipped to bring to the table - any table - in peacetime as well as in times of tension, in post-911 terms, and in remarkable awareness of what we are and are not equipped to hear. For those are wise enough to acknowledge that they do not, and cannot, know everything, these men and women are the surest antidote to cultural ignorance.

With that in mind, will The College of International Security Affairs Class of 2009 please rise?

Madame President, I have the honor to present The College of International Security Affairs’ 2009 candidates who have fulfilled the requirements and are duly recommended by The College’s faculty for the Master of Arts Degree in Strategic Security Studies.