Commencement Address at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point
Remarks by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Michie Stadium, West Point, NY, Saturday, June 02, 2001

http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/...x?speechid=363

Thank you. Thank you, General [Daniel] Christman [Superintendent of the United States Military Academy], for a very warm introduction. Please be seated. You neglected to mention that 25 years ago, when we were very young, we were working together to persuade the Congress not to take fine Army forces out of Europe. And with the help of a lot of other people, we succeeded. Those forces stood watch in the Fulda Gap and other places around the continent of Europe, and the result was one of the great strategic victories of history of which every member of the Armed Forces and every member of the U.S. Army that participated in that effort is justly proud.

I also want to complement General Christman and the Army on the great spirit with which they said, we’re going to go ahead and hold this ceremony outdoors even in this terrible weather, because it’s more important to have all the families able to come than to be inside warm and comfortable. [Applause.] Coming from Washington where, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, it’s wonderful to see this good deed rewarded with a break in the weather.

Senator Jack Reed, Congresswoman Sue Kelly, Congressman and old friend Ben Gilman, Congressman Saxby Chambliss, and Congressman Charlie Norwood; Commandant [of Cadets Brigadier General Eric] Olson, Dean [of the Academic Board Brigadier General Daniel] Kaufman, distinguished staff and faculty, ladies and gentlemen, parents and family, and most of all, members of the class of 2001:

I want to thank the Class of ’01 for giving me the honor of sharing with you this very special day. I went to school just up the road a ways in a place called Cornell where I studied mathematics. According to my calculations, if you take the corps of cadets and add a speech longer than 20 minutes, by the time you’re done, you’ll have 40% that won’t be listening, 40% who will be sleeping, and 20% will be asking for their money back. [Laughter.]

So, the responsibility of a commencement speaker is heavy indeed. Your remarks should be sentimental to please the parents, substantive to please the faculty, and short to please the cadets [Laughter.] When we say the word "short" to the class of ‘01, I’m told that we’re talking to experts. In fact, I can see that this class is so short [audience: "how short are we?"], you have fewer hours until you receive your diplomas than the plebes have years to graduate [Cheers and laughter.] But, plebes … your day will come, too.

Today also marks the last time that the distinguished Army leader General Dan Christman will stand before a graduating class as Superintendent. But, there was even a time when General Christman was a plebe. Back then, in May 1962, he and his fellow cadets gathered in the mess hall to hear General Douglas MacArthur deliver the "Duty, Honor, Country" speech that became so famous.

Dan Christman left the Academy first in his class and answered MacArthur’s call, a call to serve "a goal that is high…to reach into the future…to…remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom…." From fields of fire in Vietnam to the peaceful Plain of West Point, from commanding troops in Korea and Europe to advising senior leaders in the Pentagon and the White House, General Christman has commanded, led and served with the simplicity and open-mindedness that MacArthur spoke of.

General Christman brought an agile mind and a visionary spirit to his tenure as your "Supe"—building West Point to keep it at the forefront of the nation’s great educational institutions. For the thousands of cadets that he has led and loved, his legacy is simple and profound—West Point is a stronger and better institution because he was here. For our nation, his legacy is a whole generation of soldiers enriched by Dan Christman’s 36 years of leadership. And his great supporter and partner, Susan Christman, was with him. Now as they prepare to leave their final assignment in the active duty Army, we thank them for their lasting contributions born of a lifetime of service. [Applause.]

There are many others who’ve been instrumental to the achievements that we are honoring here today, but no one deserves more credit than the parents who have supported and encouraged you. May I ask all the parents and guardians of the class of 2001 to stand, so that we can give you a fitting Army tribute? [Applause.]

Today, in the year that all math majors know is really the first year of the Twenty-first Century, you graduate. Congratulations to the first West Point class of the Twenty-first century! [Applause.]

As you leave, you leave well prepared for the demands of future duty. Four years have tested you in ways you probably never imagined. In Beast Barracks, you learned that you can meet any challenge if you attack it with determination. You learned that the soldier who inspires others to work together can be an agent of change. You learned that one person can make a difference, but that infinitely more is possible when one person joins a greater commitment—to a common good. Perhaps most importantly, you learned how many days are left until Army beats Navy. [Laughter.]

Extensive scientific research has demonstrated that on an average day in June, the average human brain is capable of remembering at most one thought from a commencement speech. But since today is cooler than average, and West Pointers are definitely above average, I will challenge you to think this morning about two words: "surprise" and "courage."

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of a military disaster whose name has become synonymous with surprise—the attack on Pearl Harbor. Interestingly, that "surprise attack" was preceded by an astonishing number of unheeded warnings and missed signals. Intelligence reports warned of "a surprise move in any direction," but this made the Army commander in Honolulu think of sabotage, not attack. People were reading newspapers in Hawaii that cited promising reports about intensive Japanese diplomatic efforts, unaware that these were merely a charade. An ultra-secret code-breaking operation, one of the most remarkable achievements in American intelligence history, an operation called "Magic," had unlocked the most private Japanese communications, but the operation was considered so secret and so vulnerable to compromise that the distribution of its product was restricted to the point that our field commanders didn’t make the "need-to-know" list. And at 7 a.m. on December 7th, at Opana radar station, two privates detected what they called "something completely out of the ordinary." In fact, it was so out of the ordinary that the inexperienced watch officer assumed it must be friendly airplanes and told them to just forget about it.

Yet military history is full of surprises, even if few are as dramatic or as memorable as Pearl Harbor. Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re still surprised by it. Very few of these surprises are the product of simple blindness or simple stupidity. Almost always there have been warnings and signals that have been missed--sometimes because there were just too many warnings to pick the right one out, sometimes because of what one scholar of Pearl Harbor called "a poverty of expectations"—a routine obsession with a few familiar dangers.

This expectation of the familiar has gotten whole governments, sometimes whole societies, into trouble. At the beginning of the last century, the British economist Norman Angell published a runaway best seller that must have drawn the attention of professors and cadets of West Point at that time. Angell argued that the idea that nations could profit from war was obsolete. It had become, as he titled his book, The Great Illusion. International finance, he argued, had become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that it had rendered war unprofitable.

End Part I