By Minnie Marie Hayes
The US Naval War College stands today as the oldest and most rigorous of international war colleges. It opened in 1884, originally set up in a repurposed Poor House on Goat Island in Narragansett Bay. Soon though it moved to a hill high on the rocky coast where its complex of glistening white buildings now spread like protective arms over Narragansett Bay and colorful Newport Harbor. Ancient canons still perch along cliffs overlooking the bay – in 2025 nostalgically angling down from strategic fastnesses as they did in 1776 to lob cannonballs onto British warships while the colonies fought off an addled King George.
By 2025, the USNWC has educated over 24,000 U.S. and international military officers plus hundreds of federal civilian executives. About 300 of today’s active-duty admirals, generals, and senior executive service leaders are USNWC alumni. Its now-famous ‘war games room’ anticipated every strategy used in WWII except Kamikaze pilots.
Lt. Cmdr. James E. Hayes
A NWC Foundation, NWCF, formed in 1969 to support the college with a mission to “educate today and secure tomorrow.” In 1982, naval reservist Lt. Cmdr. James E. Hayes gathered a group of navy and marine vets for monthly dinners, and they became the Chicago chapter of the NWCF. May 1 the foundation honors that Chicago history with a luncheon at the University Club. Dr. Sarah C. M. Paine, Ph.D., US Naval War College Professor of Naval History, will give a geopolitical strategy and policy update. Dr. Paine is the William S. Sims University Professor of History and Grand Strategy at the USNWC, and by mid-October her recent podcast exceeded 1.5 million views.
Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the US Navy, visiting the UWNWC
After the war of 1812, the Navy had decommissioned much of the country’s navy. Annapolis did prepare young midshipmen, but then, in 1884, Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce convinced the Navy that its high-level, experienced commanders would also benefit from advanced study of war. “Not to ‘make’ war,” Luce explained, “but to understand it.” Think Sun Tzu and Clausewitz on the open sea.
USNWC ‘war-games’ room in 1888
And not just the open sea. The North American Great Lakes contain one-fifth of the Earth’s fresh water, the largest such body on the planet. The combined lakes cover a center of the continent the size of Texas. From its origin as a trading post for French fur traders, and after Pearl Harbor when Chicago’s Navy Pier built and repaired ships inland while it trained pilots safely on lake-bound aircraft carriers, Chicago has always been a port.
Bill Obenshain giving the Sentinel of the Sea Award
Fittingly, it was from Navy Pier itself that Chicago put its big shoulders behind the USNWC. Drafted men or ROTC graduates working together had formed life-long bonds with strangers from all over the country, gone wherever the Navy sent them: Europe, Japan, Korea, Viet Nam, the Middle East. The Chicago Chapter, now headed by Bill Obenshain, began when reservist Lt. Cmdr. James Hayes organized fellow navy and marine vets, meeting on Chicago’s Navy Pier when the pier still functioned as a dock for the US Navy. He also led the Chicagoans annually to the USNWC’s Strategic Strategy Forum in Newport.
Seventeenth-century Newport with streets built for horses
JFK and Jackie Kennedy watching America’s Cup Race in Newport
Each June the USNWC Strategic Strategy Forum draws a crowd of visiting country-wide and international visitors.
From hotels below in Newport, narrow cobbled streets lead up between rows of seventeenth-century stone houses that commemorate their ages with front-door plaques.
Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House, built 1697
The oldest restored house, the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard House, was built around 1697. From beneath the shade of a thick canopy of old copper beech trees, the bumpy road emerges at the top of a hill and opens on the college’s imposing complex of stone buildings. Its lawns are a sea of visitors and naval officers about to be graduated the day after the Forum.
Capt. George E. Lang Jr,
President & CEO of the Navy War College Foundation
The auditorium fills with summer-white uniforms, there to hear the Secretary of the Navy one year, a David Gergen analysis another year, or updates by the Pacific CINC (CINC meaning Combat Commander and pronounced SINK, proving the Navy has a sense of humor).
Adm. John Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations, at the USNWC addressing
the Current Strategy Forum on “Technology, Innovation & Strategy”
One year Admiral Walter Eugene Boomer, Assistant Commandant of the US Marine Corps and dubbed ‘Boomer’ for his energy and directness, addressed the full auditorium of Navy officers. ‘Boomer’ had the chutzpah to insist that the Navy forgo some of its reduced government funding post-Kuwait and share those funds with the Marines. The suggestion produced a laugh from the packed room of Navy officers, but Boomer kept going, describing Marine bravery, ability storming dangerous beachheads, and its underwater seals. Then he nodded an emphasis: “We come from the sea.”
Ah. An ancient echo. What comes from the sea. Instantly I was a goatherd on a hilltop, chewing a glade of grass and noticing a darkening horizon thicken and become Xerxes’s navy descending on unsuspecting Thermopylae; or I was a maid carrying a bucket of milk down a Scottish hillside and seeing dragon and serpent heads of Viking longships appearing in the mist in the bay. Think of a grandmother shopping for eggs and startled to see the Americans loom out of the English Channel and flood onto fifty miles of Normandy beaches. What comes from the sea.
Most people regard this as the age of air power, because it is. But the ocean and deep-water lakes make up 71% of our planet, only 17% being land crust poking up above the sea where we’re able to survive. “We come from the sea” hit a deep probably Jungian chord inside that reminds us of what surrounds the life we’ve made comfortable enough to feel secure. We float on a leaf.
US Naval War College
In today’s largely silent competition for global water, Russia actively fights for control of both the Mediterranean and the Arctic. Chinese have built the largest Navy by half and actively increase ‘training’ in Arctic, Antarctic and Pacific Oceans. In October China warned Australian commercial flights to steer clear of its nearby live-ammunition flight exercises. It recently negotiated a fueling and repair station on Cook Island only 2,000 miles off New Zealand. Meanwhile In Chicago, a couple years ago Col Connie Pritzker warned that the US Navy had only one icebreaker that the Coast Guard operates in the Arctic.
Col. Jenny Pritzker speaking about the Arctic Ocean
Our Navy protects the right of American ships to trade on international waters, 71% of the planet. A big job. How it plans to protect that right brings USNWC’s Professor Sally Paine to Chicago May 1 to update supporters in the port of Chicago on geopolitical strategy and policy.
In conclusion of the Annual Strategic Strategy Forum, for thirty years Jim Hayes would host the Chicago contingent on the final night at the White Horse Tavern. The nation’s oldest still operating roadhouse, the White Horse has served travelers since 1673. It lists to starboard on a dip in the street, its interior floors cup cozily, its silo staircase squeezes against cavernous old fireplaces. The Chicagoans would fill the tavern, eat heartily and then sit back to sing even more heartily. Waiters serving the long tables stretched in front of 17th Century chimney-ovens would keep announcing ‘closing time’, ‘closing time,’ then literally throw in their towels, sit down and sing along deeper into the night.
White Horse Tavern, oldest still operating roadhouse in the nation.
Service travelers since 1693
At the University Club in Chicago, May 1, the foundation and Chicago supporters gather once more, whether singing or not, to hear the USNWC’s Professor Sally Payne’s presentation on geopolitical grand strategy. Meanwhile, the US Naval War College continues, as it has for a hundred and forty years, to out-strategize what might come from the sea.
Register at: NWCFoundation.org/Chicago
