Admiral Michael Mullen, USN (Retired), served as the 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 2007 through September 2011. He also served as Chief of Naval Operations, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Commander, Allied Joint Forces Command, Naples. A 1968 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Mullen retired after more than 42 years of service. Since retirement, he has been a visiting professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He sits on the Boards of General Motors, the Bloomberg Family Foundation. Sprint Nextel Group, and Afiniti.
The education I got here impacted my ability to lead and think strategically in ways that I hadn't anticipated when I was a student. I came with about 15 or 16 years in the Navy. I was a commander which is unusually senior for a student, but I was insistent I wanted a graduate education. I wanted to get that in operations research. And that underpinning allowed me to frame and analyze problems – significant problems – in a future career that I didn't know I would have, quite frankly, when I was a student here. And in my case, I became very senior and I never lost the skills, the ability to ask questions, the ability to either frame a or see when a problem was framed correctly or not, and to use the underpinnings, whether it was data analysis or linear programing or nonlinear programing and all these kinds of things that actually came to me through study and research on studying, I'm addressing Navy's most significant challenges in war, fighting for many, many years at sea, as well as senior staff positions in the Navy.
There are a lot of reasons that this institution is so important. It provides that capability almost like nowhere else. While there are great graduate institutions in the private sector throughout the country, public and, private, quite frankly, there is no place else that provides the kind of study and focus on military problems that are so relevant to what's going on in the world than here at the Naval Postgraduate School.
I think if the services and DOD do not implement new technologies rapidly enough, innovatively enough, then we will continue to fall behind, if you will. There's a great deal of literature out there right now that says that the gap between us and the Chinese, and us and the Russians, is closing. And I believe that. We cannot afford to let that gap close. We have to increase that gap. We've always been able to -- because of the brilliance of our people, because of the engagement with the private sector, the development of technologies here -- we've always been able to lead the world. We still do that. We have to be able to take advantage of those technologies that are still being invented here, if you will, incorporate them into our services and increase the gap and, quite frankly, in doing that, create a stronger deterrent effect so that we never have to go to war with China.
