NWC Review Winter 2010

The Winter 2010 NWC Review is out, and after reading China's Aircraft Carrier Ambitions: An Update (PDF) by Nan Li and Christopher Weuve, Australia's 2009 Defense White Paper: A Maritime Focus for Uncertain Times (PDF) by Jack McCaffrie and Chris Rahman, and Great Britain Gambles with the Royal Navy (PDF) by Professor Geoffrey Till I can vouch the Winter 2010 NWC Review is excellent.

I want to highlight something mentioned by RADM Wisecup in his President's Forum (PDF)

As we did with our participants in the International Sea Power Symposium, I would like to encourage our readers as well as our students to speak up, to speak their minds, to talk about some of these issues that are central to the future of our navy and our nation. It is not enough to be interested; I would go farther, to say you must engage. I say this especially to naval professionals * especially our students, in residence and in our distance education programs, American and international, any service or agency. For you naval officers, it will soon be your navy, and the U.S. Navy does not have all the answers. We must absolutely learn from the experiences of others, and we must learn to collaborate with other navies at national and regional levels, to reach out to others working on things of interest to us. Contribute a paper, write an article together - I have told the students they should show me their published articles or rejection slips by the end of the school year.

Since June 2007 Information Dissemination has grown well beyond levels I ever imagined possible. Consistently included as a blog contribution to CHINFO CLIPs, cited in 2009 in everything from Congressional research to influential academic research papers to the Drudge Report, I am very proud of the way Robert Farley, Chris Van Avery, Bryan McGrath, The Custodian, Feng, and I are able to contribute discussions on Information Dissemination to the issues related to the US Navy, the international maritime environment, and foreign policy discussions related to the maritime domain.

Because of you - all of you both in the US and Internationally - I can say with a great deal of confidence and statistical evidence that Information Dissemination has grown into one of - if not the largest - actively engaged naval communities on the internet. As I have attended events this year in DC, Annapolis, Newport, Monterey, and beyond I have consistently run into naval officers and sailors who are proud to be part of - and sometimes contribute to - the community of ideas and discussions on this blog.

As a professional naval community producing content broadly read online and in various government and industry republications and news aggregators, I want to extend an invitation to any student at the Naval Postgraduate School or Naval War College looking to publish (or even practice publishing) articles related to the various naval and maritime issues covered on this blog. Last year over a dozen naval officers, Professors, and even the NWC's own Dean at the Naval War College Center for Naval Warfare Studies contributed content on various subjects to the blog. I cannot promise the broad audience of institutions like Proceedings Magazine for your ideas, but I can promise a large influential target audience of professionals in the Navy community who are actively engaged in the development and decision process of the US Navy today.

As events unfold and decisions are made in 2010, should the urge to speak out and disseminate ideas on current topics come over you; in the spirit of RADM Wisecup's call I invite those within the Navy and broader community who wish to publish their thoughts to contact me should they desire Information Dissemination or the US Naval Institute Blog to be their forum of choice on a specific topic. As they say at the US Naval Institute - Let us dare to Read, Think, Speak, Write - And Blog!