Our efforts to maintain the high quality Navy we need capitalizes on the talents and motivation of each of our Sailors to continue to build our Navy to one ready to face the unknown challenges of the future. We cannot afford to train our Sailors for the predictable and routine duties. We need Sailors who are educated to confront the unpredictable, to anticipate the impossible, to plan for the unimaginable.
The use of information technology has the potential to upset long-held beliefs and create new opportunities, and those tried and true methods that worked on the battlefields of the past may not hold for the challenges to come. Our successful efforts today to obtain the resources to educate our Sailors and to put them into positions where they can realize their true potential, leading the culture of change from the end of the industrial age to lead the wave of the information age, will resonate generations from now.
We are transforming the way our Navy develops and equips our men and women. As our Navy becomes even more technologically advanced, our workforce will get smaller--and smarter.
This will be a Navy which values those who can accept responsibility, who can adapt swiftly and eagerly to the changes in our organization, and yet be sensitive to the needs of their shipmates, more than those who remain specialized in the status quo of their existing rating of today. Self-reliant and complex people with the courage to think independently and challenge and question the way we’ve done things are sought by the Navy to create new knowledge and information.
In considering budget realities, our flexible and adaptive uses of existing materials in new ways seems best for a Navy to remain relevant, and be able to anticipate and respond to threats in a world that is neither predictable nor, perhaps regarding the radicalism of our current enemy in the Global War on Terrorism, easily understood.
To paraphrase self-educated philosopher Eric Hoffer, in times of drastic change, it is the lifelong learners who inherit the future, while the trained usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that will no longer exist.
If you're ready, the Navy is ready to help you. Click here to visit the Navy College page to continue your journey of lifelong learning.