About 360 officers have descended on Manhattan, along with a gaggle of Army War College faculty, including me.
Each year the war college executes two major trips involving the entire resident class: to New York in November and to Washington in May. The purposes are similar: to further the students’ understanding of the larger national security environment and to educate political, civic, and business leaders about the military through contact with the war college students.
The Washington trip focuses mainly on how things run in the corridors of political power. The New York trip has two emphases: first, on the nature of contemporary urban issues, how these challenges affect national security policy and strategy, and how urban leaders think strategically about these challenges; second, on the United Nations — how other nations view contemporary global issues, the United States, and the UN; and particularly how they approach the management of global problems through the UN.
Tomorrow we’ll be dealing with the UN and will visit the permanent missions to the UN maintained by the home countries of our International Fellows (foreign officers). But today was devoted to the Big Apple.
The basic approach to these trips is to divide the class into small groups of about ten students each. The groups — in this case twenty-nine of them — leave the hotel around 8 a.m. and fan out across the city. Most visit visit two sites; e.g., ABC News, the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, the American Red Cross, and Bellevue Hospital. The students (plus any spouses who want to come along) are herded from Point A to Point B by faculty escorts like myself. In the case of my group, Point A was the New York City Counterterrorism Division. Point B was Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Both the CT Division and Dow Jones did a nice job — very gracious hosts (when we arrived the CT Division had a continental breakfast awaiting us), very informative in their presentations, very candid in their responses to questions.
I’ve said it before, but in my experience at the war college I constantly have the sense of a 19th century historian who has suddenly noticed he lives in the 21st century. One thing these trips bring home to me is how small and interconnected the world has become. That’s really a very commonplace observation. But now and again you see something that makes you feel this reality at a gut level. I had such an experience yesterday.
I was making a preliminary visit to the Counterterrorism Division. (Escorts are required to travel to each location a day beforehand, just to make sure there are no screw-ups.) An NYPD sergeant and lieutenant greeted me, got me a cup of coffee, and we spent about an hour just talking about what the Divisions does and about recent developments — for instance, the decision to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York federal court and the extensive security arrangements that will necessarily entail. But what struck me was an object tacked on the wall behind them: a large map of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Division was created in response to the September 11 attacks. Its emblem involves a view of the Manhattan skyline with a sort of ghostly image of the vanished World Trade Towers. And of course, at a cognitive level I have always known that the September 11 attacks emanated from Afghanistan. Yet somehow the juxtaposition — those New York police officers and that map — hit me in a way that has stayed with me ever since. I mean, Afghanistan, for crying out loud.
