Volume 61, Number 3 (2008) Summer

Vice Admiral James Stockdale (1923–2005) left his mark on the Naval War College not only as president of the institution, from October 1977 to August 1979, but as a thinker on and writer about—and as an exemplar of—leadership. His contributions in the latter respect are remembered today in the school’s College of Operational and Strategic Leadership, particularly in the Stockdale Group, a team of students carefully selected each year for directed study. This issue offers a prime example of that group’s recent work, in “Developing the Nation’s Operational Leaders: A Critical Look,” by Commander Christopher D. Hayes, U.S. Navy, who graduated (with distinction, as a lieutenant commander) in 2007.

Vice Admiral Stockdale’s observation reproduced on the cover is drawn from his essay “Moral Leadership” in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 106, no. 931 (September 1980), a contribution to the Leadership Forum department of that journal—of course, set conventionally, as prose. The work was reprinted as “Machiavelli, Management, and Moral Leadership” in Military Ethics: Reflections on Principles, edited by Malham Wakin et al. (Washington, D.C.: National Defense Univ. Press, 1987).