President’s Spotlight: The Supply Technicians Who Move All the Books

Starting now and continuing at least through the end of my time here at the U.S. Naval War College, I’d like to regularly highlight someone or something that’s caught my attention over the previous couple of weeks. It might be a person – student, faculty or staff – who deserves recognition, or it might be an occasion I want to draw more attention to. These short ‘President’s Spotlight’ pieces will be posted about once every two weeks.

Before I became the president of the U.S. Naval War College, I was a student. Like so many students over the years, I remember vividly going to pick up my books for classes… and my heart sinking when I realized just how many there were. 

Over the course of that academic year, I came to appreciate how valuable those readings were, how much insight there was to gain from the strategists past and present, and how much I would grow as military leader and warfighter by absorbing their perspectives.

It’s crucial to our curriculum that our students can access the writings of brilliant and astute operators and war heroes throughout history – through modern times – to understand not only the enduring principles of conflict and geopolitics, but the evolving challenges facing our great thinkers today.

And for every newly enrolled Lt. Cmdr. Darryl Walker who carries away an armload of books, there is a small team of dedicated U.S. Naval War College supply technicians who must organize, track and distribute those books to that student and hundreds more.

Working under Logistics Department Head Tim Brown, Cesar Perez and his team – Marques Woodlyn and Ronnie Gardner – have been preparing for this academic year by getting more than 10,000 core course books ready for distribution to in-residence and College of Distance Education students, as well as hundreds more in support of our numerous elective courses.

Included in that huge number are the armloads of books individual students pick up from their vault here in Newport, but also students taking courses all over the country at some of our nearly two dozen Fleet Seminar Program (FSP) sites, among other locations.

Cesar’s team works incredibly closely with our mail room and shipping & receiving teams to move tons – literally – of books with amazing efficiency and effectiveness.

One former off-site FSP student told me that when he received by mail his boxes of required Strategy & War course readings, he assumed the tracking of those books must be impossible and that the war college must lose thousands of books every year.

I’m here to tell you that we don’t, thanks in large part to Cesar and his team. Through their diligent and thorough record-keeping, we’re able to retain and reuse between 95 and 97 percent of the books that continue to be in our curriculum, with almost all of those losses due to the expected and natural wear-and-tear that comes with regular recirculation, rather than administrative oversight.

Cesar, Marques and Ronnie don’t just start and finish with our students, though.

They also coordinate and distribute the printed publications that the U.S. Naval War College produces – most recently unboxing, labeling and shipping out more than 8,000 copies of the influential and sought-after U.S. Naval War College Review.

Our institution could not accomplish our mission without their hard work, connecting our students with the writings of the world’s great strategists, as well as connecting some of today’s great strategists with the expertise being generated here at the war college.

I want to thank them for all that they do.

– Rear Adm. Darryl Walker,
President, U.S. Naval War College