Vice President Kamala Harris delivered the commencement address at the United States Naval Academy on Friday. Few in the press paid much attention to what she said. If they had, they would have heard Harris give voice to a vision for America’s armed forces that is strikingly different from previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic.
Harris told the graduating class that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the world, much as Pearl Harbor and the Civil Rights Act and the fall of the Berlin Wall changed the world in the past. Today’s situation presents new threats, Harris explained: “A deadly pandemic can spread throughout the globe in just a matter of months. A gang of hackers can disrupt the fuel supply of a whole seaboard. One country’s carbon emissions can threaten the sustainability of the whole earth.”
“The challenge before us now,” Harris said, “is how to mount a modern defense to these modern threats.”
Harris told the graduates they should excel at pursuits such as developing artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technologies. Military expertise proved quite valuable during the pandemic, she said, noting, for example, that “naval researchers figured out how to use 3D knitting machines to make masks.”
But Harris paid particular attention to “a very real threat to our national security” — climate change. “You are ocean engineers who will help navigate ships through thinning ice,” Harris said in her only acknowledgment that the Navy has any sort of relationship with the world’s oceans. “You are mechanical engineers who will help reinforce sinking bases. You are electrical engineers who will soon help convert solar and wind energy into power, convert solar and wind energy into combat power. And just ask any Marine today, would she rather carry 20 pounds of batteries or a rolled-up solar panel? And I am positive she will tell you a solar panel, and so would he.”
Left almost entirely undiscussed was the more basic mission of the Navy and the Marines. They fight wars. Heavily armed, they protect U.S. interests and shipping and project America’s power at sea and around the world. They have done it, with great valor and sometimes at enormous personal sacrifice for sailors and Marines, for more than 200 years. Harris mostly left the war-fighting core of the Navy and Marine mission out of her speech.
It was not as if there weren’t reminders all around her. Harris spoke at the Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, Maryland. The stadium’s upper decks are emblazoned with the names of battles that are legendary in the history of the Navy and the Marines. As she looked around, Harris could see them: CORAL SEA. BELLEAU WOOD. TARAWA. CHOSIN RESERVOIR. MIDWAY. GUADALCANAL. If Harris noticed them, she did not let on; she never mentioned any of the great moments in the storied pasts of the Navy and the Marines.
But Harris told the class she had personal knowledge of the Navy and the Marines. “I’ve come to know the United States Navy quite well,” she said. “Every day, in fact, I’m surrounded by sailors and Marines and your tradition and history.” Harris noted that she flies around on the vice presidential helicopter known as Marine Two. She lives on the grounds of the Naval Observatory. Her West Wing office includes a desk made by the Seabees. And her ceremonial office was once the secretary of the navy’s. Finally, that office includes a display devoted to Midshipman Sydney Barber, the 16th woman, and the first black woman, to serve as a brigade commander at the Naval Academy.
“And so, here’s what I know,” Harris said. “Midshipmen, you are tireless. You are ambitious. You are a fierce fighting force. You are idealists in the truest sense. You are the embodiment of American aspiration.” The “fierce fighting force,” along with her statement that the military will convert solar and wind energy into “combat power,” were Harris’s only explicit references to the fact that the Navy and the Marines actually fight for the U.S.
Harris’s speech presented a striking contrast with the Naval Academy commencement addresses given by the last two vice presidents, Mike Pence and Joe Biden.
Pence spoke at the Academy on May 26, 2017, like Harris, in his first few months in office. Pence quickly identified himself as the father of a Marine, then-1st Lt. Michael Pence. Then the vice president looked around the stadium. “These stands are emblazoned top to bottom with the names of lands and seas that were consecrated by the sacrifice of the American sailor and Marine,” Pence said. “I see Belleau Wood, where the Marines charged the enemy six times, and won the day, to defend the freedom of Western Europe. I see the Battle of the Atlantic and the many battles of the Pacific, Coral Sea, Midway, Leyte Gulf, when the Navy rolled back the tide of tyranny that had engulfed so much of the Asian Pacific. I see Inchon in Korea and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. I see Iraq and Afghanistan, where to this very day, at this very hour, your brothers and sisters in arms stand strong and courageous in defense of liberty in the global war on terror.”
Pence exhorted the graduates to be men and women of good character. “Integrity, humility, orientation to authority, and self-control are my admonition to you today,” he said.
The vice president also introduced the crowd to Adm. Robert Natter, a member of the Naval Academy’s class of 1967 who was there to mark the 50th anniversary of his commencement. Shortly after graduation, Pence said, Natter went to Vietnam. “One day, assigned to a small boat unit, he was working with his team to extract a group of Navy SEALs from behind enemy lines when his boat was ambushed,” Pence continued. “He was thrown overboard, wounded by shrapnel. But he still found within himself the strength and courage to swim back to his nearly empty boat and provide cover fire for his brothers. Despite his own injuries, he personally attended to the wounded. He refused medical assistance until all his brothers-in-arms had been treated. He was awarded the Silver Star for his peerless bravery and leadership under fire. Fifty years ago, he was sitting right where you’re sitting today.”
And so on. Pence spoke of the Navy and Marine mission of fighting to defend the U.S. and freedom all around the world. He did not speak of new threats but rather old threats that seem to come back in some new form generation after generation. And he celebrated the heroism that America’s military men and women have shown in the fight.
Biden, then Vice President Biden, addressed the Academy’s graduation on May 22, 2015. In true Biden fashion, he began with banter and kidding. “You’ve spent your summer abroad on real ships rather than internships,” he said. “And the specter of living in your parents’ basements after this graduation is not likely to be your greatest concern.” Besides the humor, Biden had a point: Naval Academy graduates are doing something big.
He mentioned his son Beau, who was an Army major who had won the Bronze Star in Iraq. (At that moment, Beau Biden was gravely ill with cancer and would die little more than a week later.) Then, Biden spoke at length of the Navy’s and the Marines’ mission.
“As President Theodore Roosevelt declared in an address to Congress, ‘A good navy is not a provocation to war; it’s the surest guarantee of peace,'” Biden said. “The United States is in the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Arctic. … The maritime domain, the oceans you will roam, will be as important as ever to our national strength and security in the 21st century. And let me tell you why. First, the oceans continue to be an arena of potential conflict. … But you will be there to keep the peace. U.S. foreign policy is rebalancing toward the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific region. But we can’t succeed if you don’t show up. That’s why 60% of the United States Naval forces will be stationed in the Asia Pacific by 2020 — P-8s, Zumwalt-class destroyers, littoral combat ships, forward-deployed Marines … all and many more are headed to the Pacific, and so are many of you. And it matters — because Pacific peace and prosperity, to a great extent, has depended on and will continue to depend on U.S. Naval power, just as it has for the past 60 years. President Xi of China, when I was meeting with him, asked me why do I continue to say America is a Pacific power? And I said, ‘Because we are.'”
And so on. Biden and Pence framed their speeches differently, but each showed a deep appreciation for what the Navy and Marines do. Harris described a much different Navy and Marines, with missions in which fighting is done mostly in a figurative sense, against a threat like climate change. “Ms. Harris’ visit was meant to signal that the current White House’s relationship with the military had changed since the Trump era,” the New York Times reported after the vice president’s speech. Indeed, it has.
