I’ve been traveling with youths

The US military works better when it works with other countries. So, the Naval Academy has a variety of different ways of exposing midshipmen to other countries and cultures. One of those mechanisms is the Languages, Regional Expertise, and Cultures (LREC) summer trips, where faculty members propose and lead trips for small numbers of students to other countries. Since I was going to be here anyway, I decided to lead an LREC to southern Norway.

A big chunk of my job the last few years has been working on creating academic programs that teach midshipmen how to use data to make smarter decisions, whether through programming, statistics, visualizations, or AI. So, appropriately, the centerpiece of the trip was the US-Nordic Naval Academy Data Challenge, which is an annual event thought up by a colleague of mine. In its full form, we hope students from Nordic naval academies (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark) and the USNA get together every summer at one of the academies to compete in data analysis in mixed-up, international teams. The data sets are of military interest, and ideally provided by the host school. This is intended to teach some data analysis skills, but also provide an excuse for mixing all our students up together in work and social situations, giving them friends in allied fleets.

We’re starting small with the US and Norwegian academies, and are trying to gradually grow. Last year, we hosted Norwegians in Annapolis; this year, we went to them. The Danes are enthusiastic about joining next year, so hopefully we can eventually get where we want to be.

Before getting to the academic part, we did some traveling. I met the six midshipmen in Oslo after their overnight flight. In the first two days, we went on a hike, explored the city, and looked at the fjord from a boat. The third day, we visited Krigsskolen, Norway’s West Point equivalent. A faculty member gave us a brief on the Norwegian military, and how a small country with a lot of coastline might set out defending itself. That night, the midshipmen went to a sauna with the cadets – it’s always fun to watch young people immediately make friends. The fourth day, we visited the Norwegian Defense University College, the umbrella organization that oversees all their service academies. They showed us a lot of cool things, one of which was a virtual reality system they had created that can help Ukrainian tank crews learn how to operate European tanks without having to leave the country.

From Oslo, we flew to Stavanger. Stavanger is a beautiful town surrounded by awesome nature; we did two hikes, including the Instagram-friendly hike to Preikestolen, and took a fjord cruise to see Lysefjorden. Stavanger also hosts the NATO Joint Warfare Center, a facility that designs and executes training and planning sessions so leaders can be ready to be effective if Article 5 of the NATO Treaty is ever activated (Article 5 is the part that says “if any one of us is invaded, we all go to war together”). We got a really valuable tour and set of briefings, and learned a lot about NATO, how it works, and why it’s important, particularly in the context of the Ukraine war.

From Stavanger, we flew to Bergen, a beautiful city that is also home to Sjøkrigsskolen (the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy) and Haakonsvern Naval Base, Norway’s main naval base. The faculty at Sjøkrigsskolen have become friends, so it was great to see them. It’s also really cool to watch groups of young people make friends; the Norwegian cadets were great hosts, and showed my students a really good time.

A highlight for me was the cadets took us out on a high-speed rhib boat to wind between the small islands of the fjord at 40mph in the rain. Beautiful scenery, and a really fun way to see it. Another highlight was a long discussion with some officers from their submarine fleet about how the Norwegian coastline causes submarine tactics to differ in their fleet than in ours.

The data challenge didn’t go badly, either – in one really cool project, they looked through AIS records to build a tool that could detect foreign ships moving oddly, and maybe doing espionage or sabotage; their tool did indeed find a ship that had been previously identified.

So, that’s been my last two and a half weeks! They’re good kids, and the trip went really well. Now, it’s time to finally build some sort of schedule here at home.