SAIS Students Explore the Battle of Britain in International Staff Ride
From March 16 to 22, 2024, 40 Johns Hopkins SAIS students, along with 10 faculty members and experts, participated in the International Staff Ride, an immersive educational experience in which a group travels to the site of a particular historical conflict to examine the strategic decisions of the event at the location in which the actions occurred.
The practice of a “staff ride” was invented in the 19th century by German military officers who would ride on horseback to survey former and potential battlegrounds. The concept of a staff ride was revived in the early 1900s at U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, and SAIS has been running the school’s version of the staff ride for decades, in both its international and domestic forms.
This year’s International Staff Ride, co-supported by the SAIS Merrill Center for Strategic Studies and SAIS Academic Affairs, focused on the Battle of Britain during World War II, with participants traveling to Dunkirk, Dover, and London to examine the fall of France, the Dunkirk evacuation, and the bombing of Britain.
Thirteen students collaborated for more than a semester to organize and plan the staff ride on behalf of the entire group. The preparation included a pre-trip group visit to the Smithsonian Institution’s Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center in February. Each participant was also assigned a historical figure to role-play during the March trip to Europe, so they could gain a better sense of the strategic frameworks, mindsets, and goals of different actors during the Battle of Britain.
“What’s especially great and unique about SAIS staff rides is that the whole thing is student-run,” said Eric Lindsey, adjunct lecturer at SAIS and the faculty lead for the International Staff Ride.
He further stated: “It’s a great opportunity for students to take on a leadership role, have some agency, and turn this big project into an incredible experience for themselves and their classmates… As a former staff ride quartermaster who just came from my 10-year alumni reunion, I can say that pretty much everybody involved in staff rides looks back on it later and says, ‘that was the most meaningful and memorable thing I did at SAIS.’”
Highlights from the trip included walking the beaches of Dunkirk to the Zuydcoote fort battery, hiking the White Cliffs of Dover to the Battle of Britain Memorial, as well as visiting the Royal Air Force Museum, and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The group also heard talks by Sir John Scarlett, former head of the MI6; Air Commodore Blythe Crawford, the commandant of the RAF’s Air and Space Warfare Centre; Seb Cox, head of the RAF Historical Branch; and Rob Johnson, director of the Secretary of State's Office for Net Assessment and Challenge, a part of the UK Ministry of Defence.
“I’ve been on many trips centered around historical events and military operations, but the International Staff Ride was far and away the most immersive and meaningful of them all,” said Allie Bohan, a MASCI student who participated. “There is nothing quite like learning about the people and events that shaped a military operation than doing so in the places where it unfolded, putting yourself in the position of stakeholders faced with often life-or-death decisions. I also loved getting to spend time with so many new faces from SAIS!”
The International Staff Ride will occur again in March 2025, this time heading to Gibraltar and Morocco to study the Allied Landings and the Casablanca Conference of 1942-1943.
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