Naval Education and Training Command (NETC) Force Master Chief Mamudu Cole visited Sailors from Information Warfare Training Command (IWTC) Monterey at the Defense Language Institute, March 1.

Cole met with IWTC leadership and students, spoke with the enlisted staff and toured a number of facilities across the institute, including a classroom where he observed students from all military services learning Mandarin.

Cole's trip featured an all-hands call where he answered questions and discussed the future of the Navy's recruiting and training pipelines.

"This is a great time to be in the Navy," said Cole. "We are facing a competitive war for talent, and to successfully win this war we must all come together to build a bigger, better and more lethal Navy. We must train our Sailors better, and we must mentor and develop each and every one of them."

As the senior enlisted member of the organization responsible for the Navy's training pipelines, Cole values the perspective of new recruits who are attending their initial rating training or "A" schools. His position allows him to take that feedback to his headquarters and shape the experiences of future recruits.

"The first thing that struck me about Force Master Chief Cole was his eagerness to engage with staff members at our level," said Cryptologic Technician (Interpretive) 1st Class Justin Rivers. "I was impressed that he was so ready to get hands-on with our day-to-day work, and it was encouraging to hear that many of the changes he described to our training pipeline reflected ideas that I have heard expressed on the deckplates here."

A native of Freetown, Sierra Leone, Cole's career spans 28 years. He reported for his current assignment as the NETC force master chief in March 2016.

IWTC Monterey, as part of the Center for Information Warfare Training, provides a continuum of foreign language training to Navy personnel, which prepares them to conduct information warfare across the full spectrum of military operations. IWTC has 560 members, more than 500 of which are linguists in training.

For more information and news from IWTC, visit http://www.netc.navy.mil/centers/ciwt/IWTCmonterey/ or http://m.facebook.com/IWTCMonterey/.

For more information, visit www.navy.mil, www.facebook.com/usnavy, or www.twitter.com/usnavy.

For more news from Center for Information Warfare Training, visit www.navy.mil/.