The character of a nation's officer corps says much about what that country values-not only what it fights for but also what it feels is worth preserving. Ancient Greek historian Polybius stated that "mankind possesses no greater guide to conduct than the knowledge of the past."1 But our officer corps today has more in common with British satirist Evelyn Waugh's Hooper, with "no illusions about the Army—or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe. . . . [H]e had an overmastering regard for efficiency and, drawing on his modest commercial experience, he would sometimes say of the ways of the Army . . . 'They couldn't get away with that in business.'"2
At a reception held three years ago by an Army three-star general, several field-grade officers were in attendance. Approaching a couple of us junior officers, a colonel launched into what appeared to be a set-piece monologue. He evidently had great hope for the younger generation, but this was not because of any native virtue on our part. It was our capacity to process information. Using his daughter as an example, he paid tribute to young people who spend several hours each day on a computer and their ability to rapidly take in information from numerous sources. Amid spewing such platitudes as the quickening pace of change, he extolled the superiority of blogs to books: "Who do you think is going to be able to move us forward? Not the generals, I tell you—they're still waiting for the book to come out. But in today's world, by the time the book comes out it's already out of date."
As he went on to speak of the human mind in terms others might reserve for bundles of electric wire, I realized how futile argument would be, for argument requires at least some common assumptions, and I could identify none. For those who subscribe to his doctrine—and they are many—Truth is not something we seek, sacrificing our time and energy in its eternal pursuit. It is a transitory, non-capitalized thing we are presented anew each second of every day, always changing. And it is our job to recognize it or face insignificance. The term "situational awareness" has expanded into a philosophy of life, with no room for the reflection that gives life meaning. That which is most ancient is most out of date; that which is revered is the product of ignorance; that which is intangible is probably not worth embracing.
Business Speak
A ridiculously corporate way of thinking pervades not only the mindset but also the language of the modern military. Take "The Little Blue Book," the Air Force statement of core values. In it are the following exhortations to martial glory: "We must focus on providing services and generating products that fully respond to customer wants and anticipate customer needs." Further, it explains: "Excellence in all we do demands that we aggressively implement policies to ensure the best possible cradle-to-grave management of resources."3 The language of the warrior has been replaced by verbiage gleaned from the corporate world: products, customers, solutions, leveraging, architecting, value-added.
The managerial mindset—which, as the previous example illustrates, the military has enthusiastically embraced from the business sphere—is distinguished by its insistence that everyone provides products to the "customer," goals are achieved through the appropriate mix of statistical models and measures of effectiveness, and most human problems can be resolved through more efficient organization. Above all, it is the managerialist's idolization of technology that leads him to view human beings in an increasingly mechanical, deterministic way. In my conversation with the managerialist colonel, it was clear that he equated mere access to information with profundity of thought. That is, he believed human thought to be the scanning, summarizing, and selecting activity most of us associate with a search engine.
In the world of situational awareness, the value of an idea or experience is measured in large part by the rapidity with which one can access it. In this view, working one's way through Greek historian Plutarch's Parallel Lives—the North Star for generations of great leaders—makes little sense when one can much more easily grab a summary online. But why even bother to read about Plutarch or Thucydides? In the modern military, relevance is synonymous only with recentness.
When Caesar Wept
Plutarch related that when Caesar was reading a biography of Alexander the Great, "he sat a great while very thoughtful, and at last burst out into tears." His friends asked him what was wrong. "Do you think," he replied, "I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?"4 It was in studying Alexander that Caesar realized his own shortcomings, and it was in despising his mediocrity that he aspired to greatness.
Roman historian Arrian reported that Alexander, for his part, had always been jealous of Achilles, the hero of a war a thousand years before, and carried the Iliad with him on campaign. Today, however, potential leaders are spared Alexander's and Caesar's pains, for in not having true greatness held up to them, they need not be troubled by their own mediocrity.
Yet the officer corps has spurned the broad outlook that has always informed leadership and replaced it with mere specialization. Majors and lieutenant colonels often brush off any pretense to anything profound with the remark, "I'm just an infantryman" or "I'm just an artilleryman." What might be justified from a junior soldier trying to master his craft is entirely out of place in a leader. This feigned humility is a poor excuse for not thinking about the higher ends for which the engines of war are set in motion.
Measurable Performance
What is the primary appeal of the managerial doctrine? In business, its greatest advantage lies in the concept of measurability. But this has had appalling consequences for military leadership. After training someone in the sciences or engineering, one can be reasonably sure that such a person is competent in a number of quantifiable tasks. The same cannot be said for the humanities, which is at odds with system and uniformity of instruction. Our doubtful age puts a premium on predictability, and the military is no exception. It is far more interested in a guaranteed competence than in an overlooked brilliance.
We cannot predict the emergence of a military genius such as Napoleon, so the managerialists have convinced us that we need to replace the serious study of history, literature, and philosophy with the systematic training that will give us a thousand planners who would, so the thinking goes, collectively produce a reasonable facsimile of the Corsican's genius. In place of the ingenuity and improvisation that always marked the best warriors, we get the unflinching rigor of systematized decision-making.
The most insidious byproduct of managerialism, however, is that its low esteem for the human being becomes self-fulfilling. Men and women treated as mere cogs will soon act like cogs. They begin to see themselves as powerless against a looming bureaucracy, and they seek solace in anonymity. They cannot compete for glory if they cannot conceive of it. Alexis de Tocqueville, that keen 19th-century observer of American society, noticed how this human transformation came in large part from what people read. He contrasted the great historians, who for all their faults understood ideals such as glory and honor, with the cramped imaginations of social scientists:
In reading the historians of aristocratic ages . . . it would seem that, to be master of his lot, and to govern his fellow creatures, man requires only to be master of himself. . . . The historians of antiquity taught how to command: those of our time teach only how to obey. . . . If this doctrine of necessity . . . passes from authors to their readers . . . it will soon paralyse the activity of modern society. . . . [T]he great object in our time is to raise the faculties of men, not to complete their prostration.5
Social Science over Humanities
Instead, in the past 150 years managerial doctrine has triumphed over the aristocratic ethos that animated warriors in the West for 3,000 years. In a sense, it was the outcome of a war within the officer corps between two wholly different ways of looking at the world: the humanities and the social sciences. Today we are lucky to encounter even the wreckage from the losing side of that war.
A few years ago, a fellow officer happened on a particularly revealing remnant from this conflict, written by Alfred Thayer Mahan.6 In 1879, Mahan addressed the notion, then gaining acceptance among military leaders, that future officers should be educated primarily in the "physical and mechanical sciences, and [have] an intimate acquaintance with the arts of the manufacturer." Otherwise, the managerialists threatened, the officer "must descend from the high position occupied by him and his predecessors for these centuries past and become the simple drudge of others whose minds have received a more rigorous and deeper, though often narrower, culture."7
The notion that somehow the modern military's dependence on technology requires officers to have technical backgrounds is an idea older than Mahan—and one he rejected, as well—allowing only for a small class of specialists. The attempt to combine officership with "scientific intellect," he wrote, "has upon the whole been a failure, except where it has succeeded in reducing both to mediocrity in the individual."8 This notion holds even less water today, when the ranks of satellite operators and fighter pilots include officers with degrees in music and drama. Generally speaking, enlisted and civilian personnel have greater technical expertise. But our military is in dire need of leaders, not overweening technocrats.
Mahan attacked the technocratic idea that specialization was the way forward, arguing instead for a naval officer's education based on "English studies, Naval Tactics and Foreign Languages." His defense of the humanities is an indictment against our present intellectual poverty:
If I be asked . . . how the English studies or the acquirements of Foreign Languages help a man to handle and fight his ship, I will reply that a taste for these two pursuits tends to give breadth of thought and loftiness of spirit; the English directly, the Foreign Languages by opening their literature. The ennobling effect of such pursuits upon the sentiment and intellect of the seaman helps, I think, to develop a generous pride, a devotion to lofty ideals, which cannot fail to have a beneficial effect upon a profession which possesses, and in its past history has illustrated in a high degree, many of the elements of heroism and grandeur. The necessarily materialistic character of mechanical science tends rather to narrowness and low ideals.9
Mahan also judged that the ceaseless accumulation of ever more recent knowledge—the beginnings of the situational awareness cult—was a poor addition to the profession. It tends "to impede the growth of the class of moral powers needed at sea; to promote caution unduly; to substitute calculation for judgment; to create trust in formulas rather than in one's self."10 More than a century later, it has led to the corporatization of the military, with the notion of command being eroded by an ever-increasing set of decisions arrogated to higher levels, subject to the inscrutable judgment of bloated staffs.
Nihilism, Apathy, and Violence
This managerial transformation reflected broader changes in society, but there is something tragic about the triumph of this world view within the military. The profession of arms is an ancient calling, and its hard-won cultural inheritance is rich beyond reckoning. We are asked to give all this up not for a comparable treasure but what is, in fact, nothing. A subtle current of nihilism runs through the managerial doctrine, this anti-credo that regards the human being as an information processor with no higher aspiration than to be situationally aware. When apathy accompanies nihilism, it may signify the long, slow death of a civilization. Joined with violence, it could accelerate disaster. In robbing us of our memory, this doctrine steals our ability to think about the moral ramifications of war and leadership. The mindless functionary is always despicable, but he is a particularly hateful substitute for the warrior.
What makes this situation all the more regrettable is that it need not be this way, nor need it be in the future. A vibrant tradition encompasses all that is noble and good in the profession of arms. It is a venerable tradition, as old as the bright-shining shield of Achilles, yet its words are continually fresh, untarnished by the passing of centuries. It is a tradition that seeks truth and does not believe in calling things equal that are not. It is, quite simply, an aristocratic tradition. This term is not meant as a class signifier but as the Greeks employed it, the aristoi, the best. As warriors it is our birthright. But like the Biblical Esau, we have sold it for a mess of pottage.
If it is ever to be reclaimed or even evaluated fairly, we must first realize what we have lost. Unfortunately, this is precisely what the ahistorical dogma of management denies us. Study of the past is indeed the best guide to present conduct, but it requires more than the passing glance of a survey course in western civilization or freshman English; it must be actively cultivated by those entrusted to defend our civilization.
There May Still Be Hope
This picture of the officer corps may seem unduly bleak. It does not mean to suggest that no leaders in the modern military are worthy of their forebears. Their numbers, however, are precious few, and they often lose heart, falling victim to the impersonal bureaucracy that implicitly denies any significant role to the individual. There is a great hunger in the military for something meatier than the platitudes of motivational office posters, something nobler than merely providing products for a customer, something more inspiring than an interminable PowerPoint presentation.
We need an officer corps with breadth of mind and precision of thought, despising notions of determinism, with an aristocratic sense of obligation. In thinking about an ideal, we start a dialogue that has been sorely lacking, one shorn of the corporate idiom. That ideal allows us to make qualitative judgments that are not periodically superseded by updates from on high. We can speak more confidently, unafraid of offending, once we have 3,000 years of greatness to embrace as our rightful inheritance.
1. Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 41.
2. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993), pp. 8-9.
3. Available online at http://www.usafa.af.mil/core-value/cv-mastr.html.
4. Plutarch's Lives, vol. II, trans. John Dryden (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p. 206; Question mark retained at the end from the original Dryden version.
5. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2002), pp. 457-8.
6. 1LT Brent D. Ziarnick, USAF, "Mahan on Space Education: A Historical Rebuke of a Modern Error," Air & Space Power Journal, Winter 2005, pp. 63-70.
7. CDR Alfred Thayer Mahan, "Naval Education," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 5, 1879 p. 347.
8. Ibid., p. 353.
9. Ibid., p. 352.
10. Ibid., p. 347.