If the schools of a nation are to prepare the young for entry into society, then the educational system must reflect the society it seeks to serve. In like fashion, a system of military education must be based partly in the military society in which it originates and partly in the national society its products are designed to serve. Of significance, however, is the little-recognized idea that military service schools, in spite of all their duty to society, are not obliged to ape their civilian counterparts.
One is tempted almost to apologize for referring to Karl Marx in any context other than his political theories; but even this ideological zealot of narrow vision occasionally exhibited flashes of insight, especially when he wrote the following to Friedrich Engels in 1857:
But a good deal more than the development of commercial systems can be traced by looking at armed forces as reflexions of the societies they serve. Police states have police-ridden armies. Lackadaisical countries have lackadaisical armies, whose military attaches do not answer letters, . . . and highly industrialized countries have highly industrialized forces equipped with elaborate machinery staffed by skilled technicians.
Military society may well be a reflection of the larger American social order, but it is not, at the same time, a mirror image. The goals of a secure America are, indeed, the same for both military and civilian, but the methodology by which these goals are approached need not—and probably should not—be identical.
Some precision in the use of the language should be observed here, especially when referring to the efforts of the service academies and the other schools in the military educational hierarchy in providing “professional” schooling. Napoleon’s familiar dictum that every soldier carried a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack has been clasped to the bosoms of military educators so fondly that it now supports the incredible nonsense that everyone should be trained as if he were destined to become the Chief of Naval Operations or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
What seems to be lacking, therefore, in military education is a clear idea of what the military system of schools is supposed to do.
That most military schooling is frankly vocational should be no source of shame. Both the civilian high school and the military service school, including the service academy, seek to provide a certain measure of job preparation. Lest anyone feel uncomfortable at this categorization, kindly bear in mind that far better teaching by more professional classroom practitioners is found in the high schools of America than in university classrooms, traditionally, and apparently by choice, over-supplied with learned but inarticulate scholars. This vocational bias indicates that military schooling must of necessity assume more aspects of job preparation and less of pure education in the early career years.
The choice seems to lie between education and indoctrination at least to the war college level. And the distinction between the two is important.
The military careerist hears a great deal about the virtues inherent in arguing up to the point of decision and then supporting the commander’s choice once it is made. Practically nothing, however, is ever said about the equal degree of virtue which inheres in being able to listen intelligently in the first place. Not a polite attitude of silence during expositions of differing points of view, if you please, but an intellectual grasp and understanding of what is being argued.
Education, in its purest sense, offers the intellectual process an opportunity to consider several avenues of approach to a problem, some of which may be competitive or even in opposition—a characteristic which adds several increments of value to the ability to listen intelligently. Yet, training in the development of the intellectual faculties often lags within the military services. This occasional neglect of the intellect may result from the intense realism of the military profession and its remoteness from the abstract. This remoteness is not always the virtue some professionals claim it to be.
Much abuse, for example, has been heaped on medieval universities for the inordinate amount of time their students spent debating what may well rank as the hoariest of abstractions: the number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin. Ignore, for a moment, this celestial choreography and, instead, look to the purpose of the medieval debates. Despite strong religious overtones, these arguments were not catechistical in nature and involved no articles of faith; but they were vehicles designed to test the abilities of students to handle more abstract concepts and use their language with something more than ordinary facility. The semi-articulate products of modern educational systems could profit mightily from a return to the exercise of the intellect and training in the ability to communicate and manipulate concepts both real and abstract, especially since these skills seem to be enjoying a resurgence in government circles.
The suspicion that perhaps the medieval universities gave their students something lacking in modern education is supported when we read that naval officers who aspire to flag rank are going to need, if they expect promotion boards to reinforce their aspirations, “the qualities of flexibility of mind, analytical thought processes, creativity and imagination which will best qualify them to compete with the increasingly professional and intellectual civilian leadership within an increasingly integrated Defense Department.” Other services could hardly be harmed by a similar emphasis on qualities of mind and spirit. If, however, the military professional is to present his point of view and receive a respectful, considered hearing among the academicians in the upper reaches of the Department of Defense, he will simply have to learn the language of the classroom, laden with chalkdust and jargon—or go unheard.
But where is the development of the intellect to begin? And how is the time available for all educative processes in the military service to be divided between the frankly vocational, which develops skill in maneuvering ships individually and in fleets, and the educational, which develops the ability to communicate with the “analytical thought processes” now essential for promotion? As stated earlier, the problem appears to lie in deciding where indoctrination should stop and education begin.
A university faculty would rise up in collective indignation were anyone to level at it a charge of indoctrination. Military school faculties are not so sensitive for their schools do not have quite the same goals as collegiate faculties—and no derogation is either meant or intended when I say that indoctrination is much in evidence in the military.
The necessity for indoctrination at levels of military schooling below the war colleges and during the early years of a professional career should be apparent. The field of combat, whether an expanse of wind-tossed ocean or a barren hilltop, is large enough for but one point of view—that of the commander. The forces at work during battle do not generally deal kindly with the individual who pauses to wonder whether or not the mission assigned to him is, in fact, worth the effort or whether the time is ripe for a bit of judicious disobedience. Despite much sneering from the academic community, the immediacy of combat, the management of large corporate enterprises in the form of ships or shore stations, and the vastly different orientation of military schooling holds little attraction for the intellectual dabbler. We should not assume from this, however, that no place exists for the intellectual in the military profession; but that place is not necessarily in schools at the technical level.
Military service schools have a great deal of information to present to their students in pitifully short periods of time. Time is lacking in which to explore topics at great depth or in which to develop mind-to-mind rapport between teacher and student. The desperate need in the military is not so much for great teachers with the leisure to wait patiently for flashes of insight from their students, but for competent instructors who can present highly condensed material to the heterogeneous classes they face and send their students out able to perform intelligently and competently. But even where the public schools have failed to educate the future citizen, the military service schools are still able to fill part of the gap. In a British study of various national military systems, the remark was made:
Obviously armed forces can play a particularly valuable social role if they can catch young people while they are of still impressionable age, and instil in them the ideas that life is more worth living if it has some purpose in it, and that a purpose which has some positive value for society is more rewarding than plain selfishness.
This is also one of the stronger arguments against relying on the civilian colleges as exclusive sources of military professionals: The military profession demands more of its practitioners than an amiable ability to just “get along” in society.
Faculty weaknesses at military schools should not be ignored, however, in the press to get everything taught. Despite the obvious need for competent instructors both as classroom teachers and subject matter experts at all levels in the military school system, the best use is not always made of the abilities available. All too often, instructor selection tends to be the product of a routine turn of the assignment machinery (except at the service academies where an extraordinarily high degree of selectivity is exercised). Little or no attempt is made to seek out individuals truly qualified for instructional duties, and teaching ability, if present at all, becomes a by-product. At the war colleges the situation is both worse and better: platform ability seems little inquired into, but then, rarely is any teaching done in the sense of formal lecturing.
Thrusting reluctant instructors (for few find a sense of reward or achievement with students) into classrooms results in a subtle drift towards staff or management positions within the school. A University of Southern California educator, Dr. Leslie J. Nason, made this statement concerning civilian schools, but it applies with equal force to military schools:
Actual learning has become a stepchild in some schools. In them too much emphasis is placed on administration of buildings, legal matters, public relations, and school organization. . . . Administrators receive training in schools of education in each of these subjects but textbooks and professors seldom mention the most important element— administration of the learning process.
Worst of all, the quality of this awkward blend of an educational administrative bureaucracy and the traditional system of military administration is frequently flawed. Military administrators concentrate on military matters with which they can deal with familiarity and competence; equal competence in the management of education comes very much later, if at all, and arrives just as the assignment mill turns once again to start the cycle anew.
Neither the service academies nor the intermediate military command and staff colleges, however, can afford the luxury of functioning in the same leisurely pattern as colleges of liberal arts. The academies, for example, are in many ways an initial step in a lifetime of professional schooling designed to produce men possessed of an immediately usable quantity of military competence. And to this we might also add a generous measure of military professionalism, for the military ethic, which demands placing service above personal and materiel benefits, is notably lacking in the products of civilian education.
A good deal of controversy has appeared in this area. Should military schooling, especially at the service academies, be vocational or educational? Should it be professional for the far distant future, or practical for the immediate post graduation duty assignment?
A concentration on the intensely practical was in evidence during the early years of the Naval Academy. In a report to Congress in 1866, Rear Admiral John Dahlgren, heading a board of visitors, wrote:
. . . the first requisite—failing in which all the work of the Academy will be only lost time— is, that its graduates shall be qualified to enter upon the varied and responsible duties of active service in the grade to which they are admitted.
And this idea still bears serious consideration.
An individual may well be destined to wear several stars in any of the armed services; but he must first learn such prosaic basics as the organization, tactics, and techniques of employing his arm; he must acquire more than passing familiarity with traditional customs and courtesies; and if he is to be called forth from the ranks, he must also develop some competency in a military specialty or two in which his sterling performance will serve as a basis for recognition and advancement. This requirement that a careerist be able to function as a military professional before he can function later as an intellectual may be one of the reasons for the rather fundamental ignorance common outside the service concerning the precise purpose of military schools.
An unusual aspect of military schooling bears mention here. Although personal excellence can rarely of itself transcend formal military educational qualifications (for personal excellence usually results in selection for attendance at the career-critical schools) so clear is the progression of career schooling, the military service may well be one of the last professions in which a man can enter without a great deal of formal preparation, educate himself by the myriad opportunities offered by on-duty and off-duty schooling, and still enter the councils of the mighty by the end of his career. A cursory glance at the “Help Wanted” columns of the daily newspaper in any large city gives ample evidence that a log- cabin origin must be heavily bolstered with years of formal schooling before entry upon most professional fields. In contrast, the military profession requires no material wealth, for if the individual have but the determination and the basic intelligence, he can both aspire to, and qualify for, promotion into the highest echelons of his calling.
One qualification concerning the preparatory responsibilities of the service academies is particularly important: are the service academies able, in this age of technology and specialization, to qualify their graduates “to enter upon the varied and responsible duties of active service in the grade to which they are admitted?” Perhaps it is fortunate at this moment in history for technology to be so complex.
Decades ago, weapons systems could be taught as part of the service academy curriculum; but as weaponry advances, the difficulty grows apace of teaching everything which might be needed by a newly commissioned officer in the lowest grade. At the same time, the military sphere of interest has rapidly widened to include not just the fighting of ships or the maneuvering of divisions, but economic, political, social, and even moral implications as well of the use of armed force in the solution of international problems. If the intellectual horizons must also now be broadened, then perhaps the time is proper for a return to a concentration on basics and leave the acquisition of finely detailed technical knowledge to later and more specialized periods of schooling. Participation in joint and combined agencies further demands this broadening of the understanding, while duty in the Department of Defense places particular stress on an ability to handle the abstract concepts of force development, contingency planning, and budgetary in-fighting.
This return to basics does not mean, however, simply adding different subjects to academy and service school curricula, for a proliferation of “subjects” does not guarantee either an increase in knowledge or an ability to broaden one’s intellectual horizons. Too much emphasis in both civilian and military schools is already placed on mere exposure to organized bodies of knowledge tagged “subjects,” and not enough on the ability and methodology of learning new material in relation to the old. A great gulf separates the bare retention of knowledge from the ability to learn in the first place, and military schools could do much worse than recognize the difference between subject matter content and the means of dealing with that content.
Some of this unfortunate concentration on mere lists of subjects may be due to a forced and unhappy blending of education and indoctrination or training.
The armed services began their educational endeavors as training institutions and, in the decades since the Revolutionary War, have done superlatively well. In a certain sense, this astonishing success in the training field has proven unfortunate. The same practices which worked so well in training were applied with equal vigor to education and the two— training and education—do not blend well. Where the armed services early realized that training could be highly effective though occasionally unpleasant to the indoctrinee, at the same time they also failed to recognize the inapplicability of a completely fallacious corollary, that education, in order to be effective, must necessarily be unpleasant.
A number of badly flawed practices have thus been carried over from training into military education. The trainee cannot be dismayed when he is inundated with countless repetitions, for he is expected to be able to perform his tasks automatically and with great efficiency under widely varying situations. On the other hand, the student undergoing an educational program which is supposed to develop his understanding has a saturation point beyond which the efforts of his instructors are wasted. One high-level military school, as an example, suddenly discovered the case study method of instruction and proceeded to transform it from an educational technique into a training device by requiring students to prepare no less than four case discussions daily! Unlike indoctrination, education does not lend itself to a process of forced feeding. Each method has its place and its value in the career progression of the military professional; but the techniques applicable to each are not always interchangeable.
Indoctrination is certainly needed in the early stages of a military career; but it is inevitable that education in its broader sense is also going to be demanded in the later stages if a sort of group intellectual suicide is to be avoided. If, however, the need for indoctrination is evident as the means of laying the foundation for a profession, what place should education have in building upon this foundation in broadening the profession? Obviously, the schools of the several armed forces are the instruments by which the military professional is trained and educated from his first halting entrance into the exacting world of the leadership of men to his confident stride on the stage where he participates in the leadership of nations. But where should the responsibilities for the professional training and education of the careerist be assigned at each stage of schooling?
The service academies provide the entrance for many military careerists and as such have three obligatory functions: The service academy must perforce be a “trade school” by unashamedly providing the professional aspirant with the basic tools of his professionalism. In this text, the appellation “trade school” is not pejorative, for in the same category fall the undergraduate schools which give the medical aspirant his first instruction in the rudiments of chemistry and biology, or the legal apprentice a thorough indoctrination in the professional ethics of law—and certainly none of these are on the defensive about their preparatory efforts.
Aside from fitting the military careerist with the initial tools and attitudes of his calling, the service academies also have an obligation to inculcate the ability to think clearly and to acquire new learnings to be correlated with old learnings. In every profession, the ability to acquire new information, new techniques, and new skills is essential. If the service academies do no more than fit their products to perform these intellectual functions efficiently, much will have been done toward the ultimate aim of professionalism: the performance of a service to society.
And thirdly, the service academies are obliged to acquaint the military man with his responsibilities as a citizen. A German writer of 1817 summed up this aspect neatly when he stated:
The soldier who insists on more right than any other representative of the supreme power, degrades himself; the highest triumph is achieved when it can be said: the soldier is completely assimilated as a citizen.
Above the intermediate specialized technical schools lies, in each of the military services, a staff and command course which serves as a sort of capstone to the training of the service officer as a purely military professional. But even at this level some material of educative value—the longer term aspects of military policy, an appreciation of the influence of geography on the history of nations, or the effects of economics on international politics—might well be introduced, although in full realization of the burden of special competence this imposes on the several teaching faculties.
By the time the student has reached the level of the command and general staff colleges, he should have developed some concept of himself as a military professional. At this career point, the individual is at, or slightly beyond, the midpoint of the rank structure lying below the star grades and should be ready to regard his service to the nation as something more than a mere job. The curricula of the staff colleges are still highly vocational in nature dealing as they do with ability of the individual to function as the chief or principal assistant in staff positions of organizations commanded by officers wearing two or more stars.
With the staff colleges finishing off the training of the military professional, the war colleges can then offer education for service to the nation in its highest sense. By the time attendance is ordered, war college students have survived several selection processes connected with promotion, assignment, and advanced schooling, and presumably from this group will be selected those who will ultimately deal with the higher branches of national policy and the finer decisions concerning international relations.
Unfortunately, only so much can be presented in the war college year (and a second year would only partially alleviate the time stringency). Although some critics object to the apparent hodgepodge in war college curricula and compare these schools rather invidiously to civilian institutions of comparable level, a good case can be made for the defense.
The civilian postgraduate student has climbed a clearly defined, almost formalized, educational ladder. The military postgraduate student at his service war college certainly cannot be presumed to have followed a course of similar clear definition. Backgrounds among students vary enormously both in formal educational achievements and military experience. Some commonality can be identified, especially among the staff college graduates who have learned to speak the same technical and professional military language, but not in the same sense as the product of civilian schools of higher learning.
This variety in background has many desirable features. No evil inheres in students learning from each other, although admittedly this method of gleaning nuggets of knowledge from group discussions may be less efficient than the formal platform lecture. The military profession is so varied that the assembly of any group is certain to broaden each member in aspects he would otherwise never encounter.
Since the war college student can be expected to bring his professionalism with him, attention can be turned during the brief ten months or so of his course to the political ideologies, economic theories and practices, and tools of government with which he will be expected to deal after graduation. The emphasis here is on education, for many military professionals will be unable to obtain such learnings except by attendance at a war college. Ancillary programs, such as that conducted by George Washington University, in which war college students may secure graduate degrees are an invaluable fringe benefit in adding both a further increment of broadening to the intellectual horizons and a recognized, formal degree which may be used to document the right to speak in the councils of the Department of Defense academicians. The decision of the Army War College to abandon its co-operative degree program with George Washington University, I feel, does a great disservice to its future students specifically and the armed forces generally in denying this added element of intellectual broadening.
In this fashion can a degree of stratification in military education be achieved: Indoctrination at the service academies and the intermediate technical service schools as a professional foundation; a judicious mix of indoctrination slightly leavened with education at the staff colleges to complete the military professional structure of competence; and education for all the understandings and viewpoints required in national service at the war colleges. By this stratification can military education be given a specific direction in the development of the career professional. For too long a time has the military man stood apart from the civilian society in which he lives and works and which he is obligated to defend. If the academician has succeeded in penetrating the control apparatus of the military departments, then must the military man become joined with this intellectual community set apart only by his professionalism. The leavening to be provided by civilian universities in the process of professional broadening is important and is a factor evidently being accorded more and more importance by personnel officials in military career planning.
The process of intellectual broadening and social blending may never quite transform the professional of arms into a vast learned society; but, then, the military services hardly find much utility in unproductive academic debate. The course of military education should lie in the ability to recognize the need for indoctrination in the techniques and ethics peculiar to the military, and a parallel need for education in those areas of human knowledge wherein the military overlaps the civilian. In this fashion, will military education better fit the military man for the service society expects of him and the competence his own profession demands.