Now Hear This: Send the Best and the Brightest

In his recent Armed Forces Journal essay, "A Failure in Generalship," U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling delivers a closely argued rebuke to what he sees as the intellectual and moral poverty of senior military leaders.

Combat is predominantly a physical activity. The strategy that gives combat a purpose—what precisely is the better peace we seek, and have we the means to achieve it?—is a purely intellectual pursuit. The summit of the military officer's calling is, or should be, to serve as a strategic adviser to civilian authority. Colonel Yingling rightly calls attention to our neglect of this aspect of our profession. His assertion that Congress should initiate reforms on how we educate officers for senior command is worth further examination. Restructure the senior war colleges and their admission criteria and we will have taken a big step toward correcting the problem that Colonel Yingling has illuminated.

General officers are drawn from the ranks of colonels who have completed one of the senior war colleges—and these are less institutions of higher learning than finishing schools that measure success by the uniformity of temperament their graduates demonstrably possess, something that finds oblique expression in the absence of solid admission standards. Personnel officers decide who attends and even who is qualified to attend. Intellectual ability is ignored; eligibility is based on the recommendation of commanders and an officer's assignment history. This is an unsatisfactory arrangement if we hope to produce the generals Colonel Yingling says we need.

For starters, you advance in the military by making your mind conform to that of your boss. To express a dissenting view on policy—no matter how beneficent or perceptive—is to risk being regarded as someone who is disloyal in outlook if not in deed. The personality types that thrive in a bureaucracy—military or otherwise—often feel diminished or threatened by points of view that incisively question the system that has rewarded them not only with a nice living but also with the psychic compensation that attends reaching the loftier heights of their profession.

Every bureaucracy encourages its most ambitious members to evaluate policy by the lights of "How does this make my organization look?" rather than "Is it true; is it right?" This outlook infiltrates our war colleges if only because an intelligent, persistently expressed dissatisfaction with the status quo—the wellspring of substantive innovation—will undermine, if not derail, one's career prospects. Colonel Yingling has persuasively surveyed the impact of these circumstances on our strategic vitality.

Reforming military education is an immensely broad subject that cannot be disposed of in a few sentences. However, here's the germ of an idea on which can be built a program that would populate the senior ranks with officers who can wield ideas, as well as a brigade, in the field. By all means, make attendance at war college a prerequisite for promotion to flag rank—but gaining a place should depend on passing an exacting essay exam that pivots on the ability to synthesize history, theory, and contemporary circumstance. This exam would screen out those officers who have fallen into the narrow groove of their careers, signs of which would include an uncritical faith in received opinion and an inability to express worthy ideas with clarity. By contrast, officers endowed with a well-trained mind and an intelligent appetite for reading military and diplomatic history—like Colonel Yingling—would flourish on the exam as indeed they would at strategic planning and at the highest levels of command.

The canard that rhetorical skill, and intellection in general, is antithetical to the military leader cannot be validated by history and is nothing more than an excuse for mental stagnation. Writing is not an exotic pastime or a gift of mysterious origins; one learns to write by reading a wide variety of quality books and publications over a lifetime and by a cultivating self-consciousness when it comes to using words, the carriers of ideas. The ability to write well on strategic subjects reflects a capacity for sound judgment and a perceptive grasp of how wars detonate, end, and reignite—indispensable habits of mind for a successful general.

Lieutenant Colonel Hanley has served in Saudi Arabia, Iceland, and various assignments in the United States. He currently teaches at the U.S. Air Force Academy and is a member of the Naval Institute's editorial board.

The ability to write well on strategic subjects reflects a capacity for sound judgment.