The business section at your local bookstore is filled with books by military leaders. They tout the leadership and organizational lessons of combat professionals and their application to the business world. According to the titles, SEALs, fighter pilots, and surface warfare officers have "business secrets" vital to success in the corporate world. The current education policies of the U.S. Navy reflect this mind-set. The Navy's approach to graduate education has a distinct focus on the business world. However, the history shelves at the same bookstore will result in an interesting comparison. Alongside Alfred T. Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History and Karl von Clausewitz's On War, something is missing. Despite the education opportunities provided by the Department of the Navy, you won't find texts on the war-fighting secrets of today's business leaders. The Navy needs to rethink how it funds graduate education for its future leaders.
From a junior officer's perspective, the Navy's graduate education programs point in a very specific direction. The Graduate Education Voucher (GEV) provides an instructive example. According to OPNAV INST 1520.37, this program is intended to "provide opportunity for selected unrestricted line officers assigned to shore duty to attain Navy relevant graduate education [emphasis added]." The instruction governing the program leaves the reader with the impression that the only relevant subjects for naval service are focused on business, computer science, and engineering. There is no available funding for the study of history, and only 20 percent of the available billets are for subjects in the humanities. A search for funding to study history indicates that the only reason to study it is to teach at the Naval Academy.
The Naval Postgraduate School's Executive Masters of Business Administration (EMBA) program dwarfs the GEV in numbers. In comparison to the 14 billets available under the GEV, more than 200 students are enrolled in the EMBA program, and the program graduates 100 MBAs a year. The message to the junior officer is clear: the study of business and finance is more relevant to the naval officer than the study of history or political science. The EMBA program assigns a graduate with a financial subspecialty code on graduation. These codes are becoming vital for career progression. Recent flag selections leave the impression that business sub-specialties are important "checks in the block" for promotion.
The claim might be made that the education balance is provided by the Joint Professional Military Education (JPME) system and the Naval War College. However, only one of the three core courses in the curriculum, Strategy and Policy, focuses on history and diplomacy. It is also the shortest of the courses in the distance learning JPME. In comparison the National security Decision Making course, which has been described as the "business" section of the War College experience, is nearly twice as long.
Arguing that War College and JPME make the outside study of history unnecessary would mean the outside study of business is also unnecessary. It has been suggested that modern networkcentric war is more closely associated with business than with Clausewitz and military history. However what if, as Colonel T. X. Hammes suggested in a July 1998 Proceedings article, "war will continue to be nasty, brutish, and not subject to business rationale"?
The topic de jour for the Navy's leadership is diversity. Top talking points include diversity in gender, race, and experience. However, there is very little diversity in the education that our future leaders will have. It is time that the Navy re-evaluates its educational priorities. The curriculum at Annapolis continues to be engineering-based and our graduate-level education focuses on business.
To be sure, today's officers may benefit from an undergraduate engineering background, and it is important that the Navy have some officers trained in business management and accounting. However, just as the JPMH and War College curriculums provide learning from both history and business, more balance is required in graduate-level education opportunities to develop a diverse leadership in the future. As Captain Mahan wrote in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, "a study of the military history of the past... is enjoined by great military leaders as essential to correct ideas and to the skillful conduct of war in the future."
Lieutenant Armstrong is a helicopter (light instructor with HT-28. He has a MA in military history from Norwich University and his articles have appeared in Rotor Review, Naval Aviation News, and in the Fall 2007 Naval War College Review.