Service Academies

Comment of the day goes to "Rubber Ducky," who made this observation in the discussion earlier this week of the Naval Academy:

It's a long time since the US was out-engineered in a war (like never), but one can point to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan as three examples of a failure of human understanding, the subject of the humanities.

I've studied military education some, but had never quite heard that thought expressed so well.

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Prof. Bruce Fleming checks in from Annapolis with this report on how officials at the Naval Academy are reacting to his charge that the academy is bending admissions standards:

I'm writing now to ask if you're interested in rattling the cage again, perhaps in your blog, as a next step on the "diversity" issue I raised this summer. I have to assume you are up on my own contributions to this topic -- first an op-ed in the local (Annapolis) paper, this was widely reported in the Post, USA Today, Navy Times etc. I was asked to post a long piece on the USNI blog, which I did. It threw the admin for a loop, apparently, and beyond: I hear my name came up at all-hands meeting(s) at the Pentagon where the CNO was asked, "What about Professor Fleming's assertions?" He adopted what the admin has chosen to adopt as their "shut down the discussion" mantra, namely something along the lines of "Professor Fleming doesn't have the facts." After that I asked USNI if they were interested in a second posting by me using an internally-generated PowerPoint with facts and figures direct from the horse's mouth to show that Prof Fleming DID have the facts, or enough to make the main points (minor procedural details may have shifted since my time on the Board, 5 years ago, but current statistics and graphs show that the basics are still there, namely what the administration itself calls "streamlined" admission for self-identified racial minorities, who come in one of only two ways, NAPS or "direct" -- not true for non-athlete whites). USNI asked for this, then kept it, then now doesn't even respond to my e-mails saying "are you running this?"

Meanwhile the Dean, a new one who just arrived, has gone out of his way to deny me both of the two merit pay steps recommended by my dept and its chair (two is the max; it's possible to be recommended for two and get one if there just aren't enough available to be given out, but it's unheard of to take someone out of the rankings and move him to the bottom, as he has done). I've filed, last week, a federal whistleblower's protection complaint with the OSC, on the grounds that this has every appearance of being retaliation for my saying in print that this kind of race-based admissions and two-tracking is illegal. I don't know if this grinds slowly or fast, but it's in the works. So they're upset because I'm raining on their parade.

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Here's a response to my call to shut down West Point from Col. Cindy Jebb, Ph.D., a professor in the social sciences department there:

There has been a great deal of discourse prompted by Tom Ricks's article that calls for the dissolution of West Point.  Perhaps because Mr. Ricks has only seen a glimpse of West Point, he fails to understand the institution and its contributions. To appreciate West Point and its multidimensional value, one must grasp that it is much more than the sum of its programs, its graduates, and its faculty. 

I would like to provide another voice, one with experience that Mr. Ricks lacks: West Point graduate with 27 years of service in the Army, a PhD from Duke University, and a professorship at West Point.  Furthermore, I am the co-chair of West Point's Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) Self Study. MSCHE is a regional, peer review commission that accredits institutions of higher learning. Because the brightest students and the best faculty want to work at excellent institutions, colleges and universities seek MSCHE accreditation or its regional equivalent. 

The MSCHE perspective values a holistic approach to learning. Tom Ricks misses much of the extraordinary work conducted around the Academy that plugs into key offices at the Pentagon, Training and Doctrine Command, and Combatant Commands as well. Why do these offices seek out West Point? West Point is a genuine academy in the classical sense. It brings together the best minds, from all academic disciplines to forge new ways of thinking and to solve issues of national and international importance, while simultaneously focusing on the personal and professional development of its students and faculty. 

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A research-prone reader sends this interesting note:

Thought you may find it interesting that, with GEN McKiernan's dismissal and the appointments of LTGs McChrystal & Rodriguez to command positions in Afghanistan, every 3- and 4-star general officer exclusively directing the ongoing wars will soon be a West Point graduate:

"War Czar" LTG Doug Lute '75
 
USCENTCOM CG GEN David Petraeus '74
 
MNF-I CG GEN Ray Odierno '76
MNC-I CG LTG Charles Jacoby '78 (who recently replaced LTG Lloyd Austin, '75)
MNSTC-I CG LTG Frank Helmick '76
 
ISAF/USF-A-designate LTG Stan McChrystal '76
New Operational Commander (MNC-I equivalent) LTG David Rodriguez '76
 
Additionally, the new ambassador to Afghanistan is Karl Eikenberry is USMA '73.

That's not bad, considering that West Point expelled dozens of cadets for cheating in a 1976 scandal -- but I think from the class of '77, which doesn't appear on the above list, perhaps because of its unusually high attrition rate.   

Meanwhile, another officer notes that the guys who have been criticized, fairly or unfairly, are disproportionately not from WPCC:

GEN Tommy Franks, OCS  (CENTCOM)

GEN John Abizaid, USMA '73  (CENTCOM)

GEN George Casey, ROTC (MNF-I)

GEN Dan K. McNiell, OCS (ISAF)

GEN David McKiernan, ROTC (ISAF)

LTG Ricardo Sanchez, ROTC (CJTF-7/MNC-I)

racketrx

The academy didn't teach me squat about contemporary warfare, this pilot complains in his blog:

At no point in my career so far has the Air Force prepared me to fight and win the nation's wars at the operational or strategic levels; instead, it has trained me over and over to fight Desert Storm. The numerous PME courses I've taken are all built on the same canon: a cursory introduction to Jomini and Clausewitz, overviews of historical airpower theories, then discussions of how airpower was used and misused in World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. The saga culminates with John Warden and his strategic airpower theory which was successfully employed in Desert Storm. This is the holy grail of airpower. Airpower post-Desert Storm is treated only briefly."

I actually know this pilot, and he is a smart guy. My thought: the Air Force Academy has the rep of being a faith-based institution, so perhaps this isn't surprising.

Interestingly, this pilot goes on to credit his wife and the Small Wars Journal and like outlets for providing him the education in warfare that he needed:

It's embarrassing that a captain in the United States Air Force has to turn to the Army for an education about war, but that is exactly the situation I've found myself in. While the Air Force was sitting out the FM 3-24 development process, I was on Small Wars Journal every morning and working through reading lists by top Army thinkers." 

He thinks that the Air Force Academy probably should remain open, but certainly not because it passes on the Air Force culture, which he condemns:

. . . I believe the service culture -- both within USAFA and the Air Force at large -- is a liability, not an asset. USAFA and the Air Force PME schools may not need to be closed, but they need to be reformed."

Responsible opposing viewpoints? Also, is the F-16 really an impressive platform anymore?

I really liked this note from Marine Lt. Nathan Cox, one of those "bitter grunts," as aviators call them. He has some problems with the academies, most notably in failing to teach genuine leadership. Is this a system that provides the agility we need in our military leaders?

But Cox mounts a passionate and persuasive defense of their worth. Please read all of this before deciding whether he is right or wrong.

I am a Naval Academy graduate and Marine Infantry officer with two Iraq deployments and four years' time in service.  . . .

With regard to the quality of the education, I found the Naval Academy quite demanding academically, and I have heard anecdotally from exchange cadets that it is quite a bit different in that regard from West Point. Most of the military officers with master's degrees teach the introductory level and professional courses while the civilian and military PhD's teach the higher level stuff. Grade inflation does not exist. Anything over a 3.0 requires a major amount of work and many bright people struggle just to pass. I found the higher level history courses I took to be outstanding, although I admittedly didn't take civilian courses I could compare them with. I never experienced any of the problems posters cited at West Point involving instructors not knowing material. 

The problems I had were with the leadership training or lack thereof. The actual formal leadership training I got was not helpful at all, ranging from completely irrelevant academic "leadership" classes that seemed pulled from corporate boardrooms to ballroom dancing lessons (yes, those really happened). Midshipmen are given less actual responsibility and freedom than a private right out of boot camp and are forced to comply with a byzantine and illogical set of rules, known as midregs. Midregs often violate the spirit and sometimes even the letter of the UCMJ and also occasionally contradict each other, generating a destructive contempt for "stupid rules" among midshipmen that did not serve me well in the Marine Corps.

The end result of this "training" is graduates who have little experience in actually leading people when their actions have consequences and a misperception about the importance (and effectiveness) of working within the system and its rules. The system of student government that exists is ineffective at teaching leadership skills because the elaborate midshipman rank structure provides no actual power or responsibility.... As a result, Naval Academy graduates don't know what it's like to make decisions that will cost the government money, make a real difference in the status quo or determine whether people live or die anymore than ROTC graduates do. In reality, Academy graduates probably have less experience because they're so much more sheltered. The real problem is that there is absolutely no effort made to evaluate whether what the Naval Academy does makes better officers. It is simply assumed that because the Naval Academy does it, it must work. The reasons given for some of the training we had were literally laugh out loud ridiculous, but no one has ever checked with graduates, after some years in the fleet, to get feedback on what training methods helped us and what did not. . . .

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A cadet wishing to be identified as "A Concerned Firstie" writes in to recommend requiring a year or two of enlisted service before matriculating at the academy:

West Point should change, and I think forcing all applicants to serve enlisted in a combat arm prior to admission would be a radical change that would dramatically affect admissions and retention. First, it would allow prospective officers a chance to stand among their potential subordinates before they could stand before them, this would hopefully scare away those who come to West Point because it was the only Division-1 school that recruited them or who wanted to get that sweet degree and the potential "Old Grad" connections in the corporate world, introducing a greater degree of self selection. Second, this enlisted time would allow us to weed out the duds before they showed up to West Point and gained untouchable status. A great many cadets are fragile (constantly sick, broken, unfit for duty, outright malingering) or just not cut out for military service for a number of reasons. By getting rid of them early, we would help reduce the cynicism that stems from watching our subpar classmates continue to slip through the cracks till they eventually graduate, and then show up to the Big Army and embarrass the rest of us. Not to say that I'm the best this institution has to offer. I've struggled as much or more than many of my classmates, and I seriously considered quitting at the end of my sophomore year, what eventually convinced me to stay was a chance at leading troops where I was able to excel, receiving my only A grade in the military category. That experience, along with my friends' encouragement and pleas, convinced me to stay.

The biggest drawback would also be its greatest strength, by scaring away these people, we may scare away the Rhodes Scholar types that West Point always points to whenever its academic credentials are questioned. One has to wonder if that is such a bad thing after meeting some of the Wunderkinds though. I'm inclined to believe that academic performance has little to do with officer potential after a certain baseline competence. It's much more personality-driven in my opinion. These are obviously just my impressions, and I would not say that I represent the majority of cadets even."

I like his solution.

ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images

Retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington is not just any retired Army officer. He wrote one of the best memoirs of the Vietnam War, and also went to Iraq to review Army intelligence operations there early in that war, producing a  good critique of intelligence failings and warning against the abuse of prisoners. That study has never been declassified because he never classified it -- but he only made two copies.

There is a verve in his memories, as well as a dig at West Point. Here is his note:

In 1975, I founded a new Army ROTC Detachment at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa (immediately upon my return to the States after the fall of Saigon). I was a captain, 34 years old, and made major a year later. Three months before I set foot on the campus (which was permitted only after the anti-war faculty senate voted to allow me to open an ROTC presence, by one vote, as long as I did not bring weapons on the campus), some anti-war types threw rotten vegetables at a pair of Marine recruiters. My boss, the PMS at nearby University of Tampa, advised that I might consider not wearing my uniform while on campus, but I declined his suggestion, saying that if I couldn't wear the uniform on the campus, we simply did not belong there. Within three months, I had 200 cadets, many of them VN War enlisted vets. These were the years of the so-called Vietnam Malaise, and anti-war winds were still blowing strongly. But the reception I got was surprising.

As soon as I hit the campus, all sorts of faculty members came out of the closet to admit that seeing the uniform was a sight for sore eyes, and offering their support. I would up teaching as a guest lecturer in classes ranging from Poly Sci to history, to sociology, even speech. And the more exposure I got, the more rapidly the new ROTC program exploded.  By the end of the year, I sent 52 cadets to the Ft. Bragg Advanced Camp, one of the three largest contingents from any school. The Bragg encampment is the six-week training all ROTC cadets get between their junior and senior years, barracks living, obstacle courses, marksmanship, field training, all of it evaluated, every day. My cadets finished in the top 5 of 103 schools at the camp, beating VMI, the Citadel, and a host of other military schools and major ROTC campuses. They told me that the cadets from full time military schools were cynical and, overall, seemed to expect that because they were from such schools, the whole thing would be a walkover. I stayed in the USF job four years. In year two, we came out second in the camp. In the third year, one of my cadets came out #1 in the camp and copped the Commandant's Sword-the first female to ever accomplish this feat. Our school again finished second of 103. In the fourth year, we won the trophy as the top school at the camp, including VMI, Citadel, Georgia Military College, etc. Then, in a nose-to-nose competition with the #1 schools from the Ft. Riley and Ft. Lewis ROTC advanced camps, we came out on top and the school was awarded the "Warriors of the Pacific Trophy" as the best ROTC institution in the United States. The secret was, I picked smart kids, made it clear that they could not major in ROTC, that their grades were crucial, and that leadership came from those who could excel. Magic.....

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