Education

Here's a guest post from Army Col. Joe Buche, who commanded the Iron Rakkasans, an infantry battalion, under Gen. Petraeus in the 101^st Airborne in Iraq early in the war there, and is now a fine fellow at CNAS:

I was fortunate enough a few weeks ago to attend the United States Marine Corps' Counterinsurgency Forum.  It included several great panel discussions that included insights into the institutional requirements for, tactical methods involved in, and strategic considerations to produce successful COIN operations. 

I found the panels with former battalion and brigade commanders the most interesting on a personal level.  I am an OIF 1 Army infantry battalion commander, so the chance to hear how the art and science of command at those echelons have evolved in only a few years would get me to attend a forum like this without any other incentive.  While these discussions interested me, it was two other topics, spread over a few panels that day, which I found the most compelling. 

Officer education protocols and consideration of the nature of limited war and COIN operations offered the most pragmatic discussions of the day.  Neither is as vibrant a narrative as are anecdotes about Soldiers' and Marines' valor in the face of an enemy, the now revealed internal deliberations of a tactical commander about how to allocate his or her very scarce resources, or stories about how Families of those deployed deal with enduring separation from loved ones.  These emotional realities aside, ensuring that our institutional education systems help produce the leaders we need for this fight and a common, dispassionate understanding of the nature of this type of conflict are likely more important in the long run.

The panel that discussed the education systems included some short lived but spirited debate about the cost effectiveness of our nation's military academies, but its real utility was the discussion about where to focus our officer education.  I am one who dismisses a notion that our entire Army and Marine Corps looked around in April and May of 2003 and-when confronted with the unanticipated requirement to control a population and help create a fabric of civil society-waited until some doctrinal wisdom appeared online before divining a way forward.   While our institutional education systems hadn't spent a great deal of time focused on comprehensive counterinsurgency, there had been a modicum of attention there.  In addition, that legacy education system had helped produce a cadre of leaders with the intellectual flexibility to figure out how to proceed in the absence of a plan, refined doctrine, or the appropriate resources.  We'd done something right; our institutional education and selection systems had at the very least produced a set of leaders who could adapt.

The fact is that we can't depend on the genius of individuals or depend on our educational system producing tangential characteristics that will allow for our success.  Much is made of the distinction between training and education.  The former, focused on teaching a defined and presumably critical skill, clearly has its place in the institution.  When we know with great accuracy the challenges we will confront, then training as the primary means to develop competence in a force is a terrific method to achieve that.  In the less well defined future state of warfare and conflict, education-the provision of opportunities to learn how to think, not what to think-will pay off better in the long run.

Some of the symposium's participants also hinted at what may be an Army-specific requirement for education.  Our education system likely needs to fill a void confronted by the Army in the short term as a means to ensure the quality of our officer corps.  Formerly, our competitive promotion system helped ensure the quality of our officer corps.  Based on a number of factors, the competition for promotions up to colonel is no longer all that statistically competitive.  The best alternative system we have with which to ensure collective quality is our education system.   

The nature of limited war and COIN operations is fundamental to the development of appropriate strategy.  I'm skeptical that all of us engaged in a strategic debate really understand some of these basic precepts.  Many of us live in a town where political urgency is sometimes mistaken for strategic importance.  While the reality of our system of government means that our strategy is sometimes constrained by political policy, inside those broad confines an intellectual debate about strategy can and should take place.  A fruitful examination can't occur absent at least the agreement to disagree on some elemental principals about the nature of limited war and COIN operations.

Fortunately, a few of the panelists during the day talked about these topics.  I found Dr. Eliot Cohen's and LTG (Ret) Dave Barno's comments the most telling.  Cohen reminded us all that, from the perspective of the host nation in which we are involved in a COIN fight, the war is likely seen as one of national survival.  We Americans may be willing to take one risk or another without centralized review and consideration, but a host nation political leader may well see the potential of catastrophe and judge our risk to be a gamble he or she is unwilling to take.  Barno offered that, in Afghanistan, we need to focus on defeating the Taliban's strategy of merely waiting us out.  The Taliban may see a timeline for withdrawal as simply their timeline for victory.

These points led me to think about one of the fundamental requirements for limited war-not just deciding upon the desired ends, but determining how to characterize victory in a credible way.  Unlike unlimited war, where capitulation of the enemy is almost certainly the desired end, limited war requires strategic leaders not only to figure out that a causus belli exists, but also to define winning and figure out how to convincingly communicate that state to their own people, the other belligerents, and relevant parties in the international community. 

Imagine playing a baseball game with no predetermined number of innings and no recognized system of scoring.  "Unlimited baseball" would go on until the other team either could not continue to participate or they capitulated.  "Limited baseball" would go on until one team (or both) achieved their desired ends and departed.  Whether in a baseball league or in international human conflict, it's important that there be somewhat of a common perception of who won and who lost.  If we played limited baseball, then teams would need not only to figure out their ends, but have in their employ someone who could characterize those ends as indications of victory to influential observers.  Limited war-particularly that involving counterinsurgency-requires nothing less.

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.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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.

(Read on)

My subway companions Krepninevich and Watts offer up a startling new definition of strategy in their essay about how to regain strategic competence. I am all for a new definition, because I think the ways-means-ends stuff they teach at the war colleges is not helpful. That is just not the way I have seen strategic decision-making occur. Their definition focuses on identifying asymmetrical advantages:

What, then, is strategy? In light of these various observations and insights, a pragmatic characterization is as follows:

Strategy is fundamentally about identifying or creating asymmetric advantages that can be exploited to help achieve one's ultimate objectives despite resource and other constraints, most importantly the opposing efforts of adversaries or competitors and the inherent unpredictability of strategic outcomes.

This is not, of course, the usual definition of strategy. However, it has the considerable merit of applying as readily to chess or a business firm competing against other firms for profits and market share as it does to military competition during peacetime or war. More importantly, it goes beyond the traditional definitions of military strategy by indicating how one actually goes about doing strategy. At its core, strategy is about finding asymmetries in competitive situations that can be exploited to one's advantage.

This definition strikes me as better than the ways-means-ends device, but still a bit narrow, and perhaps too focused on the enemy. I think strategy is more about defining who we are, what we are trying to do, and how we are going to try to do it. But these are smart, insightful writers, so I am going think long and hard about it before rejecting their definition.

Some vets are Princeton have launched a program to teach other vets how to run for office. This is an explicitly non-partisan effort. It looks pretty good, judging only by its website.

Veterans Campaign was initiated by a group of graduate students and influential professors at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Some of the members have military experience, while others have staffed and managed political campaigns. Members hold different ideological and partisan beliefs, but all share the conviction that having more veterans in public office will benefit the United States.

I agree that having vets in office is a good thing. I'd especially like to see some former enlisted run for office. I think the armed services committees of Congress used to benefit enormously from the skeptical questions of former sergeants who had spent time in the mud, and weren't necessarily awed by generals.

Durotriges/Flickr

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. 

(Read on)

That's the title of a good article about military professionalism in the new issue of World Affairs by Richard Kohn, the great University of North Carolina military historian (and a friend of mine).

I was especially struck by this pungent line:

Iraq has become the metaphor for an absence of strategy."

Plus an depressing fact I'd never known:

William Westmoreland was the first active duty Army officer to graduate from the Harvard Business School."

Bert 2332 is back/Flickr

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?