Setting aside the entire question of the potential for nefarious deeds by Chinese military 'students' for a minute...

According to Wikipedia (i.e., quoted with a grain of salt), the PLA has 2.25 million total troops, while the US military has 1.47 million. Virtually every officer in the US military gains a graduate degree by the time they reach the rank of O-5, around 15-20 years of service. In fact, you can't really get promoted above O-4/O-5 without an advanced degree. Many gain more - including from such foreign institutions as Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics.

With this data in mind, it is hard to imagine that the US military is not far ahead of the PLA in terms of percentage of soldiers earning graduate degrees, despite the PLA having an edge in actual hard numbers.

As for the location of theses studies (and to paraphrase David Mamet), everyone wants to study in America - that's why they call it "America."

business, gaming and client development in third world while ours studied only Clauswitz, power point politics and courtisan manners?

RPM,

My guess is that the report is talking about U.S. officers enrolled full time in Advanced Civil Schooling (ACS) where they are being paid to learn, think and reflect.

Sure a Masters earned on-post from Webster or Central Michigan and on-line from AMU or Phoenix are "graduate degrees" in the broadest use of the term. That said, who's kidding who. There is no comparison between an officer paid to be a student and one juggling a quickie Masters program on top of a demanding MTOE position.

The fact is that by 2000 the Army had gutted its ACS program and it was a ghost of what it was 15 years earlier. The Army's stock number that X # of LTCs have Masters degreees is pure eyewash. Does it even matter anymore in an Army where 97% of CPTs make Major and 90% of MAJs make LTC?

Your quickness to dismiss this topic is evidence that you would rather not have this shameful number addressed in public. Fine. I'll up the argument and dig deeper.

Let's say the numbers are wrong. We are sill talking about foreign officers (Chinese) sent to learn in foreign universities. How many US officers are afforded the same opportunity. When you look at the PLA numbers here we are just talking about officers in US schools. How many more PLA officers are in European or Asian ones? Better yet, how many are getting first rate grad degrees in China?

I would argue that as shocking as this statistic is it actually understates the problem. The best comparison is how many Chinese officers vs. US officers are paid to go to school overall and of those how many are paid to go abroad to learn? Even if the numbers cited overstate the number of Chinese in the US by 100%, there would still be many times the number of Chinese officers in US Schools alone than the US has officers in all other nations combined.

Our officer accessions model that essentially writes off places like NYC and Detroit (with high diversity and heritage language skills) as a source of new officers only compounds this problem.

I balanced an advanced degree as an MTOE unit officer and saw many others do the same - more than 15 years ago. And it wasn't Phoenix or some other bs. And, ACS programs were rare even then. Lots of officers do combine CGSC/war college or ROTC with advanced programs. But lots just find the time to do it. Harder in a high OPTEMPO environment, but doable over time.

But that's not the real point here... if you are decrying the lack of monetary support for advanced study, home or abroad, I'm right with you (and budgets are not going to get any better any time soon). And the future danger of advancing PLA capabilities across the spectrum - and the manner in which those advances occur - is a serious issue. But if you are arguing that the PLA is better educated, across the spectrum of leadership, considering every US military officer has at least a BA/BS just to begin with, c'mon...

As scary as it is that our military leadership seems to have abandoned a foundation of American political philosophy--that of classical philosophy regarding an educated, reflective warrior (like what Aristotle taught Alexander), these statistic may yield a few surprisingly positive outcomes. I agree with all the comments critiquing the military for not promoting more ACS through funding--that is defiantly forgetting that warriors in today's milieu must be able to understand and navigate philosophical and ideological battles as much as real combat. Advanced training in thinking is as valuable to today's warrior as advanced training in logic and wisdom was to Alexander (today we seem to have an immensity of Gordian knots). This caveat stems from the "hearts and minds" approach that requires social science and philosophical skills to undertake.

As to the few surprising benefits:
1) Our education here in the US is extremely more liberal (in a philosophical and educative sense, not political) than any education in China. Chinese officers educated in the US may leave here with a better understanding and perhaps even personal adoption of some of our underpinning beliefs in life, liberty and the pursuit of property.

2) We can learn who are up-and-coming officers and glean more data that can be used for later intelligence analysis. These officers are studying here, which means we can find out who they are, what they are thinking, and use this data to build dossiers on tomorrow's Chinese military leadership.

3) It opens communication between China and the US. Unlike in the Cold War where the great powers could afford economically in the short and middle terms to not engage each other; CHina and the US must engage in economic relations, which makes an all-out war extremely costly for both countries. By creating dialogue and discourse between the countries we can glean better where they are at. THey may be able to learn about America, but because of our preeminence in communication technologies and mass media, that is open-source and could have been gleaned anyway.

These are not to say that there is no risk in having a lot of Chinese military officers in our country, as there is risk. But perhaps there are some other positive benefits that must be weighed into this equation as well. I think the real moral of the story is that our own military (and overall political philosophy) need to glean something from the classics and see that an educated warrior is a warrior capable of doing the impossible things both in peace and in war. In the era of liberalisation and modernity that America has reached, educated warriors are critical as they are the representatives for all Americans and our incorrigible propositions upon which we base our lives.

RPM,

I hear you loud and clear. I'm just trying to point out that in today's OPTEMPO and organization where so much has been privatized/civilianized, the traditional opportunities for officers to earn graduate degrees on the side (e.g. ROTC) have narrowed. For many combat arms/MFE officers there is no chance to "take a knee" until MAJ. LT and CPT are series of arduous and backbreaking MTOE positions. ROTC officer authorizations have been gutted. In many Army ROTC programs you will find 2 RA or AGR officers and two private contract officer instructors. By law, there are things that only RA officers can do in an ROTC unit. Consequently, the RA officers in ROTC are being worked to death to keep up with the demands of running, marketing and organizing a program with minimal manpower.

I would submit that we cut way too deep in trimming our TDA authorizations and with nearly 100% promotion to Major we need to look into once again providing our CPTs a chance to take a knee - not just to attend grad school but to reconnect with the people they serve outside the self-reinforcing military cocoon. I am by no means suggesting that the PLA officer corps is as well educated overall as the US. I am saying that they are obviously showing a better strategic vision of developing human talent/skills in their officer corps than we are.

Spitfirega,

I don't know what to say other than the tone of your post scares the hell out of me. I mean, the language and overuse of the "warrior" gives me great pause. It seems as if you are trying to redefine the very nature of the US Army's historical relationship with the population it serves. The US has not historically had a "warrior caste"- especially since its emergence as a true global power. I believe that is a national strength. The ongoing efforts to create one now must be reexamined. The increasingly popular notion of a self-selecting uniformed military unaccountable to the nation it serves - because "warriors" are exempt from budgetary and behavioral norms because they "provide freedom" for a nation of "sheep" unwilling to "defend" themselves - is noxious to many and downright poison when instilled into 22 year old 2LTs and 19 year old PFCs who don't know any better. This frame of self-identification has actually been enshrined in the Army's re-written Soldier's Creed (with Orwellian flourish).

JThomas,

You raise excellent points. My only comment would be that given the Army officer corps' increasingly self-selecting and demographically narrow composition, the opportunity to have ones assumptions challenged and see others' perspective is more important than ever. Civilian graduate school is one way of doing this. While it won't automatically instill an innate ability to "do COIN" - whatever that means - it will provide a framework for thinking, reflecting and synthesizing information/opinions/agendas.

I cannot overstate my concern about the narrow pool our officer corps is drawn from. In 2003, the Army Cadet Command (who runs ROTC) consciously determined that it would "write off" 85% of the US college population and aggressively target a 15% slice of that population (called "first stringers") who were already predisposed to Army service. The Army has respectively 2 and 3 ROTC programs serving over 8 million residents (each) of NYC and NJ while it maintains 12 programs in Virginia and 10 in Alabama - states with smaller populations. Between 1989 and 1991, the Army unilaterally chose to abandon college students in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Jersey City and Detroit as a source of Army officers. The Navy has ZERO ROTC presence in NJ, CT, RI or NH and enrollment in NYC is limited to students at only 2 schools.

From my vantage, graduate education is not any sort of "silver bullet". It is however a chance to leaven our thinking among career officers and mitigate our epically short-sighted officer accessions policies.

I think that question makes all the difference. I'm guessing here, but I would wager that most of these PLA students are in science and engineering programs. The US military does science and engineering too (my wife was one of those "ACS" students - twice - getting a masters and is now doing her PhD in engineering), but I suspect, and my anecdotal experience suggests, that most officers get some kind of "management" graduate degree.

Numbers are certainly important, but type and quality of education matter too, and I would bet the PLA has us beat there in many cases too.

My law school had more Chinese (from China) than African Americans. This was a few years back, but it seemed very odd.

It seems pretty smart. In the year 2000, the Chinese leadership was receiving alerts from their advisers that the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) were elements of defrauding on a wide scale. Our Presidents were receiving during the period financial contribution from the CDS creators.

Wonder if our intelligence operators ever understood enough to so brief the President. About that time, wonder if our military and defense professionals had yet mastered the ATM card.

Chinese officers may be gaining a greater understanding of America through study in its graduate schools, but they are unlikely to gain a greater understanding of America's military this way. When was the last time you met an American graduate student who understood America's military? And few of those that do came to the knowledge through graduate studies.