Which teaches officers more, engineering or the humanities?

Thu, 10/08/2009 - 10:49am

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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Obrigado.

by Rubber Ducky on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 11:11am

TR: muito obrigado.

Unfortunately, this question

by stephane taillat on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 11:55am

Unfortunately, this question should be raised for almost every part of Western society.I live in a country (France) and work for a Ministry (Education) that have long endorsed the humanities as the golden path to the highest situations and roles in the society (along with engineering that said). Today, humanities have been discarded as mere useless futilities (as it is illustrated by Sarkozy's bad comment on "La princesse de Clèves", one the most important book in French in the 17th C.; or in the broader society by the decreasing numbers of pupils and students that choose to study Modern Literature, not to speak of Ancient literature, Greek and Latin, or even worse, Philosophy)...
Surprisingly, the most humanities-oriented institution is the French Army's officers Corps.

There was a time when we listened to Stockdale..

by Bill Keller on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 12:57pm

..after he returned and had received the Medal of Honor for his stoic resistence in the POW camps. James Stockdale gave interviews parts of which I remember vividly today on the value of humanities study and its importance to character development and adversity forbearance. Stansfield Turner at the War College was a ruthless enforcer of humanities study for those officers at a former country club in Newport.

But there was yes another powerful counter to this, a Czar of Nuclear Power, Rickover who filled the Navy with engineer only flags who could be relied upon to follow procedures and orders with a perfection whether in a nuclear deterrance role or sitting high on the Joint Chiefs without the doubts humanities could cause. Men that when actions were directed by the National Command (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rummey, England, Feith et al) would act with the alacrity of a turning of the Y-stop key.

So if we find ourselves at the end of the Iliad or on the beaches of Syracuse will we have only the assurance of the GPS device to find our way home. (Assuming the satellites have not been taken out.)

I'm a Stockdale fan

by tom ricks on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 1:09pm

I read his book. I've always felt sorry for the way he was mocked after his awkward but honest appearance in the vice presidential debates, I guess back in 1992.
Best,
Tom

His statue made the cover....

by Bill Keller on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 1:27pm

of Shipmate, USNA alumni association magazine, last month.

Think Perot was wrong to have him in that position. Time was by then taking its toll. Some times I think McCain is in the same position, there seems to be handlers constantly around him. Heroes are good frontmen for a bad back room.

Back on Stockdale, his biggest fear was that they would learn that he knew Tonkin was contrived. He had flown the F-8 over the site and found no attackers.

Jesus Christ: Superstar

by PrahaPartizan on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 1:57pm

The topic reminds me of the refrains in the latter part of that rock opera, wherein God is basically accused of being real good on "when", "where", and "how" but not so good on "why." This debate in technical schools about the education offered has been going on for at least a half century. Unfortunately, the military academies were established as technical schools from the gitgo.

CP Snow's Warning on Hyper-Specialization

by Steven Thomas Smith on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 4:08pm

I hope that you're just pot-stirring with the title's false dichotomy, Tom.

Everyone knows about the Two Cultures Lecture, but what appears to be lost between CP Snow's tweaking techies for not reading books and artists for ignorance of thermodynamics is his main conclusion about the dangers of hyper-specialization. Snow's thoughts on this and merit-based performance reviews based on mastery of a "solved" subject are worth reading, and appear to have some relevance.

(Jargon alert: the Tripos was Cambridge's notoriously competitive and rigorous final exam in mathematics; the highest-scoring student was awarded the title of "Senior Wrangler", and Google books has a full scan of all problems to 1878.)

we have set ourselves the task of producing a tiny élite … educated in one academic skill. For a hundred and fifty years in Cambridge it was mathematics: then it was mathematics or classics: then natural science was allowed in. But still the choice had to be a single one. … I have given reasons why … I think it is fatal, if we're to perform our practical tasks in the world. But I can think of only one example, in the whole of English educational history, where our pursuit of specialised mental exercises was resisted with success. It was done here in Cambridge, fifty years ago, when the old order-of-merit in the Mathematical Tripos was abolished. … The competition for the top places had got fiercer, and careers hung on them. In most colleges, certainly in my own, if one managed to come out as Senior or Second Wrangler, one was elected a Fellow out of hand. A whole apparatus of coaching had grown up. Men of the quality of Hardy, Littlewood, Russell, Eddington, Jeans, Keynes, went in for two or three years' training for an examination which was intensely competitive and intensely difficult. Most people in Cambridge were very proud of it, with a similar pride to that which almost anyone in England always has for our existing educational institutions, whatever they happen to be. If you study the flysheets of the time, you will find the passionate arguments for keeping the examination precisely as it was to all eternity: it was the only way to keep up standards, it was the only fair test of merit, indeed, the only seriously objective test in the world. The arguments, in fact, were almost exactly those which are used today with precisely the same passionate sincerity if anyone suggests that the scholarship examinations might conceivably not be immune from change. In every respect but one, in fact, the old Mathematical Tripos seemed perfect. The one exception, however, appeared to some to be rather important. It was simply—so the young creative mathematicians, such as Hardy and Littlewood, kept saying—that the rating had no intellectual merit at all. They went a little further, and said that the Tripos had killed serious mathematics in England stone dead for a hundred years.

Navy ROTC Quotas

by Eliot on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 7:51pm

I suppose we can blame Thomas Jefferson for for the engineering mantra at West Point and indirectly at Annapolis. Jefferson originally opposed the creation of a military academy. The Old Jeffersonian Republicans opposed anything that could create a new aristocracy, or at least other than what already existed, in the US. A military academy was considered a threat to (small r) republicanism.

Jefferson change his mind though. West Point came into being but not as a school for doctrine and tactics but as a school of engineering. This was departure not just from the original idea of a school of military education but from the civilian colleges of the period which offered classical schooling focused on a broad understanding of the humanities. Jefferson filled a niche with West Point.

Engineering was the most prestigious track at West Point as a consequence. If you look at the rosters the best students gravitated towards it in the 19th century. On the upside graduates went on to do very good work in the Ante Bellum period contributing to development and public works projects across the United States.

Regarding the modern era... My classmates gripe about the Navy ROTC tier system and how much harder it is to get a slot as humanities major. I have no idea what the Navy needs and I appreciate you want people who know their higher level math to fill out Nuke slots but its also a reason for otherwise qualified candidates to choose the Corps or the Army instead.

Dominant Specialties

by PrahaPartizan on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 11:31pm

Regarding your Navy ROTC classmates, I would say that their problems stems from the fact that the US Navy is dominated by the naval aviators and the submariners. Over the course of the Cold War the attack carrier and the submarine became the ne plus ultra weapon systems in the Navy, with all other weapon systems co-opted to serve their interests. Hence, anyone looking to go into Surface Warfare wasn't looked upon very highly. I won't even begin to address the disdain the Navy holds for the specialty systems like mine warfare. The overarching element for both aviation and submarines is their total devotion to technology. Everyone in those branches worships at technology's altar and becomes its acolyte. If you can't keep up with the technology, you have no future, even if you know better "why" you should be doing something than "how," "when," or "where."

Nukes

by Rubber Ducky on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 7:04pm

Comments above about the Kindly Old Gentleman being much the source of continued engineering emphasis at the Boat School are spot on.

Nuclear submarines are marvels of the modern world. But. But there's never been a fair accounting of the overhead these platforms impose on the Navy and its officer system. It just takes an awful lot of top talent trained in technical trivia to keep these boats going.

Now the submarine force is (finally) agreeing to enlarge the talent pool for officers by bringing females aboard. You'd think these nuclear scientists would have figured out that having twice the population to pick from would cut the recruiting and retention burden in half ... and after 55 years, they have.

Many years ago the last diesel submariner to command a submarine tender (Captain Bob Maxwell, certified good guy) made this observation about submarine nuclear power personnel policies: "That's sure a lot of fuss just to boil water." Amen.

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