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Posted By Thomas E. Ricks
Tuesday, November 2, 2010 - 6:31 AM
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Here's a guest column that follows on Bob Bateman's column on Friday, from an old friend I know from Forts Benning and Bragg.
By Col. Johnny Brooks (U.S. Army, ret.)
Best Defense guest columnistAs I work quite a lot with USMC lieutenants and captains on a daily basis, I can tell you, there are good ones and bad ones, same as in any Army. Anyone who wants to proclaim the USMC officer corps as the creme doesn't have a good perspective. I don't think there is any difference in the competence level of USMC lieutenants/captains and Army lieutenants/captains.
As for military training at West Point, it is in need of changes. I have been torn for years about what West Point is doing. I sometimes think all cadets at West Point should come from the ranks. I sometimes think that West Point should be a non-degree producing school like Sandhurst. I sometimes think that West Point should worry more about producing officers than about producing Rhodes, Hertz or MacArthur Scholars. But each time I come back to the fact that ours is a different society. If the service academies did not offer a degree, who would go? A degree was not essential in the British Army til lately, while it has been in ours for 50 years. Got to tell you when I was a company commander in the British Army, I had to replace two platoon leaders. Having commanded two companies in the U.S. Army I never had a lieutenant so bad I had to relieve him. Which system is better?
I once suggested to the leadership of West Point that they should require all graduates to be fluent in a foreign language. I was summarily executed and informed that four years of foreign language does not fit into the engineering curriculum. I have recommended that they reduce the academic admissions standards in order to get a more rounded cadet, one who more than likely would stay in the Army for a longer time and make a career of it. I was summarily executed because you don't win Rhodes Scholarships that way. Numerous other points of discussion have also been canned.
You only need a couple of Dave Petraeus's in a decade, but you need a lot of Johnny Brooks to have an Army. Still, they want everyone to have the potential to be a Petraeus. So, they go for the gusto and it is an academic institution -- or, as my son said, "An Ivy League School with uniforms." Abizaid hated that when I told him that is what cadets referred to WP as. And, as for cadets complaining about inspections; there is nothing keeping them there but a free education. They can quit any time they want. No guards are on the inside of the gates keeping cadets in.
I'm getting too emotional. I love the place, but believe you me, West Point struggles with combatting the American societal norms in order to produce a reasonable product.
this piece reads like Bateman's
Well here we go again.
And truth in advertisement up front I have no problem at all and actually encourage criticism of West Point because it offers the possibility of exposing problems to the place and potential solutions. After all West Point is an intellectual institution where academic and intellectual freedoms are fiercely promoted and protected. So nobody who I know at West Point has a problem with reasoned criticism of the place.
But this piece by Colonel Brooks, just like Bob Bateman's piece of last week, seems really out of date and based on perceptions built up over the years which may on closer examination be inaccurate.
One of Colonel Brooks's paragraphs said this:
"I once suggested to the leadership of West Point that they should require all graduates to be fluent in a foreign language. I was summarily executed and informed that four years of foreign language does not fit into the engineering curriculum. I have recommended that they reduce the academic admissions standards in order to get a more rounded cadet, one who more than likely would stay in the Army for a longer time and make a career of it. I was summarily executed because you don't win Rhodes Scholarships that way. Numerous other points of discussion have also been canned."
Ok, and I think I have some street creds here as far as being a critic of an institution that I am a part of, but after three years of criticism of Coin (and at times how it plays out at West Point) not once, not once have I ever been told to shut up or "executed" as Colonel Brooks says he was when he offered up possibilities for change.
And with regard to foreign languages at West Point, well sure, no we don’t require all cadets to be fluent in foreign languages but that doesn’t mean that West Point doesn’t take foreign languages very seriously because it does. In fact a few years ago a decision was made to require most cadets at West Point over the course of four years to take two full years of a foreign language, which if we were benchmarking other schools would certainly be on the high end. And through the Foreign Language Department at West Point has grown a significant program for sending cadets abroad for a semester to learn about other cultures.
As far as admissions for striving to draw well rounded cadets and Colonel Brooks's implied point that he was again "executed" for such heresy because the admissions focus at West Point was largely elitist and driven by a desire to bring in lots of Rhoades scholars. Well again, after sitting on the Admissions Committee at West Point within the last two years I can tell you just how very much West Point and its Admissions agonizes, agonizes over trying to get just the very well rounded cadets (intellectual, physical, leader, ethnic, class etc) that Colonel Brooks suggests we avoid. There are problems with Admissions focus and structure at West Point, but not in the way Colonel Brooks presents it.
So to sum up, again, I have no problem with going after the institution that houses me and my family and provides me with a great life, really I don’t, but gosh, can we get a primer that is based on current observations and reasoned analysis rather than an apparent jumble of perceptions that have built up over the years and produced a certain critical attitude toward the place which may be largely unfair and inaccurate.
gian
Some of the "Well Rounded" Criteria is Regionally Biased...
I agree with virtually everything that COL Gentile wrote.
My concern is that some of the metrics/attributes that USMA uses to assess who is "well rounded" are regionally biased. What do I mean? Answer: Varsity Letter athletes and Eagle Scouts.
Varsity Athletes. USMA makes a big deal about the high % of plebes who earned HS varsity letters. While a laudable accomplishment, this attribute is regionally biased towards those from small, public, rural or suburban high schools. Earning a varsity letter at a 400 student HS (50% female) in Indiana or Upstate NY is a far easier accomplishment than it is a metro area with 2,000+ student public high schools or 700-1,000 student, single-sex, Catholic HS athletic juggernauts.
I attended a large, all-male Catholic HS in a Northeastern city. In fact, we were ranked #6 nationally by USA Today for our football team the season after I graduated. We were also a baseball, track and hockey powerhouse at the state/regional level. It's a lot harder to get a letter in a school with 900 guys, many of whom self-selected for the sports program, than it is competing against 200 guys who were there solely beacuse their house sat in a small school district.
I never considered USMA, but my lack of a varsity letter would have been a significant handicap had I applied. I did just fine in the Army with fitness but I was not a varsity letter winner.
Eagle Scout. USMA also places a premium on the high % of Eagle Scouts in its ranks. Like the Army, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has executed a 40+ year shift away from large swaths of the US population. In fact, only 3% - that's right - of Boy Scouts are Hispanic. The BSA has divested itself from large parts of our major cities and made few, halting and episodic attempts to engage urban and minority populations. This is an access crisis for white boys in Park Slope as well as latino ones in the South Bronx. It was not until our diverse parish in NW, DC wanted to start a troop that I learned just how little presence the BSA's "National Capital Area" Council actually has invested in, well, our nation's capital. Today's BSA is largely a homogenous white, rural/exurban organization that increasingly looks nothing like America's diverse population of 10-18 year old boys.
Then there's the Mormon issue. Mormon youth currently comprise around 1/5th of BSA youth enrollment even though Mormon's are less than 2% of the US population. If Eagle Scout attainment is given such a high premium in USMA admissions, than there may be some inherent - however unintentional - bias towards certain groups and regions.
Finally, the concern extends beyond potential regional bias among those who actually apply to USMA. What goes unnoticed is the potential "chilling effect" that the premium placed on Eagle Scout and Varsity Letters has on potential applicants. How many HS students with neither of these credentials give a cursory look at USMA and go no further when they see that they would be in the distinct minority of accepted cadets without Eagle or a varsity letter?
These are serious issues that USMA leadership needs to consider. Given the increasingly homogenous and regionally segregated participation in Boy Scouts, should Eagle Scout be a shorthand proxy for a "good" cadet in the 21st century?
To add to COL Gentile's comments, the reason that cadets win scholarships is not because they are smart, because there are plenty of smart college students out there. It is because they are well rounded and smart, and as it turns out, they actually serve for longer within the Army compared to their peers. The current Commandant of Cadets, BG Rapp, is just one example. LTC(R) Nagl would be another.
With all of the crazy things going on in the nation, and the world, it is amazing to me that this forum devotes so much time/energy to poking at one of the purest/noblest institutions this country has. Every large organization has its pitfalls but I'll stack USMA up against just about any other place in terms of the end result after 4 years.
One could argue that times of craziness are precisely the times when one needs to poke at all institutions, noble or otherwise--because the cost of finding out the hard way that they aren't coping with the craziness is too high.
my understanding is that there is a constant back and forth between whether West Point, Air force, or Navy should be more of an academic institution or more of a "training" type institution...and the focus depends on the current profs the superintendant, as well as alums. Can anyone shed more light on that constant sway if it does exist?
Doesn't sound real to me. The academy does morph and change, just a little with each Supe or Comm or Dean. But those guys (with the exception of the Comm) don't change out that frequently.
I bet the curriculum from an academic and physical standpoint is mostly unchanged from decade to decade. Indeed one of the virtues of the place is that I can have a conversation with a grad of almost any year group and share similar stories. The military training - on the other hand - is quite adjustable and as D. Vandergriff indicates changes quite quickly with the need and times.
One of the other virtues where this kind of flexibility is the means by which lessons are taught. When I was in a entry-level engineering course we designed a screw, a set of springs and a set of gears over the semester. But each of those projects was embedded in some real world application. OK, well that isn't real special. But the next engineering design course we studied terminal ballistics, external ballistics, internal ballistics and recoil systems. Also visited Watervliet Arsenal to see all the large gun tubes in the military inventory. It was about context. We were learning the same engineering DESIGN concepts you might get at State U but with direct application to our future profession. Our capstone design project...design a replacement for the Combat Excavating Vehicle.
Back on topic - I don't think the alums or profs have much of any pull at the level you are suggesting. The Superintendent...that is a different matter. He's the "President of the University"-equivalent so you should expect as much.
my understanding is that there is a constant back and forth between whether West Point, Air force, or Navy should be more of an academic institution or more of a "training" type institution...and the focus depends on the current profs the superintendant, as well as alums. Can anyone shed more light on that constant sway if it does exist?
These sound like the same comments made by the school administration when I was a cadet more than a decade ago. We repeatedly were told that "you are the cream of the crop" and "we recruit the same students as the Ivy's." (I highly doubt I would have made it into any of them though.)
The major difference now, which I think ALL cadets understand, is that in their 5 year commitment, they are going to combat. This fact alone has changed the face of the Corps. I doubt if many Harvard students take into account the possibility of goin to Afghanistan when accepting an admission offer.
As a cadet I dreamed of branching infantry. My classmates and upperclassmen told me that I had no need to worry because there are always more slots to branch infantry than cadets that want it. I graduated about 650 in a class of 950. I wouldn't have had a chance of getting infantry in the last 3 years.
There are still some cadets who plan on getting out after their 5 year commitment. There will still be high attrition rates. But that attrition is a: in line with historiacal norms and trends and b: necessary due to the pyramid effect of the officer corps.
Notbro,
You raise some great points. For what it's worth, I agree that the "we recruit the same students as the Ivy's" line is pure bunk. USMA recruits good students, but it is an increasingly self-selecting cohort. Academically, it is not the "best of the best."
Even with the Congressional nomination process, large swaths of the US are underrepresented, most especially, diverse, urban areas.
Take NYC as an example. In 2007, USMA graduated 5 NYC residents (as I recall). Based on NYC's unadjusted proportion of the US population, this number should have been around 25. When NYC's population is adjusted to reflect its higher educational attainment and college attendance levels, around 30-35 cadets should have been graduating. The story is similar in other parts of the country. BTW, NYC contains portions of 13 Congressional districts so these numbers are even supported by the Congressional allocation model.
Areas that provide large amounts of Ivy League students are woefully underrepresented at USMA.
Some analysis needs to be done on WHO is self-selecting for our AVF and more specifically, for our combat branches/MOS' during protracted conflicts. This is worthy of further study. I have huge concerns over 100% pre-enlistment job selection for the Army's enlisted force. But I can't say that I wouldn't want to know more about the dynamics at USMA (e.g. who is making the choices, their demopgraphics, ideology, etc).
Finally, the oft-repeated assertion that USMA separation rates during OIF were within historical norms. I know that COL Bryan Hilferty tirelessly made this argument, but I found his arguments unpersuasive and often misleading. He tried to compare resignation rates for the classes of 2002 and 2003 with those eligible for the VSI during the early 90's. This is obviously an inapt comparison as the Army was trying to shed officers in the early 90's and desperate to retain them in 2007 and 2008. Moreover, COL Hilferty completely ignored the issue of stop-loss which prevented anywhere from 25-40% of the class eligible to separate at 5 years from doing so.
The War College's Strategic Studies Institute released a report earlier this year by COL Wardynski & others that officer retention rates have been sliding for the past 20 years:
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=965
The authors look favorably at the Officer Career Satifaction Program (OCSP) as a means to boost rates. I find two flaws with their reasoning: first extending the service obligation prior to commissioning ignores that enthusiasm for continued service can wane over time, such as changes in personal or professional goals or even the actual Army experience. Look at the soldier in the Patrolling with the 82d post who wanted to go SF but is now refusing to go out. I would acknowledge that this concern doesn't seem to be borne out by the results of the OCSP but I do think it should be strongly considered.
The second point is that the OCSP applied at precommissioning is aimed rather broadly at selecting for traits associated with commissioning sources rather than more accurately at officers who have actually demonstrated those desired traits in their Army career.
This is the 3rd recent thread on USMA and one of many in which some observers have foolishly raised the possibility that the status quo - at West Point, in the institutional Army, and with the AVF concept - might need some reform. With sadness I note that the almost universal response from those of West Point and of the serving Army is: not so much, we're doing just fine thank you, and never should 'outsiders' (actually we own your jobs - you work for us) ever suggest things aren't just peachy.
So if things are so goddamn fine, why are we still fighting the longest war in our history with the best gear in history against a rabble in mufti? Why is the mission we so famously 'accomplished' in 2003 still unfinished (and the capitol of the nation we subdued rocked with at least 16 bombs yesterday)?
However comforting these chauvinistic defenses in the short run, in the long run they make more likely that change will have to be hammered in from outside. Maybe that's the only way reform happens in the smug, isolated world of our Army. If so, ZUJ.
A friend of mine, yep from USMA, had as his yearbook soliloquoy [sp?] "If you treat everything as a life or death situation, you die alot." You must die alot RD.
You're discordant diatribe against West Point has little correlation to the problem at hand in Iraq/Afghanistan. Your generalizations are wrong, which is why I am fighting them at every step - not because I think I can convince you otherwise. I know at this point that is an impossible task. Nope, it's to make sure other people aren't infected with that level of obtuseness.
I'm willing to bet that the recent graduates of the Academies are doing a damn fine job where the rubber meets the road in those war-torn countries. You insist that somehow because the senior leaders of these efforts went to the academies 30+ years ago the academies are at fault. That's crazy stupid logic. Then you call out as your examples 3 people who have done probably more to correct the mistakes of their predecessors (even when the predecessor was themself - I am looking at you Odierno visa ve the transition TR discusses from Fiasco to The Gamble). (i.e. Odierno, Mullen and Petraeus referenced in a previous thread). Indeed if anybody is going to fix these warzones, they've shown the smarts, wherewithal and motivation, it is probably them.
I think that those guys successes or failures are predicated on the 30+ years of experience and learning they have had since tossing their caps in the air long, long ago. But you somehow are convinced it is their commissioning source to blame? Bet you beleive in Original Sin too?
In the end, don't blame the Academies for a problem that is largely the Army's, and (to the extent possible) don't blame the Army for the problems of DoD and the POTUS (both previous and current). As they say correlation doesn't imply causation. The Army has plenty of blame to shoulder, but misguided whack a mole games between Afghanistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan don't help.
I promise you that if DoD or the POTUS wanted this war over tomorrow it would be. Maybe you should set your sights on bigger and more appropriate prey.
Go win a war.
Grandpa, tell us the story again
The one about you "steely-eyed killer of the deep" winning that Cold War. It always inspires me.
And the one about you losing twice...
...depresses me. So does ad hominem horseshit. Criticisms of USMA, US Army, and the AVF are not pointed at the individuals trapped in these failed systems. Keep your head below the ridgeline.
I'm an individual trapped in those "failed" systems, yes...no? You're a good sport though RD. I am just dishing back some of the stuff you like to feed me.
Let me get back to winning one of those 2 wars. Oops not there right now. I'll work on it the next time I get deployed, ok?
Good job Hunter...then we see "grandpa simpson" also known as RD throw in the mandatory AVF comment, like a politician with the same 3 talking points who can never come up with an original idea.
'the mandatory AVF comment, like a politician with the same 3 talking points who can never come up with an original idea.'
Perhaps it is original. Find a citation of substance in the current context earlier than my "The Failure of the All-Volunteer Force," US Naval Institute Proceedings, October 2006, p. 12. I based the case then on the debacle in Iraq; Afghanistan now argues the the AVF has failed in even more compelling fashion.
Four talking points, actually: I also believe in gravity, evolution, and the inalienable right of individuals to make fools of themselves in public (though I do suspect that Hunter and SoldiersDiary - exemplars of the last - may be the same guy).
When you're right, you're right.
RD,
I've been accused of many things, but using sockpockets? Perhaps you are also Admiral? Or, maybe he is you when you are off your meds?
I assure Hunter and SD are not the same, SD and Hunter are not the same. I don't know who SD is, but I like his style.
Kudos to the Best Defense graphic division for scaring up a great shot of "The Million Dollar View."
For those not in the know, this is the view north from Trophy Point at USMA. West Point is on the west side of the Hudson (duh) with Constitution Island visible north and east in this image. The great chain which impeded British movement along the Hudson stretched from the west side to Constitution Island. Links of the chain can still be seen at Trophy Point (they are generally a few feet long and probably a hundred pounds a piece).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain
Storm King Mountain looms over the left side of the picture.Pollepel Island
is in the center of the river in the distance. Bannerman's Castle is there, or what is left of it after the arsenal exploded.
Great place to visit, especially on a fall football weekend. Parade in the morning, tailgate before and after the game. Maybe a tour of the historic sites. Super cadets. Very rich history. Better get there soon though, lots of people seem to want to close that place down. - wink -
Why waste your time with these frat brats?
Richard H. O'Kane
Slade D. Cutter
Dudley W. Morton
Eugene B. Fluckey
Samuel D. Dealey
Rueben T. Whitaker
Royce L. Gross
Charles O. Triebel
John S. Coye Jr.
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