Joan Johnson-Freese has a good piece. Among her recommendations:

PME schools cannot overhaul the military retirement system, but they can limit the number of [military] retirees hired onto war college faculties. One possibility would be to limit such hires to a percentage of the total faculty. This would force consideration of hiring retired officers for specialized talents and future potential, and not just for routine tasks with a nod to past rank taken as immediate qualification for the post.

(HT to D "House" M)

For his own good, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times should not have been allowed to commit to print this paragraph about the Greg Mortenson scandal:

I don't know what to make of these accusations. Part of me wishes that all this journalistic energy had been directed instead to ferret out abuses by politicians who allocate government resources to campaign donors rather than to the neediest among us, but that's not a real answer. The critics have raised serious questions that deserve better answers: we need to hold school-builders accountable as well as fat cats.

This reads to me like, "Hey, quit picking on my friends, especially one who blurbed my book, go pick on my enemies." I am amazed that Kristof could write such a thing after reading the Krakauer article.

He worries that scandals such as this will make people cynical. So it would be better to let the scam go on? I actually think someone who uses little Afghan children to live large is morally worse than an investment banker who never pretended to be doing good while living well.

Another point for Kristof to ponder: Kalsoom Lakhani wrote, "We should also use this opportunity to look inwards at ourselves, at our ability to get carried away by a charismatic personality and digestible narrative, in which Mortenson was the John Smith in the Pakistani version of Pocahontas."

By Capt. Mark Jacobsen, USAF
Best Defense guest columnist

Here's a note from an Air Force pilot who is studying Arabic in Jordan.

A few months ago I wrote up a list of secondary benefits that come with learning a foreign language, based on my own experience learning Arabic. It's a bit long, but I hope it will be of interest.

How to listen to other people's stories and perspectives. Being able to shut up and really listen to different opinions is a rare skill. If we want to make informed policy in cross-cultural contexts, we need to humanize and understand the "other" -- which includes both our allies and our enemies. We do not have to agree with each other, but we need to listen long enough to genuinely understand each other's narratives. Being in a foreign language environment forces you to concentrate and listen, especially because you probably lack the language skill to respond as you wish.

How to operate in an environment of constant uncertainty. When you arrive in a foreign culture, everything is uncertain. You feel a constant tightness in your chest because you don't know the rules for even the most trivial day-to-day tasks. Even something as simple as buying hummus and falafel or riding in a taxicab involves new processes, rituals, and vocabulary -- especially if you want to do it like the natives. You can't be a perfectionist, because you'll never get anything done otherwise. You learn to control negative emotional responses like fear, anger, or frustration. Fortunately, you do acclimate to this uncertainty. You learn to be patient, cool, and observant.

Read on

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 columnist

As 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.

If you won't believe me, consider the views of people who have taught there. Today, another vet of West Point steps up to the plate:

By Robert Bateman
Best Defense guest columnist

As a product of ROTC, but also a former Professor at West Point, I've seen both sides, and I am inclined to think that the problems at the United States Military Academy, academically and sociologically, generally outweigh the benefits, when compared to most, but not all, ROTC programs.

The fact is that cadet life at USMA, also known as West Point, ironically creates one of the most anti-military (and misogynist) sub-cultures I've ever seen, anywhere, and that includes every infantry battalion I've ever served in over the years. By the time they are "Cows" (juniors), my observation is that the majority of USMA cadets thoroughly dismiss the Army itself, and are as disillusioned as they are steadfast. This is somewhat understandable. As one of my less conventional cadets once noted of his school, "Sir, West Point is the only place in the country where it is not only legal, but mandated, that 18 year old boys hide their dirty underwear ... and 30 year old men go looking for it." (For the record, he was referring to barracks inspections conducted by the "tactical officers" who oversee the cadets.) Of course, all of this is belied by the nearly instantaneous sentiment of nostalgic gilding applied by 95 percent of new Lieutenants the moment they see Highland Falls disappearing in their rear-view mirrors. But the bottom line about military training at USMA came as a shock to me...there is practically none, and what there is, is limited.

OK, USMA is not Sandhurst (the one-year British military academy which focuses nearly exclusively upon the tactical preparation of new officer candidates), and it probably should not be, but I seriously expected more military training there than I got, for example, at the University of Delaware a quarter century ago. Such, however, was not the case. Whereas I was participating in air assault training missions as a freshman, sophomore, and junior (by my senior year I was the CDT CDR, so couldn't have fun anymore), riverine small boat insertion training, and general patrolling techniques under the constant tutelage of a three-tour Vietnam Special Forces sergeant major (thank you Leo Brown), and two-tour Vietnam and Grenada Ranger first sergeant (and thank you, Charles Laws, you bastard), USMA Cadets get nothing like that. Their days are hyper-managed, impinging on their intellectual and social development, and their lives are so totally consumed by the draconian demands of the academic and "barracks life" officers that they have no room for actually learning about, well, war.

If anything USMA should be brought up to ROTC standards of military training.

That being said, West Point holds the potential of being the greatest source of military training, intellectual development, and education, extant in our country. I am merely disappointed that it has not achieved that potential. And I am embarrassed because I know exactly the reason why: Mid-Career officers like me who each believe that if only they add one more thing to the schedule, that will make USMA that much better -- without realizing that time is a zero-sum game.

Robert Bateman is a professional military officer and, curiously, an academic. He is currently stationed in England, bound for Afghanistan as a strategist. His last book was No Gun Ri, A Military History of the Korean War Incident.

Disclaimer: Robert Bateman is an Army Officer, but his opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, the United States Military Academy, the United States Army, or indeed, his own mother.

I can't imagine a worse environment for a troubled combat veteran than sitting in his basement alone trying to get an online education. Unfortunately, that sort of education seems to have become a big business.

"I stare at the screen and fume and fume," one vet, Chris Pantzke, told Bloomberg News. "I'm kind of regretting my decision." He said he yells at his wife and punches the wall in frustration.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I have some views about the military academies (like I think we should shut them down as undergraduate institutions and replacing it with a Sandhurst-like approach). We've argued all that out, and I have no desire to re-litigate the matter. But here is a different perspective, from an Army Special Forces officer who is a West Point grad and is leaving the USMA faculty for Afghanistan, and is pretty dismayed with what he saw at the academy.

By Maj. Fernando Lujan, U.S. Army
Best Defense guest columnist

I graduated from West Point in 1998, served several combat tours, then received a master's degree from the Harvard Kennedy School so that I could instruct the cadets in politics, policy, and strategy. I have worked on the West Point faculty for two years, and this summer I'll return to the operational Army in Afghanistan. From my own limited perspective, I can say that the Academy is falling heartbreakingly short of its potential to prepare young officers. 

While West Point has recently made an effort to change with the times by adding a handful of elective courses in counterinsurgency, expanding its foreign immersion programs, and hosting several high level conferences on key Army issues, the founding principle of the cadet system remains the same:  We lecture the cadets on professionalism but we practice bureaucracy.   To summarize the difference, professional cultures debate, discuss, and continually innovate to stay effective in the changing world.  Bureaucracies churn out ever-restrictive rules and seek to capture every eventuality in codified routines.   

Consider this:  From day one at the academy every possible situation that a cadet could conceivably encounter is accounted for by strict regulations. Not sure how many inches should be between your coat hangers, whether you can hold your girlfriend's hand on campus, or how your socks should be marked? Consult the regulations. Moreover, all activity is subjected to the cadet performance system, which essentially assigns a grade to every measurable event in a cadet's life (think shoe shines, pushups and pop quizzes) then ruthlessly ranks the entire class from first to last. Cadets at the top of the list get the jobs and postings they want after graduation. Those near the bottom end up driving trucks at Fort Polk, Louisiana. 

The result is two-fold:  First, cadets have very little experience adapting to unfamiliar environments. After all, what happens when the regulations don't describe what's going on around you?   Second, cadets devote zero attention to activities that "don't count."  If it's not on the syllabus, and it's not for a grade, the cadets aren't learning it.  Ask a cadet to spend a few minutes writing up a list of the skills, traits, and knowledge that he wishes he'd have when he finally takes over his first platoon in combat. Then compare this to his four-year curriculum and summer training plans. There will be surprisingly little overlap between the two lists, and the cadet has neither the time nor the incentive to learn what's missing.  In the end, we graduate far too many cadets that are more bureaucrat than professional, lacking the expert knowledge of their trade and the flexibility to be effective in the complex environments they'll soon encounter. 

Unfortunately, wars -- particularly the types of wars we're currently involved in -- are very unforgiving of bureaucrats. In Iraq, I commonly ran across young officers who were convinced that if they answered their reports on time, followed the unit operating procedures to the letter, and strove to make their casualty numbers look ever better, that they would "win" the war. These bureaucrats might keep the proverbial machine running, but it took mentally agile professionals with expert knowledge to realize that the rulebooks needed to be thrown out, that the old routine wasn't working. 

Read on

Army Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the celebrity brigadier, began his talk by saluting UNC-Chapel Hill, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Joint Chiefs of Staff handling of the Vietnam War. Of all the things in his career, he said, it was his time as a graduate student that prepared him best for the challenges he faced in Iraq. "It was here that I think I learned to ask the right questions... about complex issues."

One more argument for sending promising officers to civilian graduate schools. And maybe shutting the war colleges (with the exception of part of the Naval War College, which could become the military institution for strategic studies, and the Naval Post-Graduate School, which could do the same for Special Operations studies). 

I beat up on Army generals enough that I think I am obliged to take notice when one produces something very good. This wise column appears in this month's Army magazine, which owns the copyright. I am carrying it here with General Dubik's permission.

Preparing for Your Future and That of the U.S. Army By LTG James M. Dubik, U.S. Army retired

In 1990, I finished commanding the 5th Battalion, 14th Infantry, 25th Infantry Division, and set out to the Advanced Operational Studies Fellowship, School of Advanced Military Studies, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Four years later, I was promoted to colonel, and, three years after that, to brigadier general.

My battalion command sergeant major, Ron Semon, left our battalion and served both as a regimental command sergeant major and as the command sergeant major for the commandant of cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y.

Colonels and their sergeants major run large parts of our Army. Generals and their sergeants major provide strategic guidance. Like CSM Semon and me, many of you now serving at battalion level (whether as battalion commanders, battalion command sergeants major, or in equivalent positions) will serve at the more senior ranks. What yet-to-be-envisioned future will you face in 2017? Simply put, no one knows.

Read on

The new issue of the Washington Monthly has a terrific mini-editorial on the lack of ROTC programs at Yale and Harvard:

This is an outrageous legacy of the excesses of the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era. It discourages a substantial group of brilliant young people from serving their country and encourages the growth of the gulf between America's intellectual elite and our military, a gulf that is costly to both groups.

If you like this blog, you'd like the Washington Monthly. Do yourself a favor and subscribe -- you could use the info, they could use the bucks.

At the other end of the educational spectrum, just what are for-profit colleges giving military students in exchange for tens of millions of taxpayers' dollars? Business Week asks some tough questions. Great "lead":

U.S. Marine Corporal James Long knows he's enrolled at Ashford University. He just can't remember what course he's taking. The 22-year-old from Dalton, Ga., suffered a traumatic brain injury, impairing his ability to concentrate, when artillery shells hit his Humvee in Iraq in 2006. He signed up for Ashford, one of at least a dozen for-profit colleges making money off active-duty military with subsidies from American taxpayers, after its recruiter gave a sales pitch this year at a barracks housing the Wounded Warrior Battalion at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

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.

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)

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

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