I’ve been following with considerable interest, the ongoing war debate between Thomas Ricks and the service academies.
It all started with this article in the Washington Post:
After covering the U.S. military for nearly two decades, I’ve concluded that graduates of the service academies don’t stand out compared to other officers. Yet producing them is more than twice as expensive as taking in graduates of civilian schools ($300,000 per West Point product vs. $130,000 for ROTC student). On top of the economic advantage, I’ve been told by some commanders that they prefer officers who come out of ROTC programs, because they tend to be better educated and less cynical about the military.
With that rather controversial start it has escalated to an all out blog war-with lots of posts on both sides of the aisle. Ricks’ side can be found here, here, here, here, here and here.
There have been a lot of posts in reply at Lex’s place, The Naval Institute Blog, Information Dissemination and from the boys at VMI.
Truth in advertising-its no secret to regular readers of this blog, that in my perfect world-the student body of any Academy would number 4,400 MEN. Thought I would get that out of the way up front-before someone brings it up.
However that said, it seems to me, that Ricks is beating the wrong horse. The problem with whether the Academies have value is not with their academics. They compete just fine on that score. There are plenty of surveys that point out that the Academies are equivalent to any major university in America in terms of academic excellence.
Does that not mean there is not room for improvement ? No. If I were king of the world The Academies need to find a “core” curriculum and then build their major programs around that. As a suggestion I could think of nothing better than at least two years of college English -because all officers need to know how to write- mandatory four years of language education, a course in the history of Western Civilization and a course in Military History.
They also should expand and make more use of programs such as the permanent military professor program-right now the problem with it is that officers have to choose too early to apply for it, before all the prizes have been handed out. The 30 year statutory retirement should be waived for those who are accepted. Don’t underestimate the value of being taught by someone who has been to the institution itself.
But to the question of value-its not about academics that academies are falling down on value. Its about the drip by drip dissolution of the military system at the academies-that should form the basis for the argument Ricks makes. Given the amount the academies have diluted their military systems-especially their plebe systems-are they really worth the expense any more? Can we even still call them academies any more? Or are they just universities where every one dresses the same?
The compromises that the service academies have had to make in their military systems over the last 33 years are well documented. Martin Van Creveld has well documented these compromises that have occurred over time. I’ve also documented it in detail here. I’ll not repeat them now.
But let me ask you this: even if changing social mores required the admission of women to the Academies ( and to my beloved alma mater), why couldn’t the women lived by what they professed to want-to be treated just like the men were treated? Congress just said the academies had to admit women. It did not say they had to sell the whole farm to accommodate that change.
Ricks loves to talk about General Petreaus as his example of what a civilain education can produce. He neglects that fact that Petreaus was a graduate of West Point-and of a military system that was very much unchanged for over a 100 years and had a proven track record of producing outstanding young men.
Even with the admission of women-the old military system could have survived-with required level of emotional violence needed to tear down a plebe and then start the process of building him ( or her) back up. Shave every-one’s heads,call them by the names that work and run them through an equal wringer. After all that’s what the feminists said they wanted-just to be treated like one of the guys.
Except of course they didn’t and the men did not have a powerful lobby working in their favor.
So over time-the military system began its inevitable decline.
And that is why Thomas Ricks should be questioning the value of the service academies. Not because of the number of PHD’s.
Like I said, he’s beating the wrong horse.