Posted on 08/19/2002 8:13:10 AM PDT by robowombat
The Uniformed Intellectual and His Place in American Arms: Part I July 2002
By Col. Lloyd J. Matthews, U.S. Army retired
Crossing the Plains on an expedition to Utah [in the 1850s], Major Charles A. May searched the wagons in an effort to reduce unnecessary baggage. When he reached the wagons of the light artillery battery, Captain Henry J. Hunt proudly pointed out the box containing the battery library. "Books," May exclaimed in astonishment. "You say books? Whoever heard of books being hauled over the plains? What in the hell are you going to do with them?" At that moment Captain Campbell of the Dragoons came up and asked permission to carry a barrel of whiskey. "Yes, anything in reason, Captain, you can take along the whiskey, but damned if these books shall go."
In the epigraph above, taken from William Skelton's splendid 1992 study An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784-1861, we glimpse in finely wrought microcosm the current of anti-intellectualism that has coursed through American arms from its earliest beginnings to the present day. My purposes in this two-part article are to trace the origins and manifestations of this anti-intellectual bias within the American military tradition; to demonstrate the existence and pernicious effects of such an attitude even in the celebrated age of information now upon us; and to suggest measures for ensuring that the intellectual potential of the officers' corps is capitalized on in optimal ways without impairing the warrior ethos of the profession.
Let us first glance at the historical antecedents of anti-intellectualism. Going back to medieval and even to classical times, a sharp distinction emerged between the so-called Active Man and Contemplative Man. Though these two opposed types were fused for a time in Renaissance Man through an expansion of Baldesar Castiglione's notion of the ideal courtier (1528), the dichotomy was unfortunately too much a part of early human typology to remain submerged much beyond its famous exemplar, the English soldier-poet-courtier Sir Philip Sidney (d. 1586).
After Sidney and his circle of emulators passed from the scene, the Active Man and Contemplative Man reasserted themselves, with the seemingly natural tension between the two types generally manifesting itself within a soldierly context. The division has remained a prominent feature of the British, French and American military traditions, with the Contemplative Man often the victim of condescension if not outright scorn by powerful men of deeds who molded the early value system of the profession of arms during a time when the only cerebral quality found useful was likely to be guile.
The theme of anti-intellectualism in Western arms is a staple feature of military studies, so frequently treated in fact that to do justice to the applicable literature in brief compass presents formidable problems in winnowing and summarizing. The prevailing attitude toward military service held by British officers during the 19th century and the interwar period of the 20th was marked by a deliberate spirit of amateurism that celebrated honor, physical courage, skill in field sports, and above all one's regiment, while deprecating professionalism, schooling and such qualities as "keenness" and "cleverness" (that is, intelligence). Correlli Barnett summed it up well:
Their traditions were against books and study and in favour of a hard gallop, a gallant fight, and a full jug. ... The preference for character over intellect, for brawn over brain, has always taken the form of denigration of the staff college graduate and apotheosis of that splendid chap, the regimental officer.
The British officer's calculated aversion to brains was noted by wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George (1916-1922), who caustically observed that the "military mind ... regards thinking as a form of mutiny." Closer to the present day, one commentator finds some abatement in the British military's traditional anti-intellectualism owing to the cognitive demands of a modern technology-based force, but warns nonetheless that "the legacy of the aristocratic or traditional [that is, anti-intellectual] role model is far from dead."
We need not pause long to examine the situation in France, since it paralleled the British experience in so many ways. One gains the impression, however, that anti-intellectualism among the French military never reached the depths of calculated dilettantism seen in the British. Still, Paddy Griffith in his detailed study Military Thought in the French Army, 1815-51 (1989) had to concede that "excessive intellectualism might be as much a qualification for premature retirement as illness, madness, or sloth." Moreover, one notes the French predilection for stirring martial catchphrases which served as substitutes for penetrating tactical and strategic analysis; witness the celebrated cry of "Elan, Elan!" during the time of Louis XIII and later, and the clarion emphasis on an audacious offensive spirit toward the end of the 19th century: "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace!"
In closing the book on the French experience, we should recall the pregnant words of Marshal Marie E. P. Maurice de MacMahon, who was later to lead the disastrous French "defense" at Sedan in 1870: "I eliminate from the promotion list any officer whose name I have read on the cover of a book." It is an irony of ironies that during the German invasion of France in 1940, a full 70 years later, the fall of Sedan again figured so disastrously. In discussing the French doctrinal preparation for defense against the anticipated invasion, Robert Doughty in The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919-1939 (1985) states that "the army thus implicitly accepted doctrine as a substitute for thinking and an alternative to creative, imaginative actions. ... Few soldiers questioned the verities uttered in lecture halls or published in field manuals or official journals."
As we turn to anti-intellectualism in the American military, things really get interesting because the contemplative officer in this country receives a double whammy. Not only is he a citizen of a country itself notorious for its anti-intellectual tendencies, but he has come into a military establishment that in many respects has been more retrograde in its receptivity to ideas than the European militaries. So far as American culture at large is concerned, one has only to examine Richard Hofstadter's unflinching book Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), particularly the two chapters titled "Anti-intellectualism in Our Time" and "On the Unpopularity of Intellect," to be forcefully reminded that respect for the speculative mind has never been this country's long suit. Hofstadter defines his subject as follows:
The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.
I can promise that those who heretofore have taken pride in what they viewed as America's superior regard for intellectual standing will wince and squirm as they read of the habitual condescending put-downs of the egghead, highbrow, bookworm, absent-minded professor, woolly-minded intellectual, pointy head, recluse in the ivory tower and all the other clever terms of opprobrium so frequently trotted out to stigmatize the scholar-thinker in American public discourse over the past 250 years.
There are reasons for our anti-intellectual heritage, of course, revolving mainly around the rough-hewn and homespun life incident to establishing ourselves as pioneers on the shores of a savage continent and then advancing the frontier across a dangerous wilderness extending some 3,000 miles ("O beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness!"). Such hardy folk are apt to be a bit earthy, more like John Wayne than Alec Guinness. But our pioneer days are long past, and though we as a people have excelled in the scientific and engineering aspects of cognitive endeavor, we still can't quite let go of the notion that thinking for thinking's sake is just not macho.
As with the European militaries, the literature documenting anti-intellectualism among our own uniformed services is embarrassingly rich, copious and conclusive. Bernard Brodie, for example, pointed out in his influential book War and Politics (1973) that "soldiers have always cherished the image of themselves as men of action rather than as intellectuals, and they have not been very much given to writing analytical inquiries into their own art." This is not to say that articulate uniformed thinkers have been entirely absent from the scene -- witness the writings of Emory Upton, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Billy Mitchell, Maxwell Taylor, Dave Palmer and, more recently, H. R. McMaster, Douglas Macgregor and Ralph Peters -- but it is to say that to the extent that such uniformed writers have succeeded, they did so in spite of and not because of official encouragement.
In 1890, U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, the most influential book ever written by a serving officer with the arguable exception of Clausewitz's On War. For this feat, his endorsing officer, Rear Adm. Francis Ramsay, rewarded him on his fitness report with the following glowing encomium: "It is not the business of a Naval officer to write books." It is precisely this sort of attitude on the part of the bosses of military intellectuals that has led such thinkers as H. G. Wells to claim that "the professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling." More amusing than Capt. Mahan's poor fitness report but no less tragic in its import is this lament from a Navy officer passed over for promotion: "I cannot understand why I wasn't selected: I've never run a ship aground; I've never insulted a senior officer; and I've never contributed [an article] to the Institute's Proceedings."
To illustrate the tenor of the anti-intellectualism that has afflicted the Army over the years, often manifested in revolts by traditionalists against the "book learning" that progressives were attempting to incorporate into an upgraded Army education and training system, let us savor a few nuggets from Carol Reardon's Soldiers and Scholars: The U.S. Army and the Uses of Military History, 1865-1920, published in 1990. Col. George Anderson complained in 1898, even as the Spanish-American War descended upon the country, that "we are all too old to have wisdom crammed down our throats like food down the necks of Strasburg geese." Capt. James Chester, an indefatigable foe of professional education, asserted that "while a man may be educated into a kriegsspieler [that is, wargamer], he cannot be educated into a commander of men any more than he can into a poet, or an artist, or a Christian." Lt. C. D. Parkhurst stoutly affirmed "that the system of theoretical instruction, education, evangelization, and reformation now so eagerly sought by some few among us, is not needed." As late as 1914, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Leonard Wood issued orders to the effect that "all military education must be severely practical; eliminate books as far as possible except for purposes of reference."
The common thread connecting the thought of all such traditionalists, richly documented by Reardon, is that book learning was useless and that the only effective school of war was the battlefield itself. Today's U.S. Army officers, who take for granted what is probably the best military training and education system ever devised by man, will be hard put to appreciate the extraordinary difficulty faced by lonely occasional soldier-reformers -- sometimes assisted by visionary civilian leaders like Secretary of War Elihu Root -- during their jousts in the 19th and early 20th centuries with a grudging institution that saw expansion of officers' minds mainly in terms of on-the-job training.
But what about the modern era? Haven't we wised up? To answer this question, we'll first have to be a little more specific with regard to terms.
In its most basic sense, an intellectual is preoccupied with ideas and the play of the mind. This suggests a speculative mind, one given to reflection and efforts to see behind surface appearances. It suggests a mind that refuses imprisonment within conventional thinking or stale orthodoxy, but looks to see all sides of issues and insists upon discovering truth for itself rather than having truth prescribed. Moreover, it understands the complex, elusive and provisional nature of "truth," intuitively grasping that things are rarely as simple as they seem. It suggests a mind that gives vent to the imagination, that is open to innovation, that seeks to be creative, that looks always for the best way to do things today rather than assuming that the well-worn path is preferable because it's where we've always trod before. The interests and curiosity of the intellectual are not compressed within the narrow confines of today's duty assignments, but rather range freely to all fields of disciplinary and cultural endeavor, not only for life's enrichment -- though that is vitally important -- but also to provide the broadest possible context in which to measure and examine professional concerns.
The intellectual thinks beyond the sound and fury of the daily grind, hearkening to George Santayana's caveat that if we "cannot remember the past we shall be condemned to repeat it," but embracing just as warmly Alvin Toffler's qualification that "if we do not change the future we shall be compelled to endure it -- and that could be worse." The intellectual is thus given to reading because, while personal experience is indeed an instructive mentor, it can never rival humanity's collective wisdom and experience as reflected in books. The intellectual takes it as an article of faith that just as the unexamined life is not worth living, so the unexamined profession is not worth following. Hence he regards the pursuit of truth as more important than the trappings of rank and station. So far as the military intellectual is concerned, he is wed to the belief that in war against a competitive foe, we shall have to outthink that foe if we are to be successful in outfighting him.
That's what an intellectual ideally is. Now let's draw several important distinctions:
There are among the human race no pure intellectuals any more than there are pure men of action. There are no disembodied brains, divorced from human emotions, hormonal urges and fleshly thoughts, engaged solely in disinterested play of the mind on the eternal verities. Instead, we are all arrayed on a spectrum, falling somewhere in the broad middle far from the impossible extremes of pure brain and pure instinct. We differ only in that some of us are perched a little more pronouncedly toward one end or the other. So when we speak of intellectuals or men of action, it is important to bear in mind that such distinctions are matters of degree, of mere tendencies, not absolutes.
Closely related to the prior distinction, uniformed intellectuals are not nerds or geeks. Morris Janowitz in his classic study The Professional Soldier (1960) makes a sharp distinction between what he calls the "military intellectual" and the "intellectual officer." By "military intellectual," he means the sniffy, pedantic, professorial officer who can't lead, can't manage, can't make decisions, and relates poorly to people, the type described by Brian Holden Reid in a wicked spoof as a "diminutive, blinking, bespectacled swot whose muscles compare with peas and who grows exhausted after lifting a knife and fork." The "intellectual officer," by way of contrast, is the solid leader who brings the intellectual dimension to his job, accommodating it to the peculiar needs and demands of the profession: "He sees himself primarily as a soldier, and his intellectuality is part of his belief that he is a whole man." There were doubtless significant numbers of "blinking swots" inducted into the officer corps during World War II and its lengthy aftermath, and perhaps a handful a year still wriggle through the sieve today. But thankfully they are very few, so that Janowitz's terminological distinction finds virtually no application in the contemporary U.S. officer corps.
Uniformed intellectuals today come from the same commissioning sources as the self-advertised warriors and men of action. They engage in the same sports, meet the same physical and medical standards, choose the same branches, negotiate the same obstacle courses, qualify on the same gunnery ranges, pass the same PT tests, parachute from the same aircraft, stomp around in the same muddy boots and shout "Ranger, Airborne, Hooah!" with the same lusty gusto. They receive the same professional acculturation, attend the same courses and schools, obtain the same degrees, receive the same early assignments, fight in the same wars and win the same medals.
The only external difference between the Contemplative Man and the Active Man in the officers' corps today is that the former may seek a doctorate, teaching tour, fellowship, attaché assignment or other mind-expanding opportunities that the latter avoids like the plague because under the present career management system such excursions will time him or her out of transiting career wicket X, necessary if the officer is to remain competitive for brigade command and a possible star.
Interestingly, however, there is no evidence that the reputed Active Man fares any better than the reputed Contemplative Man as combat commander. It is astonishing to thumb through the biographies of the nation's military heroes and be reminded of the essentially intellectual nature of many of them. Always a distinct minority, they survived the stigma of intellectuality because of their transcendent skill as fighters during times of national peril, and because in personality and demeanor their intellectuality was masked by an undeniable spirit of take-charge self-confidence. Emory Upton, often referred to as "the Army's Mahan" and the most influential writer-reformer-soldier this country has yet produced, was a fierce, skillful, innovative leader in the Civil War, commanding a 12-regiment assault column at Spotsylvania and winning his first star for "gallant and distinguished services." He rose from second lieutenant in 1861 to brevet major general in only four years during action-packed combat service.
Joshua Chamberlain, a professor of languages at Bowdoin College when the Civil War commenced, volunteered for service and eventually rose to command of the 20th Maine. During the war he was wounded six times, had 14 horses shot out from under him, became the Union hero at Little Round Top during Gettysburg, and was awarded the Medal of Honor. He returned to academic life in 1871 as president of Bowdoin, writing several books and major papers. Featured in Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (1975), a novel about Gettysburg, and serving as exemplar in successive editions of Army Field Manual 22-100, Military Leadership (October 1983 and July 1990), Chamberlain is today virtually an icon of the quintessential combat leader.
With the possible exception of Stonewall Jackson (himself, incidentally, a longtime professor at VMI prior to the Civil War), George Patton was the most pugnacious fighter-commander our nation ever produced. Yet, he was a true Renaissance Man: U.S. Olympian in the 1912 games in Stockholm, finishing fifth in the Pentathalon (riding, pistol shooting, swimming, running, swordsmanship), football player, polo player, boatsman, poetry lover, raconteur, writer, voracious reader, avid student of the military art and science, rare book collector and letter writer. Roger Nye in his incisive study The Patton Mind (1993) here sums up:
[Patton] has been celebrated as a highly energized and profane man of action -- a doer rather than a thinker, many said. But he left behind the most complete record of exhaustive professional study of any World War II general -- or any general in American history, for that matter. ... Patton acquired and used a military library for almost daily study of his profession and [employed a] system of marginal notes and file cards to develop his thinking about tactics, strategy, leadership, and military organization. Those thoughts were expressed in a stream of lectures, staff papers, and journal articles, and also in diaries, poetry, and finally in a classic book, War As I Knew It.
John Shirley (P) Wood was also of two natures. On one hand he was a football player, shrewd tactician, Distinguished Service Cross winner and extraordinarily aggressive blitzkrieger who, as commander of the 4th Armored Division, spearheaded the reconquest of France by George Patton's Third Army, for which Liddell Hart bestowed upon him such honorifics as "the Rommel of the American armored forces" and "one of the most dynamic commanders of armor in World War II." On the other hand, Wood was a brilliantly precocious student (having entered the University of Arkansas as a sophomore at the age of 16 to study chemistry); a tireless tutor of less academically gifted cadets at West Point, earning the lifelong nickname P (for professor); a pioneer armor theorist; a devourer of books; a gifted linguist who read Charles de Gaulle on armor in the original French and Heinz Guderian in German; and a devotee of Rosaceae, or what we plainer folk call the rose family.
Maxwell Taylor was similar to Wood in having a divided sensibility. On one side, Taylor was a daring, dashing, athletic soldier, entering Italy behind German lines on a secret mission in 1943 and parachuting behind enemy lines into France on D-Day as commander of the 101st Airborne Division. But Taylor also had an intellectual and cultured side, spending 13 of the interwar years either as student or teacher, attaining fluency in several languages, writing two influential books, serving as president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York and performing the difficult role of U.S. Ambassador in Saigon during the Vietnam War.
The list of those American officers who possessed an intellectual sensibility but who, when the chips were down, proved themselves as illustrious combat commanders, goes on and on. Certainly their success validates Sir William Butler's apt admonition that the nation which "insists on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards."
Not all writers and teachers are intellectuals, and not all intellectuals are writers and teachers. I have encountered intellectual instructors who couldn't teach worth a tinker's damn and intellectual writers who couldn't communicate their names. I have known non-intellectual teachers and writers with a marvelous capacity for getting recondite points across to the most obtuse student or reader. I have known Ph.D.s on the staffs and faculties of service schools who, despite their impressive scholarly credentials, remained at heart administrators and paper-shufflers, forever discovering excuses for their failure to sally forth into the arena of intellectual inquiry, speculative thought or serious professional research.
If the intellectual is to earn his keep, he must discover ways to put his ideas and capacity for penetrating reflection at the disposal of the institution. That means having what it takes to convey his ideas and the fruits of his reflections in the appropriate forums. An intellectual who can't or won't communicate is like a breeding bull that can't or won't service.
Not all defense intellectuals are in the military. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that most of the bona fide defense intellectuals active in public discourse today are not in the military. The reasons have mainly to do with the services' refusal to encourage military professionals to become the chief expositors of their own craft and with the increasingly cross-disciplinary nature of security studies. Setting aside uniformed officers, we can assign most defense intellectuals to the following categories, realizing that the categories are not mutually exclusive and that over time some individuals will fall into several of them:
Retired Military Officers. Some of our very best intellectual work is now performed by retired officers. Examples are William E. Odom, Don Snider, Edward Atkeson, Huba Wass de Czege, Richard Hart Sinnreich, Lewis Sorley, David Jablonsky and Frederick Kroesen. The late Harry Summers was a signal instance. The big advantages of retirees are their maturity and candor, but the fact that we single out their candor as a particular advantage is silent testimony to the enforced reticence of active duty thinkers.
Journalists. The large metropolitan dailies each have their specialists who handle most of the military reportage. These reporters, particularly those from the New York Times and Washington Post, often exercise considerable clout because it is they who shape the daily print news agenda and impart the spin on stories that together mold perceptions among national opinion-makers. Some, like Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post, branch out into books (for example, Ricks' Making the Corps, 1997), which extends their influence further.
Think Tankers. Perhaps no intellectual centers for security affairs have proliferated in the last 20 years to the extent that the think tanks have. Think tanks, broadly construed here to include various defense advocacy organizations and certain academic niches, are a haven for unemployed refugees from the federal government, for retired diplomats and military officers, and for civilian defense specialists who fail to receive tenure or a position on the faculties of civilian universities. They also often provide suitable sinecures for distinguished emeriti who in return for their names on the letterhead receive a plush office, a secretary, plenty of walking-around money and a promise of few distractions. The tanks come in all ideological hues, and they thrive on grant money. Many of the tankers do valuable work. Recently deceased Carl Builder, long-time denizen at RAND, produced the most insightful analyses of service cultures since Morris Janowitz, Samuel Huntington and Charles Moskos.
Academics. University faculty, principally in departments treating political science, history, sociology, diplomacy, and international relations, have long been vocal on various national and international security issues. A particularly scintillating example is Professor Andrew Bacevich of the Boston University Department of International Relations. Without exaggeration, Professor Bacevich, U.S. Army retired, is providing reams of the most incisive military commentary being produced in the country today. More recently, with the emergence in the universities of accredited graduate degree programs devoted explicitly to military, defense, and security studies (Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies comes to mind), what once was a string quartet from the universities has now become a symphony orchestra. It is no longer unusual for civilian Ph.D.s from academe to challenge military officers even on their own narrow professional turf. They offer tough competition because in general they are better writers than military officers, more motivated to write, better educated, closer to research facilities and blessed with more time to devote to intellectual inquiry. This is one reason why the services should nurture their own uniformed intellectuals -- they need people who can contend with civilian academics on their own terms.
"New Mercenaries" and Contractors. The outsourcing phenomenon has now become a dominant feature of the new century's downsized defense establishment. We hire civilians to do what was formerly military assistance and advisory work; we watch benignly as commercial firms (for example, Military Professional Resources, Inc.) serve as de facto general staffs for developing the militaries of second-world countries; we outsource to civilian contractors scores of essential functions once performed by the institutional Army, Navy and Air Force. And a great deal of this outsourced work is intellectual in nature -- preparing curricular materials and presenting instruction; writing doctrine; conducting studies and analyses; supporting war games and exercises. Most military exercises today would never get off the ground, much less fly, without their well-oiled complement of civilian contractors.
In thus hiring outsiders to do its thinking, the services risk selling their intellectual souls to the devil of deprofessionalization. The Army defends the practice on the ground that contractors are usually retired military personnel, the implication being that actives and retireds are interchangeable parts. But such is not the case. There is never perfect congruence between the thinking, interests and outlook of a contractor, even one retired from the military, and the perspective of the active duty officer who lets the contract. The reason comes down to a matter of responsibility. The active duty officer has a solemn professional responsibility based on his oath of office and commission for the official tasks he undertakes. A contractor, however, even the most dedicated and conscientious one, has only a fiduciary responsibility. One obligation flows entirely from duty, the other largely from money. There can be no true comparison. I say this with no malice whatever toward our huge tribe of military contractors, of which I am a long-time member. But let's face it, fellows, we no longer bring to the table precisely the same agenda we brought back in the glory days.
Drawing on its particular strengths but limited by its particular weaknesses, each of the five groups discussed above contributes usefully to the military marketplace of ideas broadly construed, but it is a sixth group -- the uniformed professionals themselves -- who constitute the preeminent and uniquely essential voice. For they comprise the only group with currency, immersion and expertise in today's operational problems, the only group composed of active, practicing members of the military profession, the only group with the credibility that goes with wearing the uniform now, the only group with the constitutionally mandated mission of defending our country. And it is upon this group that the profession must depend for intellectual sustenance and renewal.
As was convincingly demonstrated by Andrew Abbott in his prize-winning book The System of Professions (1988), a would-be profession, to have any legitimate pretense of qualifying as a profession, "must develop abstract, formal knowledge systems from their first origins." Otherwise, there are no criteria to distinguish professional activity from such manual trades as carpentry, plumbing and house painting. If the military hierarchy, under the banner "Only Warriors Need Apply Here!" systematically excludes from its hallowed higher ranks the one resource capable of conceiving and sustaining the profession's theoretical base, it risks nothing less than institutional suicide.
An issue of Army Times that arrived in the mail recently features an article by David Wood with this little eye-grabber for a title: "The Lines Are Being Drawn in the Battle to Shape the Future Military: Will Air Power Win?" Army partisans better hope that some very fertile green-suiter brains survive to testify on Capitol Hill as to the enduring relevance of ground forces.
To be intellectual is not the same as to be intelligent. In fact, in the sense employed in this article, there is no intrinsic connection between having a bent for ideas and having a high IQ. There are engineers, for example, with impressive IQs who excel at applying borrowed knowledge toward solutions to practical problems in the workaday world, but who have no interest or aptitude for the intellectual, theoretical and conceptual work that necessarily precedes practice.
True, intellectuals who are creative at the highest levels of abstraction can be expected to have good intelligence, but such acuity is not what makes them intellectuals. After all, the intellectual Sir Isaac Newton, who first conceptualized the universal law of gravitation, co-invented calculus and became one of the greatest figures in the history of scientific speculation, had an IQ of only about 130, certainly sharp but not off the chart.
If high intelligence alone represented sufficient mental endowment, then the U.S. officer corps would be in good shape. Owing to the necessity of professionalization during the American Civil War, with another wake-up call during the Spanish-American War followed by the steady march of military technologization thereafter, the U.S. military parted ways with the dumb-and-proud-of-it dilettantism of the British and gradually came to acknowledge the essentiality of education and training among officers, with respect for the trait of intelligence itself being a logical concomitant.
Today, though bookishness and intellectuality remain on the condemned list, high intelligence itself is a prized trait, and indeed tests conducted on Army brigadier generals during the Leadership Development course at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, reveal an average IQ of about 124, which for technical reasons Center officials say is "almost certainly" an underestimate. Yes, our general officers are a bright group and doubtless glad of it. To question the intelligence of any one of them would be construed as a deadly insult, almost as insulting as being called an intellectual.
Advanced degrees do not necessarily an intellectual make. In a further evolution toward rendering intelligence respectable, possession of a master's degree has now become a de facto prerequisite for higher rank. To be on the safe side, virtually all serious operators manage to obtain this degree, in addition to the de rigueur baccalaureate. The degree field is irrelevant -- just get the sheepskin. The services have been attentive to this impulse and have cooperated by awarding master's degrees in strategic studies upon successful completion of the senior service college course and on a less inclusive basis at Leavenworth.
Very probably, we shall soon see a de facto requirement for two master's degrees -- one from a civilian institution and one from the military. The rage for advanced degrees has widened to embrace even the doctorate. Ph.D.s among the intellectually inclined are of course relatively common, but it is interesting to note that Ph.D.s among even the most inveterate operators are now cropping up on occasion.
Normally, we should rejoice at this proliferating thirst for higher education among our officer corps, but it does have a less noble side. Much of the impulse springs from career uncertainty -- officers are hedging against the possibility of leaving the service at 30 years or earlier. This is perhaps understandable. But others are collecting advanced degrees as visible badges of professional merit, as obligatory or at least enhancing bases to be touched in their career progression.
Advanced degrees for uniformed officers, particularly the Ph.D., should entail genuine disciplinary expertise, a capacity to perform serious study in the degree field, and a bent for reflecting deeply on disciplinary issues as they relate to the military profession. In short, advanced degrees should expand the recipients' intellectual capacities and hone them for professional utilization. Degree-collecting for other purposes may be understandable, but we should not mistake such degrees as sure evidence of intellectuality.
The Uniformed Intellectual and His Place in American Arms: Part II August 2002
By Col. Lloyd J. Matthews, U.S. Army retired
The article titled "The Uniformed Intellectual and His Place in American Arms" in the July issue was the first in a two-part series addressing the origins and persistency of anti-intellectualism within the Army. In the present article, which concludes the series, we examine today's muddy-boots syndrome and discuss ways it might be moderated in order to arrest the Army profession's intellectual decline.
We now return to the question broached in Part I concerning whether in the information-worshipping age of today, anti-intellectualism in our military has at last made its grudging exit. The answer, sadly, is no -- overt manifestations of anti-intellectualism still come right out and slap us in the face. One of my favorite examples appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph a few years back:
After a recent afternoon in the Pentagon's super-secret chamber called "the tank," Gen. Alfred M. Gray, the ... commandant of the Marine Corps, complained about "too many intellectuals" at the top of the armed services. Naming no names, the 59-year-old Marine general said that what is needed is not intellectuals but "old-fashioned gunslingers" who like a good fight and don't spend their time with politicians.
This sort of reflexive, unmeditated bashing of intellectuals fits perfectly into the traditional pattern of attitudes traced so exhaustively by Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-intellectualism in American Life, mentioned in Part I. Such bashing is unbecoming, just as it would be to slur any group of citizens on the basis of ignorant stereotyping. I say "ignorant" in reference to the quotation above because the familiar sentiments expressed there again assume that an intellectual soldier can't fight and lead. As we saw at length earlier, nothing could be more wrong.
There are other examples of contemporary anti-intellectualism. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in his post-Gulf War autobiography It Doesn't Take a Hero (1992) casts in a condescending light the fact that his predecessor in brigade command "was an ex-White House fellow [and] a prolific contributor to military journals." Gen. Schwarzkopf will doubtless march into the history books as one of the ablest senior combat commanders this nation has ever produced -- certainly he'll get my vote -- and it is thus disappointing to read his assessment of a colleague that gives voice and weight to anti-intellectual considerations.
An irony here is that Gen. Schwarzkopf, despite his public image as the quintessential muddy-boots soldier, is a man of no inconsiderable intellectual, philosophical and cultural accomplishments himself. He is fluent in French and German. His musical tastes run from folk to opera. He is a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. He earned a master's degree in guided missile engineering at the University of Southern California and followed it with a teaching tour in the Department of Mechanics at West Point. While earning his degree at Southern Cal, he moonlighted by teaching calculus and basic engineering at Northrop Institute and accounting at South Bay Women's College. Classmates at West Point often referred to him as "Einstein."
To the extent that raw intelligence may facilitate intellectual accomplishment, Gen. Schwarzkopf is prodigiously well equipped. His IQ, as measured on the Stanford-Binet intelligence scale, has been publicly reported in several sources as 170, which puts him well up into the genius category. In fact, as shown in Catherine Morris Cox's pioneering study The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses (1926), not a single one of history's great military leaders for which data could be adduced possessed an IQ remotely rivaling that of Gen. Schwarzkopf. Consider: Napoleon Bonaparte 135, Robert E. Lee 130, William Tecumseh Sherman 125, George Washington 125, Horatio Nelson 125, David Farragut 120, Hermán Cortés 115, Joachim Murat 115, Nicolas-Jean Soult 115, Ulysses S. Grant 110, Philip Sheridan 110 and Gebhard Blücher 110. While attending the infantry officers' advanced course at Fort Benning, Ga., then-Capt. Schwarzkopf won the George C. Marshall Award for Excellence in Military Writing. Moreover, his autobiography It Doesn't Take a Hero, already mentioned, has taken its place as an important addition to the soldier's professional literature.
This tension between the active and contemplative selves that we observe in Gen. Schwarzkopf is by no means uncommon. Dwight Eisenhower, a crypto-intellectual himself, was as a young officer the victim of a crassly anti-intellectual assault by Maj. Gen. Charles Farnsworth, Chief of Infantry, after Ike had published an article on the promising future of tanks in the November 1920 issue of Infantry Journal: "I was told that my ideas were not only wrong but dangerous and that henceforth I would keep them to myself. Particularly, I was not to publish anything incompatible with solid infantry doctrine. If I did, I would be hauled before a court-martial." Yet, despite this searing lesson on the primitive smugness of the closed mind, we find Ike himself as President in 1954 pandering to the same type of anti-intellectual mentality that had victimized him 34 years before: "We had so many wisecracking so-called intellectuals going around and showing how wrong everybody was who didn't happen to agree with them. By the way, [an intellectual is] a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows."
Over 30 years ago, Ward Just wrote, "There has never been a Clausewitz in the American Army because the writing of [On War] took time and serious thought. An Army officer has no time to think, and imaginative reflection is discouraged." These words could as well have been written today. Col. Douglas Macgregor in 1997 managed to publish a seminal book called Breaking the Phalanx: A New Design for Landpower in the 21st Century, which presciently declared among other things that to escape the curse of irrelevance, the Army must reconfigure its gargantuan divisions into smaller, more agile, rapidly deployable combat groups whose anti-armor capability would derive partially from inclusion of the armored gun system and light armored vehicles. According to an article by Richard Newman in U.S. News & World Report (July 28, 1997), Macgregor's ideas didn't sit well with much of the Army brass. But today, five years later, the same brass, prodded originally by civilians within Defense and the Department of the Army, are falling all over themselves in a mad rush to "transform" the Army into something suspiciously resembling the model sketched earlier by Douglas Macgregor, who remains a prophet without honor in his own time.
President George Bush, during a speech to graduating Annapolis midshipmen on May 25, 2001, outlined his vision of a military that rewards imaginative thinking: the President sought "a renewed spirit of innovation in our officer corps" and decried the "old bureaucratic mind-set that frustrates the creativity and entrepreneurship that a 21st century military will need." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, describing on July 22, 2001, the traits of an ideal Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, declared that the person must have "the ability to lead, intellectually as well as personally." Were the admirals and generals listening? Very possibly they were, because on the same day that the President spoke, the Army released a "brutally self-critical" study on Army officer training and leader development by a 37-member panel convened in June 2000 by Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki. Among the findings, Army officers suffer from stifling micromanagement -- a fact long known and broadly acknowledged -- and a promotion system driven by bureaucratic needs -- also long known and broadly acknowledged.
Let us therefore turn our focus more specifically on the Army's present promotion and personnel management system because it is here that we discover a form of anti-intellectualism more subtle than that discussed earlier, but no less virulent. This form manifests itself as an overpoweringly pro-muddy boots bias. Briefly stated, the present promotion and advancement system is rigged to favor those who have served the most time with troops. All other factors being equal, advancement to the highest grades goes to those with the most time in the field (with occasional detours to especially selected grooming slots in the Pentagon). This means that officers who spend significant time in mind-expanding positions developing their intellectual skills are pro forma noncompetitive for advancement to the higher rungs.
To put this reality in broader context, consider the more capacious assignment philosophy that governed the careers of the great combat commanders of an earlier day. From the summer of 1875 to the fall of 1876, Emory Upton was sent by the Army on an overseas tour -- Japan, China, India, Russia, Europe -- to study the world's major armies. In Stephen Ambrose's words, Upton "returned home filled with new ideas and a new purpose."
Omar Bradley guarded copper mines in Montana during World War I, missing the war completely, and then spent most of the interwar years attending or teaching school. Dwight Eisenhower missed World War I, too. Like George Marshall, he became known as an outstanding staff officer, and served such details as football coach at Fort Benning, Ga., and working for the American Battlefield Monuments Commission. In addition to a steady diet of staff assignments, George Marshall served on a mapping expedition in Texas, held a command in the state of Washington devoted mainly to running Civilian Conservation Corps camps, and toured the Manchurian battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War in a quasi-official status. Matthew Ridgway spent six years at West Point as a French and Spanish instructor, tactical officer, and faculty director of athletics. James Van Fleet spent nearly 13 years in ROTC assignments, including two winning seasons as coach of the University of Florida football team, directed Civilian Conservation Corps camps, and served as a trainer of reserve component forces. J. Lawton Collins, prior to World War II, served as an instructor at Leavenworth and on the faculty of the Army War College. Admiral Raymond Spruance, one of our finest World War II naval commanders, served two tours on the faculty of the Naval War College. We've already noted that Maxwell Taylor spent 13 of the interwar years attending school or teaching it. Far from seeing their careers killed or stunted, each of these officers saw their minds and perspectives usefully broadened, and their careers prospered.
But such assignments would be career-stoppers today. Theodore Crackel says that "if Clausewitz and Jomini had served in the American military, they would have been counseled to serve no more than a single three-year teaching assignment and to escape sooner if possible." Similarly, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs David Jones complained that "we've never sired a Clausewitz. In our system Clausewitz would probably make full colonel, retire at 20 years, and go to work for a think tank." I was told recently by department professors at West Point that Pentagon assignment officers are discouraging the best and brightest from accepting West Point's graduate school-teaching tour package because they then won't have time to touch the remaining mandatory career bases. Ralph Peters weighs in with the observation that few of those "who won our wars would have made it in today's Army of nondescript careerists. Increasingly, our successful officers have identical career paths [and] interchangeable experiences and views of the world." So what is this magical insight that today's personnel handlers and promotion boards apparently think they possess that those of Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Ridgway, Van Fleet, Collins and Taylor's generation lacked?
Col. Michael Cody in a study on selecting and developing the best leaders, conducted while he was a student at the U.S. Army War College in 1999-2000 and published by the Department of Command, Leadership, and Management, reaches the following disturbing conclusion:
Had George C. Marshall begun his Army career in the late 20th century Army, it is arguable whether he would have survived long enough and risen high enough to develop into perhaps the greatest soldier-statesman who ever donned the uniform. Early on, he demonstrated transcendent skills as a staff officer, and it was essentially these skills that propelled him upward through the ranks to that point in 1939 when he became Army Chief of Staff, only 3 years after gaining his first star. But today's promotion and assignment system, with its inflexible insistence upon visits to each of several ceremoniously delineated stations of the cross as preconditions for further advancement, would have made it extremely difficult for Marshall to continue to progress in rank while cultivating the broad politico-military competencies that were to equip him uniquely to build America's World War II Army, organize the allied victory, and conceive the nation's successful early Cold War strategy.
For today, as earlier noted, time with troops has become the ultimate measure of worthiness for promotion to the highest ranks. Many of today's generals are thus very good with troops, but, lacking a broader repertoire, they often find it difficult to adapt at the higher staff and ancillary positions. Retired Lt. Gen. Walter Ulmer, our most insightful thinker on contemporary military leadership, put it this way: "Research shows convincingly how strengths that served well to accomplish the tactical tasks of early managerial years can become dysfunctional when individuals move to the strategic level."
Gen. Ulmer is taking note of the fact that the Army's system for advancing officers is designed to reward those who extrapolate lower-level command skills rather than those who develop and demonstrate skills fitted to the new duties and responsibilities associated with higher rank. In Col. Cody's words, "The embedded assumption is that if officers were paragons at lower levels, they will automatically be able to meet the demands of higher levels -- no matter how different such demands might be from those encountered earlier."
But such an assumption flies in the face of theory, experience and common sense. Our World War II sergeants commissioned on the battlefield performed superbly as platoon and company commanders for the most part, but many later began to falter when faced with the more cerebral demands of staff work at battalion level. War is full of examples of brilliant tacticians who were dismal failures at the operational and strategic levels, and of peerless brigade and division commanders who blew it on assuming corps command. Witness Lee's problems with his corps and division commanders at Gettysburg.
The reasons are clear: as the officer ascends from lower levels of command requiring direct modes of leadership to higher levels of command requiring successively greater applications of indirect leadership, or as he ascends from positions that are purely military in character to those with increasingly political, diplomatic, economic, cultural and legal dimensions, the prerequisite skills, aptitudes, personality traits and experience will change dramatically. The object of the general officer promotion and assignment system should not be simply to select the fastest "gunslingers," to use Gen. Gray's colorful term, but rather to achieve the appropriate aptitude mix among its general officer pool so as to be able to fit round-pegged generals in round holes, square-pegged generals in square holes, and fits-any-shape generals in those holes requiring a stalwart fighter capable of reflecting wisely and deeply on how he must adapt in order to win a particular war.
Indeed, a RAND study conducted in 1994 concluded that the pronounced "action bias" among the Army's top uniformed leaders, resulting in an impoverishment of essential skills in resource allocation, policy development, and programming, was a serious disadvantage to the Army in its competition for budgetary dollars with the other services, which expressly sought leaders with such relevant experience. Ironically, for the overwhelming majority of our senior warriors, their most difficult and important wars will be fought not on the crimson fields of military battle, but rather within the genteel suites of bureaucratic strife.
In a detailed analysis of actual general officer positions conducted by John Masland and Laurence Radway in 1953, it was shown that only about a third of the 500 generals were serving with armies, corps, divisions and brigade-level commands, that is, with operating units in the field (and this was during the Korean War). The remaining two-thirds were scattered among a mixed agglomeration of staff, administrative, technical and training positions. Since that time, the relatively small proportion of generals assigned to field duty has declined even further because, while force structure has been greatly reduced, the number of generals authorized has not been reduced correspondingly.
Moreover, the increased complexity of military missions today, along with increased reliance on information and advanced technology, has tended to place greater reliance on intellectual skills among senior leaders. Those intellectual skills now required among general officers in addition to field competence are reflected mainly under such duty categories as technical, policy, conceptual, doctrinal, educational, humanitarian, planning, futures, strategic, grand strategic and political-military interface. For a general who is contending in these arenas, victory and defeat will have nothing to do with the mud on his boots, but everything to do with the ideas in his head. Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, for example, recapitulated his duties in the early 1990s as follows:
I have trained and established police forces, judiciary committees and judges, and prison systems; I have resettled refugees in massive numbers twice; I've negotiated with warlords, tribal leaders, and clan elders; I have distributed food, provided medical assistance, worried about well-baby care, and put in place obstetrical clinics; I've run refugee camps, and I've managed newspapers and run radio stations to counter misinformation attempts.
It is now commonplace to note that today's regional combatant commanders, preoccupied as they are with the highest matters of state, more nearly resemble proconsuls than military commanders: "[The regional combatant commander] has plainly become something more than a mere soldier. He straddles the worlds of politics, diplomacy, and military affairs, and moves easily among them." Sorry, but just being an "old-fashioned gunslinger" isn't enough.
The intellectual who aspires to apply his competency at high levels of responsibility thus faces an impossible dilemma: on one hand, if he hews to the muddy-boots straight and narrow he can never exercise his intellectual capacities and develop them to the fullest; on the other hand, if he accepts some intellectually developmental assignments along with as many of the familiar operational qualifiers as he can, he will likely be a non-select for battalion and brigade command, meaning he'll never receive a star. We shouldn't quarrel with this result on grounds of equity, though certainly that is important, but rather on purely pragmatic grounds: the Army shoots itself in the foot by effectively excluding intellectual officers from its highest rungs, thus depriving itself of those equipped to do the Army's intellectual heavy lifting.
Many operators also face a dilemma: to express their professional ambition, they feel constrained to suppress, disguise or ignore their intellectual side. My beef isn't with ambitious operators -- professional ambition can be a healthy, positive force -- but rather with the system that forces many such officers to deny their intellectuality as the price of career success.
The present Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki spent two years at Duke University earning his master's degree, followed by three years at West Point teaching literature and philosophy. It was a marvelously seminal intellectual and cultural experience for him, to which I'm sure he'd be the first to attest. But it is problematic in the extreme whether under the promotion and assignment system that Gen. Shinseki inherited as Chief and which still largely prevails today, similarly talented young captains can successfully risk a five-year detour from the anointed path.
This system is a perfect manifestation of what outsiders have long associated with the so-called "military mind," the tendency for the military to take a basically sound idea and then press it so literally and woodenly that they eventually arrive at an unwitting reductio ad absurdum. In this case, the Army has taken a laudable principle -- getting officers off their duffs, out of their offices and down with troops where they can master their branch skills and learn to operate in the field -- and implemented it with such compulsive zeal that those officers now arriving at the top know nothing but the field.
An exaggeration? Yes, but there is no question that the present system has produced a lopsided general officer corps infinitely more comfortable with practice than with reflecting on practice. As a result, this group has turned its thinking over to Pentagon civilians, discardable field grade staffers and outsiders. "We don't have to think," they are in effect saying, "we just run things." Whatever happened to the high premium formerly placed on officer assignment patterns that engender such professional qualifications as balance, roundedness and versatility? We desperately need to alter our robotic assembly line for promotion and assignment. Its cookie-cutter uniformity and rigidity -- lacking nuance, discretion and latitude for genuine consideration of all the variable factors that coalesce in producing the enlightened senior leader -- continue to work against us.
The virulent effects of the muddy-boots syndrome long afflicting the Army's senior leadership have now been documented in convincing detail in a landmark study project at West Point directed by Don Snider and Gayle Watkins. Based on investigations conducted by 39 uniformed and civilian experts on various aspects of organizing for land warfare, the results are reported in an anthology titled The Future of the Army Profession published in April 2002 by McGraw-Hill.
In a bare nutshell, this study concludes that despite recent Army successes on the battlefield, the Army profession is rapidly degrading because it is succumbing to bureaucratization and deprofessionalization, and because it is losing in the competitive sweepstakes for legitimacy and control of its core jurisdictions. Dr. James Blackwell, of Science Applications International Corporation, for example, explains, "The Army claims primacy over the use of lethal force in land warfare. It is losing that claim in the current competition for jurisdiction over land warfare largely because its doctrine and doctrine process do not provide sufficient cognitive power in ongoing jurisdictional disputes with rival professions."
The problem is not a shortage of doctrine, Dr. Blackwell emphasizes, but rather the Army's inability to supply the theoretical underpinnings for future land warfare founded on a modern general theory of war that is persuasive to the nation's civilian leaders. In short, he says, "It is time for the institution to reestablish its intellectual curriculum vitae." Over and over in reading this book, one encounters similar indications that the profession is in disarray because its alpha males are by and large such creatures of operating that they lack the time, interest and capacity even to detect, much less reverse, the profession's declining intellectual fortunes.
Snider and Watkins here add an apt commentary on whence might come the talent to generate the future military-technical expert knowledge essential for a thriving Army profession -- but they are not optimistic:
A very sobering theme centered on the questions of whether Army officers were cleaving into two types, perceived as either "thinkers" or "doers," and, if so, whether the professional future for each was equally bright. Since knowledge is the foundation of professions -- expansion of that knowledge being fundamental to a profession's evolutionary success -- it is essential to have valued members whose role is to create and develop expert knowledge in addition to those who apply professional expertise. If the Army is to flourish as a profession, both types of Army professionals need to be equally esteemed, and to have equally bright futures. Unfortunately, this is not the case today, nor without deep cultural change is it likely to be so in the future.
Following immediately on the heels of the Snider-Watkins book was a shocking public testament to the growing impatience of political leaders with the "knuckle-dragging image" that so many of the nation's senior military leaders like to cultivate. In a front-page story in the Washington Post (April 11, 2002) by Thomas Ricks titled "Bush Backs Overhaul of Military's Top Ranks," it was announced that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will nominate Marine Gen. James Jones as the next Supreme Allied Commander in Europe in lieu of an expected Army general. According to Ricks, "Rumsfeld is selecting a cohort of leaders who stand out among the current top brass as unconventional thinkers ... Picking Jones to be the top U.S. military officer in Europe may be a way for Rumsfeld to signal to the Army that he wants it to be more innovative ... Rumsfeld aides have privately expressed surprise at what they say is a lack of fresh thinking in the Army."
There have been some positive notes in recent years, and we would be remiss in failing to acknowledge them. Among the last six commandants of the Army War College, for example, there have been a Rhodes Scholar, a published historian, a published military educator and two Ph.D.s who have also published. Among the last five Superintendents at the U.S. Military Academy, there have been a Rhodes Scholar, a widely published historian, two Ph.D.s and a J. D. (law degree). At the Center for Military History in Washington, D.C., the practice seems to have taken hold of selecting Chiefs with Ph.D.s in history. Intellectuals, often tenured Ph.D.s, are also put to good use on the faculties of the War College, the Command and General Staff College and the Military Academy. Yes, Army intellectuals are establishing a niche in the academic side of the house, but they remain conspicuously absent in high-level command and policy positions.
One of the Army's best and most articulate soldier-thinkers appeared on the year 2001 brigadier generals promotion list. He'll be left nameless here for fear of embarrassing or stigmatizing him, but we can hope his selection was a straw in the wind. As a general rule, however, military intellectuals tend to face mandatory retirement as lieutenant colonels or colonels, just as they are achieving full intellectual maturity.
To elaborate on this point, during a productive conference on Army professionalism at West Point during the period June 14-16, 2001, Gen. William R. Richardson, U.S. Army retired, a former Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Commanding General of Training and Doctrine Command, complained that "there is a separation of theorists and operators in the Army." He was right, of course, and I was disappointed that his observation evoked little discussion in plenary session. There is indeed a separation of theorists and operators, but the separation isn't simply between the two functions, it's also between the ranks associated with the two functions.
As we've seen, with few exceptions these theorists -- that is, the intellectuals -- culminate their careers as field graders, while the operators, who run the Army, move on to monopolize the general officer ranks. This rank discrepancy between the two types has far-reaching adverse consequences, for it guarantees that the services' major decisions will be made by officers for whom the process of productive contemplation is alien. John Hillen, a veteran of the Gulf War, a writer on military professionalism and culture, and formerly a member of the bipartisan government National Security Study Group, commented as follows:
The four-stars get to choose the next crop of four-stars, so they perpetuate themselves as a group. They're good fellows, they're fine fellows, they're heroic fellows, but I honestly think they'd be more comfortable with a copy of Bass Fishing magazine than with a book on military theory ... They're not bold thinkers, and they can't pretend to be.
In my estimation, this is an overly harsh estimate, but it does capture an important kernel of truth: our seniors today are highly conventional operators, an operator being one who has single-mindedly pursued command or command-qualifying assignments to the exclusion of all others. While they are superb at organizing and running things in the traditional mold, they are lamentably unequipped to conceptualize newly superior solutions themselves or even to recognize the arrival of a new idea whose time has come. In short, they are poor at achieving that delicate, ceaselessly dynamic balance between cycling out yesterday's tried and true, and welcoming in what will become today's and tomorrow's tried and true. For this task, we need the influential presence of minds at the highest grades who are comfortable in the cosmos of ideas. Of course, it's wrong to claim that a muddy-boots operator could never generate a momentous conceptual breakthrough, but to actually assign him responsibility for doing so would be like straining for plankton from the back of a whale: while it may be theoretically possible, it is certainly dangerous and inefficient, and one is entitled to suspect that precious little plankton would be harvested.
Nor are most senior operators good at eliciting big ideas from even the most talented staffs. A four-star operator milking a subject with an 0-6 intellectual can remain imperiously closed-minded, but a four-star operator consulting with a four-star intellectual will attend very carefully to what has been proposed. That is the nature of the beast. We need to propel more officers to the topmost rungs of rank who are truly capable of conceiving and defending an innovative approach. Even in the darkest hours of service anti-intellectualism, the Army always mustered the will to send three or four thinkers to the top -- the Charles Bonesteels, Andrew Goodpasters, William DePuys, Maxwell Thurmans, John Galvins, and Gordon Sullivans -- the latter of whom, above all others, taught the Army that change is not a dirty word and that professional disagreement with one's superiors is not disrespect. Gen. Eric Shinseki, the present Chief, shows every promise of proceeding along the same path. But the chances of that continuing to happen diminish steadily with each day's prolongation of the present system of professional advancement.
My complaint here isn't that our muddy-boots operators necessarily lack intellectual potential. Many of them obviously do have such potential, but most have chosen to concentrate so narrowly on erecting their house of stars that they have neglected to build their mansion of the mind. Intellectual competence does not, like Athena from Zeus' brow, spring full-blown into being at the stroke of the oath-taking on commissioning day. Rather, like other competencies, its development requires time, practice and focused effort. A distinguished Army four-star, now retired, once boasted(!) to me that he never read anything but the contents of his in-box. The Army culture that produced this sort of swaggering, know-nothing complacency simply has to give way to a tough insistence that our senior leaders be whole men and women, which is to say that they unapologetically and without career penalty give reasonable attention to developing their contemplative selves as well as the active.
Some argue that Officer Personnel Management System XXI, still in the process of implementation, will eventually accomplish the goal of moderating the Army's pro-operator bias. It may very well level the playing field somewhat between operators and specialists in promotions up to 0-6, but I see nothing in the new system that will weaken the operators' stranglehold on flag-level positions.
Several of the Army's brightest and most articulate captains and majors of the early 1990s survived their outspoken forays into the world of contending ideas and are doing well in their careers as they climb toward their first star. Unfortunately, however, they read the career tea leaves and have now clammed up. Their lately developed reticence recalls to mind Liddell Hart's observation concerning young British uniformed intellectuals:
Ambitious officers, when they came in sight of promotion to the generals' list, would decide that they would bottle up their thoughts and ideas as a safety precaution until they reached the top and could put these ideas into practice. Unfortunately, the usual result, after years of repression for the sake of their ambition, was that when the bottle was eventually uncorked the contents had evaporated.
A welcome exception is Robert Leonhard, who in his frequent articles continues to stir the intellectual pot, provoking discussion of pressing professional issues that cry to be aired.
The Army is doubtless correct in insisting on the man of action as the predominant model for the combat commander -- let there be no mistake about that. But it is dead wrong in assuming that uniformed intellectuals -- simply because they have not negotiated every wicket in a general officer qualification course that could only have been devised by Genghis Khan's G3 -- cannot be men and women of action and hence are unqualified to command the higher line echelons. Moreover, the Army is on questionable ground in assuming that those who have been anointed by a zero-defects performance at each of the stations of the cross are thereby fit to serve in every general officer slot, even those for which they obviously lack the necessary intellectual qualifications. Rather than denigrating and marginalizing the uniformed intellectual, the Army should hearken to President Bush's call for a "renewed spirit of innovation in our officer corps." It should implement the necessary promotion and assignment adjustments to assure that the intellectual potential of the officers' corps is identified, cultivated and exploited in optimal ways, which would include service at the highest echelons.
It is time finally to acknowledge that the Active Man and Contemplative Man do merge in many versatile people, and that the Army has as much need for the qualities of the latter as for the former. The intellectual man -- and woman -- have a vital role to play in all professional endeavor, not least military endeavor, and it is thus a fool's game to squander precious intellectual capital on the basis of a historical anti-highbrow shibboleth. The army that rejects seminal thinkers, thereby depriving itself of innovative ideas and the instruments for continuous intellectual self-renewal, will ultimately be a defeated army, vanquished in the wake of foes who adapt more wisely and quickly to the ever-evolving art and science of war.
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COL. LLOYD J. MATTHEWS, USA Ret., writes from the vantage of his longtime former editorship of Parameters, the U. S. Army War College quarterly, where he came to know hundreds of service intellectuals. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2002 by The Association of the U.S. Army Back
You could do well, perhaps, to try my trick of reversing the order of the sentences, and trying a rewrite from there.
Or maybe it's just me . . .
It's interesting that they mentioned Patton as an intellectual -- true, but not well known. Likewise, MacArthur was a voracious reader and military thinker. Marshall as well. Among the older military intellectuals, they forgot Halleck, known as "Old Brains". And a bump for Tom Fool Jackson!
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
Good Lord, what a babble-fest this sentence is. I didn't read any further (hell, I had to read this twice) and I already have a desire to smack the author because he sounds like a whiny momma's boy.
There was a certain French officer during the Napoleonic wars, who one day, on the battlefield (Austerlitz?) shouted,"Follow me, men! My a*****e is as round as a shiny red apple!"
No one had any idea what that meant, and we still don't get it, but the Captain's men were caught up in the moment and charged behind their leader into the fray.
(Just thought I'd throw in a (hopefully) amusing anecdote. True story, too. Read it in some book by Desmond Seward.)
This is a very interesting article. I bookmarked it and mailed this page to some ex military I know.
Admittedly not the author's own words, but properly quoted in context. The author is attempting to provoke the reader. Some will find their sense of self-importance skewered. Personally I think the idea of the officer as an all-around ubermensch is a bit skewed. But at least develop the potential to rise to the occasion.
Would you agree that deliberately eschewing the development of intellectual capacity in the field of arms is a losing proposition? This seems to be the point of the author. Is every battle and war won by the sole virtue of force in arms?
Admittedly not the author's own words, but properly quoted in context. The author is attempting to provoke the reader. Some will find their sense of self-importance skewered. Personally I think the idea of the officer as an all-around ubermensch is a bit skewed. But at least develop the potential to rise to the occasion.
Would you agree that deliberately eschewing the development of intellectual capacity in the field of arms is a losing proposition? This seems to be the point of the author. Is every battle and war won by the sole virtue of force in arms?
I'm not going to pretend that, generally, the enlisted ranks are smarter than the officer ranks, since that is definitely not the case. However, there are many noncommissioned officers and enlisted soldiers who can out-think their commanders, and their commander's commander. I learned more in high school than some of those ROTC officers learned at their third rate state colleges.
I was a MI Officer with an electrical engineering degree. I got out in '95 because I didn't like the prospect of being a staff weenie for my entire career with the small exeptions of commanding mixed-gender 'CEWI' units--not at all what I wanted to do in the military. I wanted to be an Infantryman and did serve with a light infantry unit.
I experienced a great deal of cognitive dissonance when I discovered that the Infantry and Armor Officers I met were generally very bright, clever and very keen on learning their craft as warriors.
Unfortunately, the more 'specialty' branches--MI, Quartermaster, Transportation had officers that were lazy and dumb as a box of hammers.
The author's 'poster boy' for 'uniformed intellectuals', GEN Shitsacki is an absolute joke
: --The present Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki spent two years at Duke University earning his master's degree, followed by three years at West Point teaching literature and philosophy. It was a marvelously seminal intellectual and cultural experience for him, to which I'm sure he'd be the first to attest.
Gimme a break--his example is the best argument against his thesis.
How about Colin Powell? He was a staff weenie with all those 'intellect expanding' positions and was a beaurocrat in a green suit--responsible for leaving us with out current 'Saddam' problem.
One of the greatest reasons I left active duty was the preponderance of 'intellectual' officers who micro-managed their junior officers to death; who wouldn't order lunch without a 100 slide PowerPoint briefing suggesting alternatives and who would throw their subordinates under a bus for a choice assignment or a promotion.
For this guy to claim that the Army prefers and promotes 'muddy-boot' operators is a contrary to my experience as to suggest that the American people prefer and promote ethical politicians.
Who knows?
For the past 10 years, the only 'muddy-boots' operators are officers with palm-pilots, laptops and PowerPoint presentations who got their boots muddy feeding refugees, making the Serbs be nice to their Muslims and making Haiti safe for democracy....
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