In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on February 9, 2010

The February, 2010 issue of Proceedings (USNI) has a wonderful article in it by MG Robert H. Scales entitled Too Busy to Learn.  His basic thesis is that the American military, like its British counterparts during the 19th century, are focused too heavily on the “doing” of professional military practice at the expense of actually studying what they are doing.  As he notes,

The evidence is disturbing. Throughout the services officers are avoiding attendance in schools, and school lengths are being shortened. The Army’s full-term staff college is now attended by fewer and fewer officers. The best and brightest are avoiding the war colleges in favor of service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The average age of war college students has increased from 41 to 45, making this institution a preparation for retirement rather than a launching platform for strategic leadership.

Despite a somewhat dire picture painted at the start of the article, he does see certain rays of hope which, generally, he believes will have to be legislated in order to flummox the “personelists” (aka HR) and, I suspect, he is correct.  Two of the things I find intriguing about the article are that a) it does not mention the Army’s Leader Development Strategy (NB: the link to the PDF appears to not be working) and b) it does not talk about what we might call the “distributed PME system” (i.e. personal networks and communities of practice such as the Small Wars Council) .

Most of what MG Scales argues for, I happen to agree with.  I do, however, have a rather serious cavil with one of his suggestions:

The insidious creep of the civilian contractor must be reversed such that virtually all ROTC, service academy, and staff and war college faculty positions be filled by uniformed officers. Those positions at service PME institutions better suited to civilian instructors should be filled with long service professionals from government agencies such as State, Agency for International Development, Commerce, Homeland Security, or the Office of Management and Budget, as well as a liberal infusion of professional staffers from congressional committees.

While I applaud the move back towards increased self sufficiency, I totally disagree with who he considers the civilian instructors should be.  Granted, there are some excellent people working for State, USAID, etc., but I believe that he is making a categorical error when he calls for all civilian instructors to be (ex)bureaucrats and political staffers.  On the one hand, a major thrust of his entire article is to break out of the “doing” worldview, but is this best done by recruiting bureaucrats and political staffers?

My own take on this, looking at it from an institutional and HR perspective, is that such a move would reinforce the insularity of the officer corps from the rest of society while, at the same time, increasing anti-military biases in civilian universities (that, BTW, would be a by-product of the current university employment schemes aimed at hiring primarily itinerant labour, by reducing the potential pool of available jobs for academics such that, in order to try and get a tenure track position, people will become increasingly anti-military).

It would be far better, in my opinion, for the PME institutions to hire non-bureaucratic instructors so that they can replicate the best of the civilian educational system inside their institutions.  At the same time, PME institutions should be looking at new ways of leveraging the growing number of online communities of practice; they should not be replicating Industrial Age models of organization that created the situation MG Scales decries.

Category: Teaching
Tags: PME