The case against the military academies

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1994 by Scott Shuger

Suppose that every engine in a General Motors car came from one of three GM plants. And suppose that the manufacturing cost of each of Plant A's engines is more than three times that of those made at Plant B and more than nine times those from Plant C. Further suppose that other than cost, there is no measurable difference between the engines no matter where they were made--not in their performance, nor in how long they last. Finally, imagine that Plant A is far and away the least productive of the three--it makes only a small percentage of the company's engines. Now, in order to maximize return on investment, GM should:

1) Close Plant A

2) Maintain the status quo

3) Have more Plant As

If you answered 1), you are still in the running to be the next Tom Peters. If you said 2), you probably don't subscribe to this magazine. On the other hand, if you said 3), quit reading this and call the personnel department at the Pentagon immediately. You've got what it takes to justify the continued existence of the nation's service academies.

That's because the details in this scenario are true if you substitute the words "military officers" for "engines," and "Pentagon" for "GM," and view Plant A as a service academy, Plant B as the university-affiliated Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), and Plant C as the quick-and-dirty military training offered to college graduates by Officer Candidate Schools (OCS). As a means of producing military officers, a service academy is a perfect Plant A--more expensive (academy commissions cost about $250,000 apiece, compared to about $65,000 for those coming from ROTC and about $25,000 for those earned through OCS), less productive (the academies together produce only about 16 percent of all new officers, compared to 64 percent for ROTC and 20 percent for OCS), and with no discernible difference in the results (when compared to the other officer pipelines, Academy graduates don't outperform other officers). They don't remain on active duty significantly longer. Indeed, five of the six incumbent Joint Chiefs are not academy graduates. But in spite of this, we haven't eliminated Plant A for officers--in fact, we have three of them (West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy).

So here's a suggestion for downsizing the military that the Pentagon's "bottom-up review" and Al Gore's National Performance Review missed: Abolish the service academies. As we shrink the military, we're going to have to reduce officer slots--so why not close down the least efficient officer production lines?

Right off the bat, this move would probably result in a savings of nearly a billion dollars a year in direct operating expenses. And there would be nice little (little to government, big to you and me) additional economies: We could do away with the three prep schools the academies now run for the remedial training of applicants who haven't met admission standards (a disproportionate number of them are prospective varsity athletes). Ditto for the expense incurred when service big-shots commandeer government aircraft to fly themselves and their wives around the country to service academy football games. And there's probably a nice chunk of change to be saved in no longer needing field investigations or special boards of inquiry to look into academy cheating scandals.

The Plant A argument may seem too narrowly economic, so it's important to emphasize that there is another, cultural reason for doing away with the academies. Because the academies are what sociologists call "total institutions" (like prisons and monasteries) that are virtually sealed off from the rest of us, they tend to produce officers who are isolated and even alienated from the values and ideas of the general society they are sworn to defend.

For example, when Lieutenant Paula Coughlin complained to her boss, Admiral Jack Snyder, about what happened to her at the Tailhook convention, Snyder was utterly indifferent. And where did Snyder get his basic education about how to view women in the Navy? At the U.S. Naval Academy. And how about Admiral Frank Kelso, at the time the Navy's top officer, whose manipulation of the investigative and disciplinary process to conceal his own presence at the scene of the lewd behavior and sexual misconduct Coughlin reported caused the military to end up doing virtually nothing in the case? He was an Annapolis graduate, too. Irrelevant details about the admirals' pasts?--well, remember, the Naval Academy was where, in 1988, the superintendent knew just what to call an incident at his school where a female midshipman was pulled from her dorm room and handcuffed to a men's room urinal by taunting male classmates. He called it "hijinks." He didn't dismiss any of the culprits, either. And it's not just the Naval Academy--a recent General Accounting Office survey indicated that more than 90 percent of all service academy women experienced at least one form of sexual harassment at their school. A military sans academies could be expected to have fewer officers who were so tone-deaf to issues of fairness and decency.