The case against the military academies

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1994 by Scott Shuger

Advocates of the academies defend them on the ground that they are part of our military tradition. Well, so were the cavalry and segregation. At the very least, this point can hardly be used to save the Air Force Academy, which was only founded in 1954.

It will also be claimed that the academies supply a core of leadership that the military needs to survive through all the build-ups and build-downs. This is the gist of Barney Greenwald's famous speech at the end of The Caine Mutiny, in which Greenwald reminded the mutineers he'd just succesfully defended that while he and they had been happy civilians in peacetime, men like Captain Queeg--who was an Annapolis graduate--had been thanklessly manning the guns. The problem here is that while a strong officer corps is indeed essential, there's just no detectable sense in which it is uniquely or even mainly provided by the service academies. Again, statistically, you can't tell the difference between academy grads and other officers. And I offer this anecdotal evidence: When I was in the Navy, working for and alongside dozens of officers, ranging from incompetent to excellent to even inspiring, I never saw any correlation between how they did and where they came from.

A fall-back position is that, well, at least the services depend on the academies for the bulk of their senior officers. But that's not true either. The current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General John Shalikashvili is not an academy graduate, nor was his predecessor, General Colin Powell. Two-thirds of all generals and admirals are not academy grads.

The most desperate defense of the academies I've ever heard was offered recently by Rear Admiral Thomas Lynch, current superintendent of the Naval Academy: "We've had a president. Ross Perot may make it yet. We may have another one. We've had a host of congressmen and senators, both current and past, Nobel prize winners. A year or so ago, I could say that half of all of our astronauts were Naval Academy graduates...." If you think this is a sound argument for keeping the service academies, then I have another good idea for you. How about a billion federal dollars a year for the Boy Scouts?