Transforming Advanced Military Education For the 21st Century

Army, Jan 2005 by Schneider, James J

Even for an infantryman, the old soldier conjured a particularly ugly visage: a balding gnome-like pate, puggish nose, rheumy eyes-some said from too much drink-a perpetual frown, chinless face, the furrowed brow. It was, therefore, virtually impossible to discern from his deep gaze the last thoughts coursing through his mind as he contemplated his own personal extinction. Perhaps his mind's eye cast back to the three great battles of his career, fought during the twenties and thirties; to the time when he struggled courageously, mano a mano, defending a wounded tentmate; or, in a later fight, when he gallantly led a hard-pressed rearguard force, only to be rescued by his old wounded comrade, now a hard-riding cavalry officer. This was the same cavalry officer who, in a few short years, would lead his nation on the most disastrous amphibious operation in its history. Following the catastrophe, the tired foot soldier, virtually alone among his peers, sought to defend the court-martialed generals of the ill-fated campaign. For his efforts and for other "crimes," he was sentenced to death: the sentence he now faced, surrounded by his anguished comrades-comrades, who, in their grief, perhaps failed to notice the bemused twinkle in the old veteran's dark eyes, the old veteran, known to his friends as Socrates, founder of Western philosophy and father of advanced military education-Socrates, the heretic.

During periods of rapid military transformation, history suggests that success or failure in the endeavor depends critically on intellectual leaders as agents of transformation. The chief purpose of advanced military education is to create such intellectual leaders. They provide purpose, direction and motivation to the unconvinced, the ignorant and the uneducated-whether a subordinate, superior or peer. Intellectual leaders lead the unconvinced to seize new ideas, topple the outmoded and, when necessary, defend the old. The Greek word "to seize" (hardri) provides the root for our English word, heretic. A heretic is someone who seizes or takes an unorthodox position, opinion or belief. The intellectual leader dissents not for the sake of heresy. His main purpose is to overturn the irrational and the irrelevant embedded in the current orthodoxy as it becomes increasingly more dogmatic over time. The intellectual leader may also defend the current orthodoxy when it is under irrational assault. An intellectual leader who can rigorously defend a rationally held doctrine in the face of an illogical attack is still a heretic; but when he defends his position on irrational and dogmatic grounds, he is merely a fool.

A student becomes an intellectual leader by first becoming what Gary Klein, in Sources of Power, calls an "expert learner." Any successful system of advanced military education must begin by creating the academic conditions that allow the expert learner to flourish. These conditions include rigor, creativity and motivation. Together they forge the first links in a chain of learning by recognizing the limits of our own knowledge and the extent of our personal ignorance. An expert learner is taught to recognize his own limitations. Based on his professional experience, he is taught to develop a personal theory of war: simply a reliable and meaningful system of beliefs about the way war works; a kind of map that helps him establish the underlying rules of the game. A working theory of war helps the expert learner establish norms and patterns of expectation and anticipation. This further helps him develop situational awareness. He is able to recognize patterns that novices do not see and anomalous events that violate expectation, since these anomalies or subtle differences are too small for the unschooled to notice. Pattern recognition provides the expert learner with the big picture-a holistic, systems view of the operational environment. The discerning judgment that acute pattern recognition and situational awareness provide the military practitioner is central to the entire creative process. The successful military artist in the role of field commander is also an expert learner who has discovered how to improvise, anticipate, create and exploit opportunities as they unfold during the course of operations and that only he can recognize. The expert learner in the field imposes a creative template on the chaos of battle, hammering victory in a forge obscured by the smoke and spark of combat, in the same way the skilled sculptor hammers forth an image once hidden within the marble.

The principles of military education now seem second nature to the Army and the other services. In fact, military education in its refined form is a fairly recent development evolving fitfully over hundreds of years into a form that is perhaps unique in the West.

Advanced military education was born among the ashes of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). For almost 30 long years, an Athenian coalition fought against Sparta and her allies. Increasingly, as the war raged on, Athenian strategy and even democracy itself became dominated by a series of demagogues who appealed to the base instincts of the masses as they tried to sell a flawed plan of war.