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Air
& Space Power Journal - Winter 2002
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To any other Nation the loss of a Nelson would have been irreparable, but in the British Fleet off Cadiz, every Captain was a Nelson. |
–Adm Pierre Charles de Villeneuve |
*I wish to thank Prof. Dennis Drew, Prof. Rich Muller, Prof. Rich Andres, Col Tom Ehrhard, Dr. Harold Winton, Lt Col Steven Basham, Lt Col John Terino, Lt Col Forrest Morgan, Maj Ro Burnett, and Ms. Sheila McKitt for their astute advice in the preparation of this article. Its shortcomings are mine alone.
Hardly any student of British or naval history needs instruction on the role of Horatio Nelson as a teacher. One of the major keys to his greatness was his battle preparation. He carefully gathered his captains aboard his flagship to nurture them and make them understand his own intentions in the uncertain world of battle under sail. He knew that, amid the smoke and thunder of such battles, centralized command was out of the question. Britain’s desire to prevail in its struggle against Napoléon Bonaparte rested upon these captains- Nelson’s “band of brothers”- who knew what he intended and were educated to take the initiative and achieve the goals in any way possible.1 Admiral Nelson, then, provides only one example from another day and another medium to suggest that Air Force officers are inevitably teachers. The purpose of this article is to provide readers with some fodder for their own professional reading program that may help them increase their effectiveness as teachers.
A number of books would prove helpful to air-warrior mentors, especially two by US military teachers of the first rank: Col Roger Nye’s The Challenge of Command: Reading for Military Excellence and Maj Gen Perry McCoy Smith’s Taking Charge: Making the Right Choices, both of which contain essays on the role of a military leader as a teacher.2 In an effort to explore some of the ways that air-warrior mentors might enhance their teaching capabilities, this article reviews two new, important books on the subject: Theodore J. Crackel’s West Point: A Bicentennial History (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2002), which takes the institutional or macro point of view, and William F. Trimble’s Jerome C. Hunsaker and the Rise of American Aeronautics (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), which takes the individual or micro point of view. Like the other articles in this “fodder” series, this one provides a sampling of books for readers who wish to delve more deeply into the topic.
Instructors in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFROTC) program; in the training programs at Lackland AFB, Texas; at the Air Force Academy; at Air University; or in the technical and flying schools are not the only Air Force people who must teach- perhaps they are not even the primary ones. Rather, the entire purpose of the military in peacetime is teaching and learning. The classical definition of a profession asserts that it is a field of endeavor that (1) commands special expertise deeper and wider than that of a mere occupation or trade, (2) demands a sense of responsibility to society which transcends that of the ordinary citizen, and (3) features a “corporateness” that implies a special set of standards and internal enforcement of those standards.3 Specialized knowledge is delivered to practitioners in two ways: (1) through an established, professional school system and (2) through lifelong self-education that includes such activities as reading new literature and professional journals as well as participating in professional meetings. Although the corporateness of the old Air Corps days may seem lost in the huge Air Force of today, it is clear that continuing education must nevertheless remain a responsibility of all officers- both for themselves and for the people who work for them.
Doctors have their schools, associations, and specialized journals- as do lawyers and the clergy. True, military officers have these things as well, but is the military profession the same? No. Doctors, lawyers, and priests are expected to respond to more than mere money by aiding and comforting the poor and unfortunate- even with no prospect of pay. But they are not expected to pay with their lives.
The military differs in that it is a violent profession. Although we (like Gen George Patton) prefer that the enemy sacrifice his life for his country, we are nevertheless expected to do so for ours should the situation demand it. Because it is a violent profession and because adversaries are not microbes of uniform behavior, its expertise is more than a mere science. The fog, friction, and uncertainty of war exceed those of the other professions by a wide margin. According to Carl von Clausewitz and many others, then, the military profession is both a science and an art that demands more in the way of intuitive judgment than that required of many doctors, lawyers, and priests- and requires it under conditions of extreme danger and exhaustion.4
Implied in all that is the same problem Nelson faced at the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar: it is impossible to anticipate everything that happens in battles like those, as is the case in a war on terrorism. Too, the commander might be killed, as was Nelson on the deck of the HMS Victory, or isolated from his or her people in battle through, say, an attack on the command and control system. Thus, for this reason among many, a commander, like Nelson, has the obligation to educate his or her own band of brothers so that they can take the initiative and carry on in his or her absence. At all levels, then, the commander has the obligation to be a teacher.
Military training has occurred since the earliest times, even before the Greek Phalanx. In fact, the discipline that grew out of extensive instruction and very long practice was a strong suit for the Greek city-states in combat against their enemies. Military education and its associated teaching awaited the emergence of states and their standing armies. After artillery overcame wooden and stone fortifications, builders used science and engineering to improve the fortresses. This process reached maturity during the eighteenth century and led to the foundation of permanent military schools, which were often dedicated to mathe-matics and civil engineering. Meanwhile, although artillerists were usually civilian contractors (the art proved too complex for the dilettantes commissioned because of their nobility), that field gradually became a military function. A knowledge of ballistics involved a grasp of mathematics, and that too became a factor in changing military education. Increasingly, admission to and promotion with-in the European officer corps came to be based less on family connections and more on merit; thus, officers had to acquire the requisite skills and knowledge in part from formal military education as provided, for example, by the French L’Ecole Polytechnique- one of the models for West Point.
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A Timeline for the American Air-Warrior Teacher
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The problems of surviving as a small nation in a world of large, predatory empires persuaded the likes of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton of the need for formal military education. Such a system, however, did not come to fruition until the administration of Thomas Jefferson; even then, the motivation was as much the need to reduce the influence of family and wealth in the American officer corps as to develop a body of competent military engineers. Thus, in 1802 West Point was established as a school for engineers. A huge amount of literature exists on the history of the US Military Academy, punctuated recently by the appearance of a significant new work whose publication marks that institution’s bicentennial celebration.
One could hardly hope to find a better qualified author to do a two-century history of the Military Academy. Theodore J. Crackel, a retired soldier with teaching experience at the Military Academy, Army Command and General Staff College, and Army War College, knows what the Army and West Point are about. At the time of this writing, he is again at West Point as a visiting professor, as well as director of a National Endowment for the Humanities effort at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania.5 Crackel, who has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois and a doctorate from Rutgers, is widely published on diverse subjects, having done previous books and studies on West Point, the Army under President Jefferson, and the Civil Reserve Air Fleet. He is a military teacher who deserves our attention.
Clearly, Dr. Crackel has enormous respect for West Point, yet perhaps a fair assessment is that he has written a better balanced judgment than many USMA graduates might have. Although he respects this great national institution, Crackel nevertheless deals with some of its warts in an evenhanded way.
Bicentennial History explains that for some years after its founding, West Point was not a full-fledged civil-engineering school- indeed, none existed in America at the time. The academy focused on mathematics from the beginning and only gradually blossomed into a professional school for engineers. Some of its graduates, such as Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, distinguished themselves as early as the Mexican War of the 1840s and later assumed pivotal roles in the American Civil War. The school belonged to the Army Corps of Engineers for the greater part of its first century of existence but gradually evolved into an institution with a wider focus. Its corps of teachers included the permanent professors, almost all of them distinguished Army officers and engineers of very long tenure, as well as many returned graduates still in the company grades. As Crackel explains, instructional methods were rigorous (as they were when he and I were on the faculty). In the nineteenth century, they entailed daily graded recitations, usually at the blackboards. In very large part, the cadets taught themselves while the instructors corrected their mistakes and kept score. Academic attrition was substantial.
Dr. Crackel effectively elucidates a perennial problem at the Military Academy- the fact that a cadet’s day encompasses only 24 hours. Competition for those hours has remained intense from the beginning, when academics vied with military training. But well before the end of the nineteenth century, the competition expanded to factions within the faculty itself. Generally, this has taken the form of tension between the need to teach prospective officers the hard sciences and engineering subjects central to the day-to-day activities of junior officers and the need to broaden cadets’ horizons with more work among such liberal-arts subjects as languages, social sciences, and humanities. These tides have ebbed and flowed, but mathematics and the other hard sciences have remained prominent in the curriculum.
For a long time, as Crackel demonstrates, West Point was the leading engineering institution in the country. But after the Civil War- and especially at the turn of the century- increasing numbers of civilian institutions overcame that lead, even surpassing the Military Academy. But West Point stuck to its traditional teaching methods, only in recent times reducing the emphasis on frequent graded recitations and a rote approach to learning. Gradually, after the founding of the Air Force Academy (largely on the West Point model), USMA has followed the younger institution by adopting electives, majors, more graduate education for its faculty, and other features common to civilian universities.
Bicentennial History also speaks to some other perennial problems of the Military Academy, especially the tension between one group made up of tenured, long-term permanent professors who constitute the Academic Board (usually colonels in modern times) and superintendents and commandants (in modern times, usually generals on temporary assignments), and another group consisting of nontenured faculty (usually captains and junior field-grade officers- until recent times, when civilian professors were added to the mix). Observers often perceive this situation as a contest between stability and reform- between tradition and modernity. Too, since the dawning of the twentieth century, rising demands for physical conditioning through intramural and intercollegiate athletics have further complicated the contest for the hours in cadets’ days.
One of the glories of West Point that Crackel dwells upon is the natural beauty of the site, complemented by the architecture of the academy’s buildings and achieved through great patience and the passage of time- despite continual congressional parsimony. The academy’s setting seems to have a mystical quality that can long affect its graduates. For example, Gen Carl Spaatz headed the Air Force Academy’s site-selection committee four decades after he graduated from West Point. His widow told me that his first choice for the site of the new institution was the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, not only because of its location near the center of the US population, but especially because it so resembled the location of his alma mater.6 Generations of Army officers have practiced great patience and care in building up this place, and the results are impressive- as readers can see from the many fine photos in Crackel’s text.
The title of the last chapter- “The Years of Turmoil”- which covers the period since 1960, is apt, due in part to Vietnam, advancing technology, great social and cultural changes in America, and substantial evolution in American higher education. In the end, although Crackel’s admiration of the institution is clear, his book is more descriptive than judgmental. He thinks that the country got a good return on its investment in the Civil War and both world wars, but the question of whether or not taxpayers are still getting their money’s worth from the academies is a subject for another book.
Why should air-warrior mentors concern themselves with the subject of West Point? Although most modern airmen probably would not care to admit it, the Military Academy had a good deal more to do with the foundations of American airpower than has the Air Force Academy. Time alone accounts for that fact. The Air Force was already at its pinnacle by the time the first class emerged from that service’s academy in 1959. Veterans of the Air Service and Air Corps likely considered their branch superior to the others precisely because it was less dominated by West Pointers- a conceit that may still be with us. The chief of the Air Service/Air Corps during the six long, formative years from 1921 to 1927 was himself a distinguished graduate of the Military Academy. More than is commonly recognized, Mason Patrick’s ideas were very similar to those of Billy Mitchell- undoubtedly, both of them had gotten those notions in part from the West Pointers around them. Some commentators have argued that Patrick did more for airpower because of his nonconfrontational, patient, and persuasive methods than did Mitchell himself.7 Their staffers included such West Pointers as William C. Sherman, Edgar Gorrell, Thomas DeWitt Milling, Carl Spaatz, and Oscar Westover. Hap Arnold, who learned flying from the Wright brothers themselves, was a West Pointer. Although he was one of Mitchell’s protégés, he arguably had greater influence on the development of airpower- perhaps because he was in charge from 1938 to 1946, when the Air Corps transformed itself from a flying club into the greatest air force the world has ever seen. Still under his leadership, air forces fought the greatest tactical and strategic air campaigns in the history of air warfare.
If all that were not enough, 10 of the first 13 chiefs of staff of the Air Force were West Pointers, the Air Force Academy itself was built on the West Point model, and Military Academy graduates dominated the Air Force Academy’s key positions for decades after its founding.8 Thus, in order to know where the Air Force is going, we must know where it started.
While all that was going on at the undergraduate level, Army and Navy postgraduate professional institutions emerged, establishing precedents for the Air Force. Even before the conclusion of the Indian wars, the Army had its School of the Infantry and Cavalry established at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as early as 1881. It evolved into the Command and General Staff School and then into today’s Command and General Staff College. Coming out of World War I, airmen were permitted to found the Air Service Field Officers School at Langley Field, Virginia, which evolved into the famous Air Corps Tactical School and thence to Air University at Maxwell AFB, Alabama. The performance of the Army in the Spanish-American War proved such a fiasco that it provided a powerful incentive for the establishment of the Army War College at what now is Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, D.C. The Army schools were especially important to airmen because the usual process in the early years called for attendance at the Air Corps Tactical School. Along with the airfield and classroom facilities, one found a stable for training pilots in horseback riding so they would not find themselves at a disadvantage on staff rides when they moved on to Command and General Staff School- a two-year program up until the mid-1930s.9 Many airmen thought the practice old-fashioned and a distraction from flying, doing anything they could to avoid it. For example, Spaatz, then a major, managed to delay his attendance until it was reduced to one year- even then, he gradu-ated next to last in the class.10 Although Spaatz did not go on to the Army War College, many others took this last step in the professional education program for Air Corps officers.
Back in the “from here to eternity” Army, senior officers commonly mentored their juniors:
As a newly commissioned second lieutenant, Omar N. Bradley recalled his first mentor after his graduation from West Point in 1915. Shortly after his arrival at Fort Yuma, [Arizona,] he fell under the tutelage of Lt. Forrest Harding, “a man of rare wit, ability, intelligence and professionalism” who organized a weekly study group at his home to provide the younger officers with an opportunity to discuss practical small-unit tactical problems and other military questions.11
Among their colleagues in the Air Corps, mentoring was seldom as well structured as all that, taking the form of “hangar flying” if it occurred at all. Yet, Mitchell clearly had his group of protégés, principally Arnold, Spaatz, and Ira Eaker. Any such teaching expired when Mitchell resigned in 1926, but these three men remained close forever after.
The Navy, whose school system developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was also a major contributor to the growth of American airpower. Many captains in the sailing-ship Navy had their own shipboard mentoring programs for junior officers. Even confined largely to ship management, handling, and navigation, such programs required a good deal of instruction. In the nineteenth century, officers had to take formal examinations to qualify for each succeeding promotion, another reason the teaching of juniors became an imperative. When steam propulsion emerged in the years before the Civil War, the process became simply too complex for shipboard instruction, so the US Naval Academy began in 1845, charged with the professional development of mechanical engineers to run the power plants. Only toward the end of the end of the century did it expand its mission to the development of professional officers. Like West Point in those days, its curriculum focused heavily on technical subjects but gradually broadened to the extent that the same kind of competition for hours in the midshipmen’s days (naval cadets at first) ensued- and remains so today. The Naval War College became part of the educational scheme to deal with subjects on the strategic level, leaving the technical and tactical subjects to the academy and unit-training programs.
The major technological revolutions in na-val warfare that occurred after the Civil War generated a need for postgraduate education in engineering. For a while, the Navy met this need by sending its officers to American or British graduate schools but then chose to establish the Naval Postgraduate School in Annapolis (now in Monterey, California) in 1909 with a curriculum largely focused on engineering and management. The Navy started its flying school in Pensacola, Florida, even before World War I, and some preliminary flight training began at the Naval Academy in the 1920s.
The Navy initiated a professional journal somewhat earlier than did the Army. Soon after the founding of the Naval Institute, it began a publishing effort that quickly evolved into the Naval Institute Proceedings, a journal that still appears under that name. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, many of its articles were technical, tactical, and even strategic in character. Carl Builder described the Navy as the most “traditional” service, a characterization that doubtless contains more than a grain of truth.12 Many of those articles indeed looked back at Jutland and Trafalgar, but just about as many of them in the 1920s addressed aviation and the ways in which it might make the naval service more effective. Then and long after, midshipmen clearly understood that getting published in Proceedings should be one of their early career goals.
One often hears the West Point class of 1915 (that of Eisenhower and Bradley) described as the “class the stars fell on” because of the number of its graduates who became generals. Among sister services, the Naval Academy class of 1908 is certainly in the running for that title, 32 of its graduates having attained flag rank.13 But that group does not include the class’s number-one graduate- Jerome Hunsaker- who nevertheless became just as renowned as any of its eventual admirals. Resigning after 22 years in the Navy, he went on to fame and fortune in business, government, and academia.14 Earning his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before World War I, Hunsaker later established America’s first college program in aeronautical engineering at that university. He also served as a vice president of Goodyear Corporation and, most importantly, as the chairman of both the executive committee and the main committee of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) all the way up to 1957. In at the ground floor of aviation, Hunsaker became a pillar in the structure of US aeronautical leadership by serving as a teacher, researcher, manager, and policy maker for several decades.
Dr. William Trimble has worked on the Hunsaker story for many years; his earlier books on the Naval Aircraft Factory and on Adm William Moffett both are foundation stones for Jerome C. Hunsaker and the Rise of American Aeronautics. Trimble, who earned his PhD from the University of Colorado in 1974 with a dissertation on the Geneva Naval Limitation Conference of 1927, is a prominent professor in the History Department of Auburn University in Alabama. He publishes extensively in aviation and technology journals and has served repeatedly as a visiting professor at the Air War College.
Born in 1886, Jerome Hunsaker earned his doctorate in engineering at MIT at the tender age of 26. Most of us in the Air Force are quick to assert that ours is the most technological of the services, but the Hunsaker story should be enough to temper that view somewhat. The Navy was sufficiently broad minded not only to send him to MIT for a graduate degree while he was still a very junior officer, but also to send him back again to teach there for three years. During that time, he set up MIT’s pioneer course in aeronautical engineering- and constructed the most advanced wind tunnel in America. As if that were not enough to generate a bit of humility among us, Hunsaker translated Alexandre Gustave Eiffel’s book on aerodynamics from French into En-glish and published it during the same period.15 Furthermore in 1919, during World War I, among many other accomplishments, he designed the NC-4- the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic.16
In 1919 Hunsaker rode back from Europe on the SS Aquitania in the company of Brig Gen Billy Mitchell of the US Army Air Service. He was treated to all of Mitchell’s vision for the future of aviation in America. The vision at that point was not much centered on any idea of strategic bombing, but it did look toward the immediate creation of a separate air force with all of American aviation under its control and with the resulting three services under a central department of defense. This did not promise much for naval aviation, and Hunsaker carried his alarm back to the General Board of the Navy. The admirals of the board invited Mitchell in that spring, and the good general did not modify his vision much for them, which prompted them to move quickly on the creation of a Bureau of Aeronautics within the Navy. Certainly, the whole experience could have done little to endear Billy to either the Navy in general or Hunsaker in particular.
Hunsaker already favored lighter-than-air aircraft since they seemed to promise a cheap way to provide scouting for the fleet and to enable the Navy to overcome its disadvantage in numbers of cruisers compared to the British and Japanese navies. Hunsaker himself designed the Shenandoah- the first US-built rigid airship. General Mitchell had done nothing to improve his popularity with the Navy in the battleship-bombing tests against the Ostfriesland in 1921,17 and Mitchell’s reaction to the crash of Hunsaker’s Shenandoah hardly two years after it first flew threatened complete alienation between the services. His public implication of treason on the part of the Navy and Army high commands led to his court-martial and conviction that fall. Soon after that, in 1926, Hunsaker resigned from the Navy but retained his enthusiasm for airships.
The point of all this is that Trimble admires his subject for many reasons, but he is not blind to Hunsaker’s limitations- witness his remarks that Hunsaker stuck with the lighter-than-air idea far longer than he should have, given the evidence of its impracticality and of the ability of airplanes to perform many of the functions envisioned for airships. Clearly, Trimble believes that Jerome Hunsaker was indeed a brilliant engineer and manager; however, he also acknowledges his subject’s conservative streak- which made him less willing to embrace desirable change.
Hunsaker officially left the service in 1926 but served the Navy (and the air forces of the other services as well) long after- even beyond his retirement from NACA in 1957- and proved instrumental in establishing MIT as a leader in the development of aeronautical science and education. In the late 1920s, he took a job with Bell Laboratories, where he helped develop US airways and the air-traffic-control system so essential to the progress of commercial aviation and flying safety in general. Later, in the 1930s, he worked for a while as a vice president of Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation but with only limited success. The death of Adm William Moffett in the crash of the Navy airship Akron in 1933 and the burning of the German zeppelin Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937 killed the rigid-airship business for good.
Meanwhile, Hunsaker had returned to MIT, this time as chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department. He later headed a new Aeronautical Engineering Department, and, serving both as a teacher and an administrator, he remained one of the pillars of American airpower development. As noted, he served as well with the NACA for many years through World War II until 1957, although not always with splendid results. Trimble cites Dr. Alex Roland’s argument in the latter’s history of NACA that Hunsaker gradually got overly cozy with both industry and the military- a relationship that sacrificed too much of NACA’s autonomy, to the detriment of its function of research in basic science. Trimble does not contest that judgment.
Through it all, Hunsaker continued to contribute to the development of professional expertise by authoring many books and articles.18 He also contributed through his many lectures and speeches to professional organizations and frequent testimony to Congress. In 1934 President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him to the Howell Board, which allowed him again to make a contribution in the nonaca-demic environment. Hunsaker actively participated in several professional societies and was one of the founders and the first president of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences in 1932, also serving as the editor of that organization’s journal. Although he became fairly wealthy, he offered his services either for no pay or for mere honoraria. Thus, even though he was not a flyer, one might argue that Hunsaker indeed came close to being a true professional. If revolutions in military affairs do in fact reflect some combination of technological change, doctrinal adjustment, and organizational adaptation, arguably Trimble’s man was a major contributor to the airpower portion of that revolution in all three areas.19
Hunsaker retired from MIT in 1952, and his function at NACA expired in 1957. He lived until 1984, gradually suffering a decline in health until he died almost 50 years after Billy Mitchell’s passing. The current Air Force warrior-scholar can read Trimble’s short biography with great profit. The author’s writing style is effective, and he handles his subject admiringly but evenhandedly. Reading this book might well help the serving airman realize that there is more to airpower than merely delivering lethal force through the sky. Clearly, air transport, the aircraft industry, science, academia, and even the US Navy are important parts of the whole. All of these elements have merged- and continue to merge- in many ways to yield aeronautical leadership for America.
Some identity seems to exist between the terms officer and teacher in the US Army. In spite of the Air Force’s roots in the Army and West Point, is it possible that no similar identity exists in the Air Force? One indicator might be that Bradley, Eisenhower,20 Patton,21 and many other Army officers spoke of deliberate mentoring programs run by their seniors to educate their own band of brothers. Based on my own study of Air Force memoirs and biographies (and my line experience), such programs have not been nearly as common in the post– World War II Air Force. Bradley, Tasker Bliss, Douglas MacArthur, and William Westmoreland all served tours at West Point and still reached the pinnacle of the Army. Bradley and Bliss served more than one tour there. Mac-Arthur and Westmoreland both served as superintendent and went on to become chief of staff. However, the only faculty member of the Air Force Academy to become chief of staff so far is Gen Ron Fogleman, who had only a two-year tour at the academy.22 There, as at the Naval Academy, the superintendent’s job is almost always a “sunset tour,”23 and for many years that has frequently been the case for AFROTC professors and war college teachers.
As noted, writing for publication in journals and elsewhere is often considered part of what one does as a professional. Air Corps and Army Air Forces officers did not entirely ignore that task. Billy Mitchell himself wrote several books and many articles.24 Henry Arnold and Ira Eaker were handy with the pen.25 George Kenney was a writer as well.26 Still, one suspects that such work was much more common in the prewar Army and Navy than it has ever been in the air arm. Patton’s writings are a case in point. Before World War II, he published service-journal articles that were much more of a professional, technical nature than those of most airmen although he, like many other Army officers, also found a lucrative market for his wartime memoirs.27
Compared to the situation of officers in the prewar Army, at least, it appears that ser-vice as a teacher at the Air Force Academy is more likely to derail most folks from the fast track. Perhaps the same can be said for professional military education (PME), Air Education and Training Command, and AFROTC teachers.28 Until Vietnam, at least, writing for publication was not particularly a feather in the cap for fast movers.29 Notwithstanding the fact that most rated people do some work as instructor pilots or navigators before reaching the middle ranks, one wonders whether anecdotal evidence suggests that a difference exists between the two service cultures that may not prove beneficial to the Air Force. Must we believe that teaching experience reduces one’s competence as a leader?
How might teaching experience enhance one’s potential for leadership? First, it is quite clear that the ability to speak and write well is essential to a leader. Teaching certainly improves one’s comfort in speaking before a group and, hopefully, enhances one’s ability to explain things. And there is no better method for improving one’s own writing than correcting that of others. Furthermore, getting the message across and conserving time are critical attributes for most commanders. Repeated lesson planning can certainly help organize one’s thinking to convey material in a finite amount of time. Above all, leadership is a matter of motivation. Some theories of learning suggest that it is an individual process- that it can’t be forced upon someone. Thus, perhaps a teaching tour helps develop one’s ability to motivate other people. A classroom setting provides instant feedback- if students’ eyelids start drooping, the teacher is not motivating them. Practically all leadership models also include the ingredient of courage- both physical and moral. For example, some people of unquestionable physical courage have trouble standing up to the boss. In a small way, preparing to face a classroom full of students without making a fool of oneself becomes a bit of a moral challenge. Too, assigning someone a failing grade, knowing that doing so can result in a career disappointment for that student, is a daunting prospect. Many a heroic aviator has had trouble “telling it like it is” on officer evaluation reports.
Further, practically all leadership models demand excellence in professional knowledge. Either in training or education, the best way to learn material and retain it is to teach it. Having flown the Instrument Landing System at the Midland-Odessa airport in Texas with students a couple of million times, I’ll never forget the procedure.30 But once aspiring leaders gain competence in the technical and tactical dimensions of the profession, they need to move on to the operational, the strategic, and even the political levels- something one can do only at the educational level of teaching. Perhaps it is time for our profession to reduce the career penalty for teaching in the training, AFROTC, Air Force Academy, and PME environments.
Hopefully, it is more than mere parochialism in a journal published at Air University to assert that mentoring is a vital part of the function of all officers- in many circumstances, perhaps, the most vital part. How are they to fulfill that function? Perhaps the reader will conclude that it is only partially with tongue in cheek that I offer the following:
• Honor thy mentorees as thou wouldst have thy mentorees honor thyself.
• Thou shalt not kill thy mentorees whose ideas do not agree with thine own.
• Thou shalt not do all the talking.
• Thou shalt learn PowerPoint immediately, if not sooner.
• Thou shalt eschew obfuscation in both speech and letters.31
• Thou shalt not go into the classroom, briefing room, hangar, or O Club bar less prepared than thy mentorees.
• Thou shalt understand that promptitude is next to godliness for thyself as well as thy mentorees.
• Thou shalt not consider a sense of humor sinful.
• Thou shalt always be mindful that examples speak louder than words.
• Thou shalt be ever mindful that bad examples speak even louder.
• Thou shalt never forget that inflexibility is sinful in mentoring, as it is in love and war.32
A 12-Book Sampler on the Officer as a Teacher* Two for an Overview
The Challenge of Command: Reading for Military Excellence by Roger H. Nye. Wayne, N.J.: Avery Publishing Group, 1986.
Neither Athens Nor Sparta? The American Service Academies in Transition by John P. Lovell. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1979. Ten for Depth and Mastery
The Wisdom of Eagles: A History of Maxwell Air Force Base by Jerome A. Ennels and Wesley Phillips Newton. Montgomery, Ala.: Black Belt Press, 1997.
History of the Air Corps Tactical School, 1920–1940 by Robert T. Finney. Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force History, 1992.
Sailors and Scholars: The Centennial History of the U.S. Naval War College by John B. Hattendorf, B. Mitchell Simpson, and John R. Wadleigh. Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1984.
The Patton Mind: The Professional Development of an Extraordinary Leader by Roger H. Nye. Garden City Park, N.Y.: Avery Publishing Group, 1993.
The Leavenworth Schools and the Old Army: Education, Professionalism, and the Officer Corps of the United States Army, 1881–1918
by Timothy K. Nenninger. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.
The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance by Thomas B. Buell. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1974.
George C. Marshall, vol. 1, Education of a General, 1880–1939 by Forrest C. Pogue. New York: Viking, 1963.
A Soldier’s Story by Omar Nelson Bradley. New York: Holt, 1951.
Bliss, Peacemaker: The Life and Letters of General Tasker Howard Bliss by Frederick Palmer. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1934.
Of Responsible Command: A History of the U.S. Army War College, rev. ed., by Harry P. Ball. Dallas, Tex.: Taylor Publishing, 1994. One for Good Measure Professional Military Education in the United States: A Historical Dictionary edited by William E. Simons. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. This book would make a useful addition to any air warrior’s/scholar’s desk-reference set.
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Notes
1. “The Battle of the Nile: Admiral Nelson to Admiral Earl Howe,” on-line, Internet, 8 May 2002, available from http://www. bandofbrothers.com.
2. Roger H. Nye, The Challenge of Command: Reading for Military Excellence (Wayne, N.J.: Avery Publishing Group, 1986); and Perry M. Smith, Taking Charge: Making the Right Choices (Garden City Park, N.Y.: Avery Publishing Group, 1988). Colonel Nye served as a combat officer in armor during the Korean War, and General Smith as a combat fighter pilot in Vietnam. Nye, who did his dissertation on the history of USMA, had many years of service on the faculty of West Point; Smith had a tour in the Political Science Department at the Air Force Academy and later became commandant of the National War College. Both are West Pointers as well as warriors/ teachers.
3. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957), 8–10.
4. Clausewitz himself was a longtime teacher in the Prussian system of formal education.
5. The project aims to restore the records, destroyed by fire, of the War Department for the last years of the eighteenth century.
6. Mrs. Carl A. Spaatz, Washington, D.C., interviewed by author, 25 March 1982 and 12 April 1984.
7. See James P. Tate, The Army and Its Air Corps: Army Policy toward Aviation, 1919–1941 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1998); and Robert P. White, Mason Patrick and the Fight for Air Service Independence (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001).
8. Until 1991, 10 of the first 11 Air Force Academy superintendents were USMA graduates. Until 1983, four of the five academic deans were USMA graduates, and the other one had served a tour on the faculty of West Point. Until 1978, nine of the first 10 commandants of cadets were USMA products. Four of the first five directors of athletics to 1975 were West Point officers. The only Naval Academy graduate in any of those positions was Col John Clune, who served as director of athletics from 1975 to 1991. (Although significantly more Naval Academy people than West Pointers came to the Air Force Academy from 1948 to 1959, they almost always held junior positions there.) Commandant of Cadets, US Air Force Academy, to Col Tom Ehrhard, School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, fax, 9 May 2002.
9. So argued Maj Thomas DeWitt Milling, assistant commandant of the Air Service Tactical School, who added that such training would also improve the hand-eye coordination so vital in the piloting business. “The Air Service Tactical School: Its Function and Operation,” 1924, Air Armament Center History Office, Eglin AFB, Fla. The stables continued after the school moved to Maxwell Field, Ala., in the 1930s.
10. Maj Carl A. Spaatz to Lt Col Henry H. Arnold, March Field, Calif., letter, 5 February 1935, box 7, Spaatz Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
11. Carol Reardon, Soldiers and Scholars: The U.S. Army and the Uses of Military History, 1865–1920 (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 203.
12. Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 18.
13. One of them was Maj Gen Hugh Knerr, USAF.
14. He served four years at the Naval Academy and 18 on the line of the Navy, retiring as a Naval Reserve O-6.
15. Eiffel is the same man who designed and built the famous tower in Paris.
16. The original belongs to the Smithsonian but is on loan to the National Museum of Naval Aviation at Pensacola, Florida. That exhibit alone makes a visit there worthwhile.
17. One can easily argue that both the Navy and Mitchell were trying to stack the deck in the tests to prove that each was right.
18. Examples include Aeronautics at the Mid-Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1952); “Forty Years of Aeronautical Research,” in Smithsonian Report for 1955 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1955); “Europe’s Facilities for Aeronautical Research,” Flying 3 (April 1914): 75, 93; “The Navy’s First Airships,” United States Naval Institute Proceedings 45 (August 1919): 31–44; and “Progress in Naval Aircraft,” Society of Automotive Engineers, Transactions 14, pt. 2 (1919): 236–77.
19. Hunsaker was never a fan of either Douhet’s or Mitchell’s approach to air war.
20. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Eisenhower Diaries, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (New York: Norton, 1981), 6.
21. See Roger H. Nye, The Patton Mind: The Professional Development of an Extraordinary Leader (Garden City Park, N.Y.: Avery Publishing Group, 1993), 40, 42. Here we find that both Gen John J. Pershing and Maj Gen Fox Conner acted as mentors for Patton when he was a young officer and later when he was middle-aged.
22. I did four-year tours in the history departments of both the Air Force Academy and West Point. The departments were approximately the same size. Only one of my colleagues from the Air Force Academy ever went back to the line and became a general (Maj Gen Davis Rohr); at least seven of my Army colleagues returned to serve with the troops and rose to general-officer rank- two of them to lieutenant general.
23. This is the last tour before retirement.
24. His books include Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power- Economic and Military (1925; reprint, New York: Dover, 1988); Memoirs of World War I: “From Start to Finish of Our Greatest War” (New York: Random House, 1960); General Greely: The Story of a Great American (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1936); Skyways: A Book on Modern Aeronautics (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1930); and Our Air Force, the Keystone of National Defense (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1921). Mitchell also wrote a host of articles, mostly on airpower advocacy or outdoor sporting life, usually published in popular magazines such as Collier’s or Saturday Evening Post.
25. Gen Henry H. Arnold did considerable writing, sometimes including an advocacy character to inform the public about aviation. Perhaps his most significant book- Global Mission (London: Hutchinson, 1951)- appeared at the end of his life. With Ira Eaker, he coauthored This Flying Game (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1936, 1943); Winged Warfare (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941); and Army Flyer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942). Early on, he wrote Airmen and Aircraft: An Introduction to Aeronautics (New York: Ronald Press, 1926).
26. Gen George C. Kenney wrote more after World War II than he did in his younger years: General Kenney Reports: A Personal History of the Pacific War (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949); Dick Bong: Ace of Aces (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1960); The Saga of Pappy Gunn (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1959); and The MacArthur I Know (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1951).
27. Patton’s writings include “The Form and Use of the Saber,” Journal of the United States Cavalry Association 23 (March 1913): 95; “Comments on Cavalry Tanks,” Cavalry Journal, 1921, 251–52; “Motorization and Mechanization in the Cavalry,” Cavalry Journal, 1930, 331–48; and many other similar pieces, including a serialized set of wartime articles in the Saturday Evening Post. He was also a frequent contributor of book reviews to Cavalry Journal. He published his wartime memoirs under the title War as I Knew It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947).
28. A clear exception to that notion is teaching service at the Weapons School at Nellis AFB, Nevada, which is known to boost an officer’s prospects.
29. That situation may be changing. In the early 1950s, hardly a third of the Air Force’s officers were college graduates, although most officers in the prewar Army and Navy held degrees. By the 1970s, a college degree had become a prerequisite for commissioning; that requirement appears to have had some effect.
30. This system provides a precise method for low approach and landing during adverse weather.
31. Lt Gen Truman Spangrud, USAF, former Air University commander, suggested this commandment.
32. We know that Moses got along with 10, but we will give you 11 anyhow.
Contributor
Dr. David R. Mets (BS, USNA; MA, Columbia University; PhD, University of Denver) is a professor at Air University’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He studied naval history at the US Naval Academy and taught the history of airpower at both the US Air Force Academy and West Point. During his 30-year career in the Navy and Air Force, he served as an instructor pilot in Air Training Command, a tanker pilot in Strategic Air Command, an instructor navigator in strategic airlift, and a commander of an AC-130 squadron in Southeast Asia. On another tour there, he was an aircraft commander for more than 900 tactical airlift sorties. A former editor of Air University Review, Dr. Mets is the author of Master of Airpower: General Carl A. Spaatz (Presidio, 1988) and four other books and monographs.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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