Document created: 27 April 03
Air University Review,
January-February 1976
Brigadier General John E. Ralph
STUDENTS of diverse interests and persuasions may find military education a fascinating subject because the phrase itself, in the context of Western history and values, contains an inherent tension. Since the Renaissance, with its emphasis on humanism and its overwhelming enthusiasm for education, the central threads running through theories of education have been creativity and betterment. Education has been seen as a means to make better human beings and better societies; it molds and tints the quality of life.
In respect to its own society, the military plays a protective role. But in carrying out that protective role, the military must focus on destruction: the destruction of property, life, and symbols in external societies that may be challenging or threatening. While the purpose of this destruction is to preserve and perpetuate the property, life, and symbols of its own society, along with the institutions that underlie their special qualities, the action and focus of attention of the military are on destruction. In the latter half of the twentieth century, mass communications in general and television in particular have stressed the inhumanity and agony of combat to such a degree that the fundamental purpose of that combat is neglected and hence widely misunderstood. The Air Force, in its institutional popular history, has responded to this assault on the self-image and public image of combat forces by stressing the heroic: the one-on-one dogfight, the tight bomber formations flying through heavy flak, the third strafing pass down the valley when the second seemed impossible. But television has avoided this heroic emphasis. The power to create images rests with the cameras, and modern drama focuses on the suffering, not the heroics.
This dichotomy intensifies the dilemma of military education. The central impulse of the military is to improve the human lot. Yet military forces kill in ways that make gruesome pictures, and pictures dominate the consciousness of the society the military forces are charged to protect. When the military focuses on the individual officer and structures his education, it responds to the deep current of humanism in Western life and to the pressures of modern imagery. Military education has been broadened in the hope that greater emphasis on the humanities will preclude My Lai's, that more sophisticated area studies will preclude the naïveté that characterized our early experiences in warfare, and that eloquence will somehow transform itself to substance.
In the recent past, this broadening had gone too far. It was too pervasive. It was another form of naïveté in its expectations. During the decade of the sixties military education tended to divorce itself from the ultimate purpose and forms of military utilization, which the armed forces must remember when everyone else forgets. The military likes universalists. Military officers like to view themselves as universalists, perceptive in a range of disciplines and issues. But we must also win our military engagements, in which determination, hard experience, and a detailed understanding of equipment are more telling than grand visions. There is danger that a broad pool of understanding in peacetime will become a deep swamp of hesitancy in wartime. In the military profession the most logical and well-reasoned explanation of failure, no matter how well articulated, is not an acceptable substitute for success.
I am not in favor of a purposely narrow education aimed at blind commitment and unquestioning action. I fully endorse the value and spirit of what is called a liberal education. What concerns me is the absorptive capacity of the liberal concern, its vastness. We push all our people to investigate a range of subjects that would exhaust the most dedicated scholar. We leave too little time and place for attention to specific military functions. As a profession, the military must comprehend the great issues of our society and accommodate its internal plans and structure to the guidance received from the leaders of our society in responding to these issues. While we in the military cannot neglect the great issues, neither can we dwell on them at the expense of functional proficiency. A meager, irrelevant, or vague education in the area of combat employment will diminish military effectiveness. There is no alternative, no substitute for professional proficiency. There is little comfort in knowing that a defeated army was the best-educated ever fielded.
These pressures posed by universalism (in the form of liberal education) and specialization (in the form of military training and proficiency) are not peculiar to the military. In a Daedalus article, "Memorandum on Youth," the noted psychiatrist Erik H. Erikson asked.
Has not every major era in history been characterized by a division into a new class of power-specialists (who 'know what they are doing') and an intense new group of universalists (who 'mean what they are saying')? And do not these two poles determine an era's character? l
The interaction of these forces has taken on a peculiar form in America. It is reflected not only in its history of violence in support of high ideals but also in its literature. An example is the character Natty Bumppo, hero of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, a dead shot wandering the frontier with simple convictions and quick insights into good and evil, like a saint with a gun.
The military is the societal crossroads where these tensions and ironies seem to be most visible. The struggle over values and purpose in military education has received special attention at the service academies, where, as Joseph Ellis and Robert Moore point out with regard to West Point in their recently published School for Soldiers:
Public confusion is a natural consequence of two related developments: first, West Point has come to regard itself as both an undergraduate college with an academic purpose and as a professional school for Army officers with an essentially military mission; second, the pressure to combine these antithetical goals, to be both Athens and Sparta, has meant that the Academy has evolved in a way that makes it unlike any other educational or military institution in America. 2
The professional schools attended in the course of a military career are less spectacular, less drenched in publicity and tradition than the service academies, and therefore they have greater opportunities for redirection and realistic adjustment. The mid-career schools have other advantages. They catch officers with greater career commitment and student motivation, officers with more experience and a better understanding of issues and limits. These schools have, in general, all the advantages so often cited in support of adult education. They are an ideal ground in which to let the legitimate differences between a military and a civilian education grow and bear fruit.
Before I turn to Air Force junior officers and their particular professional situation, I would like to list three trends in military education at all levels which are now evident and which should be further encouraged.
Once we focus on the military as subject and object of the education process, we find another puzzle. The military is not a bundle of symmetrical combat elements tied neatly together with organizational string; it is a mobile hodgepodge of combat elements and support elements, many of which constitute, relate to, and even identify with external professions—lawyers, doctors, teachers, police, and so on.
The importance and pace of activity in these subprofessions within the military vary greatly from place to place, from service to service, from command to command, and from peacetime to combat. Many individual officers feel responsive to standards, trends, enthusiasms, disappointments, journals, and issues that reach beyond their military role. For these officers, routine work and day-to-day pride are bound tightly to the ethos and energies, of their subprofession. They hear its criticisms. They often speak in its voice.
In the course of a career, moreover, an officer normally moves at least twice among the subprofessions. This is part of the nurturing and growth process that we like to call "career broadening." Career broadening exposes new kinds of problems, stimulates new kinds of appreciations, tests different skills, and involves another set of standards. It is designed to groom the officer for later, expanded responsibilities. It also links him to a new group of people with different values and emphases.
Within the military, the subprofessions are expressed in various ways. They may be explicitly functional; e.g., training for combat in an F-4, running a finance office on a base, implementing a flight-safety program in a demanding overseas weather and traffic environment, and so on. Subprofessions may be advisory at operational or management levels; e.g., staff work to coordinate, refine, and monitor broad programs. They may be advisory at a level that allows the officer to define and establish programs. Finally, they may be expressed in a truly universal way, as small elements in an overlying pattern of strategy, principle, and initiative that make up the military contribution to national policy. I will say now and emphasize later that few reach this level and that in an age of quick, pervasive communications, even fewer are likely to reach it in the future.
But the point germane to this section is that the military officer responds to many audiences: superior and subordinate, staff and command, military professional and civilian subprofessional. In addition to this direct contact and influence, he responds to an overlay of broader guidance and reaction, much of it jumbled and sporadically critical. He hears the Congress, the media, the alumni. From this pluralistic audience, he hungers for applause and suffers its silence. He relates what he hears (all of what I have just elaborated) to himself as an individual who is part of a service, an establishment, a profession, a community, a family, and, by some counts, a corporate mind.
In Greek mythology there was a brigand named Procrustes who caught passersby and laid them in his bed. If they were too short, he stretched them. If they were too long, he cut off their feet. The military officer today often feels as if he is revolving past Procrustes's lair—someone is always trying to adjust him to fit a certain bed. The professor, for example, makes demands and poses incentives that reflect traditions and goals of the academic community. The businessman excites expectations and standards appropriate to the business community. The lawyer expresses bureaucratic formalities and evidential concerns that are representative of the legal community. Molds as varied as the range of modern professions pass by the military officer and arouse changing enthusiasms and anxieties. He is especially vulnerable to these diversionary attentions and standards because his core military professional activity is typically latent while his subprofession is active. Probably no other profession is impacted by so many divergent influences, thereby vesting a persistent and intense level of role stress. This phenomenon creates a compelling reason for periodic professional military education. From time to time, as military officers, we need to assemble and focus on the specific military center of our professional lives, to appreciate the demands of the flanking subprofessions, to explicitly identify our role and unique relationship to the civilian community, and to go through a learning process which meshes the burning issues with each other and with their military ramifications. And most important, we need collectively to identify ourselves as a military profession with a unique role in the society, one having unique problems, a unique perspective, a unique need for discipline, and a unique form of service. This need is especially great for the junior officer, whose opinions are firming and who is pressing down the seal on his commitments.
Soldiers are special. Sailors are special. And so are the Marines. In stressing the military core of a profession which sometimes seems a hopeless mix of technical, bureaucratic, and political aspects, we find that we can identify patterns of combat employment that are unique to the individual service. These patterns are psychological, technical, and organizational. They weigh heavily on the structure and content of professional education, and they should weigh even more heavily than they do. Among the services, the character of combat varies widely, the demands and focus of leadership vary, the pressures of confinement vary, the forms and pace of teamwork vary, the nature of fear and the nature of pride vary. This variance is especially wide for the junior officer, which is a powerful argument for single-service professional education at that level.
An elaboration of the qualities that make Air Force combat—or perhaps I should say combat for air forces--different from that of land and sea forces would make up a study in its own right. I will note a few of these qualities to illustrate. First, and most fundamental, a significant percentage of Air Force officers engage in direct combat as crew members in aircraft. Of the 108,000 officers in the Air Force in April 1975, more than 48,000 are flyers. This is reflected in organizational structure, largely centered around squadrons of rated officers, college educated, working for and with each other, supported locally by other organizations which usually consist of one or two officers "running a shop" of enlisted and civilian personnel to provide transportation, financial, maintenance, safety, and other forms of support. These focuses are backed by command-size research and support organizations such as Systems Command (AFSC) and Logistics Command (AFLC), educational organizations such as the Air Force Academy and Air University, etc. Manning in these large organizations varies with the mission and consists of a mix of rated and nonrated officers. The rated officer is always susceptible to the call of combat.
The character of air combat—or to make it more inclusive, air operations in a combat theater—is interesting and instructive. Air forces deal with bursts of combat. Their work may involve long periods of relative-sanctuary and stability, both on the ground and in the air, as well as short, intense periods of combat that range from running the gauntlet of surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery to a dogfight or a helicopter rescue. They plunge and recover. They are divers, not swimmers. These short, decisive moments require the most intensive forms of preparation and discipline. The telling decisions are instantaneous and frequent.
The officers who fight in this compressed atmosphere normally fly in teams and work as crews. Their interdependence is extreme, and the need for discipline is accordingly extreme. Leadership and authority, which rested with rank on the ground, rest with skill and immediate combat experience in the air. If the major is lead and the colonel is his wingman, the colonel works for the major until the airplanes are put back to bed. At the point of combat, the feeling is like that of a basketball team on a fast break. The need to anticipate with confidence is absolute. There is no room for mavericks or pedants. This intense teamwork illustrates discipline whose source of authority is demonstrated skill and whose demands for compliance are total.
A final point that makes the combat engagements of air forces unique is that the basic contact is not man-enemy but man-machine. The pilot, with his crew, makes the machine do what it is supposed to do, and when the situation threatens collapse, more than it is supposed to do. The machine makes the immediate demands, cries for attention, draws the focus, the feelings. The target is background, important but distant, like the target beyond a properly sighted rifle. The combination of physical perspective from the air and the bond between crew and aircraft leads to a sense of abstraction, of detachment, which is as eerie on the one hand as it is fundamental to training and psychological conditioning on the other.
In contrast, land forces deal with an intense geophysical environment, large and less cohesive combat organization, more prolonged exposure to fear, and repeated visual contact with death. This requires different emphases in leadership, different conditioning and discipline for the combat experience, and a different style and program of professional education. In the course of his career, the officer deals with thousands of problems, thousands of interpersonal contacts, through situations and requirements totally removed from combat. He evolves toward a staff or management hub in a slowly turning set of bureaucratic gears. Many issues and challenges that surround him are common to all sizable organizations, and it is easy to let concern and enthusiasm for the combat role slip away. Professional education can serve in an important way by recalling that role, illuminating its special characteristics, and exercising the qualities it will demand.
With this in mind, I believe that the general thrust of Air Force professional education, particularly for the junior officer, experienced a phase which was too esoteric, too anxious to treat the officer as if he were on the threshold of a career breakthrough to the National Security Council, too ready to stimulate his expectations and dilute his interest in combat itself, its history, its technical evolution, its leadership demands. Education for combat roles is not available in any other setting. I think it important for young officers to be conversant with the great issues, to be fluent spokesmen for their personal and professional interests. It is wrong, however, to give this ancillary aspect of professional life such emphasis that it feeds later frustration and impatience.
The young officer should understand issues, but he should also understand his role in these issues. Perhaps that is the key point. We have to relate our education to anticipated military roles and requirements in a realistic way. We have to train and educate to fight wars. In this regard, I would like to mention briefly the prisoner of war (POW) as a highlight of symbolism. Every junior officer who is facing combat should understand that while he is not likely to use his insights for great high-level decisions in the immediate future, he is likely to exercise his discipline in a spotlight role that will make him a symbol for all his home institutions: his family, his community, his service, his country, and his people. As a POW he would face a role as hostage and focus of the national pride. Pain would bring him celebrity, and he would have to deal with the two of them together. The seriousness of even a small number of failures was emphasized after the Korean War, when a wave of publicity and simplistic treatises (like Eugene Kinkead's In Every War but One) exaggerated issues and statistics to make the 4.3 percent of all repatriated prisoners war found guilty of prisoner misconduct or collaboration into a national shame that worked to erode the confidence between the military and the nation for years. 3
In an age of mass communications, any officer of any grade and specialty is subject to instant, highly selective publicity. His words may be immortalized in ways that he would not choose to have them remembered. The anonymous major at Ben Tre who said, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it," 4 is a case in point. We should ensure that every officer understands his vulnerability to instant symbolism and its potential distortions. I am not asking for muzzles, only understanding. I believe that we should encourage reticence, along with skill and discipline, because symbolism and publicity are modern facts of life that demand attention and respect, just as rain suggests a raincoat.
To support what it has seen as an important requirement for junior officer professional education, the Air Force established an introductory school at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, in 1946 under the auspices of Air University. This initial course, with many expansions, contractions, and shifts in emphasis, has evolved into the present Squadron Officer School (SOS) of Air University at Maxwell AFB.
Officers attending SOS are selected from among Air Force lieutenants and captains with two to seven years' active commissioned service. Age is not a criterion. Four 11-week classes, of approximately 780 officers each, pass through the school every year. The Air Force goal is to send 85 percent of the career-officer force (those who will stay in service for at least 20 years) through SOS. Due to budget constraints, specialty demands, contingency demands, and so on, the Air Force falls short of the 85 percent figure, though we are moving steadily toward it. Officers not able to attend can complete the course by correspondence.
The curriculum is divided into four major areas, with 68 hours devoted to Communications Skills; 133 hours to Leadership in the Air Force, which involves both classroom and field activity; 46 hours to Management; 86 hours to a subject called "The U.S. Air Force and Force Employment," which blends a "great issues and grand strategy" outlook with the study of force capabilities and structure; and a few miscellaneous hours to administration, testing, and the like. 5
The basic thrust of the curriculum and spirit of the school is toward a socialization process that recognizes some of the concerns addressed in the earlier sections of this article. We want the junior officer to see and understand his military role so that he can either reject it at this early point or relate to it and use it as a basis for professional development throughout the rest of his career. SOS emphasizes the special demands of combat and links both explanation and conditioning in the education process to those demands. Much of this emphasis appears in the Leadership and the Force Employment blocks.
The SOS Communications Skills area recognizes that in its bureaucratic role especially the Air Force is a highly verbal institution, relying in large measure on polished speech and writing for much of its effectiveness and image, and that in its combat role clarity of communication is vital. The instructional technique is largely practical exercise, with pressures of time and audience to enhance the realism of speaking and writing experiences. This forced activity is a form of therapy aimed as much at confidence as at skill.
The Leadership in the Air Force block is the heart of the SOS program. It takes up more than a third of the formal instruction and a higher percentage of the spirit and energies of the school. The formal part of the block includes the normal lecture and discussion of exemplary cases, contemporary problems, and theories of human behavior. This theoretical and verbal backdrop is brought to life in a number of special field exercises, in a strenuous physical conditioning program, and in the dynamics of the seminar relationship.
The Management area is designed to familiarize and make the student conversant with classic or topical theories and current techniques and to open his way to individual research. The twofold intent is to excite the student with levels and subtleties of perspective and to offer him vocabularies and conceptual models he will find useful in his professional undertakings.
The U.S. Air Force and Force Employment subject presents information and theory on the exercise of national power, the character and dynamics of the international environment, a review of U.S. forces and weapon systems, and discussion of the role of the U.S. Air Force in conflict resolution. The presentation is dominated by platform lecture and background reading, with seminar appraisals to allow students to crystallize and articulate their own thoughts. At the end of the block, as a culmination and integration of the diverse material presented, the students undertake a scenario-type force employment exercise, to increase their understanding of the complexities in operational planning and conventional force application.
Nearly half of the scheduled SOS instruction time is spent in seminar, which serves as the school's organizational core. Internally, the seminar is a convenient, compact exchange market for experiences and ideas. Each seminar consists of 12 to 15 officers, with a calculated diversity of background and specialty. A sprinkling of foreign officers (usually one per seminar) extends and spices that diversity. Students and faculty agree that the students learn much from each other. In seminar, they gain appreciations and insights in the most direct, meaningful way possible, from the sources of experience at the working level.
The seminar is also a test bed. All students start the SOS program with expectations and façades that shift with changes in pressure, familiarity, and competitive opportunity. They deal with exposure and critique of unusual intensity in a program that intentionally drives a relentless pace, with sudden swerves in demands and direction. They see group dynamics in action, and they examine the results explicitly.
As a former commandant of the school, I believe the SOS experience is as total as a school experience can be. Demands on time alone are purposefully enormous, and the forces pushing or pulling toward involvement are purposefully great. Individual and interseminar competition is pervasive; achievement and failure are highly visible. Student wives are encouraged to accompany their husbands, to attend open lectures, to cheer the seminar athletic teams, and to share directly in the interests, triumphs, and disappointments that develop in the program. Social life in and beyond the seminar is spirited. School activity as a whole is slanted toward the sense of community and participation that is so important in the context of disruption and rootlessness typical of military life. Like other aspects of SOS viewed independently, it reflects the Air Force in microcosm.
Another important aspect of seminar activity is the informality of its selection process for functional leadership roles and the process of internalized motivation. The faculty representative in the seminar is a facilitator, not an authority figure. The seminar chooses its own academic chairman, its own athletic chairman and team captains, its own project leaders. The seminar sets its own goals, decides from the outset how it will approach the school experience, and continually reappraises that decision. This is not military traditionalism but a reflection of organizational dynamics in the Air Force, with contemporaries mingling in a kaleidoscope of formal and informal patterns to pursue goals in a flux.
This kind of organization, with the imposed pressures and group interdependence, with the strong accent on wins and losses, especially reflects the combat environment for the Air Force officer. Other aspects of the SOS program intensify that reflection. In a part of the Leadership block called "Project X," officers are confronted with problems of improvisation and time through a series of obstacles. For example, a seminar group has to cross a stream. They have two logs (shorter than the width of the stream), a rope, a plank, and a barrel. They have eleven minutes to get everyone across, with the barrel. A leader is designated. He coordinates suggestions and makes decisions. If he fails or falters, an informal leader usually emerges and takes the initiative. The clock and the goal dominate the situation, just as they do in combat. The group disciplines itself toward achievement. It is intense discipline, but fluid in its focus of authority. Success or failure often depends on the degree to which pressures are handled and cooperation and interdependence are fostered.
The intent of the field portion of the curriculum, along with such other aspects of the SOS program as quick-reaction games during calisthenics, is to reinforce explanations of the combat experience with miniature reflections of that experience. This whole process disciplines and educates the officer in the most relevant sense to recognize his own strengths and shortcomings so that he can tailor his future efforts toward growth and can react to unexpected demands with realistic self-appraisal. For the noncombat officer, this portion of the curriculum may appear less relevant. Experience, however, has shown that without an open marriage of combatant and noncombatant skills, based on understanding and, most important, attitudes, the most dynamic combat force can be vitiated by hesitant or imperceptive support. The noncombat officer must gain his combatant insights through vicarious experience. These insights provide him a creative frame of reference that will make his support of the combat force more meaningful.
The information passed through the SOS curriculum could be summarized in textbooks and briefings and distributed to the junior officer corps in the field. That would save money. But the spirit, trials, relationships, and personal growth that accompany that curriculum cannot be sent through the mail. They need a formal setting and heightened excitement, personalities and audiences, tests and triumphs, false starts and failures, to come alive. SOS is a liberal education in the sense that a broad array of subjects is presented and a wide range of new appreciations is awakened. It is not a liberal education in the sense that its purpose is open-ended, with an eye to relaxed musing and meandering personal growth. The ultimate purpose of SOS is to make the Air Force a better combat force.
I am pleased with the present system and structure of junior officer professional education in the Air Force. That may be the most radical thing I have said so far. I am convinced that professional education is vital to excite the awareness as well as influence the orientation of the junior officer; that its effectiveness in a formal setting is far superior to its effectiveness in more diffuse forms; and that its focus should be on the combat role of the officer and the military in general. Squadron Officer School reflects those convictions.
Obviously, education is a dynamic art but still a surprisingly crude art. Any educational process, any school should be periodically re-examined, from the depth of its assumptions to the tips of its pencils. With regard to SOS, we can adjust the time and timing, as we recently have, without serious impact. We can alter the pace. We can track the students with different criteria. We can waver from elitist to democratic approaches and back. We can juggle the balance among skills, information, and socialization. We can perpetuate the education process by insisting on more deep and pervasive professional studies in the field. These are refinements, not revolutions.
My recommendations are directed toward a continuing refinement process at the deepest level, or, more explicitly, toward the fundamentals on which further refinements should be based:
(1) Squadron Officer School, along with other professional military schools, can serve itself well by more explicit recognition of the role it plays in a democracy in which power and decision are channeled through an array of institutions, most of them interacting at some point and level with the military. The military is not and cannot be all things to all groups in society. When it allows that impulse to emerge, through either persuasion or relaxation, confusion and frustration eventually wallow together through the ranks. The business and the proper focuses for 95 percent of the officer corps are combat and its compatriot, combat readiness.
(2) Squadron Officer School should continue to explore the nature of combat and the combat experience of air forces and then relate the curriculum to that experience. As an adjunct, there should be more explicit recognition of the legitimate tensions between combat and Western ideals and of the differences in discipline driven by combat from discipline driven by organizational imperatives. No more than a handful of officers in the Air Force can afford to settle into an office or an office routine. Tomorrow can bring armed conflict, with its sudden disruptions and demands. That thought should never drift too far back in the mind.
(3) Squadron Officer School should take cognizance of the nature of symbolism, with one officer, one graphic sentence, one event, susceptible to explosion and a grand myth-making process. He should leave his early professional education knowing the power of images and the dangers of individual excess.
SINCE a gentle caveat is always good form and a classic route toward exit, let me say in partial conclusion that we should shy away from great expectations and grandiose claims for professional officer education or any specific educational system and institution in contemporary society. Our age is drenched in communications and opportunities to learn. Past his adolescence, an individual whose mind is on the prowl will learn. He will learn with us, above us, below us, and around us. He will read and listen and learn. An individual whose mind is stagnant will, like a sleepy pig, move a few feet with a lot of grunting and squealing if we prod him, and then go back to sleep, having relearned only what he already knew.
In other words, the institutional program and intent are important, but individual motivation is central, and the process of education goes on at some level ahead of, around, and behind the formal schools. Squadron Officer School intensifies the education process because its program is systematic, structured, and intense and because we are conditioned to open our minds to formal presentations and situations stamped important. The things it can do alone are good, but neither great nor wonderful. It can improve certain professional skills. It can clarify an officer's role in society. It can accelerate his enthusiasms and interests. It can serve as part of a broader socialization process that will make him more perceptive, with greater personal and professional balance. But all these things it does in moderation, in fits and starts, with partial failure and modest success.
To cope with the inherent tensions discussed throughout this article, the core of the military educational effort, especially for the junior officer, must be professional identity. The junior officer must understand and accept the relationship of the military to the society in which it exists. He, as a military professional, must be committed to fight in support of that society and, at the same time, endure its pulses of enmity. This is the dilemma, the paradox, with which he has to live. Military men are called upon to commit violent acts. For the junior officer who is a military combatant, there is no clean path away from the ethics of his society or his own conscience.
Junior officers must accept the fact that their business is national security, the most comprehensive business of all, embracing history, science, technology, psychology, philosophy, and wile. Military officers must be cognizant of a complex world. For many junior officers, the overarching imperative in the business of national security is success in battle. Victory in warfare and the forms it might take rely on critical decisions and perceptions that come down from the national political leadership. A discourse on the meaning of victory is beyond the scope of this study. Whether it is "victory" or "concluding the hostilities on terms favorable to our objectives," few officers will ever play an important role in influencing that type of key decision. But success in battle is another thing. The insights, skills, advice, and motivation of junior officers will be vital in combat. National security is the business of the junior officer, and success in battle is his specific job in that business. The junior officer must avoid distractions. He must beware of a diffusion of interest so far-flung that it leaves him shallow and bewildered. He must beware of deep grooves of comfort and the sense that words can take the place of physical things. These are hazards and temptations to all military professionals and are not easy to escape in modern life.
This is not an appeal for Spartan education. War is not simple, not at any level nor in any aspect. Only fools pretend that it is. Officers cannot afford to be simplistic. The expansion of professional education into new disciplines and concerns is a healthy thing. What is not healthy is the pursuit of these disciplines and concerns outside or beyond their links to combat and combat preparation. Professional military education should first illuminate the centrality of combat, then emphasize the linkage of its subject matter to combat. When we let our interests and enthusiasms stray too far, as we sometimes have, we practice a form of self-deception. It is as if we have been invited to so many masquerades that we have become more comfortable with our masks than our faces. Neither the military profession nor Western civilization can afford that.
Hq United States Air Force
Notes
1. Erik H. Erikson, "Memorandum on Youth," Daedalus, Summer 1967, p. 867.
2. Joseph Ellis and Robert Moore, School for Soldiers: West Point and the Profession of Arms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 30.
3. Albert D. Biderman, March to Calumny: The Truth about American POWs in Korea (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 28. Mr. Biderman's book is a balanced corrective to the Kinkead report. Throughout, he emphasizes the special characteristics of POW groupings based on nationality, service, background, etc., and avoids swollen generalizations.
4. Don Oberdorfer, Tet! (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971), p. 184.
5. This is the curriculum now projected for January 1976. The numbers and block titles reflect minor changes from the existing curriculum, and in all likelihood they will be further adjusted prior to their formal implementation.
General Ralph's article will appear in a book, Educating the American Military Officer, edited and introduced by Dr. Lawrence J. Korb, Naval War College. The book will be published in 1976 by the International Studies Association.
Contributor
Brigadier General John E. Ralph
(USMA; M.P.A., Princeton University) is Director of Doctrine, Concepts, and Objectives, DCS/Plans and Operations, Hq USAF. After pilot and gunnery training in 1954, he went with the 388th Fighter Bomber Wing to Etain Air Base, France. He served a year as adviser to the Saudi Arabian Air Force, and for several years he participated in air operations in the Southeast Asia war, in Vietnam and Thailand. He has held assignments in both operations and command at George and Seymour Johnson AFBs; as instructor, USMA; as Commandant, Squadron Officer School; and in Hq USAF. General Ralph is a graduate of Air Command and Staff College and Industrial College of the Armed Forces.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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