Air University Review, May-June 1985
| Young people at universities study to achieve knowledge and not to learn a trade.
We must all learn how to support ourselves, but we must also learn how to live. We need a
lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of modern engineers. Sir Winston Churchill |
NINETY-ONE percent of the general officers sampled in a Spring 1984 Newsweek survey indicate that the "quality of recently commissioned officers" had improved. Another 7 percent believe that quality is unchanged, while only 2 percent of the generals surveyed thought that it was "worse."1 This impressionistic evidence is confirmed by more analytic measures of quality: scores on standardized tests, school class standing, and the number and variety of student leadership positions. Indeed, in terms of these characteristics, recent commissionees are better than at any time since the early 1960s and, possibly, since World War II. Moreover, further improvement in quality can be expected over the next few years.2 For senior officers who watched the campus protests of the late Vietnam era, this development is indeed encouraging.
The general officers responding in the Newsweek survey also believe that the public has become more supportive of the military and of a stronger national defense––again, trends confirmed by other opinion surveys. This shift in public sentiment has influenced young Americans, many more of whom now regard commissioned service as a desirable and rewarding career. But the U.S. Armed Forces also deserve credit for effective management of their commissioning activities. Over the past decade, the services have successfully adjusted officer-recruiting programs to the realities of the post-Vietnam era. One change involves more effective use of national advertising. This effort has increased public knowledge of the opportunities afforded by commissioned service, particularly among women and minorities, both of whom are now better represented in the officer corps. More intensive and better organized summer training activities have stimulated student interest and better prepared commissionees for their initial assignments. Finally, changes in administrative and personnel policies, particularly the assignment of younger and better qualified officers, have improved the campus standing of ROTC, the largest of the several commissioning programs.
Several other developments have affected quality directly. The first is the expansion in size of West Point and the Air Force Academy, which began during the late 1960s and was completed in the early 1970s. Each academy now produces about 950 officers a year, some 350 more than before expansion, for a total of about 15 percent of overall officers accessions.3 A second and more important change involves the ROTC scholarship programs. In 1964, the U.S. Army and Air Force were authorized scholarship programs similar to the one adopted by the U.S. Navy in 1946. Since these programs became operational by 1970, each service has commissioned about 1050 scholarship recipients annually. Additional scholarships were authorized in 1980, raising the DOD total to 29,000, and the services will soon share between 5500 and 6000 ROTC scholarship graduates each year, almost double the number of a few years ago.
As information about ROTC scholarships has become more widely disseminated, the number of young men and women applicants has increased sharply. In 1981, for example, there were roughly seven applicants for every scholarship. The greater selectivity afforded the services has resulted in a higher-quality ROTC student. In terms of measurable characteristics, in fact, ROTC scholarship recipients are virtually identical in quality to entering service academy cadets and midshipmen: top-quintile ranking in high-school classes; an average Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) score above 1200; and strong records of extracurricular activities, especially in athletics and student leadership positions. These qualifications rank academy and ROTC scholarship students in the top 10-15 percent of all college students. Such top-quality young men and women now account for almost 40 percent of total officer accessions; the comparable figure in the pre-Vietnam era was only 10 percent.
Other commissioning programs have also improved standards. Officer Candidate School/Officer Training School (OCS/OTS) programs, which currently supply about one-third of all officer accessions, accepted many high-school graduates in the past. With few exceptions, entry is now limited to college graduates. Similarly, competition among nonscholarship ROTC students for commissioned billets has intensified. Because officer recruiting is less sensitive than enlisted recruiting to economic conditions, these patterns have not been seriously affected by unemployment trends. In short, there has been a steady, across-the-board improvement in quality, with a particularly sharp jump in the number of top-quality commissionees.
Not only are the armed forces commissioning more highly qualified individuals than in the past, but the services are using these young men and women to better advantage. The period of obligated service has been increased in recent years, from four to five years for academy graduates, from three to four years for ROTC scholarship recipients, and from two to three years for ROTC nonscholarship and OCS graduates.4 The lengthened period of service is reducing personnel turnover and enabling young officers to become more effective in their jobs. Future accession requirements are also reduced, and the services can expect to enjoy a high degree of selectivity among candidates for commissions in the years ahead.
Along with these positive shifts, the services have adopted policies designed to achieve a better match between undergraduate degree programs and initial, entry-level assignments. Such matching policies have affected all commissioning activities but have been applied most effectively in ROTC and OCS/OTS. In the past, service concern with ROTC curricula was directed principally at the content and sequence of military training activities. With the newer policies, the emphasis has shifted to the student's college courses and programs. In effect, ROTC students (and particularly scholarship students) are now being required to elect engineering or technical majors, those academic programs which involve intellectual skills related to the career fields that young officers expect to enter. Students unwilling or unable to follow these requirements can expect to lose their scholarships or even to be disenrolled from ROTC. The U.S. Air Force has the most stringently applied matching policy, and almost all of its ROTC scholarship students are now enrolled in an engineering or technical major.5 The Navy's slightly less rigid policy focuses more on specific sources than academic majors. The Army, with fewer technical requirements than its sister services, has moved more slowly in this sphere, but it does require several academic courses designed to provide "a foundation for continued professional development."6 Only the U.S. Marine Corps remains relatively unconcerned about the undergraduate majors and courses of its candidates for commissions.
The Navy and Air Force have followed a similar approach in their OCS/OTS programs (quantitatively, the largest source of officers for these two services), giving priority to students with degrees in engineering and technical subjects. There are still openings for students with, for example, liberal arts or business degrees, but the numbers of such degree recipients have been sharply limited over the past decade. Moreover, while some recipients of nonengineering-nontechnical degrees enter flight training, most are assigned to support or service activities in administrative, intelligence, or security units.
There is much to recommend the matching policy: newly commissioned officers enter service career fields that make immediate use of the knowledge and skills that they acquired as undergraduates. These new officers may be more productive more quickly than would be the case were they not so assigned. The need for costly entry-level training by the services is also minimized. An individual's satisfaction with his or her job and the service generally is probably greater––an all-around benefit. Finally, the policy is consistent with the attitudes of a majority of today's college students, whose concern for jobs and careers leads them to select vocationally oriented undergraduate programs such as engineering or business. Thus the matching policy seems beneficial from several different perspectives.
If the short-run, immediate benefits of commissioning mainly engineering and technical degree recipients is considerable, the long-term implications of such a policy are less clear. The question is whether an undergraduate engineering or technical degree is, in fact, the most appropriate educational background for a professional military officer. Are there alternative undergraduate programs that might better serve the long-run interests of the armed forces and, especially, fulfill the requirement for a corps of generalists for top-level command and staff positions? Put another way, what kinds of undergraduate education are most likely to produce the colonels and generals needed by the nation in the twenty-first century?
Most American military leaders since the Civil War have been graduates of West Point or Annapolis. The dominance of the academies can be attributed in large measure to the fact that for much of that period they were the principal source of regular officers and, for a time, the only source of college-trained personnel. Until World War II, ROTC and OCS programs were specifically intended to provide officers for wartime service. But part of the academies' success may be attributable to their curricula. Although both had a strong engineering bias, courses in the sciences, humanities, and liberal arts were added after the Civil War. West Point, for example, included such courses as history, English, and philosophy in the late-nineteenth century; by 1902, Samuel P. Huntington notes, some 39 percent of a cadet's time was devoted to the "liberal arts and sciences."7 Additional shifts took place after World War I, with the addition of courses in government and economics. Similar changes also took place at the Naval Academy, although at a somewhat slower pace.8 Although clearly not comparable to civilian liberal arts institutions of that period, the steady decline in the technical content of the curriculum permitted the academies to provide an increasingly general education.9
The changes in academy curricula and establishment of military service schools after the Civil War were key elements in the professionalization of the officer corps. With these developments in place, professionalization could take place in two stages, along lines pioneered earlier in Europe: preprofessional, general education, followed by technical training and professional education in the several service schools.10 This pattern was strongly reinforced after World War II, when ROTC became both a major commissioning source and the largest producer of career officers. The services paid little attention to the content of undergraduate education of ROTC students, and large numbers of individuals with degrees in the social sciences and liberal arts were commissioned.11 This approach was encouraged by civilian observers of service commissioning programs, who urged even greater liberalization of the ROTC curriculum:
The emphasis in many cases has remained upon the skills and techniques of the craft. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, if the concern is merely preparation for the job at the lowest level. It is clearly inadequate, however, for preparation for advancement to higher and broader levels of responsibility where the skills of the technicians are increasingly less useful and the ability to relate to other factors and to manage large affairs becomes increasingly important.12
The matching policy adopted by the Air Force in recent years has reversed this long-term trend, while similar policies are affecting the other services as well.
The matching policy is designed to improve utilization of newly commissioned officers in entry-level positions, especially those with high technical content. This approach is essentially the same as that of American business and industry: match undergraduate degrees with initial job requirements; for example, hire engineers for engineering jobs or business school graduates for marketing and financial management positions. In this sense, at least, officer recruiting has been "civilianized"––a change parallel in many respects to adaptations in enlisted recruiting. But American business is beginning to rethink this approach, for two reasons: first, engineering and business schools, trying to keep abreast of growing technical complexity, have steadily reduced the general education content of their respective curricula. As a result, degree recipients, well qualified in their respective fields, often lack the breadth and general knowledge required in all but entry-level positions. Second, business organizations have become increasingly aware of the advantages of employing individuals with a more general education, including liberal arts and the social sciences.
A number of recent studies provide interesting evidence of the advantages of a broad educational background in terms of career success. Studies by the Standard and Poor's Corporation and a related analysis by Professor Michael Useem of Boston University have examined the general relationship between undergraduate training and career success in the business world. The Standard and Poor's study, conducted in 1982, surveyed some 50,000 top executives in 38,000 public offices and private American companies. The highest-ranking executives, this study found, typically attended colleges that offered only a general education, usually in the liberal arts. In contrast, executives who attended institutions that offered majors in business administration were less successful in achieving senior executive positions.13
The study by Professor Useem extended the Standard and Poor's analysis and took account of the social background of executives. Focusing on graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (which offer only liberal arts majors for undergraduates, Useem compared those who had no further graduate schooling with graduates of the Harvard Business School. The Harvard-Yale-Princeton group was more successful: those employed by large firms were promoted earlier to vice presidencies; they received more invitations to serve on the boards of other companies; and they were likely to be selected equally as company chief executive officers.14
Studies by two large corporations––Chase Manhattan Bank and American Telephone and Telegraph––provide additional insights into the career success of employees with general educational backgrounds. Chase examined the careers of 147 commercial banking trainees hired between 1977 and 1980. It found that those holding only undergraduate degrees developed stronger technical skills than those with advanced degrees. Of the undergraduates, almost all were liberal arts majors.15 The AT&T study evaluated the progress of corporation executives with service of more than twenty years. Although it employs relatively few social science and humanities graduates, the number at AT&T was such to allow comparison with business and engineering graduates. The study, surprising perhaps even to AT&T, showed that employees in the social science/humanities group were promoted to higher managerial positions earlier, on the average, than those with engineering or business degrees. By the end of twenty years, some 43 percent of the social science/humanities degree holders had achieved AT&T's executive level four, as compared to only 32 percent of the business group and 23 percent of the engineering group. Assessment center measurement of the qualities of the various groups identified attributes that contributed to the generally greater success of the social science humanities group: its members scored higher on virtually all assessment dimensions, with especially strong showing in interpersonal and administrative skills job motivation.16 The social science/humanities group also was judged as more creative, characterized by a wider range of personal interests, and better than their engineering and business counterparts in oral and written communications skills. The only dimension in which the group was weak was in quantitative skills; nevertheless, this group was considered to have the greatest potential for managerial success of any group of AT&T employees.17
Another study, by Anne Bisconti of the Midwest College Placement Service, offers reasons for the success of those with more general educational backgrounds. Bisconti surveyed 524 college graduates who had reached mid-career positions. After entry into the work force, the respondents noted, they moved quickly into more responsible and diverse positions. These new positions required less in the way of specific training but placed a premium on skills that drew on a general educational background. The skills most valued by the midcareerists included the ability to work well with others; leadership and decision-making effectiveness; analytical and problem-solving abilities; and, especially, oral and written communications skills. Overall, Bisconti concludes, the career value of specific knowledge declines sharply over time, while the importance of general intellectual skills developed by the liberal arts and humanities increases.18
Personal testimony from American business leaders provides additional support for a general educational background. One of the most widely cited is Judd H. Alexander of the James River Corporation. A self-styled "believer in the liberal arts," Alexander regards the diversity of assignments in his own career as the strongest justification for a liberal arts degree:
I have had nineteen jobs or assignments in my business career, and at least seven of them were new. They had never existed before. How do you prepare for a job like that? Well, based on my experience, you get an English degree from Carleton, and then you learn as much as you can about as many subjects as you can absorb.19
Alexander's position is supported by Professor John Kotter, who studied the day-to-day activities and management style of thirty highly successful managers responsible for large business organizations. These managers, Kotter found, typically faced two fundamental challenges:
"The best preparation for that kind of work is obvious," Alexander notes. "It would be a liberal arts education ... and experience."21
If the benefits of a broad general education are increasingly recognized by the private sector, the question remains as to how much that applies to military officers. Military officers are not bank managers or salespersons or telephone company executives. Officership is a very different activity and presents its practitioners with ethical questions and operating problems unknown to the business community. Indeed, many contend that the armed forces really require leaders, not managers.
These concerns are not specious or trivial. The profession of arms involves difficult questions of societal responsibility and is indeed more demanding, complex, and often more dangerous than the world of business. But we must be careful not to let the obvious differences obscure the fundamental similarity between the work of senior corporate executives and that of senior military officers in peacetime.
Part of the problem in military circles, surely, is the distinction often drawn between leaders and managers. Originally intended to highlight differences in outlook among officers on the importance of military traditions and the use of modern technology,22 the terms now are of ten used to imply that managers lack combat leadership skills, that management of any type erodes combat capabilities, and that leaders are charismatic and all-encompassing in ability and interests.23 This caricature of an otherwise useful distinction obscures the obvious fact that senior military leaders should have interpersonal and administrative skills as well as a knack for using resources effectively. As Lieutenant General Walter F. Ulmer, Jr., U.S. Army, recently noted, the "leadership management dilemma" is "a bit phony," adding more specifically, "I can't think of any significant number of great leaders who couldn't count their horses or artillery."24
It is also fair to note that a large and probably growing number of senior military positions are essentially managerial in character involved with procurement, R&D, supply, maintenance, financial management, and so on and that the tasks associated with these managerial areas must be accomplished very well in war if combat effectiveness is to be achieved. In peacetime, the complexity and close public scrutiny that attend the procurement and support activities of the U.S. Armed Forces also demand high-quality management. While the corporate executive may not be the perfect model for the senior officer, or vice versa, there are nevertheless many qualities in common between effective business executives and effective senior military officers. Indeed, many will agree that Professor Kotter's description of the fundamental challenges facing his sample of senior executives is a quite accurate, if abstract, description of the range of problems that senior officers must deal with. And if one accepts these similarities among business executives and military leaders, the experience of the business community then becomes obviously relevant to career development in the armed forces.
The services clearly cannot and should not stop recruiting engineers and technically trained or trainable students and seek only undergraduates with liberal arts degrees. Rather, there is a need to strike a balance and recognize the advantages that a broad general education offers in terms of preparing officers for senior-level positions. In that sense, the private-sector experience is instructive, as is the older academy tradition of providing officers with what was in its time a liberal education. The growing emphasis on military history and the military classics in the senior service schools is strong evidence of the services' concern about the intellectual breadth and quality of officers.25 But this remedial measure should be joined by another: a broad general education as a prerequisite to commissioned service.
Texas A&M University
I am indebted to Ms. Diane Haddick and Dr. Joseph Johnson of The Association of American Colleges for research assistance and to Professors Roger Beaumont and Calvin L. Christman for comments on an initial draft of this article.
W.P.S.
Notes
1. There were 257 respondents of all four services in the sample, roughly one in five of the general officers on active duty. The poll was conducted for Newsweek by the Gallup organization. Newsweek, 9 July 1984, 32 ff.
2. The discussion of recent developments in officer commissioning programs in this and subsequent paragraphs is drawn principally from William P. Snyder, "Officer Recruitment for the All-Volunteer Force: Trends and Prospects," Armed Forces and Society, Spring 1984, pp. 401-25.
3. Public attention, understandably, centered on another development during this period––the opening of the academies to women in 1976.
4. Air Force ROTC and OTS graduates are exceptions and must serve four years. In all cases, obligated service begins after completion of special entry-level training, e.g., flight school.
5. The restrictions are even more severe than indicated. The Air Force wants mainly electrical and aerospace engineers; other engineering fields may not be accepted. Technical degrees are limited to computer science, mathematics, physics, and meteorology.
6. E. M. Dopieralski, "Military Qualification Standards I: Briefing for Professors of Military Science, Third ROTC Region [Army]," briefing paper, 20 October 1981.
7. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1957, p. 238.
8. Ibid.
9. An examination of recent curricular developments at the academies is contained in John P. Lovell, Neither Athens Nor Sparta? The American Service Academies in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).
10. Huntington, pp. 239-54.
11. Until the mid-1960s, many Army ROTC units were branch-oriented, and their military training focused on junior officer duties in these branches. The undergraduate curriculum was not a matter of concern, however, and many liberal arts graduates were commissioned from these units.
12. Gene M. Lyons and John W. Masland, Education and Military Leadership: A Study of the R.O.T.C. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 217.
13. Standard and Poor's, "Executive College Survey, 1982," (New York: Standard and Poor's Corporation, 1982).
14. The analysis is summarized in Michael Useem, "Education in the Liberal Arts Makes Good Managers," unpublished draft.
15. Stanley Burns, "From Student to Banker: Observations from the Chase Bank," The Humanities and Careers in Business (Princeton, New Jersey: National Endowment for the Humanities/Association of American Colleges, 27-29 April 1983), pp. 9-12.
16. On assessment centers, see George C. Thornton III and William C. Byham, Assessment Centers and Managerial Performance (New York: Academic Press, 1982).
17. Robert E. Beck, Career Patterns: The Liberal Arts Major in Bell System Management (Washington; Association of American Colleges, 1981).
18. Ann Stouffer Bisconti, College and Other Stepping Stones: A Study of Learning Experiences That Contribute to Effective Performance in Early and Long-Run Jobs (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: The CPC Foundation, 1980), pp. 6-22.
19. Judd H. Alexander, Liberal Education and Executive Leadership, The Associated Colleges of the Midwest/The Association of American Colleges, 1982.
20. John Kotter, "What Effective General Managers Really Do," Harvard Business Review, November-December 1982, pp. 156-57.
21. Alexander, op. cit.
22. The distinction was first advanced by Morris Janowitz in his classic, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1960), p. 21ff. Janowitz's terms were heroic leaders and managers.
23. See, for example, Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage, Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); and First Lieutenant Ralph H. Peters, "Leaders and Managers: Rewards out of Balance," Army, August 1984, pp. 63-63.
24. Lieutenant General Walter F. Ulmer, Jr., USA, review of Robert L. Taylor and William E. Rosenbach, Military Leadership: In Pursuit of Excellence (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1984), in Parameters, Autumn 1984, p. 87.
25. See, for example, Harry B. Summers, "Preparedness Depends on War-Savvy Officers," Wall Street Journal, 3 August 1984.
William P. Snyder (USMA; Ph.D., Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Political Science and Interim Director of the Military Studies Institute, Texas A&M University at College Station. During his military career, Dr. Snyder taught at the Military Academy, served as a staff officer and unit commander in Vietnam, held senior staff positions at the Pentagon and White House, and served on the faculty of the Army War College. Dr. Snyder is a graduate of Army Command and General Staff College and Army War College.
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.