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Sunday, April 29, 2007
The Human Sciences and the Generals
Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling has published a blistering attack on the Army’s top brass. It is entitled “A failure in generalship" and appears in Armed Forces Journal, “the leading joint service monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community.” Yingling is deputy commander, 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment, and has served two tours in Iraq.
Regarding the wars in both Vietnam and Iraq he asserts that “these debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America’s general officer corps. America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy” and calls for revisions in the way general staff are selected and trained, revisions requiring Congressional intervention. Among other things, he notes that “a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army’s senior generals speaks another language.” On this matter he makes the following recommendation:
Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer’s potential for senior leadership.
I wonder what novels he’d put on the reading list.
Comments
Bill, thanks for pointing this out. It’s interesting that conservatives dominate the military and yet they fail to hold the military up to the same educational and intellectual standards they demand from the academy. ACTA blasts English departments that fail to require a Shakespeare course, but where’s their outrage that three- and four-star generals have neither language skills nor any advanced training in military history, world history, management, culture, or any body of knowledge relevant to leadership.
Then again, these are some of the same geniuses who think an eighteen year old is responsible enough to hump a machine gun but not mature enough to enjoy a beer.
One smells around this e-rag a desire to institutionalize. The point is that institutionalization is ending. The problem with the general staff is the problem with staffs in general...those categories no longer exist.
Rather than embracing this momentum and finding the interest in not having genres and standards and canons, “scholars” are rather characteristically lamenting a past they hated when it was in force.
There never were useful standards. Exposing this fact is an advantage not a matter for shame. The generals are what they are. The novels they read are as irrelevant as ever, and their failures are those of a age in permanent decay, not those of a feckless elite. There is no elite; the sooner we realize that, the sooner we’ll stop hoping for deliverance.
I don’t know how receptive you (the in-the-Valve mid-steamblast collective ‘you’) are to interlopers and our consequenceless e-foisting of random (and probably ignorant) opinion, but, I want to mention how deeply gratified Mr. Lanham feels about his oh-so-correct denunciation of this institutionalist rag.
100 Years of Solitude, perhaps? It’s the first thing that came to mind when I stopped to think of novels that deal successfully with the complexities of modern war.
I really liked the post and the comments that followed.I don’t think any kind of reasoning justifies violence...however that said, only fiction and non-fiction can educate the naive public about the ground realities of war.
BlueRectangle Video Book Reviews
Interestingly I’ve had a few officers tell me that they strongly recommend people read Shaara’s books on the civil war. I have to admit that I tried reading them but found them a little dry. However they suggest that the books capture a lot of what’s good and bad in Officers and that it is still extremely relevant today.
"The Ugly American” perhaps