As you probably know by now, Tom Ricks of CNAS has kicked off a major discussion about the value of the service academies versus others means of commissioning students who attend public or private colleges, such as ROTC or OCS.
In some ways, this discussion is not only logical, but long overdue. The rise of COIN theory out of academic obscurity to political and strategic prominence has reminded people of how important intellectual firepower is, and how important flexibility in warfare is. At the same time, COIN warfare rewards giving commanders freedom to make smart local decisions, while democratizing the diffusion of expertise and knowledge amongst officers, regardless of commissioning source. Meanwhile, many universities, including most Ivies, don't allow ROTC on campus, and there's a huge desire to bring that back.
However, I think Mr. Ricks isn't considering a bunch of objections to his argument that revolve around the fact that both the military, and academia, are complex social institutions. These objections fall into two major categories: "This is what happens to any academic institution" and "Centralization has a purpose."
Anyone who spends even a few hours listening to faculty members complain about their colleagues and departmental politics knows how important money is, and how likely it is that money is being spent unwisely. And there are easy academic routes to take at West Point? So too there are at other universities, and we all know people who BS their way through. And there are professors that don't care about educating their students exist in the Ivies as well, and prefer to focus on their side projects. Apples and apples, here.
Similarly on the funding question, departments continue to grow to the limits of the funds provided. At the alma mater that I share with Mr. Ricks, the 4-year tuition, room and board cost is north of $160K, but that's only the external cost charged to the students and their families. The endowment kicks in far several times as much money per pupil, both to cover day-to-day operating costs and to improve facilities. So we end up with a total internal cost number in the same range as the very broad numbers being thrown about to discuss the service academies, without Yale having to pay the costs of deploying them as temporary third lieutenants, expending ammunition, providing facility security, etc, etc, etc.
In other words, yes, it costs more than other commissioning routes, but to do an academy at all requires this amount of funds. What reason, then, is there for the service academies? Why centralize the education of a significant portion of officers in these hulking campuses on crags or swamps? It may surprise you to know that scientific opinion now informs us that the appendix, rather than being purely useless, also acts as a reservoir of important immune system information. Schools are much the same way.
First, having academies produces a powerful incentive to keep around active-duty officers who think long and hard about the same problems for a long time, to a degree not possible in the military in general. Even if you assume that Ricks' preferred alternative results in a greater number of better-educated officers, there's no certainty that those officers will keep their intellectual skillsets fresh to the same degree as officers who get to be in the classroom. This is particularly true, I suspect, given that classrooms face these thinkers every day with the questions of cadets. This unparalleled opportunity for confrontation in a hierarchical military may force officer-teachers to rethink first principles in a way they otherwise would not.
Think of it this way: General Petraeus pulled much of his staff directly out of the West Point Social Science faculty, as Ricks acknowledges. There are other Ph.Ds in the Army, and lots of graduates of the war colleges, and lots of former Army think-tankers, too. Why did he pick the people he did? How much is a well-executed Surge worth to the American taxpayer, in terms of West Point operating budget-years?
I also wonder if the prestige effect of service academies may paradoxically allow for more change than would otherwise occur. If teaching of army values was more diffuse, then army culture could easily become beholden to no one and difficult to alter systematically, spread as it would be across ROTC, OCS, PLC; a large number of sites and a variety of training programs. By contrast, the prestige of the academies allows for values and ideas to be quickly inculcated in a large batch of future officers, for good, or as Mr. Ricks rightly points out, for ill.
Similarly, I wonder if it might allow for more dissent, both by academy graduates and their instructors. The seal of approval that an academy offers its graduates means that it's harder to accuse a reformer or dissenter of being unmilitary in their values or beliefs; at the same time, the responsibility for teaching cadets well allows for instructors to make broader and more pressing claims about what is being taught, and how, than might occur otherwise. This can cut both ways - consider how effective Gian Gentile has been at arguing for his position, in part because of his status as a leading and respected member of the West Point academic community.
Second, I'm highly skeptical of the claim that the promotion system, or evaluations by superiors alone, can capture all of the relevant data as to whether service academies produce better officers. For example, I would love to see an analysis of the effectiveness of service academy graduates at training Iraqi and Afghan security forces on land, and at conducting joint exercises and knowledge transfer in the air and sea realms. It seems plausible to me that cadets who trained in a highly-hierarchical environment where they had to teach their juniors military discipline, skills, etc, might well be particularly good as officers at training missions by comparison to others who did not have to do so for the same length or to the same degree in OCS (ROTC I don't know enough about to meaningfully say - Yale lacks it). It's a commonly repeated (albeit unproven) complaint that success in those fields does not correlate with promotions or positive evaluations; if that's the case, then Mr. Ricks' reports from the field wouldn't capture that highly-vital factor, or other similar and relevant data.
Finally, suppose that Ricks' conclusion gets backed up by a series of major studies, and it really does cost more to run service academies, and it really doesn't produce better individual soldiers. That doesn't mean that DoD, as a system, does not benefit tremendously from having service academy graduates. It may well be that there is a tremendous value to the personnel system of knowing that a standardized product of roughly X officers per year, who are guaranteed to know A, B, and C within the following long-established statistical bounds, will be commissioned on a date certain. I imagine this is much more difficult to do with ROTC and OCS, where so much relies upon local recruitment and organization.
Does any one of these reasons suffice to justify a service academy? Not necessarily. But the data is as yet really shaky, and these factors aren't being considered, which should fill anyone expressing strong opinions on the topic with great caution.
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