The war colleges are weighed in Gen. Bob Scales’s balance — and found wanting
When I called last year for closing the undergraduate service academies and replacing them with something like the British Sandhurst model, it caused so much controversy that my related recommendation to shutter the war colleges (except maybe for the Naval War College’s strategy department) went all but ignored. So I was pleased to see retired ...
When I called last year for closing the undergraduate service academies and replacing them with something like the British Sandhurst model, it caused so much controversy that my related recommendation to shutter the war colleges (except maybe for the Naval War College's strategy department) went all but ignored.
When I called last year for closing the undergraduate service academies and replacing them with something like the British Sandhurst model, it caused so much controversy that my related recommendation to shutter the war colleges (except maybe for the Naval War College’s strategy department) went all but ignored.
So I was pleased to see retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales take up the issue in the February 2010 issue of Proceedings. Scales knows what he is talking about — he’s a former commandant of the Army War College with a PhD in history. He says:
The best and brightest are avoiding the war colleges in favor of service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The average age of war college students has increased from 41 to 45, making this institution a preparation for retirement rather than a launching platform for strategic leadership.
Yow. If we’re looking to trim the Pentagon budget, that sounds like a good place to start. But there’s more. Scales also worries about the practice of contracting out teaching to civilians. Professional military education, or PME, he says, has become "an intellectual backwater."
The answer, he says, lies not in academic reform but in the military personnel system:
The truth is, PME reform is not a pedagogical problem. It’s a personnel problem that can addressed only by changing the military’s reward system to favor those with the intellectual right stuff.
Driving home the point, another article in the same issue, by Army Maj. Niel Smith, one of the lions of Ramadi, takes a pop at "a lethargic [military] education bureaucracy staffed largely by retirees and contractors."
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