Best Defense

Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Do NCOs need to write better?: Hell no, says former enlisted guy who is a writer

If I were preparing my future NCO Corps for anything, it would be advanced math and computer skills.

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By Peter Lucier
Best Defense Council of the Former Enlisted

By Peter Lucier
Best Defense Council of the Former Enlisted

Does the average non-commissioned officer need to have better writing skills, as was asserted in this space yesterday?

To answer that, I think you have to first answer, “What do you expect from your NCO Corps?” And to answer that, you have to ask, “What will the NCO Corps be required to do in future conflicts?”

Tom did a long running cover of Napoleon sometime last year, and the switch from aristocrat-dominated militaries to technocrat-dominated militaries, with Napoleon as the example as an officer who made his bones in the artillery, a scientific, mathematic branch, looked down on by the old stuffed hats. Modern artillery, modern gunnery, modern industry, and the political changes occurring at the time (fully national armies, post-French Revolution) needed a revolution in the field of arms.

If we are sitting on the cusp of a similar revolution, from Industrial to Information, the movement of power between states (United States to China) and the movement of power away from states (rise of non-state actors, enabled by technology) who will be the new technocrats?

Everything points towards STEM and IT fields. If I were preparing my future NCO Corps for anything, it would be advanced math and computer skills.

In that new schema, an officer and enlisted divide might make sense again: enlisted as technical experts, officers as tacticians.

Long story short: I love writing, I think it’s incredibly important. But in a world of limited resources, we have to think about what we will need from our NCOs, what tasks we will expect them to accomplish in the conflicts to come, after the revolution in the character of war, of which we are in the beginning stages. Nothing that I see points towards the the NCO corps needing strong liberal arts backgrounds.

Peter Lucier is a former Marine infantry rifleman (2008-2013) who deployed to Afghanistan in 2011. He is co-holder of the Marine Corps chair on Best Defense’s Council of the Former Enlisted.

Photo credit: Tom Woodward/Flickr

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com. Twitter: @tomricks1

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