Military Professionalism
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PPCLI Guy said:That was back in Roman times, right?
Dave
Why you cheeky sod. I should have binned you on Phase IV. Damn my weakness and pity. If I could get out of this walker and untangle my catheter, I'd give you such a thrashing..... Oh-time for my pill.
Cheers
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pbi said:
Do you ever wonder about the ones that "you let get away"? The marginals that were allowed to pass? It would be interesting to do a back bearing on successful soldiers today to see what their early course reports said - and also to track those who did well on initial trg and see how they turned out.
Dave
P.S. I apologise for poking fun at you, "Venerable Elder".
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What? Are you suggesting I have a Sexually Transmitted Disease? Smart ass young pup.
Seriously, my guess is that while you'd find a few anomalies in digging through course reports (and of course we can all trot out various Great Captains of history who didn't do all that well in the Acadaemy) the great majority of folks would more or less follow the trajectory as demonstrated by their characters while undergoing DP1 training. Some will drop off, some will rise above, but in general I bet there would not be too many surprises.
Cheers.
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Speaking of "Great Captains of History" (chuckle), thought this article might be somewhat/marginally appropriate to this discussion:
Studying the art of war
By Robert H. Scales (from the Washington Times)
From the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the German invasion of France in 1914, the British Army maintained order from Egypt to Hong Kong with an Army that never exceeded 300,000. A "thin red line" of British infantry fought a succession of small wars against mostly tribal enemies, winning virtually all of them quickly. The Achilles' heel of the Victorian military system was intellectual rather than physical. The demands of defending the empire created an army too busy to learn. For an institution obsessed with active service, time away from campaigning was time wasted. Staff college attendance was considered bad form. Writing about one's profession gave evidence of a mind unengaged in the necessary business of fighting real wars against real enemies. In the officers' mess, polite conversation was spent on equine sport rather than the art of war.
The parallels between the British Army then and ours today are striking and disturbing. The American military has become so stretched that it has little time to devote to any activity other than repetitive deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. The strains of overcommitment are evident, most disturbingly in the military's crumbling academic infrastructure. The Department of Defense is seeking ways to cut drastically the time soldiers spend in school. In World War II, 31 of the Army's 35 corps commanders taught at service schools. Today, the Army's staff college is so short of instructors that it has been forced to hire civilian contractors to do the bulk of the teaching.
After Vietnam, the Army sent 7,400 officers to fully funded graduate education. Today that figure is 396, half of whom are studying to join the weapons-buying community. The military school system remains an anachronism of 19th-century pedagogy that fails to make best use of the dismally limited time available to soldiers for learning. Many young officers have voted with their fingers. The most popular learning platforms among lieutenants and captains are self-generated Web sites such as companycommand.com rather than established institutions.
While the press of operations lessens opportunities to learn, experience in Iraq reinforces the belief that the need to learn has never been greater. Soldiers today can no longer just practice the science of killing in order to win. They must understand and be sensitive to alien cultures. They must be skilled in the art of peacekeeping and stability operations. They must be able to operate with coalition partners and work with governmental and non governmental institutions such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, junior officers and sergeants make critical life-and-death decisions that were the purview of colonels and generals in previous wars. Thus, in this new and unfamiliar era of conflict, the military must prepare soldiers to think critically and analytically much earlier in their careers.
Who is to blame for allowing the learning deficit within the military to grow so wide? The list of the guilty is long. Congress shares much of the blame. In the past it has had a "show me the money" attitude toward funding military education that required an immediate and demonstrable payback for any fully funded learning program. This policy tended to overstate the need for scientific degrees and minimize opportunities for officers to study culture and the art of war.
This administration is to blame for slighting professional education in an effort to free up the (too small) pool of available soldiers and Marines for deployment into combat. The services are to blame for failing to build progressive learning institutions and to recognize those who demonstrate exceptional intellectual ability. Before Vietnam, some of our best universities, such as Duke, Yale and Princeton, had vibrant defense-studies programs that gave future combat leaders the opportunity to learn from many great teachers of the art of war. For the most part those programs and teachers are gone, victims of an academic culture that somehow believes that ignoring the study of war will make wars go away.
While the British Army obsessed on fighting distant small wars, the Germans, under Helmuth von Moltke, developed a system of disciplined learning that rewarded brilliance and creative thought. During the opening battles of World War I, the Germans taught the British a lesson in blood: In war the intellectually gifted will win over well-practiced dullards every time. Just as the British failed to understand how to transition from small- to large-scale combat, perhaps we are facing a similar intellectual challenge transitioning from large to small wars.
One fact is clear, however. War is a thinking man's game and only those who take the time to study war are likely to fight it competently. Soldiers and Marines need time for reflection, time to learn, teach, research and write. In this new age of warfare we must do more to prepare soldiers to think as well as act.
Retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales is the former commander of the Army War College.
Studying the art of war
By Robert H. Scales (from the Washington Times)
From the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the German invasion of France in 1914, the British Army maintained order from Egypt to Hong Kong with an Army that never exceeded 300,000. A "thin red line" of British infantry fought a succession of small wars against mostly tribal enemies, winning virtually all of them quickly. The Achilles' heel of the Victorian military system was intellectual rather than physical. The demands of defending the empire created an army too busy to learn. For an institution obsessed with active service, time away from campaigning was time wasted. Staff college attendance was considered bad form. Writing about one's profession gave evidence of a mind unengaged in the necessary business of fighting real wars against real enemies. In the officers' mess, polite conversation was spent on equine sport rather than the art of war.
The parallels between the British Army then and ours today are striking and disturbing. The American military has become so stretched that it has little time to devote to any activity other than repetitive deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. The strains of overcommitment are evident, most disturbingly in the military's crumbling academic infrastructure. The Department of Defense is seeking ways to cut drastically the time soldiers spend in school. In World War II, 31 of the Army's 35 corps commanders taught at service schools. Today, the Army's staff college is so short of instructors that it has been forced to hire civilian contractors to do the bulk of the teaching.
After Vietnam, the Army sent 7,400 officers to fully funded graduate education. Today that figure is 396, half of whom are studying to join the weapons-buying community. The military school system remains an anachronism of 19th-century pedagogy that fails to make best use of the dismally limited time available to soldiers for learning. Many young officers have voted with their fingers. The most popular learning platforms among lieutenants and captains are self-generated Web sites such as companycommand.com rather than established institutions.
While the press of operations lessens opportunities to learn, experience in Iraq reinforces the belief that the need to learn has never been greater. Soldiers today can no longer just practice the science of killing in order to win. They must understand and be sensitive to alien cultures. They must be skilled in the art of peacekeeping and stability operations. They must be able to operate with coalition partners and work with governmental and non governmental institutions such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, junior officers and sergeants make critical life-and-death decisions that were the purview of colonels and generals in previous wars. Thus, in this new and unfamiliar era of conflict, the military must prepare soldiers to think critically and analytically much earlier in their careers.
Who is to blame for allowing the learning deficit within the military to grow so wide? The list of the guilty is long. Congress shares much of the blame. In the past it has had a "show me the money" attitude toward funding military education that required an immediate and demonstrable payback for any fully funded learning program. This policy tended to overstate the need for scientific degrees and minimize opportunities for officers to study culture and the art of war.
This administration is to blame for slighting professional education in an effort to free up the (too small) pool of available soldiers and Marines for deployment into combat. The services are to blame for failing to build progressive learning institutions and to recognize those who demonstrate exceptional intellectual ability. Before Vietnam, some of our best universities, such as Duke, Yale and Princeton, had vibrant defense-studies programs that gave future combat leaders the opportunity to learn from many great teachers of the art of war. For the most part those programs and teachers are gone, victims of an academic culture that somehow believes that ignoring the study of war will make wars go away.
While the British Army obsessed on fighting distant small wars, the Germans, under Helmuth von Moltke, developed a system of disciplined learning that rewarded brilliance and creative thought. During the opening battles of World War I, the Germans taught the British a lesson in blood: In war the intellectually gifted will win over well-practiced dullards every time. Just as the British failed to understand how to transition from small- to large-scale combat, perhaps we are facing a similar intellectual challenge transitioning from large to small wars.
One fact is clear, however. War is a thinking man's game and only those who take the time to study war are likely to fight it competently. Soldiers and Marines need time for reflection, time to learn, teach, research and write. In this new age of warfare we must do more to prepare soldiers to think as well as act.
Retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales is the former commander of the Army War College.
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We must continue to educate ourselves from all sources on our Profession. Please make no mistake about it, it is a profession as much as medicine and law. Only our Graduate courses are a little more dangerous.
TangoTwoBravo
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Good post and article, but I do offer some observations.
The Prussians certainly led the way in terms of professionalizing their officers, but the British "lag" in that area can perhaps be ascribed to cultural reasons rather than being too busy fighing across the empire. Even if he had the opportunity I doubt that the Victorian-era British officer put much stock in education or a sense of the "professional officer". I believe that the attitude was "What had worked at Waterloo would certainly work in the future (officers as gentlemen first)". The Prussians, on the other hand, had had a rather disastrous Napoleonic period (Jena in particular) and were searching for ways to improve. It was only after the startling victories of the Prussians in 1870 that the British began to "professionalize" in earnest (albeit still behind the Prussians) and this still ran into class and cultural barriers.
Rather than exlusively looking at education I would perhaps examine how armies prepare for war in general. Sometimes you can study for the wrong test. The small British regular army in 1914 had not been designed to fight a continental war. As Gen Scales points out it was geared for fighting across a wide empire. The Germans had exclusively prepared for a continental war. Education was a part of this but I am hesitant to ascribe it as the sole cause of any German victories (or defeats, they did fail to reach Paris by turning too soon at the Marne). Perhaps similar examples can be found today. I would say, however, that the British regulars (the "old contemptibles") did give the Germans some checks along the way in 1914 (based perhaps on their soldier skills and unit cohesion rather than anything else). In addition, both the Germans and British armies suffered high casualties when conducing operations in the new environment. All the German staff plannnig still resulted in dreadful battles of attrition at places such as Ypres and Verdun.
All that being said professionalization is undeniably the way to go for a modern army. This must be combined, however, with mental agility and adaptability. In addition, defeat and difficulties seem to lead to improvements, while victories lead to complacency. I would also say, however, that sending officers on year long graduate studies during a war may not necessarily be the best policy. I think that an army needs to be able to "coast" on its education during a war to some extent.
Cheers,
2B
p.s. I've added the quotation marks and premable to my remarks about Waterloo. Upon reading I realized that my remarks could have been interpreted as proposing that only the upper class should be officers.
The Prussians certainly led the way in terms of professionalizing their officers, but the British "lag" in that area can perhaps be ascribed to cultural reasons rather than being too busy fighing across the empire. Even if he had the opportunity I doubt that the Victorian-era British officer put much stock in education or a sense of the "professional officer". I believe that the attitude was "What had worked at Waterloo would certainly work in the future (officers as gentlemen first)". The Prussians, on the other hand, had had a rather disastrous Napoleonic period (Jena in particular) and were searching for ways to improve. It was only after the startling victories of the Prussians in 1870 that the British began to "professionalize" in earnest (albeit still behind the Prussians) and this still ran into class and cultural barriers.
Rather than exlusively looking at education I would perhaps examine how armies prepare for war in general. Sometimes you can study for the wrong test. The small British regular army in 1914 had not been designed to fight a continental war. As Gen Scales points out it was geared for fighting across a wide empire. The Germans had exclusively prepared for a continental war. Education was a part of this but I am hesitant to ascribe it as the sole cause of any German victories (or defeats, they did fail to reach Paris by turning too soon at the Marne). Perhaps similar examples can be found today. I would say, however, that the British regulars (the "old contemptibles") did give the Germans some checks along the way in 1914 (based perhaps on their soldier skills and unit cohesion rather than anything else). In addition, both the Germans and British armies suffered high casualties when conducing operations in the new environment. All the German staff plannnig still resulted in dreadful battles of attrition at places such as Ypres and Verdun.
All that being said professionalization is undeniably the way to go for a modern army. This must be combined, however, with mental agility and adaptability. In addition, defeat and difficulties seem to lead to improvements, while victories lead to complacency. I would also say, however, that sending officers on year long graduate studies during a war may not necessarily be the best policy. I think that an army needs to be able to "coast" on its education during a war to some extent.
Cheers,
2B
p.s. I've added the quotation marks and premable to my remarks about Waterloo. Upon reading I realized that my remarks could have been interpreted as proposing that only the upper class should be officers.
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You also have to take the attitudes of British society as a whole on also. Being "swotty" or being studious was frown on by the landed classes at that time. It really didn't change until after WWII. When my Grandfather was commissioned in 1907 having a degree (unless you were in a technical field) would ensure that you weren't commissioned.
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Prussia was a land power, and so was the Germany that it created. England was a sea power. The Royal Army was an institution that sold commissions as sinecures to the scions of the upper class. There ineptitude gave us a long string of military blunders. The Royal Navy had more rigorous academic requirements and standards for its officers, and advancement was more merit based. The British professional noncommissioned officer was the backbone of its military power, the officer corps was its weakness. The transformation of the army in the face of a real war against an equal opponent was both painful and costly. Wellington during the peninsular campain had to create a trained and competant leadership through the sort of heavy handed tactics that would have occasioned his removal in times even a shade less desperate. The first world war British had the same problem, a peacetime officer corps that were ill suited, in the main, for a war against a serious opponent. The experience of the British fighting soldier, and the minority of officers who had educated themselves fighting the brush wars of empire, gave the British the stiffening to hold long enough to start to cut away the deadwood of their officer corps and its outdated thinking. Too many soldiers died while this remedial education was happening. The tempo of war has been accelerating constantly for centuries, the time the British took to get their act together in WW1 would have lost WW2. Now it is even faster, and getting faster still. Since Korea, war has been fought "as is". You go with the equipment you had in peacetime, with the doctrine you had in peacetime, and if that won't win the war, you will not have time to change it. When the Canadian Armed Forces was forced to limit training to free up funds for deployment, it made my blood boil. We don't have material superiority over potential opponents, it is only our training that allows us to compete and survive. When we are given the choice to spend on training OR deployment, spend it on training, and if the govt objects, send over some MP's or DND bureaucrats to do the dying for a change.
TangoTwoBravo
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Mainer,
Good points on the differences between the RN and the army. I believe that Wellington was actually an opponent of "professionalization" after "the war" as he believed in having officers who came from the ruling class. I wholeheartedly agree that the British officers at the turn of the last century had to change in the face of the modern battlefield but I would say that they were not alone.
I agree that wars do have a "come as you are" nature today but I also believe that we must be ready to adapt our doctrine, organization and even equipment. I ascribe the horrendous losses of the First World War to a failure to adapt to the new battlefield rather than different armies being more or less "professional." The French had begun to professionalize and had quite a keen doctrine and equipment and clothing geared towards it except that it was suicide on the battlefield (they basically ascribed to a doctrine of offensive spirit over everything else). Mass charges by men wearing bright uniforms had disastrous results. Although I would agree that the Germans were the best prepared even they had horrendous losses.
We must remain prepared to throw out our notions of the battlefield and adapt to our situation. Today is not necessarliy 1914, but I would argue that Western forces today are finding themselves in battles/operations that they had not necessarily trained for ten years ago. I realize that I am dragging this thread down a tangent and apologize (I seem to be making a habit of this).
Cheers,
2B
p.s. I would also like to see every deployment come with the appropriate additional funding to ensure that future deployments are a success.
Good points on the differences between the RN and the army. I believe that Wellington was actually an opponent of "professionalization" after "the war" as he believed in having officers who came from the ruling class. I wholeheartedly agree that the British officers at the turn of the last century had to change in the face of the modern battlefield but I would say that they were not alone.
I agree that wars do have a "come as you are" nature today but I also believe that we must be ready to adapt our doctrine, organization and even equipment. I ascribe the horrendous losses of the First World War to a failure to adapt to the new battlefield rather than different armies being more or less "professional." The French had begun to professionalize and had quite a keen doctrine and equipment and clothing geared towards it except that it was suicide on the battlefield (they basically ascribed to a doctrine of offensive spirit over everything else). Mass charges by men wearing bright uniforms had disastrous results. Although I would agree that the Germans were the best prepared even they had horrendous losses.
We must remain prepared to throw out our notions of the battlefield and adapt to our situation. Today is not necessarliy 1914, but I would argue that Western forces today are finding themselves in battles/operations that they had not necessarily trained for ten years ago. I realize that I am dragging this thread down a tangent and apologize (I seem to be making a habit of this).
Cheers,
2B
p.s. I would also like to see every deployment come with the appropriate additional funding to ensure that future deployments are a success.
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IMHO, I think that comparing Soldiers to Dentists, Doctors and Lawyers is like insisting a bird must have a violin to be a bird. And again, IMHO an Officer who believes that NCOs are somehow an inferior class of being will, in time have this belief rectified in a dark and forboding place. An Officer must be a professional Soldier to make the decisions he (or she) must make and issue orders. The Officer must hand off and trust the NCO will carry them out and "make things happen" in a professional manner. One cannot be "professional" in any way without the other and so I tend to believe that the Profession of Arms is unique in itself and encompasses both halves of the equation to work. Both Officers and NCOs are their capacities professionals within of the Profession of Arms.
Peter
Peter
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You obviously haven't read my other post in other threads. When I compare us to other professions, I am talking about the profession of arms (all ranks to the uninformed), not simply those who carry a commission.
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You might want to read the original thread, it is precisely about the difference in professionalism between the ranks and officers and how this is actually being taught as an OPME.big bad john said:
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