Change You Can Really Believe In

Here's a suggested change by Thomas E. Ricks. If Obama made this change, then that would be something that I could believe in:

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."

Actions, not words. That's what I want to see: actions.

Generally every war starts badly because the "careerist" have jammed up the works. Those with real skill are left on the outside until necessity knocks down the doors and lets them in. I'm hoping this moment has arrived for many American institutions. But... seeing is believing.

Generally I'm not big on war & military, but I'm pragmatic. I understand its need. But if you are going to do it, then do it right. Put the best in and let them take the initiative to modernize to meet the real world as it is, not as the politicians would like to think it is.

As for incompetence and corruption in the "old" top ranks, here's a story of incompetence from Google News:

A military investigation into a deadly battle in eastern Afghanistan could lead to punishment of up to three US Army officers amid allegations of "negligence," officials said on Friday.

US defence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP a Central Command investigation faults three officers, including a battalion commander, for their role and suggests possible disciplinary action.

Nine soldiers were killed and 27 wounded in the July 2008 battle when about 200 Taliban fighters broke through American lines and nearly overwhelmed a remote outpost in Wanat.

And here's a bit from an article by Mark Benjamin at Salon on corruption and cover-up:

Internal documents and e-mails show that Navy officials unfavorably doctored a psychiatrist’s performance record after he blew the whistle on what he said was dangerously inept management of care for Marines suffering combat stress at Camp Lejeune, N.C. ...

Now top Navy officials are tangled up in the blackball campaign. Soon after Manion was fired, Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., asked the Pentagon about Manion’s concerns about healthcare at Camp Lejeune. In a Dec. 17 letter to Jones, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus panned Manion’s ethics and professionalism, presumably based on information Mabus received about Manion from Camp Lejeune.

But Salon has obtained internal Navy documents and correspondence that suggest officials at Camp Lejeune altered Manion’s favorable personnel records after he went public with his concerns, adding new, derogatory remarks similar to some of the information in Mabus’ letter to Jones.

As Salon reported in November, Manion warned superiors, on multiple occasions and in writing, that mental healthcare at Camp Lejeune was overwhelmed with Marines suffering psychological injuries from combat. It was a toxic environment, Manion argued, that would only contribute to a rapidly escalating suicide epidemic in the military.

Manion also warned the situation at Camp Lejeune threatened to provoke a Fort Hood-style explosion of violence, or one like the acts allegedly carried out by Sgt. John Russell, who the Army says last May executed five fellow soldiers at a military mental health facility in Baghdad. Manion also claimed that troubled Marines sometimes experienced harassment from superiors for seeking help.

It is amazing how the corruption of an "old boy system" with its "cover up" and "let sleeping dogs lie" can degrade the performance of an institution.