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Reviews
07/01/2007
TEACHING WAR
Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War. David Axe. The University of South Carolina Press. 111 pages; black and white photographs; $24.95. Military Education: A Reference Handbook. Cynthia A. Watson. Praeger Security International. 192 pages; index; $54.95.
Reviewed by James Jay Carafano
War teaches best, but the price of learning in combat comes very high. The objective of professional military education is to bring the cost down. Unlike training, which instructs soldiers how to perform specific tasks to a standard under given conditions, education teaches leaders to ponder hard and deep the challenges they could face in battle. Professional military education is about developing critical thinking skills—a combination of mental and moral toughness and the capacity to deal with the uncertainties, ambiguities and stress of making and implementing decisions in the real world. Teaching leaders to make hard choices is the best preparation for confronting the fog and friction of fighting wars and winning peace.
The real key to professional military education is getting away from the notion that there is a guide book or set of rules that will tell leaders exactly what to do. After World War II, the Army sent many of its combat veterans to Command and General Staff College. Typically the students would rail against the school's "approved solution" to tactical problems. Veterans of the European Theater would say, "That wouldn't work in a real war; here is how we did it." Meanwhile, officers who saw combat in the Pacific would declare, "No, that's not the way it's done. Here is what we did." All of their answers missed the mark. Teaching war is not about being told what to do, but learning how to think about how to decide what to do. There is a big difference.
That said, books that address the topic of professional military education could not be timelier. In particular, it is hard to think of a better occasion for a really thoughtful study of the ROTC program, the largest source of commissioned officers for the U.S. military.
Unfortunately, David Axe's Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War does not come close to being a book on the subject that anyone needs to read.
Army 101 traces the experience of cadets at the University of South Carolina. In addition to that narrative, professional journalist Axe superimposes a brief history of the ROTC program, from its inception at the beginning of the 20th century to today. The book delivers neither a compelling story nor substantive analysis. Axe's style is a poor imitation of Dispatches, Michael Herr's classic account of combat in Vietnam. To call ARMY 101 uninteresting and unreadable is kind. Worst of all, the book fails to offer any worthwhile insights on the ROTC program at war. What is really needed is an update to Michael Neiberg's fine essay "The Education and Training of ROTC Officers, 1950-1980" in Forging the Sword: Selecting, Educating, and Training Cadets and Junior Officers in the Modern World (1998).
Military Education: A Reference Guide is a far better book. Cynthia A. Watson, a professor at the National War College in Washington, D.C., has managed to cram all the essential information concerning the scope of U.S. military professional education into a single, well organized volume. Military Education includes a concise history of the subject, a survey and curricula of military schools from precommissioning through senior leader education, and biographical sketches of key figures who have had a valuable impact educating military officers.
Watson also raises some interesting issues on the future of the military profession that will have to be addressed. One is the application of the lessons learned from building a Joint education process that enables officers from the different armed services to work well together.
Another challenge to be addressed is the future of Joint professional military education. There are so many competing demands to be included in Joint curricula that the education process is in danger of being diluted into a checklist of training requirements rather than a graduate-level critical thinking experience.
If anything, Military Education could have been longer. It would have been useful, for example, to see a discussion of military-sponsored graduate programs at civilian universities. Although not specifically military education, what officers study in civilian graduate schools potentially affects their performance in the field.
As the Long War gets longer the adequacy of professional military education will increasingly come under scrutiny. More soldiers and scholars should focus on the issue so that when the questions are asked, they have good answers. Watson's Military Education may be a good place to start; Axe's Army 101 is not.
James Jay Carafano is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the author of G.I. Ingenuity: Improvisation, Technology, and Winning World War II.
REINVENTING U.S. MILITARY POLICY
Finding The Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy. Frederick W. Kagan. Encounter Books. 444 pages; index; $29.95.
Reviewed by Maj. Gen. Edward B. Atkeson, U.S. Army retired
Frederick Kagan's Finding the Target is a compendium and critique of the development of virtually all serious American military theory during the service of our entire officer corps currently on active duty, and a fair share of what has gone before. The unprepossessing dust cover, depicting a single combat aircraft high in its operational environment, suggests a narrow interpretation of the title. Aeronautical specialists will search in vain for discussion of target acquisition techniques close to their stock-in-trade, for that is not what Kagan offers us. On the contrary, he brings us an impressive discussion of the full range of military intellectual challenges to the security of the United States at both the operational and strategic levels over the last half century. While he tends to focus on ground conflict, he also covers theories applicable to air and sea operations.
The first four chapters of this work set the stage for Kagan's inventory of where we are in our pursuit of military theory. They deal with problems of recovery from Vietnam, especially the Army's difficulties in developing a sensible doctrine oriented towards Europe for dealing with the enormous Soviet threat. Kagan argues that the abolition of the draft improved the Army, but a number of measures adopted in that period were counterproductive. He points out that the 1976 version of Field Manual (FM) 100-5 Operations resulted in an overemphasis on forward defense in Europe and oversight of the threat posed by the Soviets' "second echelon" or "follow-on-forces." In Kagan's view, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command commander Gen. William DePuy's concept of an "active defense" was a "fiasco"—so much so that "not even the Army accepted the doctrine or its underlying concepts, and outside the service it was entirely stillborn."
From there, Kagan delves into the "Reagan Revolution," overcoming the threat of Soviet aggression and succeeding concepts of airpower. He highlights John Boyd's OODA (observation, orientation, decision, action) loop, a concept of how people interact with each other and their environment, and also discusses John Warden's focus on airpower as the single most essential requirement for victory in any modern conflict.
Kagan expresses disdain for such concepts as "shock and awe" (he calls it disappointing and possibly counterproductive) and the Army's program for Stryker armored vehicles ("neither sufficient armor nor sufficient armament to face Iraqi tanks"). Kagan argues that "the M1 [tank] is an overpowering weapons system that few enemies can kill and very few can survive." Regarding military operations against terrorists, Kagan writes that anything less than 100 percent of enemy casualties "is really a defeat, for they are unlikely to repeat the mistake of concentrating again in the future."
Kagan continues his analysis to present day, suggesting that the planning for the war in Iraq was based on false assumptions. He points out that although Iraq is larger than California, the police force of that state was used as a measure to determine the American troop strength required to subdue the country following the fall of Baghdad.
Kagan concludes his work with a number of fundamental and notable observations:
• The U.S. defense budget is too small.
• U.S. ground forces are too small. The United States should have 200,000 more soldiers and marines on active duty and a force of at least 100 deployable brigades for minimal security operations worldwide.
• Volunteers are better than draftees.
• It is not possible to plan for the "generation [of forces] after next."
• There is no task in U.S. national security more important than success in Iraq.
• Transformation of U.S. forces must take second place to victory in Iraq.
Transformation is a concept Kagan dismisses as weak. "At the end of the day," he writes, "something is 'transformational' if someone says it is, and not otherwise."
In Finding the Target, Kagan provides an interesting analysis of U.S. military reinvention since the Vietnam War, as well as a timely critical analysis of the results of that transformation.
MAJ. GEN. EDWARD B. ATKESON, USA Ret., Ph.D., is a senior fellow at AUSA's Institute of Land Warfare. He has written four books and more than 150 articles on military affairs.
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