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Copyright by John T. Reed

Good day,  sir,

My name is Dave Starr.  I've visited your web site often in the  past, originally to peruse your real estate guru rating information.  As  a retired military contemporary (I was an AF enlisted maintenance guy during  the same years you went through west Point and Vietnam, I find there are a lot  more items of interest as well.  Unlike you I endured (succumbed to  inertia) for 10 years active and 28 more years in USAF Civil (swivel?)  Service.  I don't spend my life regretting ... there were good times and  good things that I was part of during those years ... but too soon old and too  late smart ... I probably would have chosen a different career path if given  the opportunity again.

Without just  sounding like a lower-grade chronic bitcher I have to say I find some of your  comments on the officer corps, especially the winnowing process that  eventually provides us with our general officers extremely on point and sadly true to life.  Of all the GO's and senior O-6's I served under and worked  with in nearly 40 years the ones who "had a clue" or actually served the  country before themselves could be counted on one hand.  That sounds  pretty sour and I don't mean it to ... many of these men (and a few women) are  actually very good and well educated people but they have to make their  talents and efforts "fit" into the mold to such a degree that their better  qualities eventually wither and die on the vine.

Be  Well
Dave
www.retiredpay.com <http://www.retiredpay.com>  

The following email was signed when I received it, however I have removed the name of the sender because he did not respond to my request for permission to quote him. My responses to what he says are in [red brackets].

Mr. Reed:
 
Sir:
 
I appreciate your writings on West Point and the Army.  My background - serving Army officer [as soon as I see that the writer is currently on active duty, I expect him to be inhibited in what he says—I would be curious as to whether recent escapees from the military officers corps corroborate what he say about how the military has changed.], USMA graduate.  A few of my own:
 
West Point: I attended USMA because I did not believe that civilian college would challenge me.  [Try Cal Tech for a greater academic challenge or the LSU football team for a greater physical one] In retrospect, I am very glad that I went to USMA, because, frankly, I needed to get toughened up. [Once again, I would recommend any college football team over USMA for toughening] I thought the education at USMA was not broadly related to developing a coherent world view - much of how, little of why.  I majored in history, but, in actuality spent the last two years reading whatever I thought interesting, and performing the least work possible elsewhere (engineering).  I was basically "waiting" for my commission.  I would have much rather been sent to the Army as an apprentice officer for two years.  I also thought that the USMA leadership training was, as you might put it, process oriented, rather than people oriented.  [I said process rather than results, not people oriented.] West Point is losing its focus [winning our wars] by attempting to be a "super-star" Army Ivy-league equivalent undergraduate school.  The quality of undergraduate education is not, historically, an important factor in a successful officer corps.  This does not imply that such a corps is not intelligent - but that its focus is on war waging.  The Wehrmacht did not require a degree for its officers, but its officers were very well schooled in how to fight and win wars.  Their performance in the years 1866 to 1945 attests to such a focus.  Likewise, the British Army did not have many university graduates among its ranks - it did however produce native experts, linguists, explorers, and spies.  West Point should be a one year military school, like Sandhurst, which focuses on preparing officers to be military leaders.  [Arguably correct—and the students there should be older. The nurture-based theory that if you get cadets young enough you can mold them has been disproven by 205 years of West Point. Instead, they need to become nature-based and focus their efforts on mature people who have decided based on experience to make careers of the military rather than 17-year olds like me who had no business being in the Army.] The distinction between USMA and non-USMA is not important in the Army anymore.  In any case, only a 1/3 of graduates elect to remain on active duty. [So much for molding teenagers into career military people.] However, all of this actually speaks to the widespread credentialing and professionalization of society.  Police officers require college degrees. School teachers require Masters.  Doctor so and so is the school principal.  Wall street requires MBAs.  Whether credentials actually improve performance.....do you think you would have been less successful had you not attended Harvard? [Yes, I would have been less successful, but the education upon which my success is based was about 90% self-education by reading books, taking seminars, and work experience tailored to my specific goals, not the sorts of general information taught at West Point or Harvard. For example, I have never once in my life used the subject we studied the most at West Point: calculus. I feel we studied that and many other subjects just to live up to some West-Pointers-are-engineers stereotype.]
 
Army: I really enjoy the Army.  [You need to get out more. You have spent your entire adult life in the military since high school. You cannot meaningfully compare a military career to the alternatives from that experience base. It is very unlikely that you or any other person would find a better match between your strengths and weaknesses and likes and dislikes in the one-size-fits-all military than in the infinitely more varied international civilian world.] The fellow soldiers and officers I have served with have been decent, hard working people.  My company grade experiences were, largely, positive.  I was given freedom to plan and conduct imaginative training, to hold my subordinates accountable, and to make a difference, however small, in the Army.  [Must be nice. I had zero of that.] I have served 1 Iraq tour, and I will soon deploy for another year as an Army Foreign Area Officer.
 
The Army's largest problem is their own definition of success.  Rank = success.  Thus, gaining rank is more success.  [Well put] This attitude drives conformity and bureaucracy throughout the organization, as other measures of success do not count for much.  The up or out system, the mandated intervals of promotion, the required "ticket punches" all reduce innovation and risk-taking.  Additionally, the culturally ingrained love of technology (we are Americans after all) inhibits focusing on long-range human solutions to problems.  Being wedded to technology, unfortunately, drives the military-industrial complex, swallowing vast amounts of dollars. [Amen]
 
Specific criticisms of some of your postings -
 
1. Examples of blind stupidity, rank arrogance, and leader incompetence from your Vietnam experience.  I have encountered a few such problems, but nothing like a leader who makes his subordinates wait on him to begin eating.  Never.  The power of OVUM and leader's wives, and the fake social atmosphere of the Army is gone.  The crackdown on alcohol abuse in the 1980s and 1990's destroyed the "social" army aspect. [I have gotten the impression from afar that DUI had reduced the military’s affection for “work hard play hard,” i.e., we’re entitled to get drunk and cheat on our wives—glad to hear it has changed for the better.]  Most officers today consider their social lives as private lives. [My position when I was in the late 60s and early 70s was that my private life was my own. My superiors were mad at me for a number of things, but the main one was my refusal to attend so-called “command performance” parties which were approximately a monthly occurrence. They responded by hitting me with every punishment other than court martialing me—and they repeatedly tried to do that but were talked out of it by JAG officers who told me about it.]
 
2.  The much bemoaned lack of quality soldiers today - the quality of the NCO's and soldiers today remains excellent. [Not according to the media reports. Since they are statistical rather than anecdotal, they arguably carry more weight than one junior officer’s experience.] I read about the recruiting abuses, the lowering of training standards, the lowering of recruiting scores; BUT, I do not see it. [I saw it when I was in the Army 35 years ago. That’s a long time, but human nature and the military are not known for change.] Soldiers who go AWOL or test positive for drugs are punished and removed from the Army.  [Glad to hear it, but it begs the question of why the Army is giving increasing numbers of “moral waivers” many. if not most of which are for criminal drug offenses before enlistment. See my article on the need for a military draft.] This happens rarely, but leaders are trying to achieve a perfect solution in a society where 10-15 percent use drugs "recreationally."  We will never get to where we want to be in terms of soldier standards.We all want soldiers that are high school varsity athletes, self-disciplined, focused, and an IQ of 110 and above.  Well, good luck. [The vast majority of private businesses are far closer to where they want to be regarding the quality of their work force. Accepting an unacceptable situation with such “c’est la guerre” shoulder shrugging is a typical occupational hazard of being in the military for all of your adult life.]  Units that can conduct extreme self-selection (Special Forces, Ranger Regiment) often can achieve that. [I would say they have more motivated personnel than other military units but more does not necessarily mean adequate. As I said in my articles on elite rangers and airborne units, the word “elite” is extremely relative and not very meaningful when used by the military. College football teams are an example of truly elite units. The typical so-called elite military unit would get its butt kicked big time in any fair competition—including military operations after necessary basic training—against a college football team.]
 
3. You actually said that Army officers do not need to learn a language other than Arabic.  Learning languages is vital because....we have not fought an English speaking enemy since 1865.  Learning languages exposes you to other people...creating empathy, understanding, and an ability to appreciate your friends and enemies. [I was one of the top language students I was ever around. In high school, I was the only kid in the history of my school who was allowed to take two languages simultaneously—Spanish and German. I got all A+ in each. At West Point, I was section marcher of first section Russian about half the time. (highest ranked cadet by grades in the highest ranked classroom of the subject) Once, the other section marcher commented that if he got even a single question wrong on a Russian test, it lowered his grade. I thought about that and said, “Me, too.” The max grade there was 3.0. Missing one question got you a 2.9. So we both had GPAs in Russian of 2.95 or higher. In Vietnam, I was one of only two soldiers on our large base who acquired a working knowledge of Vietnamese. I once learned a little Japanese and when I said “What is your name?” in Japanese once, a Japanese citizen turned around and expressed astonishment at my perfect accent. She thought a native was speaking. A German native once asked me how long I lived in Germany after hearing me speak German. (Would you believe five days?) In other words, I know foreign languages better than the vast majority of native-born Americans and West Point cadets. Yet when I tried to speak the languages I studied to natives throughout my life. They always switched to English which they could speak far better than I could speak their native language. A twelve-year old German boy absolutely refused to speak German with me insisting on English instead. He wasn’t going to waste his time. His parents spoke German to me to avoid hurting my feelings. In Germany once, I entered a restaurant once and said, “Speisekarte, bitte” (German for “Menu, please”) to the head waiter. He brought me an English-language menu. The email writer’s points are nothing but conventional-wisdom, psychobabble with no hard-evidence basis. In 2007, the non-Americans you need to speak with almost all speak English far better than almost all native-born Americans can speak any foreign language. Americans have an inferiority complex about this. Get over it. English is the Microsoft Word of languages. It may not be the best, but it won the competition. For a native-born American to learn a foreign language is an intellectual affectation and a waste of time and money.]
 
A Giant Agreement -
 
1. I may be the only active-duty modern officer who supports a draft, largely for the reasons you stated.  Bluntly put, I think that men who hire other men to defend them are essentially, contracting out their own freedom.  I also believe that draftee soldiers, as you and COL Hackworth note, will throw the BS flag on BS aspects of the Army.  

[Conspicuous by its absence in this email is any mention of my article “Is military integrity an contradiction in terms?” When you consider that USMA grads universally say that the cadet honor code was the most important aspect of a USMA education, that absence is more striking.]
 
Recommended readings:
 
The Transformation of War by Martin Van Creveld
 
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram
 
Recommended Web Sites
 
D-N-I.net
 
[Name withheld because he did not respond to my request for permission to quote him. I have always found it disquieting that the career military people in charge of protecting our freedoms of speech and press have zero interest in exercising those same freedoms. During the cold war, I also found it disquieting that the career military people in charge of protecting us from the socialist countries themselves lived socialist lives (cradle-to-grave free government housing and medical care, government bosses). They still do.]
 

I appreciate informed, well-thought-out constructive criticism and suggestions.

John T. Reed