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Expert: Officers need more time in classroom

The U.S. can no longer assume that top commanders can acquire skills “on the fly” when facing new situations, an outside expert advising Congress about possible changes in professional military education said Sept. 10.

“The depressing story of our flawed efforts to handle a burgeoning insurgency during the post-invasion period in Iraq suggests that too many senior officers had never studied the lessons of Vietnam, much less the experiences of the British in their efforts to defeat the 1920 insurgency in Iraq,” Williamson Murray, an Ohio State University professor emeritus, told House lawmakers.

“The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests that the United States can no longer afford an approach resting on the comfortable assumption that commanders can acquire skills on the fly to deal with the new and different complexities that each conflict will bring in its wake,” Murray told the Housse Armed Services Committee’s oversight and investigations panel at the sixth and final hearing in a series dealing with professional military education for officers.

“History suggests that however carefully Americans think about the future, however thorough their preparations, however thoughtful their concepts, training and doctrine, we will be surprised,” Murray said.

“In the end, it will only be our imagination and intellectual ability — or lack thereof — that will determine our success or failure in navigating an uncertain and dangerous future.”

Retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, director of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, said education for professional officers is “drifting off course,” partly because so much is expected of officers that there is little time for academics in a military career.

Iin addition, military culture — and rewards like promotions — do not put much emphasis on being brilliant, he said.

“Our military culture, found in one form or another in each of our military services, denigrates the value of knowledge and reflection on war and promotes operational experience above all other attributes,” said Barno, a former commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan.

He said he understands why operational experience trumps book learning in wartime. But he warned that promotions based on who racked up the most command time in combat may not yield the best strategic leaders for the future.

Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., said he expects the panel will issue a report in a few months with recommendations for Congress and the Defense Department about improving professional education for officers.

Murray, Barno, and a third witness, Loyola University of Chicago political science professor John Allen Williams, had several recommendations for the subcommittee to consider:

* If Congress wants better trained and educated officers, it needs to have more officers at all paygrades so people have time in their careers for professional education.

* Classical military history and strategy needs more emphasis at senior service colleges.

* More military officers should receive graduate education at nonmilitary schools, where they are exposed to different material and different schools of thought.

* More officers should be accepted with undergraduate degrees in humanities and social sciences.

“Without underestimating the need for technically competent officers, the proper balance of technical, social scientific, moral and humanist components in curricula needs to reconsidered if we are training officers to lead people, as opposed to machines, in the most challenging and ambiguous environment,” said Williams, who also is president of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, a group of more than 700 scholars who study military personnel and policy issues.