The case against the military academies.

Suppose that every engine in a General Motors car came from one of three GM plants. And suppose that the manufacturing cost of each of Plant A's engines is more than three times that of those made at Plant B and more than nine times those from Plant C. Further suppose that other than cost, there is no measurable difference between the engines no matter where they were made--not in their performance, nor in how long they last. Finally, imagine that Plant A is far and away the least productive of the three--it makes only a small percentage of the company's engines. Now, in order to maximize return on investment, GM should:

1) Close Plant A

2) Maintain the status quo 

3) Have more Plant As

If you answered 1), you are still in the running to be the next Tom Peters. If you said 2), you probably don't subscribe to this magazine. On the other hand, if you said 3), quit reading this and call the personnel department at the Pentagon immediately. You've got what it takes to justify the continued existence of the nation's service academies.

That's because the details in this scenario are true if you substitute the words "military officers" for "engines," and "Pentagon" for "GM," and view Plant A as a service academy, Plant B as the university-affiliated Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), and Plant C as the quick-and-dirty military training offered to college graduates by Officer Candidate Schools (OCS). As a means of producing military officers, a service academy is a perfect Plant A--more expensive (academy commissions cost about $250,000 apiece, compared to about $65,000 for those coming from ROTC and about $25,000 for those earned through OCS), less productive (the academies together produce only about 16 percent of all new officers, compared to 64 percent for ROTC and 20 percent for OCS), and with no discernible difference in the results (when compared to the other officer pipelines, Academy graduates don't outperform other officers). They don't remain on active duty significantly longer. Indeed, five of the six incumbent Joint Chiefs are not academy graduates. But in spite of this, we haven't eliminated Plant A for officers--in fact, we have three of them (West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy).

So here's a suggestion for downsizing the military that the Pentagon's "bottom-up review" and Al Gore's National Performance Review missed: Abolish the service academies. As we shrink the military, we're going to have to reduce officer slots--so why not close down the least efficient officer production lines?

Right off the bat, this move would probably result in a savings of nearly a billion dollars a year in direct operating expenses. And there would be nice little (little to government, big to you and me) additional economies: We could do away with the three prep schools the academies now run for the remedial training of applicants who haven't met admission standards (a disproportionate number of them are prospective varsity athletes). Ditto for the expense incurred when service big-shots commandeer government aircraft to fly themselves and their wives around the country to service academy football games. And there's probably a nice chunk of change to be saved in no longer needing field investigations or special boards of inquiry to look into academy cheating scandals.

The Plant A argument may seem too narrowly economic, so it's important to emphasize that there is another, cultural reason for doing away with the academies. Because the academies are what sociologists call "total institutions" (like prisons and monasteries) that are virtually sealed off from the rest of us, they tend to produce officers who are isolated and even alienated from the values and ideas of the general society they are sworn to defend.

For example, when Lieutenant Paula Coughlin complained to her boss, Admiral Jack Snyder, about what happened to her at the Tailhook convention, Snyder was utterly indifferent. And where did Snyder get his basic education about how to view women in the Navy? At the U.S. Naval Academy. And how about Admiral Frank Kelso, at the time the Navy's top officer, whose manipulation of the investigative and disciplinary process to conceal his own presence at the scene of the lewd behavior and sexual misconduct Coughlin reported caused the military to end up doing virtually nothing in the case? He was an Annapolis graduate, too. Irrelevant details about the admirals' pasts?--well, remember, the Naval Academy was where, in 1988, the superintendent knew just what to call an incident at his school where a female midshipman was pulled from her dorm room and handcuffed to a men's room urinal by taunting male classmates. He called it "hijinks." He didn't dismiss any of the culprits, either. And it's not just the Naval Academy--a recent General Accounting Office survey indicated that more than 90 percent of all service academy women experienced at least one form of sexual harassment at their school. A military sans academies could be expected to have fewer officers who were so tone-deaf to issues of fairness and decency.

Similarly, shutting the academies down would mean getting more officers with non-military college educations. This would be a plus because civilian curricula do a better job of developing divergent thinking and imparting knowledge of non-military subjects (such as history, economics, and computers), which are essential components of military leadership, on and off the battlefield. The technical details of particular military jobs are taught to officers after they receive their commissions anyway, so why not opt for the solid, but broader base offered by a civilian education?

And getting rid of the academies would give us the opportunity to have more slots for officers who come up from the enlisted ranks. This would be a boon because formerly enlisted officers tend to have more insight into the mind-set and actual work requirements of the troops they command. And enlisted troops find it easier to see such officers as role models--after all, they didn't come from West Point or some other fancy place; they were troopers once, too. (The highly-regarded Israeli military requires all officer candidates to have two years' prior enlisted service.) And having more officers come up from the ranks would make promotion in the military less like the frat house and more like the police department, where supervisors have to work their way up from starting positions as beat cops.

In short, abolishing the service academies and picking up the slack via other commissioning sources would make the U.S. military less isolated, more well-grounded, more cohesive, and more meritocratic. These are vital features for a military--especially one representing a democracy. After all, these folks aren't fighting for imperial Prussia.

Service academy proponents in and out of uniform will howl at my suggestion. But none of their likely objections seems decisive.

The best argument for retaining the academies seems to be that compared to other commissioning programs they subject their participants to a more thorough and intense indoctrination in the military ethos. And this is no small matter. The military, especially a downsizing military, requires officers who are there not because they don't know what else to do or because the job market is lousy but because they are seriously committed to the profession of arms.

But just because the academies provide the best military orientation doesn't mean that despite all their inefficiencies and drawbacks we have to keep them in business. What we should do instead is incorporate much more of their indoctrination program into the other remaining commissioning sources. In other words, after the abolition of the academies, in addition to whatever technical and academic training is subsequently received by up-from-the-ranks officer candidates, ROTC graduates, and OCS students, officers should all have to start off in an uninterrupted hard-core three-month indoctrination program on the same level of intensity as Plebe Summer at Annapolis or Beast Barracks at West Point. We could even keep one of the academy campuses as the year-round site for this initial phase. (But let's be sure to put the other two to good civilian use; they'd be ideal for national community service training and/or for retraining those making the transition from welfare to work.)

Advocates of the academies defend them on the ground that they are part of our military tradition. Well, so were the cavalry and segregation. At the very least, this point can hardly be used to save the Air Force Academy, which was only founded in 1954.

It will also be claimed that the academies supply a core of leadership that the military needs to survive through all the build-ups and build-downs. This is the gist of Barney Greenwald's famous speech at the end of The Caine Mutiny, in which Greenwald reminded the mutineers he'd just succesfully defended that while he and they had been happy civilians in peacetime, men like Captain Queeg--who was an Annapolis graduate--had been thanklessly manning the guns. The problem here is that while a strong officer corps is indeed essential, there's just no detectable sense in which it is uniquely or even mainly provided by the service academies. Again, statistically, you can't tell the difference between academy grads and other officers. And I offer this anecdotal evidence: When I was in the Navy, working for and alongside dozens of officers, ranging from incompetent to excellent to even inspiring, I never saw any correlation between how they did and where they came from.

A fall-back position is that, well, at least the services depend on the academies for the bulk of their senior officers. But that's not true either. The current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General John Shalikashvili is not an academy graduate, nor was his predecessor, General Colin Powell. Two-thirds of all generals and admirals are not academy grads.

The most desperate defense of the academies I've ever heard was offered recently by Rear Admiral Thomas Lynch, current superintendent of the Naval Academy: "We've had a president. Ross Perot may make it yet. We may have another one. We've had a host of congressmen and senators, both current and past, Nobel prize winners. A year or so ago, I could say that half of all of our astronauts were Naval Academy graduates...." If you think this is a sound argument for keeping the service academies, then I have another good idea for you. How about a billion federal dollars a year for the Boy Scouts?