Two cultures in military education.

Abstract

Borrowing C.P. Snow's "two cultures," the author insists that, no matter what apparent distance separates the military from the academic world, a citizen's curriculum must share the rostrum with the military regimen. Lessons in human value and passion from literature, in judgment and expression from language, in eccentric thinking and analogy from poetry, in the physical world and its limits from mathematics, science, engineering, in human behavior from psychology, economics, history, sociology complement military discipline with its eclipse of personal fantasy; its denial of latitude; its surrender of privacy. The military ethos, though, becomes the vehicle for study of traditional, "civilian" subjects, requiring no special curriculum for the soldier and none for the civilian: only one for the citizen.

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For twenty-six years I served as a sergeant of Special Forces. Still a novelty, we wound up for every mission briefing any field grade officer with time on his hands: endless dog and pony shows, duly tracing infiltration routes, laying out demolition plans for that bridge to go up, ticking off contingencies, and on and on. That, sir, concludes my portion of the briefing. What are your questions? Now, since the days of Caesar no officer has ever declined that invitation. Mostly we knew what we were doing, so it didn't get ugly till the Old Man fetched up with theoretical issues. From those ticklish interrogations, one could actually follow the evolution of American business school curricula since all officers standing the grade of major had to have a master's degree and since most viewed that requirement as a mandate to acquire credentials in something "practical." Each rising class of field grades would testify to the current shibboleths: now it's Theory Z; now it's Total Quality Management; now it's Management by Objective; now it's Core Values. Where's our tree diagram? What would Maslow say? Had we "war-gamed" outcomes? And on and on. We were always one cycle behind, alas, and in that ignorance at once gratified the commander and exposed ourselves to patient disquisitions on the reigning template.

An essay in the Harvard Business Review ("What Leaders Really Do") distinguishes, for the umpteenth time, between "management" and "leadership," but it's the illustration to the article that strikes me: a couple of guys and a woman in business suits, ties, briefcases in hand, struggling up a hilt. But ... look again. One is carrying a guidon. They all wear helmets. Explosions burst behind them along a smoky horizon. The guy up front is doing what we call Fort Benning yoga: he waves his arm in that Follow me! gesture. The article drones on about "aligning," "organizing," "staffing," the inevitable "problem-solving" ... Yeah, yeah. But, in rendering into graphics the notion of "leadership," the artist resorts to a cast off metaphor, namely that leadership, the kind understood and recognized even by civilians, is that practiced by military leaders ... even if we read again and again of the "bankruptcy" of the top-down military model. Out there they do wonder, though: just what is the secret one learns in military school? What is the state of mind of the product? And how does it differ from, well ... the normal?

In a bizarre, futuristic 1941 novel penned by a member of the academic establishment in England, a fictional "Air Vice Marshall," high priest of military culture and technology, addresses servicemen and villagers in the small community upon which an "Aerodrome" has imposed its structures and values. He reveals in this harangue an officer's arrogance, that is true, but a darker, subtler tendency of military thought as well, utopianism: "The civilization into which History has brought us," thunders the Air Vice Marshall, "wholly indefensible as it is, is yet part of our duty to defend. You will discover in the course of time that we aim not entirely to defend it, but also to transform it" (Warner, p.179).

What is interesting here is not so much the menace of the ideas ascribed to the Air Vice Marshall, but the very attribution of these words to him by a respected academic, a professor of Classics and schoolman, erudite representative of a segment of our population divorced in many ways from that population, one for whom military ethos (though, perhaps because he was a serving officer, too) conjures up somber fears of a lugubrious future. C.P. Snow has identified this sort of polarity as a "gulf of mutual incomprehension" in his essay The Two Cultures--though he was speaking of physical scientists and literary colleagues--in which he describes "moving in two groups ... not grossly different ... but who had ceased to communicate at all ... [the] scientists ... shallowly optimistic, unaware of man's condition ... [the] literary intellectuals ... totally lacking in foresight and unconcerned with their brother men ..." (p. 2) He concludes that the core upon which this perception reposes is "not entirely baseless" but that it is "all destructive."

There is a comparable gulf in military schools, I say, between constituencies grudgingly striving together and often enough blindly toward that "general Welfare" you hear so much about. A faculty member at one of America's service academies reported not so long ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education that "civilian faculty members tend to be disaffected, not in sympathy with the aims of the academy ... how could they reconcile research in what were essentially ... anti-authoritarian theories with teaching conservative students who had committed themselves to preserving society's status quo?" This professor concludes, wistfully, "The civilian faculty and the military administration work at cross purposes, with each side showing a lack of respect for the other's professional values" ("Putting the Naval Academy on Course"). "Military hierarchy," declares yet another officer, "is hierarchical not egalitarian, oriented toward the group rather than the individual; it stresses discipline and obedience, not freedom of expression ... it requires immediate action and prompt decision, not thorough analysis and extensive debate; it relies on training, simplification, and predictable behavior, not education, sophistication, and empiricism" (Gabriel, p. 89).

Nor is this climate warmer toward those who would mend such rips in the social fabric of schools where both soldiers and academics commune. One university icon refers to the "remarkable uniform incompetence of academic administrators." "It is tempting to say," he continues,

that academics get the leaders they deserve, but it would be more
accurate to say that academics get the administrators the want.
What they want is administrators either so weak that they provide no
protection against the pressures exerted by higher-level
administrators or so tyrannical that there is no protection against
the pressures they exert. In either case ... they get to complain.
(Fish, p. 276) One need hardly ask how military officers view such
administrators.

I now serve as an academic officer at a military institute. For nearly twenty five years before that, however, I served as a military man in a civilian academy. From both vantage points I have viewed what I should delicately describe as a decalage (French for a bleak, remorseless, profound, and irretrievable enmity) between the professor and the military officer. In American culture this gulf has to do partly with old grievances which disunite graying sons and daughters of the sixties who for whatever reason did not serve or did not approve of service and their coevals who did. But there is a deeper and more menacing schism which makes cohesion within the academic program and the military regimen a permanent tension and which imposes on administrators the constant requirement for intervention and the more imaginative forms of child psychology to separate the players when they determine to scrap.

My school is not a service academy, however. Though we have sent our cadets off to many wars and though many of our graduates have distinguished themselves at all echelons in all military services, our mission rings today as it did in the beginning: we call to this place, in the words of one of the founders, "... a crowd of honorable youths, pressing up the hill of science with noble emulation, a gratifying spectacle, an honor to our country and state, objects of honest pride to their instructors, and fair specimens of citizen-soldiers." That leaves this school, at least, with the double mission of preparing her graduates for military service as a career or in the event of war but also of preparing them for the duties--and opportunities--of commerce, the professions, the arts and sciences, life among our people. And for that dual purpose, considerable delicacy is in order. Though a soldier may be thought much like another citizen, there are ways in which a soldier's preparation must differ from that of an ordinary citizen, ways which in fact may indispose him or her to be a citizen. "The essential basis of military life," observes Sir John Hackett in his essay "The Profession of Arms," "is the ordered application of force under an unlimited liability. It is the unlimited liability which sets the man who embraces this life somewhat apart. He will be (or should be) always a citizen. So long as he serves, [though], he will never be a citizen" (Gabriel, p. 86).

A military school--any military school--is a place where men and women submit to confinement, oddly enough, in the name of freedom. One thinks of Edmund Burke's oracular utterance to the effect that he fancies he favors "a moral, manly, regulated [italics mine] Liberty." Nor is that the last paradox within this community, a community that reasons, that values after a fashion we can only call "other." A community whose currency is sweat. Sometimes blood. A community that often prefers what was to what is. A community that denies the attributes of individuality to affirm the individual. It's a plain old other world. And when cadets leave it, they head for the one we, in our folly, call real, and where, for instance, anything that smacks of doing what one doesn't want to do is described as "fascist" or "Prussian"; where passion in pursuit of a goal, in defense of an ideal is "militant"; where words like "soldierly" and "obedient" are charged with mistrust or disdain; where "discipline" and "camaraderie" if not laughable become intrusive, cumbersome; where "loyalty" and "self-effacement" get derided as "lockstep" or "imaginationless." And cadets find soon enough, out there, that they'd do well to grow some hair. Any old place.

The curriculum that claims to make soldiers of citizens threads a very narrow channel of contradiction and a need to reconcile opposing notions. It's a slippery and sophisticated exercise that we demand, ironically, of young people before they gain experience ... and of crotchety professors often without experience. This world of the soldier is other than rational. Military stuff is, after all, about combat, and combat is will, spirit over geometry, and will is nothing if not unreasoning. Reason itself, learning can't always slow down the momentum of events or buck physical law, maybe, but shear human stubbornness--dumb, blind, dogged, unthinking will, resolve, in a word Major Jackson, professor of Natural Philosophy here, was fond of--can in fact overturn inevitability. We've seen it done. What, in fact, is tradition is but something we do--often a dumb something at that--just because we always have, as testimony--unreasoning but passionate testimony--to the ones who've gone before us? The dumber, in fact, the exercise, the stronger our faith in those forbears.

We have words for this complex of tradition, necessity, fantasy, psychology that defines the military world: antinomy; dichotomy; anomaly; paralogism; paradox. Doublethink, Orwell might say. They all mean, in some form, a reconciliation of opposites, or seeming opposites; a compromise, or sort of compromise; an unsatisfactory resolution in any event. Yet we take one side or the other at some risk: service academies, in this country and elsewhere, now and again toy with the notion of providing an education that will serve only the needs of the armed forces and virtually prohibit a young officer or a retiring one from translating that education into civic life; likewise an academic curriculum which disdains action, establishes moral imperatives which preclude action virtually reserves the military ranks to professionals rather than "citizens."

The answer, it seems to me, is an old one, old at least as Pericles, who saw no need to prepare for war, for military service other than through the moral education of citizens. "There is a great difference between us and our opponents," he says in his famous funeral oration, summarizing the culture of the Athenian polis, "... in our educational systems." Under the harsher regime, he says, the young "are submitted to the most laborious training in courage; we pass our lives without these restrictions, and yet are just as ready to face the same dangers as they are" (Warner, Thucidides, p.118). Pericles adds: "We see no incompatibility between words and deeds ... We are capable at the same time of taking risks and of estimating them beforehand" (p.119). This translation, by the way, of Pericles' words is that of the very professor who created the fictitious "Air Vice Marshall" cited earlier, for counterpoint. I would say that the notion is just right today: the education of soldiers has to be the same as that of citizens for fear, among other things, that the two cultures we fancy we note diverge to such an extent that the soldier no longer understands the citizen or respects the life the citizen leads on behalf of the community, that the citizen no longer esteems the sacrifice of his defender, yet it must be a vigorous and not a debilitating formation, to use the word the French prefer.

Lessons in human value, worth, passion from literature; lessons in judgment and expression from language. Lessons in eccentric thinking and analogy from poetry, music, art. Lessons in the physical world and its limits from mathematics, science, engineering. Lessons in human behavior from psychology, economics, sociology. All the stuff the other collegians learn in college: that Martianus Capella stuff, "regurgitata," if you take his word for it, out of Philologia, Mercury's enigmatic bride. No special curriculum for the soldier and none for the civilian: only one for the citizen. Not one side or the other chosen in this dilemma, nor even a compromise, but an insistence upon both. The whole curriculum and as vehicle for this apprenticeship, the military regimen with its sinister impositions: surrender of personal fantasy in clothing, language, gesture; surrender of latitude in use of time, in choice of friends, in disposition of body; surrender of privacy, of intimacy, of leisure. Here, I may part company with Pericles, who claimed--as plenty of us did when we were in the machine--that you don't have to train to be miserable. "We do not have to spend our time," he says in that same oration, "practising to meet sufferings which are still in the future" (p.118). Not that one can, of course, anticipate "sufferings which are still in the future," but one can inure oneself to abnegation, discomfort, effacement; one can make a habit of resilience, persistence, recovery; one can savor, meanwhile, that union of souls tried even in a local crucible and the strength that comes from mutual resistance to adversity, even of the itchy trousers, square meals, up early in the morning variety. One can, I think, endure such a regimen while keeping faith with others among one's fellow citizens who do not. We count on the commonality of curriculum to effect this reconciliation, but the prime reconciliation is that of the physical life with that of the mind for, if we know anything about combat, it is that spirit is essential and often enough a deciding factor.

I asked rhetorically: just what is the secret one learns in military school? If the core of subjects is common for the citizen and the soldier, if there is no special curriculum for leadership, if the military regimen is merely vehicle and--if Pericles is right-unnecessary, then what does set the graduate of a military school apart from his cohort at a conventional college or university? This, I'd say, having lived in both worlds: the cadet has learned to live an ideal, that utopian disposition turned to parody in the portrait of the Air Vice Marshall. The graduate of a military school has learned to live an ideal, thereby to risk an ideal. And to curse it, often enough. He has learned how easily it tarnishes. She has learned what survives the first moments of disillusionment, that intersection set of action and of expectation. The cadet, I think, unlike the mere student, knows how hard it is to sustain abstraction in the face of concrete resistance, temptation ... humanity, in a word. He has learned what honor costs. She has learned to persist, to drive, to endure ... The cadet has learned resolve, that word again, what in the main distinguishes a soldier from any other man or woman.

The one formative moment we have is during the education of these men and women, who will need the resources of both traditional forms of military training but also the insistent, humane, off-center, occasionally undisciplined and frequently enough irksome intrusion of those faculty members who cannot seem quite to get the uniform on or quite to master the hand salute, who will not quite respect the haircut regulation or the assigned time and place but who bring to the training theater the devices--and the release--of poetry, sentiment, nuance, ambiguity, and humanity. The place of classes in ethics, foreign language and culture, literature, fine arts, even etiquette and social grace in the makeup of a military leader in the next century is likely to be more significant rather than less if the current pattern of interventions and incursions persists. As the psychologist Norman Dixon concludes in his classic study of military incompetence,

The controllers of nuclear weaponry should perhaps be relatively
obsessive, rigid, conforming "and over-controlled--in short, mildly
authoritarian ... a naturally inhibited, totally obedient,
'bullshit' ridden bureaucrat ... at the other end of the scale,
for peacekeeping operations ... an authoritarian cast of mind would
probably be a crippling disability. For such 'warfare,' tact,
flexibility, imagination, and 'open minds,' the very antithesis
of authoritarian traits, would seem to be necessary if not
sufficient. (p. 403).

With the services reducing, with service careers diminishing in appeal and length, with strain imposed on the traditional and essential administrative structures by irregular deployments, with the very nature of service--and war--changing so that more and more activity is conducted within civil frameworks and under civilian strictures and in civilian environments what can military schools do but facilitate the easy transition between ... the two cultures?

Works Cited Dixon, N. The Psychology of Military Incompetence. New York: Basic Books, 1976. Fish, StanLey. There's No Such Thing as Free Speech. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1993. Gabriel, Richard. Military Incompetence. New York: Farrar/Strauss, 1985. Kotter, John. "What Leaders Really Do." Harvard Business Review, May-June 1990: 103-111.

Palm, Edward. "Putting the Naval Academy on Coarse." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 May, 1966.

Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Warner, Rex. The Aerodrome. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. --, trans. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War. Baltimore: Penguin, 1954.

Alan Farrell, Virginia Military Institute

Dr. Alan F. Farrell fought in Vietnam with the Fifth Special Forces Group, taught nearly 25 years at Hampden-Sydney College, then served as Dean of Faculty from 1996 until 2000 at Virginia Military Institute, where he now teaches French.