Op-ed discussion  &ndash  The Academies' March Toward Mediocrity

Facts

Set-asides: students with lower grades and SAT scores than the published minimums. Also known as: "two-track" admissions system.

Set-asides are routinely sent to NAPS for a year of remedial work, a C average gets them to the Naval Academy the following year.

Set-asides can be helped to pass courses by massive applications of extra instruction from the professors.

African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are considered as their own group and admitted using different criteria than nonminorities.

The English Department gets complaints from flag officers that our graduates cannot think cogently in words.

A cruiser skipper reported he spent half of his time correcting grammar on memos that crossed his desk.

Assertions

The education costs nearly half a million dollars per student, more than four times what an ROTC-trained officer costs.

I know of nobody in the Navy or other services who would argue that graduates of Annapolis or West Point are, as a group, better than those who become officers through other programs.

To keep our teams in the top divisions of the NCAA, we fill officer-candidate slots with students who have been recruited primarily for their skills at big-time sports. That means we reject candidates with much higher predictors of military success   ...   Sports stars avoid many of the onerous duties other midshipmen must perform, and know they're not going to be thrown out. Instead of zero tolerance, we now push for zero attrition: we "remediate" honor code offenses.

Another response is: sports are one of the prime venues for developing/practicing leadership, esprit de corps, and tenacity.

Another program that is placing strain on the academies is an unofficial affirmative-action preference in admissions. I can confirm from the years I spent on the admissions board in 2002 and '03 and from my conversations with more recent board members, if an applicant identifies himself or herself as non-white, the bar for qualification immediately drops.

Here is a quota anecdote from a co-worker with a PhD in Electrical Engineering ...

The issue of recruiting minorities versus recruiting the best people (without regard to race/gender/orientation/etc) crops up in all levels of society, and I doubt we'll get past it in our lifetimes. When I was at the Agency, we took some flak one year from one of the Inspector General's diversity people because there weren't enough American Indians in the herd of mathematicians that the Agency looks after. This (apparently) escalated to the Director's level, where it was found that - yeah, verily - we had the one American Indian with a mathematics degree already on board; there simply weren't any more out there who were qualified to do the work. Sometimes we don't reach our diversity goals, but it's not for lack of trying.

I've taught low-track English classes; the pace is slower and the papers shorter than in my usual seminars, but the students who complete them get the same credit. When I've complained about this, some administrators and midshipmen have argued that academics are irrelevant to being an officer, anyway. Really? Thinking and articulating are irrelevant to being an officer?

Instead of better officers, the academies produce burned-out midshipmen and cadets.

The students who find this most demoralizing are those who have already served as Marines and sailors who know how the fleet works and realize that what we do on the military-training side of things is largely make-work.

We're a military Disneyland, beloved by tourists but disillusioning to the young people who came hoping to make a difference ... The service academies are a huge disappointment to their students, who come expecting reality to match reputation ... My most promising students tell me, "Sir, this place shows you what not to do."

I had "what not to do" feelings about The Basic School and flight school. A good friend that made a career in the Marine Corps recently had the following to say about The Basic School staff (34 years later), "I did learn a lot about what to do from watching them (and doing the opposite)."

So ... "what not to do" feelings are probably all too common when you combine large numbers of high achieving alpha personalities, close quarters, intense requirements, and a little bureaucracy thrown in for good measure.

I think some background on Professor Fleming is important. Here is a transcription of two minutes of audio from his Web site ...

BBC interview, Dan Demon, 24 May 2010 ... Is traditional military culture at West Point and Annapolis out of step with the rest of society? This is the belief of Bruce Flemming. He's an english professor at the US Naval academy in Annapolis. He says the service academies are a net loss to the taxpayers who finance them, as well as a huge disappointment to their students, who come expecting reality to match reputation. I asked him what the fundamental problem is. Professor Fleming's response ... I would say the military is holding on to a Victorian paradigm that has largely been replaced by much more efficient ways of dealing with the world. I would say that the military prizes what it calls leadership which comes out of the same grab bag of terms with gentleman - which is kind of an essentialist notion. The idea is that you show leadership - its kind of like waving a magic wand. Another one in the same category is character - you have character, you are a gentleman. The civilian world since the 19th century has basically abandoned that way of thinking about the world. We teach skills in the civilian world. We are expected to not show leadership but to perform a job and so on. A little bit less glamorous perhaps, but that is the direction the world has gone into; the military not.

military culture      civilian culture
----------------      ----------------
Victorian paradigm    more efficient ways of dealing with the world
leadership            teach skills
character             perform a job
gentleman

I'm guessing I've got your point right but I'm not sure, so briefly: I'm saying that "leadership" is nothing besides the sum of its components. We need to teach/model the components and stop saying we (academies) can teach this magic thing called "leadership" whereas ROTC can't. My position is that you can't TEACH leadership. People become leaders because of personal talent and desire. Components of what we call leadership are: intelligence ability to see the other side physical charisma ability to interact with people big smile/positive attitude intelligence We can teach some of these and model others. The result MAY be a good leader. But it also may not be if the person can't put the elements together. The reason given for the academies in their current state is that they teach this magic "leadership." They don't, partly because they show bad leadership (and no, you can't say that's their purpose), but partly because leadership can't be taught. As Clausewitz said, leaders are born, not made.

And Professor Fleming's reply ...

I don't so much think outmoded as abandoned for other ways of doing things, and as a result defended precisely because they have no visible application. This in turn lends them a sort of "magic" aura that makes their practitioners able to claim powers unavailable to the world at large. The military gets to feel smug that it alone teaches/shows "leadership." What's wrong with this is that the military serves the civilian world, not the reverse. And it's like being proud of not being able to drive or use a computer. Gentlemen in the l9th century were proud of having nothing to do with new developments - and they used being a "gentleman" as the same sort of club that the military currently uses "leadership" and "character." If you're interested the point is developed in an article of mine in the current Yale Review, attached.

The title of Dr Fleming's 21-page paper is "Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide". In it, he asserts there exists an unnavigable chasm between the military world and the civilian world, because the military skill set is stuck in the 19th century and the civilian skill set has responsibly matured.

The military needs civilian skills, and the civilian world needs the military. Both can benefit from unclenching their fists, dropping their defensive crouch, and talking to each other with mutual respect. The civilian world owns the military, and the military exists to serve the civilian world.   [p21]

• B.A. Philosophy, Haverford College, May 1974
• M.A. Comparative Literature, University of Chicago, June 1978
• Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Vanderbilt University, May 1982
• Fulbright Fellow, Free University Berlin, 1982-83
• Lecturer, English Seminar, University of Freiburg im Breisgau, 1983-85
• Fulbright Professor of Anglo-American Literature, National University of Rwanda, 1985-87
• Professor of English, U.S. Naval Academy (Assistant, Associate), 1987-present

It was interesting to learn: "the departments of English and history, which, save for a few mainly junior faculty members in military uniform, are largely a civilian enclave".

Throughout the article, I was struck by all the problems and pathologies Dr Fleming indentified as peculiar to the military. I believe all the excerpts captured below are not the distinctive domain of a dystopian military — they are the all-too-common proclivities of the human experience. These failings are chronicled in the Dilbert cartoon on a daily basis.

I believe Dr Fleming's complaints and prescriptions originate from his very focused and homogeneous work experience, and from his plight in the following roles/circumstances.

• a whistle-blower
• a progressive in a traditionalist culture
• an intellectual elitist in a testosterone elitist culture ("most in the intellectual elite are unwilling to be voluntarily involved with the military", "[if the military fixes itself] the result might be that elite college graduates would be willing to join the military")
• a reflective, "off-line" personality in a real-time environment ... why vs NOW!  (An engineer takes a problem and fixes it. A humanist takes a problem and celebrates its complexity. [Robert Weisbuch])

The military makes opaque decisions and hides behind the mantle of leadership ... The civilian world employs public reasoning to identify the best possible course of action among many alternatives.   [p10]

	Dilbert: May I take this one? Wally: Go for it. Alice: Make us proud.	Dilbert: Question - if making a decision is just a process, why can't a computer do it?	PHB: Because sometimes I have to rely on my gut.
Dilbert: Which part of your gut is the smart part? Is it the stomach lining, or maybe the colon?	PHB: I'm talking about instinct. It's an indefinable leadership quality.	Dilbert: Is the indefinable thing like a superstition? Wally: Or cooties?

The idea of "honor" has disappeared from practically every institution but the military. That of a "gentleman" is a quaintly old-fashioned, albeit attractive concept that is usually preceded by the word last, when it is not linked with officer. "Character" is something the (paramilitary) Boy Scouts talk a lot about without knowing what it is. Of all these pre-Industrial Revolution concepts (all vaguely related to the idea of a "gentleman," someone who does not work), that of "leadership" seems to have lodged most comfortably in the officer corps of the military. The world outside, meanwhile, has largely replaced this concept with such things as skills and capabilities. Still, it is clear why the military retains this outmoded vocabulary, and the pretense that we can teach "leadership" at places like Annapolis. Given that it is the enlisted people who have the skills in the military - they are the ones who actually work the machines - what is left for the officers?   [p9]

What is left for the officers?? Oh, pa-lease! Every bureaucracy, every corporation, every school district has layers and layers of "management". None of them "actually work the machines." In point of fact, most officers do very much than manage, and many of them do actually work the machines.

[The military uses its willingness to die as moral leverage and as a means of silencing even constructive criticism from without.]   [p3]

[The military disciplines people that publicly criticize organizational policies without first seeking internal redress.]   [p3]

The military is unwilling to portray itself accurately ... Instead they make things worse by adopting a defensive stance ... they close ranks against the slightest criticism ... they blame their detractors or enemies.   [p6]

The military is a monopoly ... it exhibits aspects of feudalism, dictatorship, and the propped-up industrialism of the now-imploded East Bloc ... it can be 99% inefficient and still function ... it has no impetus to change   [p8]

The military is rife with cults of personality in which individuals and their whims trump the rule of law. Personnel are supposed to do anything to make "the old man" (the CO) happy.   [p8]

Military bosses do not like to hear things that go contrary to their views. They equate criticism of the way things are with criticism of themselves.   [p10]

Military underlings with views that the brass do not want to hear are almost always squelched and branded malcontents. The result is that problems multiply and fester until they erupt, rather than being addressed at an early stage.   [p10]

In the military, if the battle is won, nobody cares about the waste, inefficiency, heartache of the process, or lowered morale that results from a bad leader   [p11]

If an engagement ends in victory, nobody says the price tag in lives or goods was ten times what it had to have been; everyone is simply grateful for the victory.   [p11]

The chances are wildly against the military of being even remotely efficient. This does not mean that the armed services are going out of their way to be inefficient and wasteful; rather any unregulated system or one without outside alternatives will by its nature simply do what it does because it does it, not because it has a justification for doing so.   [p13]

The civilian world thinks through alternatives and chooses the most justifiable; the military brass could do this too. Instead, they insist that the military has "leadership," and that it is like Mary Poppins: practically perfect in every way. Any decision that comes from leadership is the best one.   [p13]

People in the military do things for other people, not for ideals like democracy or country ... their greatest loyalty is typically to one another ... Of course the reason the military is so relentlessly personal is that this is the only way that truly filthy, but sometimes necessary, actions - like killing other human beings in battle - can be performed.   [p13]

The military is about control, and control is established by intimidating enemies. Such intimidation is partly achieved by insisting loudly and repeatedly that the military is big, bad, and invincible. Telling the truth is not the goal here, intimidating the enemy is.   [p14]

If something in the military is discovered to be less than perfect, the service immediately closes ranks, denies wrongdoing as long as possible, and then, abruptly and tersely admitting that there was a problem, announces that it has everything in hand and is taking care of things. Almost always, it overreaches in the imposition of internal controls, just as it had overreached earlier in denying the problem. The military is constantly careening from side to side, when a looser but more constant hand on the tiller could keep it on an even keel.   [p14]

The military typically claims that problems it can no longer deny are individual, not structural. It will invariably characterize each problem as "one bad apple" rather than even consider the possibility that the organization creates such bad apples by the nature of its system. The result is that the military is reduced to crisis management: rather than having control over predictable problems, people in the military almost always see the identification of problems as itself a problem. To a large degree, messes in the military come from this fact, and the brass make them worse by failing to understand this.   [p15]

The military views problems that are publicly revealed as a loss of face. It therefore will seek to vilify those who want the problems aired.   [p16]

The military is notoriously, bitterly resistant both to change and to outside influence. Because power is so personal, the individuals with power tend to identify the things they do individually with things that are best for the institution. Few people inside the system, trained to be "loyal" to specific individuals above them, will try to make fundamental changes within it; if they do, they are almost certain to be slapped down.   [p16]

Because of the hierarchical nature of the chain of command, the senior people are dealing with people one and maybe two levels below them. People at the top do not really ever interact with those at the bottom. Those close to the commanders make them happy by saying "Yes, sir" or "Yes, ma'am." Thus the higher up a person is, the more out of touch that person is with what those below him or her are really thinking. Opinions are filtered and sweetened as they go up the chain - if they go up the chain. Usually input from below is not solicited, and when it is, everybody knows what to say to keep the brass happy.   [p16]

The relationship up the chain of command ... amounts to a sort of feudal submission: a military person's relationship, though ostensibly abstract, to a system, is in fact based on a relationship with his or her immediate superior, whom the subordinate is trying devotedly to please. If the superior is a good person and a good officer, the relationship can be wonderful. If she or he is not, it is a nightmare. The civilian world rarely gets this intense ... When the person in charge is merely filling a place or is working out a grudge, has either too much confidence or too little and so for whichever reason does not accept disagreement, or is simply unwilling or unable to see others' points of view, things are bad.   [p17]

The military, unfortunately, harbors many officers who think that anyone who suggests changes or improvements to their view of mission is inimical to the mission and must be annihilated ... it makes sense to listen to as many views as possible: this, military commanders are constitutionally resistant to doing. Most commanders sense suggestions or disagreements as denial of their authority and treat those making them accordingly, by breathing fire. Their hostility makes it certain that once a bad path is embarked upon, it will be relentlessly followed.   [p17]

The natural resistance of the military to internal debate is a structural weakness caused by the individual nature of command within the system. A further weakness is found in the fact that this first deficiency will not even be addressed unless the institution addresses it. Individuals cannot be expected to encourage people who defend points of view contrary to their own; thus, we cannot expect the individual to look for a way to overcome this weakness. Instead the structure, unsurprisingly, must address the structural weakness; it is almost certain that the individual will not. So long as the point of view that predominates in the military is the deeply personal one based on "leadership" and "character," these weaknesses will get worse.   [p18]

We cannot eliminate the structural weaknesses of the military's monopoly situation, but if we are willing to acknowledge their existence, we can set about minimizing them. The key is being willing to acknowledge them, which is something the military, if left to its own devices and allowed to make its own decisions based on its own proclivities, will never do. Because the military is based on individual command in a top-down situation, it reinforces its own weaknesses, rather than addressing them. The solution is to build as many checks into this system as possible short of dismantling it. These will be based on rational choice, on sharing collectively gathered data, and on giving reasons for decisions that are based on more solid ground than "leadership."   [p18]

The military is rife with unjustified decisions based on "character" rather than evidence. Those decisions remain in force because people have no alternative but to put up with them: there are few internal checks and balances, and the military repulses attempts to ask for justification from without. Many of these decisions are probably the wrong ones, but they continue to be upheld, and the orders followed. Thus the military is condemned to the endemic inefficiency of all monopolies.   [p18]

Civilian democracies contain many checks and balances that, while not making wrong courses of action impossible, at least render them more unlikely in the long run: the system is to a large degree self-correcting. (Big exceptions, like the crash of 2008, are, thankfully, fairly rare.) The military is not self-correcting, at least not as it is currently run. In the civilian world there are the internal checks and balances of the multiparty system, the division of government into branches, an active press, and an informed citizenry.   [p19]

The first course-corrector would be for the military to acknowledge its weaknesses, and hence to "own" them. If the military brass took ownership of the service's weaknesses, they would treat its problems diffierently. Instead of denying them, trying to cover them up, and then blaming those who uncovered them, service personnel would acknowledge openly that problems are the price of doing business. Military brass would therefore have no reason to treat the identification of problems as a threat. This would eliminate one big problem immediately: the fact that an attempt by the military to cover up something always ends badly, in a scandal composed almost equally of the event and the attempt at cover it up, which costs the military man-hours and prestige.   [p19]

Another major course-corrector would be to insist that decisions be made based on data and reasoning, not "leadership" ... Falling back on authority rather than rational choice as the first line of defense is a structural weakness of the military, alienating those within and without.   [p19]

The military also needs to work on encouraging real, viable, internal dissent ... Higher-ups should actively encourage input from personnel who are lower than the next layer down from themselves. They should surround themselves with people who, instead of saying "Yes, sir," will tell them things they do not want to hear.   [p20]

The military needs more of the civilian ability to consider possible alternative paths objectively, and to talk about criticism nondefensively.   [p21]