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thedrifter
08-04-03, 06:11 AM
08-01-2003

The ‘Annapolization’ Threat



By Ray Perry



When a senior official responds to critical commentary by stating, “Rebutting every point would take more space than allowed,” it piques my interest. He is most likely going to duck something important.



So when I read the letter to the editor of National Review Online by Dean William C. Miller of the U.S. Naval Academy, I just had to find the offending article and read it, “Babylon Comes to Sparta” (John Miller, National Review, July 14, 2003). I believe I can offer a few points in defense of the Naval Academy that Dean Miller in his letter felt constrained to sidestep by his position there.



The author of “Babylon Comes to Sparta,” John Miller, had three key points of discussion:



* The “scholarly discussion” of a proposed academic paper by a uniformed member of the Academy faculty on why the U.S. military’s decision to take Iwo Jima during World War II was based not on military necessity but because of racial hatred.



* The potentially stifling influence of tenured civilian professors at the Naval Academy as compared with the practice at West Point and the Air Force Academy of appointing mostly uniformed officers to serve as professors.



* The “unreasonable cost” of producing a graduate commissioned officer via the service academies.



The first point concerning the paper on the Battle of Iwo Jima that was peer-reviewed suggests some amount of faculty unwillingness to speak frankly about a race issue no matter how flawed the thesis. Simply put, history does not support the thesis of the author, a Marine captain. Someone on the Naval Academy faculty should have had the intestinal fortitude to tell this man, “This is a stupid idea, go try again.” Unfortunately, the fact that no one threw the penalty flag at all does give credence to John Miller’s point.



The vast bulk of John Miller’s article was devoted to the issue of whether a sizable civilian academic faculty is good or bad for an institution building career naval officers.



Of course, tenured civilian professors have clout and certainly they wield far more power than the fewer and more transitory civilian professors at West Point and Air Force.



Why would they not develop similar power to the civilian staff of the Navy Department in Washington, D.C? These civilians in Washington know they have time to wait out their uniformed bosses and thus are able to accomplish things no fast-track officer ever will.



Fitness reports for the uniformed faculty are surely signed by another commissioned officer in nearly all cases, but you can bet that these professors know how to provide input. Such bureaucratic power is a fact of life within the professional headquarters staff in Washington, D.C., and accomplished academics surely are capable of the same.



So how is the balance between military and civilian faculty members struck? Is the West Point model better? Should the Navy move that way? Or is the current dichotomy between the service academies healthy?

I believe this dichotomy is healthy for the nation – not because of any trendy issue such as diversity, but rather because it stems from the different and longstanding outlook of the individual services, all serving the same Constitution.



Historically Army personnel were stationed at posts far distant from the cities, many quite remote and isolated. The Navy, in contrast, operated from the centers of commerce and frequently was called on to assist in diplomatic matters overseas. The current Marine Corps embassy guards are an outgrowth of this latter relationship with the Department of State.



This led to different outlooks within the services. The Army was more “hard core” and insular while the Navy was more cosmopolitan. The service academies necessarily became a reflection of these views, and this helped shape their respective faculties.



This trend appears in other nation’s military forces for similar reasons. The Japanese army and navy took similar paths as they built themselves after the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s. The Japanese Army modeled itself after the French Army and became quite focused on “The Attack” as the French Army did following the Franco-Prussian War of the early 1870s.



The Japanese Navy modeled itself on the British Royal Navy. This in turn led to an outlook that moderated the extraordinary brutality seen in the Japanese Army of World War II.



John Miller’s assertion that an all-military faculty can infuse in young officers an ethos that civilians cannot is true, but irrelevant.



Moreover, an all-military faculty contains the risk that the caliber of institutional thinking will atrophy over time. On the other hand, an effective civilian faculty can infuse an ethos of equally great value to naval and military officers alike and is a necessary counterpoise to an all military view.



For example, Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale has written on the powerful role that civilian Professor Philip Rhinelander of Stanford University played in helping him survive years of brutality as a POW in North Vietnam. What was the professor’s contribution? He had tutored Stockdale on the classic Greek essay, Epictetus’ Enchiridion, which provided the carrier pilot with the intellectual and psychological strength to withstand the torture and oppression of his captors.



I view the Naval Academy faculty as it stands today as a clear strength.



While there are surely cases where tenured professors get off the reservation, the protection of tenure is still important. But it is protection against the vagaries of changing administrations, not protection from the professors’ own vainglory and PC Think. Civilian professors are there to build officers just as much as the uniformed professors are.



There are ways to at least minimize the impact of such professors on midshipmen.

They include the professors evaluations, which can stack up to firing after a long enough period, reducing the number of classes he teaches (e.g. tenure ensures a paycheck - but not being in front of midshipmen necessarily) or short-term firing if the case is egregious enough. The issue is that it is difficult to take action against a civilian of any kind – but it can be done if the uniformed guys put their mind to it.



The Naval Academy should not be reluctant to do so in the case of the faculty advisor that allowed the young Marine captain to write something that will reverberate to the clear detriment of his career. This faculty advisor surely will do little better teaching midshipmen.



In his National Review Online article, John Miller skewed his analysis of the cost of educating midshipmen as they prepare to become commissioned officers. His target point for cost should have aimed much farther along the career path. Rather than focusing on newly-minted ensigns and 2nd lieutenants, the analysis should evaluate how much did it cost (how many midshipmen had to be educated) to produce one lieutenant commander serving as a ship’s department head or one captain entering command of a cruiser or aircraft carrier.



When viewed through this lens, the service academies’ cost-effectiveness comes clearly into focus, and is not nearly as expensive as critics would present it.



I would not expect Dean Miller to address in public the actions taken regarding the issue of how the Captain’s paper was handled nor for Dean Miller to speak publicly regarding tenured professors getting off the reservation. But he must act nonetheless.



The issue of whether the civilian faculty contributes to the development of a strong ethos within the officer corps is not only germane but of the greatest importance. I feel Dean Miller should have more directly addressed this. His boiler-plate rhetoric merely clouded the issue instead of clarifying it.



Lt. Raymond Perry USN (Ret.) is a DefenseWatch Contributing Editor. He can be reached at cos1stlt@yahoo.com

“Babylon Comes to Sparta”
http://www.newtotalitarians.com/TheAnnapolizationOfAmerica.ht
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http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=DefenseWatch.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=156&rnd=829.5936937140469


Sempers,

Roger
:marine: