Picking fights with West Point

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite
posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This
originally ran on April 20, 2009.

Dunno why, but I've managed to pick fights with parts of the Navy and the Army at the same time. On the ground, I recommended in the Sunday edition of the Washington
Post that West Point and the other service academies be closed. Here is what
I wrote:

Why We Should Get Rid of West Point

By Thomas E. Ricks

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Want to trim the federal budget and improve the military at the same time?
Shut down West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy, and use some of the
savings to expand ROTC scholarships.

After covering the U.S. military for nearly two decades, I've concluded that
graduates of the service academies don't stand out compared to other officers.
Yet producing them is more than twice as expensive as taking in graduates of
civilian schools ($300,000 per West Point product vs. $130,000 for ROTC
student). On top of the economic advantage, I've been told by some commanders
that they prefer officers who come out of ROTC programs, because they tend to be
better educated and less cynical about the military.

This is no knock on the academies' graduates. They are crackerjack smart and
dedicated to national service. They remind me of the best of the Ivy League, but
too often they're getting community-college educations. Although West Point's
history and social science departments provided much intellectual firepower in
rethinking the U.S. approach to Iraq, most of West Point's faculty lacks
doctorates. Why not send young people to more rigorous institutions on full
scholarships, and then, upon graduation, give them a military education at a
short-term military school? Not only do ROTC graduates make fine officers --
three of the last six chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reached the military
that way -- they also would be educated alongside future doctors, judges,
teachers, executives, mayors and members of Congress. That would be good for
both the military and the society it protects.

We should also consider closing the services' war colleges, where colonels
supposedly learn strategic thinking. These institutions strike me as
second-rate. If we want to open the minds of rising officers and prepare them
for top command, we should send them to civilian schools where their assumptions
will be challenged, and where they will interact with diplomats and executives,
not to a service institution where they can reinforce their biases while getting
in afternoon golf games. Just ask David Petraeus, a Princeton PhD.