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Should We Close Our Service Academies And War Colleges?

Thomas Ricks [1] believes that we should shutter West Point and the other service academies because they’re expensive and, as far as he can tell, they produce no better officers than ROTC.  Plus, their instructors don’t have PhDs, making them essentially junior colleges.

So says James Joyner. [2]

Frankly, I think it fairly safe to wonder if Ricks isn’t harboring some sort of anti-military bias, given his body of work.

He got the Surge so staggeringly wrong, for example, one wonders how anyone would give him credit on getting so radical a change as eliminating West Point, right.    The Gamble is the most recent book of his I’ve bothered with. You pretty much knew what you were dealing with when he opened, approvingly with the Jack Murtha narrative of Hadditha.

I’m forced, with these and several other brushes I’ve had with the man’s work, to conclude that what we’re dealing with here is leftist with all of the attendant political baggage… to the point where anything he says about the military is to be taken with a half shaker of salt.

In this case Ricks is essentially suggesting that we take our best and brightest on the military track and place them in civilian colleges, apparently forgetting the fact that most of the colleges around the country have consciously decided to disallow such mixing of Military… witness the ouster of ROTC programs from college campi across this country, but let’s ignore that small point, for the moment.

Perhaps, the man is hoping that by exposing our military to leftist idealism rampant in the halls of “higher learning”, that our military will be less effective.  For surely, that’s what we’ll get.

Every once in a while, the secret desires of the leftist media leak out.

Others: Jules Crittenden, [3]Information Dissemination [4]Memeorandum [5]

Addendum:  (David L)

Me at Out the  Beltway:

The military tends to be conservative because the price of failure is not paid in reduced corporate earning but rather in the blood of soldiers. I for one and not willing to entrust the lives of soldiers to Rick’s theory.

Given the time is takes reach say division level command, any effects of Rick’s proposed change would take decades to produce change and even more decades to remedy.

Our current system works. When given a reasonable objective, and sufficient operation freedom, the American fighting men produces results. A free Iraq [6] is just one example.

I will not that the only war we lost was lead by a corporate executive, McNamara, who knew more about graphs and metrics than about military leadership. I’ll take Storming Norman any day

As  for recent examle, John McCain graduated fr0m the Naval Acadamy, with transcripts.  The one claims to have graduated from Columbia, but no transcripts have been released to support this ration dubions assertion.   I’ll take the Nanal Acadamy.