Do Officers Really Need to be Educated?

There is a great article in today's Air Force Times by Rick Maze entitled, Expert: Officers Need More Time in Classroom. Reading it reminded me of a recent Tom Ricks blog post where he asked if officers were better educated with an engineering or a degree in the humanities. This is an important conversation and perhaps a decade too late.

From the Maze article:

Retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, director of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, said education for professional officers is “drifting off course,” partly because so much is expected of officers that there is little time for academics in a military career.

In addition, military culture — and rewards like promotions — do not put much emphasis on being brilliant, he said.

I think our military education needs serious reform as many will note reading this blog. I think the importance of "fluffy" education needs to be highlighted. It's great to study engineering and computer science and those are great skills. They are the degrees that allow a person to build something and act as a tool to create something tactically useful. But in the warfighting business, and especially in the people based COIN realm, we need reflective people who seek to understand themselves and others. Those are the people who can best use such tools to craft a strategy that wins wars.

There may have been a time when shallow but committed fighting men were more useful than their thinking counterparts. I think that time is over.