An Educated Military
Professional Education and the Profession of Arms
Introduction
Education is vital to twenty-first-century professional militaries, and likely to become more so, given the challenges they face.1 Education is related to but different from training; we must clarify this difference before we can continue: Training is, of course, the basis of any armed force: to fulfill their role, forces must shape the skills and attitudes of their members, especially recruits but also those in mid-career, with clearly defined aims and immediate, practical application. For instance, training must convert recruits who cannot fire rifles, drive tanks, or fly aircraft into trained personnel who can do these things with set minimum levels of proficiency. Likewise, officer training aims at instilling minimum levels of competence. At the tactical level, platoon and company commanders are trained to fight and to lead soldiers under fire; at the operational level, staff officers are trained to plan procedures and manage logistics, among other things. Training, therefore, is fundamental, clear-cut, and skills based.
A professional military, however, needs programs of personal development in areas beyond basic training requirements: it must instill knowledge, intellectual skills, and, most important, the ability for members to think about the world and the military’s place in it in an independent, informed, and logical manner. Personal development at this level goes beyond training and is more accurately referred to as education. Of course, in the military as in most environments, training and education overlap: training courses for potential officers at West Point or Sandhurst, or courses for middle-ranking officers at staff colleges, contain a strong element of education, while the British Army’s former education for promotion courses for senior NCOs included identifiable training, albeit in fields that require some application of intellect, such as management and administration.
Whereas training aims at building, maintaining, and improving work-related skills, and training in the military also aims at preparing personnel physically and psychologically for combat, education instills knowledge. Not just knowledge for its own sake, either—not just filling a student’s brain with facts or figures but expanding her understanding of the world in hope of steering her decision-making along routes that achieve more good than harm for herself and others. Thus, most professions have a degree of ethical education as part of their induction process, the aim being to enable people to think about why they do things beyond just how they do them, and how and why their actions might impact others.
Samuel Huntington can be disputed on many things, but he was right in arguing that a key component of any profession is awareness that it is, in fact, a profession, a group with specialist knowledge differentiating it from others, and that this specialization gives members status within society, balanced by a duty of service to that society. Professionals should never forget that their relationship with society is subject to circumstances of history, politics, culture, and economics, meaning in turn that technical expertise and specialist education must combine with a degree of liberal and ethical education, so that professionals understand their place in the world and how their actions might affect it.2 A profession’s importance to a functioning society means that its knowledge must be preserved so it can be passed on to future generations of professionals. Another difference between education and training is that the latter hinges on demonstration, imitation, and practice rather than on any theoretical corpus.
The Historical Context
Education has been a key feature of modern professional militaries since the nineteenth century. The rudiments of professional structures were visible in many European armies, and the embryonic US Army, by 1800. However, up to the 1790s armies were a long way from Huntington’s ideal model. Before then the feudal aristocracy, which is the landowning classes, held a virtual monopoly over officership in European armies, and officers received little education for their role, reflecting a belief that leadership was innate in those of a certain social breeding. Military education before 1800 can be divided into two types. The first was schools for the preliminary military education and officer training of boys of noble birth, such as Frederick the Great’s appropriately named Ritter Akademie. Technical training establishments for artillery and engineer officers make up the second category. Perhaps the most famous among them is the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, founded in 1741 to provide mathematical and technical education for future officers of the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, and the US Military Academy at West Point, founded in 1794 as a technical school for engineers and gunners.
Foundations of Professionalism
The emergence of modern professional militaries and the education systems to go with them was one small expression of the main defining social trends of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were rooted in the growth of economies based on industrial production in cities. The political power of the old landed aristocracy waned sharply because of this, and the industrialization of society brought the emergence of the professions, a new middle class of educated specialists who served the new industrial economy and society as managers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, and scientists. The nationalist and liberal revolutions provided the political context in which population growth and the Industrial Revolution allowed states to mobilize armies on a scale previously unthinkable and enabled armies to develop a class of professional commanders to organize and lead them. Indeed, the key role of the military profession over the next two hundred years was to provide a core of commanders for mass armed forces of citizen soldiers formed from a combination of conscription and short-service wartime volunteers.
Napoleon showed what this profession should do, and in turn shaped ideas about why and how the profession should be educated. Under the Napoleonic system, armies that previously marched and fought as single bodies were divided into separate corps, advancing on broad fronts before closing in on the enemy. The movement of these corps was coordinated via a bureaucratic staff who drew up maps, issued orders, and made sure each corps had enough supplies to get where it needed to go and could fight when it got there; this staff needed to be trained and educated to the level of technical expertise needed to accomplish this. Many of Napoleon’s victories prior to 1809 can be attributed to his staff organization, and his enemies adopted their own versions of the Napoleonic staff and command system in response to his successes against them.
After 1815 industrialization allowed states to perfect the Napoleonic system of warfare, and the new professional middle class was better adapted to take many positions in what became an increasingly technical and technological endeavor. From 1850 to 1875 advanced technical establishments, staff colleges, were created to train officers for higher levels of command and staff work. A leading figure in this was Napoleon’s former general Gouvion St. Cyr, who was allowed to continue serving after Waterloo, and who was appointed French War Minister twice. St. Cyr established a coherent system of officer education based on the premise that all officer entry should be from the ranks or by competition from one of France’s two military schools, the Ecole Polytechnique, founded 1794 to train artillery and engineer officers, and L’école spéciale militaire, Grande école d’enseignement supérieur at Fontainebleau, founded in 1803 on Napoleon’s orders and moved to Saint-Cyr in 1808.
Across the Channel, the Royal Military College for infantry, cavalry, and staff officers of the British Army was founded by General John Le Marchant at High Wycombe in 1802 and moved to Sandhurst in 1812; attendance at the Royal Military College or Royal Military Academy for all officer candidates of the British Army was compulsory from 1879. However, the global leader in the development of military education was Prussia, where class restrictions on entry to the officer corps were abolished in 1808 and officially sanctioned educational requirements, strictly enforced, meant that all Prussian officers were kept to a uniform, high standard. Under General Helmuth von Moltke, its head from 1857, the Prussian General Staff became the model for all others. Moltke’s staff officers were not just technologists, but also were trained experts in war making, who monitored and advised commanders, ensuring conformity with officially prescribed tactical doctrine.
New Professionals
The rise of professional military education was in reaction to the profound changes in war and society that took place courtesy of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the development of mass armed forces, and the growing technical nature of warfare. The form and development of military education in the twenty-first century must reflect contemporary developments. To begin, Western nations at least are moving away from the idea of the conscripted or volunteer citizen-soldier to that of the long-serving military professional, conscription in most Western countries, and many Eastern ones, being either abolished or permanently suspended since 1989.
Armed services made up of long-service professionals can be trained far longer and more thoroughly than the conscripts in a mass armed force, leading to two further developments. First, forces are professional at all levels. When Huntington wrote The Soldier and the State in the 1950s, the only real career professionals who could be identified as such were officers, and generally only those above a certain rank or filling specific positions. There were forces that had NCOs and senior soldiers with many professional characteristics, like the British Army, the US Marine Corps, and the French Foreign Legion, but they tended to be rare and the exception. Today all ranks above lance corporal need serious professional qualifications to do the jobs required of them, along with a strong sense of themselves as professionals.
This leads to the second point: professional militaries now exhibit high levels of specialization and division of labor. These extant forces often rely on technology to compensate for their relatively smaller size, which means that instead of the old mass army model, where the bulk of forces consisted of infantry, artillery, or armor, combat arms now tend to be in the minority, with specialists outnumbering combat formations.
The change in the internal structuring of armed forces has coincided with evolution in ideas about the purpose of the military. The prevalent view in the age of mass armies and total war was that armed forces existed to protect the state from existential threats. Now, it seems armies exist to project the power of the state overseas to protect its political and economic interests. Some states might also take responsibility for protecting others from suffering created by natural or manmade disasters sufficiently seriously to want their forces to make liberal/humanitarian interventions. So, the background to military education in the West in the twenty-first century is one of smaller, highly professional forces developing and preserving the capability to intervene globally.
Why Military Education Is Different
It is the education military professionals receive, the why they do a thing, that glues together the different schemes of training they pass through into a coherent whole. Members of the military are professionals in applying deadly force on behalf of their government in pursuit of that government’s policy aims. The more professional the military, the more seriously it should take this role, the more efficient it will be, and the better the chances of achieving those policies.
The military differs from other professions in several other ways, thereby affecting the educational programs the military needs and how they are delivered. First is the career structure of military forces. All soldiers, sailors, and airmen start from the bottom of a rigidly hierarchical structure with a promotion system intended to move talent upward, so that the young people recruited by the forces are developed from within to become the leaders of tomorrow. Officers and soldiers progress through a series of appointments, each presenting new mental demands, requiring some adjustment of attitude, and demanding development in diverse areas ranging from the theoretical background to different types of warfare to technical and trade training. Moreover, some military employments require skills, such as foreign languages, not covered by basic military training, thus requiring a higher level of individual instruction than the standard training process can allow for. Alongside this, to get the best out of their charges, officers and NCOs require education in the art and science of management as well as in the right way to lead troops under fire. Despite the sentiments expressed in recruiting literature and in many a Sovereign’s Parade Speech at Sandhurst, no professional force expects commanders to get by on natural flair alone.
The second major way in which the military differs from civilian professions in its approach to education stems from the unlimited liability it imposes on its members. In stark contrast with any other profession, the military can require its members to be in situations where they must kill or be killed. Military professionals must, therefore, have the greatest possible degree of understanding of their reasons for doing the job and the commitment it entails, and of what motivates those they operate with and against. Put starkly, they must understand why they must apply deadly force where, when, and in the way they do. The third difference is the very high level of responsibility that the military places on leaders, putting them in charge of what are literally life-or-death decisions. Unconstrained by economic factors, the military officer must appreciate his responsibilities to his colleagues, his soldiers, his superiors, and, most important of all, to his country, the people he serves, and the way of life he protects. All war is explicitly political, and so every action by any member of the armed forces in the performance of any military operation will have political intent and implications. This leads to a key reason why education is so important for militaries now, and why that education needs to be crafted especially for the kind of situations they are likely to face on the ground.
Narrative and the Profession
Some otherwise very well-trained militaries have been found wanting in political awareness, particularly in the complex scenarios that have emerged in twenty-first century warfare. Thanks to their training and experience, most individual officers and NCOs will know a good solution to a problem when they see one, but militaries collectively can sometimes give the impression of institutional autism, as the slowness of the US and British militaries to adapt to the situation in Iraq in 2003–4 indicates. Several recent books on Afghanistan, particularly those by Emile Simpson and Frank Ledwidge, present the idea of competing narratives, or the notion that there can be an accepted idea of what a war is about, why it is happening, who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, who is going to win, and how. However, other people in that same war could have radically different views on all these same things, possibly including your friends as well as your enemies. Such narratives can be the backbone of combat motivation and morale for the troops and for public support for military action, in the areas of operations and the domestic constituency, in the case of intervening forces. Yet, a reading of Simpson’s and Ledwidge’s books shows many have tried to impose an inappropriate narrative on what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq recently. The old Maoist model of revolutionary warfare being imposed on the Taliban and Daesh, these entities being portrayed as a single, all pervasive insurgency carried out by evil people, hard-core religious fanatics intent on imposing a totalitarian theocracy on those protected by the West.3 The reality is a complicated patchwork of tribal, family, and criminal networks, all pursuing their own aims, which can stem from ideology, commercial interests, or simply turf. These personal alliances might be fighting viciously one month and allied with each other the next. These alliances tend to be far more influential than state governments across large parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Yet Ledwidge, in particular, cites numerous examples of the kind of embarrassing and occasionally self-defeating things that happen when supposedly professional militaries do not appreciate the complex and unpredictable environments created by these informal networks.4 This failure to adapt is of particular concern, and indeed, rather paradoxical, given that interventions into genuinely multicultural, multitribal, and multilingual societies of the sort found in the Middle East, Africa, and across much of Asia are exactly the scenario for which most Western professional armed forces claim to train and structure themselves today.
It is therefore doubly essential that service personnel receive historical, political, and cultural education about the people they are working with and against. If, at the very least, forces develop a good, accurate understanding of why the enemy sees the world the way he does, then those forces are some way along the road to defeating or at least neutralizing him. If they understand the culture and worldview of the people among whom they operate, particularly during interventions and insurgencies, it will help immensely in gaining local confidence and cooperation and improving efficiency in areas like intelligence gathering. Moreover, the importance of narrative means that, on one level, a basic understanding of the part the modern media play in shaping the narrative is vital, particularly in an age where satellite and cable television and social media mean that anyone in a war zone with a mobile phone is a potential war correspondent whose stories can reach vast audiences within hours.
On one level, therefore, all military personnel should have at least basic education in what the media does and the level of its importance in the modern world. On another level, having a positive narrative of the war you happen to be fighting, and a positive narrative that is accepted by most of the public, is vital. Indeed, wars of choice such as the United States and its allies have fought recently can be won or lost on the narrative. One need only refer back to Clausewitz’s trilogy of forces; it is the will of the public that decides how far the war will and can be pursued, and that depends entirely on which narrative of the war it accepts.5 The narrative presented to the Western public about Iraq and Afghanistan was that NATO troops were engaged in a liberating, liberalizing mission, but that narrative would be easier to sell if everybody on the ground behaved accordingly. Best, therefore, to avoid stories such as those of Sergeant Blackman and the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib atrocities—idiotic to allow the electronic recording of their crimes, but even more idiotic to commit those crimes in the first place, recorded or not.
It follows that on one level the art of crafting narratives and understanding how they are developed and employed needs to be studied and taught to service people at all levels. On a more fundamental level, ethics and soldiers’ virtues should form a key part of any military education scheme, and for more than just cosmetic reasons. Not only does an uncompromising code of conduct underlie any profession, but also, combined with the political intent behind their actions, that code is a strong ethical underpinning that differentiates the military from a band of armed thugs. As to what this framework should be, for clarity we defer to the model laid out by David Fisher, who before his academic career was required to engage with moral dilemmas practically as a senior civil servant with the British Ministry of Defence. Fisher argued that the main virtues the military must cultivate are courage, practical wisdom, and a keen sense of justice: of these, justice is the one virtue that can be taught most obviously in a classroom.6 Justice is an interesting concept that can be described as doing the right thing because that is what you are conditioned to do. It might be argued that a real moral dilemma—indeed, most real-world moral dilemmas—involves choosing the lesser of two evils. Such decisions are complicated further by the speed and chaos of the modern battlefield, where warriors sometimes have to make decisions on the basis of rapidly evolving information under conditions where military personnel, their peers, and subordinates might be in deadly danger.
Nevertheless, military professionals can be educated that there are some things that are morally unacceptable because they are illegal under domestic or international law or the general concept of jus in bello and that true military professionals do not forget this even if the enemy does. A good working knowledge of the Geneva and Hague Conventions is a good place to start. Educators of military members must make clear to the recruit or officer cadet that such international agreements are not just things to be recited in promotion examinations, but rather a code that shapes the military profession and one that members of the armed forces are expected to live by. This is where practical wisdom or common sense becomes important. Practical wisdom is the ability to look at a situation, weigh up the options for dealing with it, assess potential costs and benefits to all those involved, then come to the option that solves the situation most effectively and at least cost to all those involved. To some extent, practical wisdom is a function of personality, sharpened by experience and maturity; it is perhaps the most vital attribute of anyone in a position of leadership. Fisher cited the example of the US Marine Corps officer in Vietnam who came across one of his Marines, “enraged by the death of his comrades,” about to shoot a Vietnamese civilian woman. The officer simply said, calmly but firmly, “Marines don’t do that,” and the Marine snapped out of his rage and lowered his weapon. “Where an appeal to the just war principles would have failed, an appeal to the military virtues embodied in the Marine’s own code of honor worked. Marines do not kill innocent women. Marines are not murderers but just warriors.”7 Like courage and loyalty, practical wisdom and a sense of justice can be developed, in particular by presenting military trainees with historical examples of virtuous or evil behavior in war and incorporating frequent problem-solving exercises involving an ethical element into programs of military training and education.
Doctrine and the Profession
Another vital component of the argument in support of military education is why each armed force goes about its business in the way it does. The word “doctrine” can be defined as principles to be taught, and so refers explicitly to education. The concept of doctrine started in religion and was transferred to politics, and then to the military. It denotes any attempt to create a coherent, systematic way of doing things, usually taking the form of an officially endorsed set of recommended actions for any given situation. Doctrine is the “why” for most military people and is more of the glue tying all professions’ training, organization, and acquisition policy together into a coherent whole that works better than the sum of its parts. Education is particularly important to the US and British militaries because of their attitude to doctrine. A general philosophy in both forces is that doctrine should not be too prescriptive, but rather a set of guidelines that can and must be adapted to whatever situation it comes up against. US and British military doctrine hinges (in theory) on the concept of mission command: fundamentally, give a commander an objective, a time to achieve it by, and then trust him to get on with it without too much supervision, adapting to the situation as he sees fit. Mission command requires all commanders to have sufficient intellectual breadth to appreciate the overall mission of the entire force, how they fit into it, and the impact, for better or worse, of certain actions on the enemy. It is important, therefore, that commanders have some knowledge of the evolution of strategic theory and military history. Understanding strategic theory is important because it answers another set of “why” questions; Why is there a particular arm of service, called on by its political masters to perform specific tasks, and why does each service go about them in the way it does? Just as important, might there be better ways of doing these things the professional should know about? A truly professional officer, of any service, should be asking these questions constantly to help his service adapt and evolve not only day to day on the ground but also decade to decade as history throws new shocks at it.
Military history is vital as well. History is accumulated vicarious experience, allowing decision-makers today to learn from what others did before. Serious, instructive history is about the study of change and process over time, which is another way of explaining how and why things happen now in the way that they do. History also provides guidelines for what professional militaries might be doing now—history does not repeat itself, but it does occasionally rhyme. While a good knowledge of military history probably will not teach explicit lessons for today’s armed forces, if understood properly such knowledge will send important messages. The first and most important of these messages is, “Nothing starts with us.” Truly unprecedented situations are rare, contrary to what many claimed in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11. Others have dealt successfully with similar situations in the past. While studying history might not provide specific answers, it can direct professionals toward which questions need to be answered.8
Consequently, officers’ education in military history should cover defeats and fiascos as much as it does successes, if not more so. A study of events that lead to defeat usually teaches more than triumphalist celebration of success of the sort that followed Operation Desert Storm, a celebration that shaped perceptions of how operations in Iraq and Afghanistan ten years later would play out. There is also something more visceral about military history, perhaps one reason why the British Army places such great stock on recording regimental histories and why the US Marine Corps makes knowledge of Corps history a requirement for all its recruits and officer candidates. History reminds people they are part of something bigger and older than they are, in which those going before have set standards of conduct and behavior that today’s people are expected to keep up. It also shows people that others have faced apparently impossible challenges in the past and overcame them. For any profession, including the military, history both serves an inspirational purpose and teaches humility.
Jointness and Interagency Cooperation
The final argument in support of military education is linked explicitly with the intervention-based missions and organizations that modern Western forces train for. Twenty-first-century military interventions combine jointness with the comprehensive approach, a country’s armed forces acting in cooperation with each other and the forces of allies, be they local or part of broader international coalitions. It is now presumed that civilian agencies will be involved at all levels of a conflict as well, particularly in humanitarian interventions and counterinsurgencies. The comprehensive approach is controversial, but a professional force must adapt to it. Its application necessitates some understanding and appreciation of how other agencies work, and in many cases, how the armed forces of allies work. As to the latter, coalition operations, under tight political control, are now the norm, and senior officers find themselves operating alongside officers from allied countries who sometimes have greater firsthand knowledge of a situation than they do, and civil servants, senior police officers, and civilian intelligence personnel of their own country and others, who are all highly qualified professionals themselves. For senior military officers to play their part effectively at this level and to retain their credibility with colleagues, they must develop awareness of the complexities of defense and political issues, international history, and regional security as well as some sensitivity to the cultural mores of other groups.
The growth of jointness means that, in future, knowledge of advanced and integrated warfare, and even strategy, might have to stretch down to junior levels. In the British Army this process begins at Sandhurst and continues via Joint Services Command and Staff College to the Royal College of Defence Studies. At an individual level, the language courses provided at the Defence School of Languages, Beaconsfield, include strong elements of the subject nation’s culture, society, and politics. Such a broad, humanities-based education does not just involve understanding these other nations and agencies now, but also involves learning something of their past, giving insight into what they are capable of and prepared to do, with the aim of improving the planning process and cooperation on the ground. It also seeks to reduce the chance of cultural clashes, particularly between the military and civilian agencies that might have widely divergent reasons for why something is happening and what they are going to do about it.
Western forces are facing a complicated and sometimes rather awkward operational environment in the twenty-first century, the main scenario for which most militaries train being intervention in areas geographically and culturally far from home. All service people, be they airmen, sailors, soldiers, or marines, are going to need the breadth of knowledge, vision, and understanding to do their jobs in this environment. They will need a degree of cultural understanding, because culture shapes everything from the political aims of allies and enemies down to their organization for achieving this, and the way in which a professional military navigates this environment. Awareness of the way in which effective performance has been produced in the past will give service people a greater understanding of how to perform effectively now or at least avoid poor or counterproductive performance in the future. Combined with an understanding of the social and historical context of the military as a profession, this awareness, developed through education, will allow the military at all levels to ask itself and others the right questions to produce the right answers. Education is vital to the twenty-first-century militaries, and likely to become more so, given the challenges they face.
Notes
1. The author would like to thank Col. David Benest, Prof. Christopher Dandeker, the late Dr. David Fisher, Col. John Hughes-Wilson, Frank Ledwidge, William F. Owen, and Emile Simpson for their ideas, inspiration, and support.
2. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, 10, 16–18.
3. Daesh is the Arabic language acronym for the Islamic State group, or ISIS.
4. Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), esp. 62–71; Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics (London: Hurst, 2012), 3–4, 15–24, 31–39.
5. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (London: Everyman, 1993), 83–85, 101, 158–59.
6. David Fisher, Morality and War: Can War be Just in the Twenty-First Century? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 108–33.
7. Fisher, Morality and War, 128–29 (including quotes).
8. As argued by General James Mattis, former Supreme Allied Commander, Europe in an interview in Military History (July 2015): 14–15.