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West Point is only one of three service academies, and it needs to teach only enough of the higher level of war to produce a reasonably competent Second Lieuten
by psunavy03 1y ago
West Point is only one of three service academies, and it needs to teach only enough of the higher level of war to produce a reasonably competent Second Lieutenant. In fact it's arguable the service academies are a waste of resources as currently implemented as opposed to OCS and ROTC.
What matters is what is taught to the Majors, Lieutenant Colonels, Lieutenant Commanders, and Commanders 12-15 years later at the War Colleges. And as a graduate myself (if only by correspondence) I can assure you that Clausewitz and Sun Tzu were very much still on the books in the 2010s.
- pclmulqdq 1y agoThe war colleges are more intellectual than many people think. The curricula of those schools include most of the seminal works on war and statecraft from Thucydides to Kissinger.
- psunavy03 1y agoI was disappointed they truncated the remote version of Strategy and War and we didn't get to dig into Thucydides and Corbett. I will say getting that intellectualism to stick in the officer corps doesn't necessarily always work. There are jokes about "it's only a lot of reading if you do the reading," and oftentimes being able to spend a year in residence gets passed over in favor of sending people to other assignments and expecting them to do the War College syllabus by correspondence. That said, the War Colleges are also heavily involved in things like designing and evaluating higher-level military exercises, red-teaming things, etc.