Thinking creatively in some situations kills one sooner than blind obedience. Think incoming (What's that sound, which direction is it coming from, is it ours or their's, which of my counter-battery options are best suited to returning fire?) instead of just getting in the ditch as a muscle-reflex. Over-simplified but to the point - much of our tradition is based on the thought that a civilian must be broken of that innovative spirit that causes hesitation. This is not to be scoffed at and thrown away or "transformed" lightly.

I have no bone to pick with the academies, I have known good, bad, and great graduates. Most problems they face are writ large in other institutions of higher learning. We have as a society scrapped discipline for relativity. Our services now are trying to find a way of turning that social dogma into good military theory, particularly when it comes to current conflicts where creative thinking seems to be a yet unharnessed wave to victory.

I am unconvinced. I submit the wholly inadequate single source of Custer's "Life on the Plains" as evidence of a counter-tribal-insurgent fighter who probably didn't pick up any Lean Six Sigma or synergistic-cooperative-think-meeting courses in his time at Hudson High, but some how managed to transition from a totally conventional war to a totally unconventional war quite well (final battle aside). And he certainly had to do plenty of inexplicable make-work in school. I submit he learned more about human nature in that four year experience than current studs do and that is really what victory in any kind of battle hinges on.

Cadets suffer from social isolation that makes them auto-mans in regular society. So what. We don't really care how they perform in regular society and they have the rest of their life to figure it out anyway. My question is "is there any significant decline in the quality officer (given current social phenomena) and can we do something about it?"

My previous post brings up two of the most recent "transformations" in those institutions in particular, less so in regular society(being recent transformations), and I would start there in trying to find if anything and what has changed. They are namely, the inclusion of the fairer sex in cadet ranks and a distinct leftward leaning in the faculty (I am relying on anecdotal evidence for the later claim, mostly from cadets I have known, but also from friends who have taught there and are so persuaded.)

I don't have a dog in the fight really. But some times its fun to poke and prod the fighting dogs.