Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

[marct]

Hi Shek,

I thought the "fashion tips" metaphor used by Dr. Wong was quite clever, although the message itself is disheartening. Once again, as an Army, in order to close a gap, we implemented a "fix" by starting to award masters degrees for the war college to show that we were "educating" our officers; however, the war colleges don't provide the broadening experience that a civilian graduate school will, and so some of the value of a graduate degree is lost (this isn't saying that they don't receive solid instruction at the graduate level, but a lunchroom conversation over a particular conflictwith other uniformed members isn't the same as one with fellow grad students who may have been with NGOs working a completely different side of the same conflict and can provide a potentially alien perspective).

I also thought the fashion metaphor was good - it reminded me of many academics I have worked with .

I think you are right about the war college acting as an internal reinforcer of perceptions. Maybe they would get a better overall "experience" at a civilian graduate school. Honestly, I think it might be better still if they took degrees in civilian graduate schools outside of the US. That way you would get both a civilian "take"on the issue as well as experience in a different culture. It would be interesting to see what the graduate exchange programs are like. By way of example, a couple of my former students have studied in France, while others have studied in England, Australia, the US and New Zealand. The cultural difference alone does seem to make a lot of difference.

As far as "critical thinking," I guess that I am also naive as to its true meaning. What I was trying to get at was the ability to look at a problem at from several angles, especially to include those that you disagree with or may not have otherwise ever thought of (e.g. the conservation with a NGO member) so that you can arrive at a solution that has thought through all the possibilities. Thus, as the proverbial saying goes, not all problems look like nails wanting a hammer to fix them

Point taken ! One of the people in my Ph.D. cohort defined "critical thinking" as the ability to rip anyone's argument apart - that way you could get easy publications, still be perceived as "critical", and get a rep as a great theoretician. That particular one never really impressed me, but I did see a lot of it .

Marc

[120mm]

Again, my experience with 101st in OIF I was generally positive, while my experience with 4ID was universally negative.

On Petraeus, I like the fit of his jib. He is both warrior and scholar, while not being a weakened amalgamation of both. There are few Generals I would trust to collect a good group without just "picking names." Petraeus is one of them.

[Stan]

www.usnews.com
By Julian E. Barnes
10/31/05

The general credits the Army's field training for teaching him to be a creative commander. But his adaptive thinking also comes from his work outside the military. At Princeton, where he earned his advanced degree in international relations, he had a chance to interact with exceptional scholars, many of whom had a very different view of the world and of human nature.

[lirelou]

I appreciated the article despite it's pandering to stereotypes. Just a small comment on Kilcullen. The Australian army is a small, but very professional. It presently counts six active battalions in its structure, and like us relies upon its reserves to meet all its present commitments. Some of my mates felt that in terms of pure manpower, they had only enough men to fully man four of the six infantry battalions. The Aussie Army also has some unique characteristics which make it different from both the British Army, and our own. First of all, Australian infantry officers spend much of their careers within a battalion. This gives them long term exposure to many different levels of battalion operations. In my day (II Corps MIKE Force, 1968), the typical Aussie captain had been a rifle platoon leader, a mortar platoon leader, and often a recce platoon leader, as well as battalion supply officer, transport officer, perhaps intelligence officer, and assistant training officer, before he became a company commander (a Major's position), and many had already commanded companies. They tended to be a few years older than their U.S. counterparts, whose career patterns had taken them in and out of tactical battalions, schools, and non-tactical assignments. Moreover, as the Australian defence forces lacked the enormous logistical power projection capabilities of the U.S. military, both the officers, and especially the warrants, tended to be far more enterprising in seeking solutions outside the traditional chain of command. The men who trained these officers were inevitably the warrants (senior NCOs), and here I would note that the only U.S. service to have an NCO corps which equates to the Aussie Warrants is the U.S.M.C.. These warrants were likewise highly experienced, having spent many years within a battalion, and having held a similar variety of positions ranging from infantryman to BREN gunner, up through section (squad?) and platoon, in rifle, recce, and occasionally mortar platoons. This gave them a grounding in small unit operations that was, in Vietnam, generally lacking within U.S. battalions once the U.S. battalion's original complement had been filled by replacements. In summary, reaching lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army is as much an achievement as making the 0-6 tactical brigade command list in the U.S. Army, and he should have some very solid small unit operational experience that will assist him in his duties. And he not foreign. He's Australian!

[George L. Singleton]

Hi Shek,



I also thought the fashion metaphor was good - it reminded me of many academics I have worked with .

I think you are right about the war college acting as an internal reinforcer of perceptions. Maybe they would get a better overall "experience" at a civilian graduate school. Honestly, I think it might be better still if they took degrees in civilian graduate schools outside of the US. That way you would get both a civilian "take"on the issue as well as experience in a different culture. It would be interesting to see what the graduate exchange programs are like. By way of example, a couple of my former students have studied in France, while others have studied in England, Australia, the US and New Zealand. The cultural difference alone does seem to make a lot of difference.



Point taken ! One of the people in my Ph.D. cohort defined "critical thinking" as the ability to rip anyone's argument apart - that way you could get easy publications, still be perceived as "critical", and get a rep as a great theoretician. That particular one never really impressed me, but I did see a lot of it .

Marc

Marc:

More small humor from "the old coot" kibitzer.

As I was doing by correspondence the sections of my USAF Command and Staff College, which was being monitored and graded at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama by an active duty USAF 05 War College Professor, I did two things, a somewhat "fire for effect" to see what happens scenario. My half Irish impish nature, let's say.

1. I quoted in my C&S paper a long article I in fact had written and published in the WALL STREET JOURNAL a few years earlier on the World Bank loaning to the poorest nations and the linked relationship of the Bank for International Settlements in Berne, Switzerland, where all nations have SDRs (special drawing rights to increase any/a nation's money supply/credit instantly for justifiable purposes of economic need when total national productivity or lack of same stoppers doing whatever requires more funding your country just "ain't" got at the moment). *My eclectic background included several years after active USAF duty, before I joined the USAF Reserve program, as an international banker in NYC. That experience was the basis on which I later wrote and published in the WALL STREET JOURNAL the SDR article, while working as a Congressional Budget Officer for the US Department of Veterans Affairs Central Office in Washington.

2. I also noted an article on the decimation of the rain forest in Brazil and it's effect on the regional, even global economy via climatic impact, which in turn affects weather patterns which in turn affect some economic enterprises, all impacing the (old terminology today) GNP and NNP economic measures, both topics woven into total topic of affordability of "a" nation to deal with "guns and butter."

Topic #1 cited in the bibliography the author as "George Singleton, then an International Banking Officer with Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., NYC" , while #2 cited one of my former New York University Sterne Graduate Business School (night division) B-school economics professors.

My C&S course/paper monitor didn't like my use of the WALL STREET JOURNAL as a source for what he accepted as related topic support material but overlooked/didn't notice who the author was (me!) somehow. On rebuttal, with further explination of my paper's goals and purposes, the 05 relented and agreed after all that "maybe" the occasional WSJ financial/economic reference was OK, still not noticing that I was the article's author.

On the Brazilian rain forest decimation, the 05 paper monitor/grader still did not like the analogy, but finally accepted it, as I simply refused to take it out. And, as I did quarterly guest drills with the *Maxwell Base Commander's office to avoid frequent drill only commutes to HQSOCOM at MacDill in Tampa, I used a drill period to go sit down over coffee with the C&S 05 Professor (at that time I was still a reserve 05 myself) and talked him into "my logic and reasoning" to the point he let it go.

*Base CO was a civil engineer by degree and used me to help redesign the entire base runway and road system. My BA was in history and poltical science, but because I had a night school MBA he felt "I must know what I was doing as I was then at the JCS level involved in both J4 and J5 plans!"

Enough long winded blather. Unique thinking, and different experiences can all help solve problems, including war and civil affairs issues, if one has an open mind and can relate the pieces of the puzzle in an understandable and practical outcome manner.

My view is we really wasted huge amounts of time undermanning and not dealing cohesively up front with the civil affairs needs of Iraq after our first few weeks of hot conflict ended there. I will not digress further into what might have been, as that is now pointless, I am sure you agree.

George Singleton

[marct]

Hi George,

Marc:

More small humor from "the old coot" kibitzer.

Not at all! It is "the sharing of relevant experience". Besides that, I'm an Anthropologist and one of the things that we know is that stories are the basis of "learning" because they combine both emotion and logic .

Unique thinking, and different experiences can all help solve problems, including war and civil affairs issues, if one has an open mind and can relate the pieces of the puzzle in an understandable and practical outcome manner.

I totally agree with that. I remember, during the 2nd year of my Ph.D. fieldwork, I was asked to give a "critique" seminar to the career counsellors I was studying. Within 20 minutes, we got into an intense discussion of how to construct their seminars using a model from the study of ritual (actually, a variant of Victor Turner's work). The discussion moved through all sorts of different religious traditions and, by about 25 minutes int it, we were arguing the relative merits of ecstatic rituals vs contemplative ones in training people how to write resumes. There was something surreal about discussing Divine Pomander and The Gospel of Norea in a business boardroom, but the changes made in their seminars reflected that conversation and, in the end, proved much more effective in getting people to write good resumes.

Marc

[George L. Singleton]

Hi George,



Not at all! It is "the sharing of relevant experience". Besides that, I'm an Anthropologist and one of the things that we know is that stories are the basis of "learning" because they combine both emotion and logic .



I totally agree with that. I remember, during the 2nd year of my Ph.D. fieldwork, I was asked to give a "critique" seminar to the career counsellors I was studying. Within 20 minutes, we got into an intense discussion of how to construct their seminars using a model from the study of ritual (actually, a variant of Victor Turner's work). The discussion moved through all sorts of different religious traditions and, by about 25 minutes int it, we were arguing the relative merits of ecstatic rituals vs contemplative ones in training people how to write resumes. There was something surreal about discussing Divine Pomander and The Gospel of Norea in a business boardroom, but the changes made in their seminars reflected that conversation and, in the end, proved much more effective in getting people to write good resumes.

Marc

As a co-founder and past Alabama State Chairman of the Chuck Colson Prison Ministry, there are some (not vast numbers, but some) one-time, non-violent, higher IQ ex-offenders (ex-cons) who could make good enlisted men and women for any/all branches of our services. IN the process they would find a niche in life and could become military "lifers." These men and women are not of any one ethnic or racial background in my experience, but of all colors and backgrounds, bascially all from in the main poorer homes or lack of homes, and in need of remedial reading courses and such.

From experience of 6 years on the Board of the Alabama Department of Youth Services (our juvenile, under age 18 jail system) we found the same thing, young teenage boys and girls, few but some in number there who could benefit the military if remedial reading and a stable environment were available, such as the military.

In the middle of a hot war may seem an odd time to address this topic. But, some small subset of these do not need remedial reading, are actually well educated and just made stupid/dumb one time mistakes, and could be of use and easily/readily trained at the grunt use level right now.

Please don't stop the war to deal with these side issues, but someone in military manpower should be gleaning these inputs and talking to the various service recruiting commanding generals to get something done to get and use the virtually ready to go now teenagers and younger adult ex-cons who made a one time, non-violent huge mistake. They are salvagable and I believe in the main would make good enlisted personnel.

George Singleton

[marct]

Hi George,

Please don't stop the war to deal with these side issues, but someone in military manpower should be gleaning these inputs and talking to the various service recruiting commanding generals to get something done to get and use the virtually read to go now teenagers and younger adult ex-cons who made a one time, non-violent huge mistake. They are salvagable and I believe in the main would make good enlisted personnel.

And, quite possibly, excellent officers .


Historically, military organizations have been an excellent way of allowing "troubled youth" (I think that's the current PC phrase) to get a good swift kick in the fundament and give them a chance to get both a future and a sense of meaning. And, given the nature of the current conflict, it's not a side issue - it is a fundamental problem.

Marc

[Steve Blair]

Hi George,



And, quite possibly, excellent officers .


Historically, military organizations have been an excellent way of allowing "troubled youth" (I think that's the current PC phrase) to get a good swift kick in the fundament and give them a chance to get both a future and a sense of meaning. And, given the nature of the current conflict, it's not a side issue - it is a fundamental problem.

Marc

Actually I think it's "challenged youth" or "youth at risk" these days. Or possibly "alternate behavioral lifestyle-oriented persons of pre-adult status"....

[slapout9]

Hi George, I don't know for sure but several years ago Marion Military academy was having tremendous financial problems. How and if that was resolved I don't know but they were trying to get major funding to remain open without drastic increases in tuition. PS- I will be in B'Ham next Thursday and Friday maybe we could meet up for lunch? Hey, you no where Duck town,Tenn, is? My parents are from there. Also you married an Auburn girl? Which side do you sit on when you go to the Iron Bowl

[George L. Singleton]

Hi George, I don't know for sure but several years ago Marion Military academy was having tremendous financial problems. How and if that was resolved I don't know but they were trying to get major funding to remain open without drastic increases in tuition. PS- I will be in B'Ham next Thursday and Friday maybe we could meet up for lunch? Hey, you no where Duck town,Tenn, is? My parents are from there. Also you married an Auburn girl? Which side do you sit on when you go to the Iron Bowl

Thanks for your note. Send me your cell phone number by e-mail with date and time of day you may be reachable here in Bham and we can have lunch, fine with me.

1. MMI went broke and the State of Alabama took over the two year junior college program, from which in the past Second Lieutenant's flowed in goodly numbers.

2. The prep or grades 6-12 private school of MMI remains just that, private, and also remains "broke." That issue, grades 6-12 is still being "discussed."

3. The President of MMI is retired Marine Colonel James H. Benson, who has his PhD about completed from George Washington University in DC.

4. My wife is a Yankee, a graduate of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Our oldest of three daughters has two architecture degrees from Auburn. Except for the Iron Bowl we sit with Auburn at Auburn games; with Alabama at Alabama games; and I sit with Alabama at the Iron Bowl, Alice switches, sometimes sits with our Auburn graduate daughter, sometimes with me, the Bama grad.

5. Yes, I know Duck town, great place and area. Tennessee is a great state. Two of our three daughters chose to live and work in TN, one did two degees on scholarships at Vanderbilt, in fact. I sure couldn't afford VU with three children overlapping 3.5 years out of the 5 years (architecture is a 5 year degree) they were all three at Auburn, Vanderbilt and Furman (VU & Furman = our twin daughters).

6. My late Dad did his college during the very early 1920s in the night division of Pace University in NYC, then named Pace & Pace Institute, where he studied accounting and auditing. He later did extra coursework at Auburn University in accounting and auditing when/while he was Chief Examiner of Public Accounts, Alabama's equivalent of other states Auditor's job. *Dad was #7 of 8 children.

REGARDING MARION MILITARY INSTITUTE:

In 2005 I donated to MMI's military museum my late Uncle Alex Singleton's WW I Sgt's wood tunic, with three wound stripes on the sleeve (that would be three Purple Hearts) together with his metalic thread sewn on Sgt's stripes. My late Dad, Bennett Powell Singleton of Union Springs, Bullock Co., Alabama, was Alex Singleton's younger brother. Dad (bps) was America's youngest veteran of WWI, ran away from home and enlisted in the Alabama Army Guard at age 14; two weeks later his Troy, AL ANG Company was called up with President Wilson's Declaration of War against Germany that kicked off US involvement in WW I. Dad was a Corporal, a Squad Leader. He was wounded in a trench in France when a German shell burst in the air over them. All his squad, four men on either side of Dad, were killed outright by the shell burst. Shrapnel blew off the left side/brim of Dad's pie-hat helmet, knocking him out. When Dad came to, all his squad dead, his Lt. was blowing the whiste to go over the top and attack the German lines. Dad did this, alone! He captured 25 Germans who simply "gave up" when this lone, skinny Corporal approached with a rifle mounted with his long bayonet!

Dad mustered out of WWI, then in Germany in the Allied Army of Occupation, at age 16, was returned to an Army post in South Carolina, where he was given a train ticket home to Alabama.

My Grandfather Singleton, who died 5 years before I was born, was a real "hard ass" lay Methodist minister, Probate Judge, and local businessman, general store, etc, etc. He welcomed my father, now with two Purple Hearts (wound stripes) home by blessing him out for running away from home. Dad's "punishment" was to be sent to Marion Military Institute, where he was "jump started" as a junior, having only completed the 8th grade before WW I!

Since Dad's WWI uniform/gear were stolen by the movers when we moved from Alabama to Tennessee in the late 1940s. I used my inherited from my first cousin, his Dad was my Uncle Alex, WW I uniform blouse (NCO) to donate to the MMI military museum. This in 2005 really made my old Karachi Army friend, now a retired 08, furious, as he wanted me to give that wool WW I NCO tunic to some newly being formed Army Museum in Pittsburgh, PA where I never lost anything!

Uncle Alex during WW I was also a brevit Lieutenant for six months or so, his Lt. having been killed in action in the Muse Argon. I also inherited from my first cousin his Dads, my late Uncle's WW I wool officer's tunic. In 2005 I donated that to the Textile Museum at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, via my College of A&S.

As Paul Harvey says: "Now you know the whole story that you didn't need to know so much about to begin with!"

Dad died in 1984 at age 81 of heart disease. He chain smoked from age 14, in the trenches in France, WW I, until our family Dr., the late Dr. Thomas Frist, Sr. who was Dad's doc, talked Dad into quitting smoking together with him. Dad was age 53 when he quit smoking. Dr. Frist went on in Nashville, where I grew up, to found and chair Hospital Corporation of America (HCA).

What a digression! Excuse me for taking too much space and time.

George Singleton

[slapout9]

George,I am retired Law Enforcement and I am now a security manager at a hospital in Montgomery that we bought from HCA?? Small World. I will email you contact information later. I am at my day job and I am about to get busy.