Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

[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