GEN Petraeus vs. Ralph Peters on Graduate Education for Officers

[Dominique R. Poirier]

While perusing General David Petraeus’ essay, Beyond the Cloister, I spotted in it the following excerpt which struck me.

“What General Galvin meant was that military professionals often live a cloistered existence that limits what we experience first hand. At the same time, we have our noses to the grindstone, which tends to make us unaware of what we’re missing. We don’t pause and look up often enough, because we don’t have the time.”

Actually, my point just aims at putting the emphasis on this pertinent statement. For, I personally experienced it with huge benefits. It applies to civilians and scholars as well!

During some years of my professional career in communication and media I busied myself doing, teaching, writing, meeting, chitchatting, exchanging inormation, going here and there, and, the last but not the least: reading and studying.

Eventually, an event in my life put a sudden end to all this frenzy, and I began to remember: past conversations, readings, people, events. That’s from this moment on that I came to realize and understand many things, many meanings, many important details I totally missed to see until that moment because my mind was overwhelmed at jumping from one event to another and at memorizing; but not synthesizing since I just didn’t have the time and the rest for. I ventured into my mind as I would do while looking in the shelves of a library.
Pursuing on my metaphoric comparison, dusty “books” and “records” and “files” where all here--including the oldest and forgotten ones--painstakingly put side by side, but oten unconnected each with others.

That’s when I began to “read” slowly all of them, one by one, sometimes breaking this “rule” when compelled to jump from one to another located at the farthest end of the “shelf” because a new hypothesis was surging up. Physically, I was doing nothing; I even didn’t read. At best, I could passively watch television, but in an absent-minded manner as anyone could easily notice it. In reality, my mind was truly piecing bits of memory together. That way I retrieved countless unnoticed details, anecdotes and pieces of old readings that now found their relevancy and importance.

I learned a great many things from that new experiment. Things I previously memorized without properly analyzing them. I did it like that, without doing anything; in appearance only.

How enlightening and profitable was this experience to me. Now, I do not exclude the hypothesis that my mind may possibly not have the capacity to read, learn, and properly the flow of incoming information all at the same time. What about you who read me?

When I was in the army I learned that the mind of the soldier must be made busy by all possible means so as to prevent him from thinking. For, it was said, a soldier is not supposed to think, but to execute orders; and discipline is broken as soon as the soldier begins to think.

Does this military rule still prevail nowadays as General David Petraeus seems suggest it?