Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

[selil]

The idea of advanced degrees has changed over time. The rudimentary idea of the degree system in the United States has the bachelors degree associated with practitioner status, the masters degree describes itself as mastery and synthesis, and the doctoral degree is defined as dedicated advancement of the science.

We take a mildly well rounded citizen of the world out of high school and push them through a series of courses defining and deepening knowledge across the spectrum and specializing them into a profession or area of expertise. Once the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the individual have been tested and associated with the objectives of the degree plan we graduate that person from the bachelors program. They base their knowledge on the “wrote” and usually don’t go much beyond that.

The graduate degree is conferred upon those who master a level of knowledge. We further devolve from general theory and worldly concepts professing a deeper understanding of one portion of the pool of knowledge rather than the principles of the pool itself. Unlike the Renaissance man current academia culture has stove piped removing the interdisciplinary links of liberal arts and restricting the sciences to wading rather than diving into the pool of knowledge.

When you look at a doctoral thesis defined within the scope of a problem within a discipline, and often defined as narrowly as a piece of a miniscule element of a whole that incremental knowledge added to science becomes infinitesimally small. And, missing from the discussion is the often liberally considered thought of ethics, right & wrong, the reflection on results, and so much more that science ignores. The doctoral thesis is not about being a well-rounded thinking intellectual, but about being a narrowly focused juggernaut of specialization.

The PhD does not confer wisdom. It does give the tools to research, adapt, consider, reflect, and corresponding make decisions based on rational thought. The near transference of expertise from one dissertation topic to a new topic is inherent in the advanced strategies that a doctoral student should be equipped with. Those who have never experienced the horrendous crashing of your own ego as an trained proponent of the scientific method has shredded your well vetted ideas do not understand the relationship of a PhD to thinking.

A well-formed PhD program will create an evaluative thinker. It unquestioningly can create arrogant imbeciles filled with the inertia of clueless thought wrapped in the heritage of intolerance and suicidal intellectualism. Somewhere in the travesties of ivory towers there are intellectuals who gather knowledge against the storm of “focused” research and realize knowledge is not restricted by a degree or departmental agenda. But, they won’t get tenure.

The military hierarchy isn’t much different than the academic. The malfeasance of restrictive thought, career centered choices, refutation of challenges, and leadership by blame management infects all of the services officer corps. A few rotten apples can ruin the barrel but they can also make some kick butt hard cider. When looking across the ranks of those who lead there is a panorama of a normalized curve showing a swelling of those who do their jobs, those who don’t do their jobs, and those who do their jobs superlatively. Much like academia within the bastions of military head quarters there are likely those who don’t worship at the altars of restraint and look more towards solving problems. It would be nice to think in the structured thoughts of doctoral military leaders the flexibility and reflectivity of thinking and research might reach a crescendo to allow for problem solving where blame is put away and solutions are created.

It’s a nice thought anyways.

[120mm]

Selil, the elegance and accuracy of your summary has me mentally gasping. That was absolutely perfect on the spot.