The Clipboard: Rumsfeld: Scale back military education

From an article¹:

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut back military officer education during "stress periods" like the war in Iraq so more will be available for deployment.

At the same time, the Army's 4th Infantry Division has decided to pull 29 officers out of their 10-month professional education curriculum early to send them to Iraq, according to a Feb. 9 memo obtained by United Press International.

The 29 officers are being withdrawn a few weeks early from Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, at the request of the commander of the 4th I.D., who has a critical need for 32 more officers before he deploys to Iraq. The officers will get full credit for having finished the course, according to a Pentagon official.

The CGSC will also give up one instructor to the 4th ID for deployment, and two other officers have been identified in the field for the assignment.

The move is one more indication that the Army does not have sufficient numbers to both fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and prepare its officers for future conflict, according to Pentagon and congressional sources close to the matter.

The Army has 114,000 soldiers in Iraq, 42,000 in Kuwait and 14,000 in Afghanistan. More than 150,000 Army reservists are serving on active duty.

And it might be the leading edge of a larger policy...

..."You've got two missions, as I see it: to fight these wars and prepare for the next war," said Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo. "The golden age of professional military education was the period following World War I. It sustained the Army's war fighting competency during those lean times and produced the commanders that lead the nation to victory in World War II. Today, warfare is becoming more complex at lower and lower levels, and our professional military education system must continue to evolve to develop the thinking warriors the future will require."...

...The Iraq and Afghan wars have driven home the need for creative, flexible soldiers. Tank commanders have been pressed into duty as small-town mayors; artillery units as local police in countries where they do not speak the local language. Operations tended to be smaller, with younger officers forced to make crucial decisions without their command structure above them. They are increasingly joint and require flexibility: what may begin as a construction mission can turn to hostility, and expected battles can be avoided with resourceful diplomacy, if the soldier has a sensitive ear for the local culture.

While some of that knowledge and resourcefulness can be picked up in the field by exceptional officers, it is left in the field for each new soldier to relearn unless there is a formal way for it to be cultivated and shared, according to a senior military official.
(link)

More on the Army's overstretch. Those who call for more troops to be sent to Iraq should explain where they plan to get them from.

Also, this policy sounds like sabotaging the Army's future to meet present needs. Not very good planning

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Complete text of the article, Rumsfeld: Scale back military education, by Pamela Hess

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut back military officer education during "stress periods" like the war in Iraq so more will be available for deployment.

At the same time, the Army's 4th Infantry Division has decided to pull 29 officers out of their 10-month professional education curriculum early to send them to Iraq, according to a Feb. 9 memo obtained by United Press International.

The 29 officers are being withdrawn a few weeks early from Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, at the request of the commander of the 4th I.D., who has a critical need for 32 more officers before he deploys to Iraq. The officers will get full credit for having finished the course, according to a Pentagon official.

The CGSC will also give up one instructor to the 4th ID for deployment, and two other officers have been identified in the field for the assignment.

The move is one more indication that the Army does not have sufficient numbers to both fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and prepare its officers for future conflict, according to Pentagon and congressional sources close to the matter.

The Army has 114,000 soldiers in Iraq, 42,000 in Kuwait and 14,000 in Afghanistan. More than 150,000 Army reservists are serving on active duty.

And it might be the leading edge of a larger policy.

In a Jan. 31 memo, Rumsfeld directed Myers to produce by mid-March options for reducing professional military education.

"Let's come up with some options how we might shorten professional military education or abbreviate it during stress periods," Rumsfeld wrote in a short memo marked "for official use only." It went only to Myers and Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel David Chu.

Rumsfeld's proposal is already meeting with resistance among the uniformed military.

"We're so good because of our professional education, and you can't eliminate it, postpone it, or reduce it if you want a professional military," one senior Army officer told UPI.

The Joint Staff is expected next week to recommend no such blanket policy be established.

"We've done this before, but on a case by case basis," said one officer close to the matter. "We've had other requests (during the Iraq war) that we've turned down."

"We don't have enough (officers) but we feel this is not the right method to take," the officer said. "Rumsfeld's memo supposes we need to be doing this, and it's my contention that we don't."

The matter is also raising concerns on Capitol Hill.

"You've got two missions, as I see it: to fight these wars and prepare for the next war," said Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo. "The golden age of professional military education was the period following World War I. It sustained the Army's war fighting competency during those lean times and produced the commanders that lead the nation to victory in World War II. Today, warfare is becoming more complex at lower and lower levels, and our professional military education system must continue to evolve to develop the thinking warriors the future will require."

PME is carried out by all the services, and the Army recently embraced it in a big way, committing to cycle every major to command through Command and General Staff College in a pilot program called "Intermediate Level Education."

Cutting professional military education where officers learn how to think -- as distinct from military training where they learn how to do -- is not unprecedented. During World War II it was done away with entirely, the Pentagon source said Tuesday.

However, officers who spoke to UPI draw a direct line between the generation of WWII officers who skipped the higher-level training and the "hollow" Army of the 1970s.

And professional military education is in steep decline. According to retired Army Maj. Gen. Bob Scales, the former commander of the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn., after the Vietnam war the Army sent 7,400 officers on to graduate education, many of them in the liberal arts -- a system the produced leaders like Gen. John Abizaid, the highly respected chief of U.S. Central Command. Currently, the Army is sending only 396 officers on to civilian graduate school, and half of them are studying the acquisition of weapons systems. The other half will end up professors at West Point.

The hunger for higher education -- the art of war and diplomacy and the study of culture and history -- is evident in the Web sites that young officers have generated for themselves, like companycommand.com, according to Scales.

It is on these listservs that young officers share failures and successes and ask for advice from others on dealing with the insurgency and the complicated nation-building tasks foisted upon them with minimal training.

The Joint Staff is clear on the need for continuing education for all military personnel. It issued draft guidance in October 2004 that expands the requirement for professional military education from officers to the enlisted corps.

The Iraq and Afghan wars have driven home the need for creative, flexible soldiers. Tank commanders have been pressed into duty as small-town mayors; artillery units as local police in countries where they do not speak the local language. Operations tended to be smaller, with younger officers forced to make crucial decisions without their command structure above them. They are increasingly joint and require flexibility: what may begin as a construction mission can turn to hostility, and expected battles can be avoided with resourceful diplomacy, if the soldier has a sensitive ear for the local culture.

While some of that knowledge and resourcefulness can be picked up in the field by exceptional officers, it is left in the field for each new soldier to relearn unless there is a formal way for it to be cultivated and shared, according to a senior military official.

Despite the crunch, the Pentagon continues to resist congressional calls for a permanent increase in Army and Marine end strength, citing the long-term budgetary implications for what it views as a near-term problem. As Iraqi and Afghan security forces are trained and equipped, the assumption is the requirement for U.S. soldiers and Marines will decrease. Nevertheless, Congress has increased the size of both forces by a total of about 23,000, with the possibility of adding 10,000 more soldiers in 2006.

"It's too early for anyone to say with any confidence that ...this is the number we need," said Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita. "It's fair to say we thing there should not be any statutory end strength for any of the services."

More than 600,000 military personnel have cycled through Iraq or Afghanistan deployments over the last three years, at least a third of them more than once.

The Army has about 502,000 active duty soldiers, and another 150,000 reservists mobilized for active duty. Congress has authorized the Army to increase to over 512,000 by 2009, up from about 482,000.

The Army was cut nearly in half after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, going from more than 700,000 to 482,400.

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