If Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has some notions about strategy, he has been reticent in sharing them. But he does trumpet his commitment to restoring Confederate names to bases and their statues to national military cemeteries, which is absurd and vile. And we know that he thinks civilian academics have little if any place in military education, which is wrong and even more damaging.
Forty years ago, I turned down promotion from assistant to associate professor at Harvard to join the strategy department of the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. My academic mentors were baffled and dismayed by such a self-willed fall from grace, but in retrospect it was one of the best professional decisions of my life.
The Naval War College, not to be confused with the Naval Academy, was established in 1884 to prepare senior officers for the higher-level problems of warfare. For a service that, like the Royal Navy, believed in learning on the job rather than in classrooms, creating such a school was a remarkable thing to do. The War College immediately brought in as faculty members not only Alfred Thayer Mahan, a Navy captain who became the most prominent naval historian and naval publicist of his time, but a U.S. Army colonel, Tasker Bliss, to provide instruction beyond the maritime realm.
That same mission of higher-level professional education continues today. When I was in Newport, roughly half of the students were naval officers at the rank of commander or captain, the other half a mix from various services at equivalent ranks (lieutenant colonel or colonel) and foreign naval officers, many of whom would eventually go on to be the chief of their country’s navy. They were at a watershed in their career. Many of the aviators, for example, were at the point where they had to stop flying regularly and instead move into staff and command positions, a painful transition. All of the officers, focused heretofore on tactics—how to maneuver ships, airplanes, or units on the ground in close combat—would be more likely after a year in Newport to participate in the handling of much larger formations at what the military calls the operational level of war. Some of them would now help make strategy, the alignment of military means to political ends, the fundamental purpose for which navies and armies exist.
That is where the strategy department, to which I belonged, came in. It was half civilian, half military, led by Alvin Bernstein, a former Cornell professor who had started life as a historian of the ancient world but had then given up tenure to come to the War College. There, depending on his sense of the classroom, he would turn on either his Yale and Oxford education, or his Brooklyn accent and street smarts, and equally effectively. He would talk elegantly about the glories of Periclean Athens and, with a twinkle in his eye, say, “Ya know, some of you, particularly da Marines, think da Spahtans were da good guys because they did lots of push-ups. Dey weren’t, and I’m gonna tell you why.” Amid the guffaws, the point sank home.
Bernstein assembled a spectacular group of military historians, some from Britain and Canada, and a few renegade political scientists such as myself. Twice a week the civilian professors would spend the mornings lecturing to the entire class, uncomfortably noting the reaction of their colleagues who would sit in the back row and offer unsparing critiques during coffee breaks. One afternoon a week, we would tackle the issues raised in the readings and lectures with about a dozen students and our teaching partner, a senior officer.
The curriculum was tough. The students had plenty of free time, but they needed it to tackle considerably more than 500 pages of reading a week, plus the frequent short papers we assigned. The course had a heavy dose of theory but was mainly a study of strategy from the Peloponnesian War to the present. No one, civilian or military, had enough background to master all of those conflicts, so faculty and students alike scrambled. Complaining, however, was not on. One of my colleagues—a diminutive, grizzled, and grumpy former Army draftee who was an expert on the Napoleonic Wars, and was known inevitably as “the Frog of War”—once encountered a student asking how much of the reading he should actually do. “All of it. You’re not humping a rucksack, you’re not sleeping in the mud, and no one’s shooting at you. Don’t whine.”
We taught strategy as a discipline of thought, viewed through the prism of individual cases. What were the political objectives in these wars? How did they change and why? When and how were the military means chosen congruent with those purposes? When civilian and military leaders (inevitably) disagreed, how were the tensions resolved? In seminars of a dozen students and twice-weekly morning lectures in the dank, cold, stony auditorium (the Navy economized on upkeep of shore installations, including this one), we all wrestled with it. I found it exhilarating.
A minority of the students hated it. They had been taken from a world of concrete realities and tasks and thrown into a world of politics, where everything was gray and shifting, susceptible to multiple interpretations, and where no amount of training or rule following could guarantee success. Not to mention those strange Greek names in Thucydides. A majority, I would say, were interested, absorbed what they could, and got ready for the next stage of their career. A minority (larger than that of the dissidents) positively reveled in it. Many of those were the ones who went on to flag- or general-officer rank.
For a young civilian academic, it was marvelous. I was engaging with officers on their own turf—not as the polite visiting fellows in business attire at Harvard, where they were the unusual ones. Here, my colleagues and I were the unusual ones, in some cases younger than the officers (in my case by a good 15 years), and profoundly ignorant of the practical problems of military life, leadership, and hardship. The teaching could be perilous: The officers responded quickly, and savagely, if they thought they were being patronized or mocked. But if you showed that you respected their expertise, they respected yours, because theirs was a world in which professionalism of any kind was highly valued.
To teach in Newport was to become familiar with the upper-middle-level leadership of the armed forces: highly intelligent, experienced, serious, and patriotic, but not yet suffering from the diseases of the ego that can accompany the placement of stars on one’s shoulders. You could help the students prepare for the rest of their military career, and that was profoundly satisfying. In turn, by osmosis a young professor could pick up an enormous amount of knowledge about leadership, character, and all the ways in which the complex realities of military operations can confound the axioms of political-science theories or the deceptive clarity of retrospective certainty.
Over many decades, from the 1950s on, a who’s who of American military historians, national-security-oriented political scientists, and international lawyers passed through the faculty in Newport. They carried what they learned by teaching there into the wider academic world, to colleagues and civilian students. Some of us took those lessons into senior government service as well. And from Newport and its sister institutions—the other service-war colleges as well as National War College in Washington—have emerged generations of thoughtful military professionals, who understand the responsibilities and the challenges inherent in the use of force in infinitely better ways than those who think it all comes down to “lethality.” It was not merely a wonderful experience, but some of the most rewarding and substantive public service one could imagine.
Which is why preserving and protecting these institutions from the anti-intellectual spasms of the current secretary of defense and those who think like him is important. “The book and the sword descended intertwined from Heaven,” the ancient rabbis declared. Together they do not guarantee success, but to sever one from the other, as some in this administration seem to want to do, is to guarantee calamity.
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