...in the most unlikely places.
LTG Petraeus (CG here at Fort Leavenworth) was interviewed by the German Spiegel (Mirror) Online.
Spiegel asks...
SPIEGEL: General Petraeus, you were in charge of combat operations in Iraq, you supervised the build-up of the new Iraqi security force and now you oversee the training and education of Army officers here at Fort Leavenworth. Would you agree that you are trying to impose a sort of a cultural revolution on the United States Army?
LTG Petraeus' answer will be soup for Ry's soul:
Petraeus: There is quite a big cultural change going on. We used to say, that if you can do the "big stuff," the big combined arms, high-end, high intensity major combat operations and have a disciplined force, then you can do the so-called "little stuff," too. That turned out to be wrong.
This little snippet caught my attention:
SPIEGEL: You propagate the idea that young officers should go to graduate school. Why does a soldier need a master's degree?Petraeus: We're talking about how to react to unforeseeable, non-standard tasks, we're talking about environments that are very different to those we're used to. You have to work in a foreign language, you have to negotiate with people who come from another religious background or who don't even share what we would call the same core values. Now here you have a setting quite similar to graduate school, which takes you out of your intellectual comfort zone -- and that really is something a young officer should experience.
You know, we in the Army, we have to admit, that we're living sometimes a sort of a grindstone cloister existence. We work very hard; indeed, we have our noses to the proverbial grindstone. And we tend to live a somewhat cloistered existence much of our lives. So we have to try to raise, as one of my colleagues once put it, our sights beyond the maximum effective range of a M-16-rifle. Graduate school and other experiences that get us out of our intellectual comfort zone help us do just that.
Heh. While I agree, and emphatically, I sent this response to the SAMS (School of Advanced Military Studies) graduate buddy of mine, Jim C. who sent me this link...
Heh. And those of us who did raise our sights above the proverbial M16 post-and-peep were rewarded exactly how...?
And Jim, who is something of a warfighting intellectual himself (at least the government pays us decent dollars to do this for them... now) responded thusly:
I believe we were shown the door.
Indeed. I agree with LTG Petraeus' responses in the piece. I only hope he (or someone like him in stature) is really working the other side - the officers who sit on the promotion boards. From our era, a not insignificant number of whom don't have combat patches. And I hope he finds a way to institutionalize it so that it lasts beyond this period of combat, though the history of the Army does not offer much hope of that.
One of the reasons I blog, beyond gun pr0n, or "the more kinetic aspects of history" as Matt describes the stuff at the Castle - to be a little ember, casting a small glow in a forgotten corner near the disused lavatory in the third sub-basement. You know the one - the one with the sign that says "Beware of the Leopard!"
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