Warfighters in Ivory Towers: Does the US Army Need Officers with Doctoral Degrees?
Paul Lushenko | July 8, 2020
By the time Gen. Raymond Odierno became the Army chief of staff in 2011, he fully realized the tension between thinking and doing in the US Army. Amid the high operational tempo of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, officers had become, as retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales described it, “too busy to learn,†devoting increasing time and energy to operations at the expense of professional study. And the Army, Scales noted, largely acquiesced by de-prioritizing professional military education in favor of meeting the requirements of securing, stabilizing, and democratizing two countries. In observing this challenge, Scales reiterated a point made by Bernard Brodie, the strategist par excellence, nearly fifty years earlier. In 1973, he wrote that even the premier education received by colonels at the US military’s war colleges was “too brief, too casual, comes too late in life and keeps the military consorting with each other.â€
In 2012, Odierno developed the Advanced Strategic Planning and Policy Program, commonly referred to as ASP3, suggesting he took these insights seriously. He designed the program to afford qualified officers the opportunity to pursue a fully funded doctorate in a field of study that benefits the Army’s modernization and diverse missions. Odierno’s intent was to use this stable of officers, who are referred to as General Andrew Jackson Goodpaster Scholars, as a means to help the Army strike a better balance between a warrior ethos that emphasizes martial virtues on the one hand, and critical thinking on the other. The program aims to develop Goodpaster Scholars as both strategic thinkers and future senior leaders. It reflects a recognition that operational experiences should not be the only factor shaping officers’ promotion through the ranks. These experiences, when combined with an ability to reason and communicate, best inform officers’ potential to serve as institutional leaders given an increasingly complex operating environment.
https://mwi.usma.edu/warfighters-ivory-towers-us-army-need-officers-doctoral-degrees/
