Cultivating Army Leaders:

Historical Perspectives

The Proceedings of the Combat Studies Institute

2010 Military History Symposium

Kendall D. Gott

General Editor

Combat Studies Institute Press

US Army Combined Arms Center

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Cover Photo is a composite of the following images left to right: “General John J. Pershing. General Headquarters, Chaumont, France,” DA photo, 19 October 1918, NARA, ARC Id 

#530766, CGSC copyright registration #11-670 C. “Lt. Gen George S. Patton, U.S. Third Army 

Commander, 10/13/1946,” DA photo, October 13,1946, LOC (LC-USZ62-25122), CGSC copyright registration #11-667 C. 4) “General Dwight D. Eisenhower, talks with Lt. General Lucus B. 

Clay at Gatow airport in Berlin, Germany during the Potsdam Conference. Gen. Omar Bradley is 

in the background,” DA photo, July 20, 1945, NARA, ARC Id#198840, CGSC copyright registration #11-672 C. “General William C. Westmoreland, Commanding General, MACV, watches the 

ceremonies on the arrival of the Royal Thai Volunteer Regiment in Vietnam,” DA photo, ca. 1974, 

NARA, ARC Id #530616, CGSC copyright registration #11-669 C. “General Winfield Scott,” 

War Department photo, ca 1860-1865, NARA., ARC Id # 528333, CGSC copyright registration 

#11-671 C. “Lt. General Ulysses S. Grant standing by a tree in front of a tent, Cold Harbor, Va,” 

War Department photo, ca. June 1864, NARA, ARC Id #524455, CGSC copyright registration 

#11-668 C. 
Cultivating Army Leaders: 

Historical Perspectives

The Proceedings of the Combat Studies Institute

2010 Military History Symposium

Kendall D. Gott

General Editor

Combat Studies Institute Press

US Army Combined Arms Center

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Combat Studies Institute Military History Symposium (8th : 2010 : Fort Leavenworth, 

Kan.)

Cultivating Army leaders : historical perspectives : the proceedings of the Combat 

Studies Institute 2010 Military History Symposium / Kendall D. Gott, general editor.

 p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-9837226-2-5 (alk. paper)

1. Leadership--United States--Congresses. 2. Command of troops--United States--

Congresses. 3. Military education--United States--History--Congresses. I. Gott, Kendall 

D. II. Title. 

 UB210.C645 2011

 355.3’3041--dc23

 2011033055

First printing, August 2011.

CSI Press publications cover a variety of military history topics. The views 

expressed in this CSI Press publication are those of the author(s) and not 

necessarily those of the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense. 

A full list of CSI Press publications, many of them available for downloading, 

can be found at http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/csi/csipubs.asp.

The seal of the Combat Studies Institute authenticates this document as an official publication of 

the CSI. It is prohibited to use CSI’s official seal on any republication of this material without the 

expressed written permission of the Director of CSI.
iii

Foreword

These Proceedings are the eighth volume to be published in a series generated by the 

annual Military History Symposium hosted by the Combat Studies Institute. Each year, 

these conferences bring together both military and civilian historians, as well as formal and 

informal students of military history, literally from around the world. They gather for the 

purpose of presenting ideas and points of view on current military issues from a historical 

perspective. The 2010 symposium was sponsored by the US Army Combined Arms Center 

(CAC) and was held 21-23 September 2010 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

This symposium will explore the development of leaders within the US Army in order 

to attain national goals and objectives in peace and war within a historical context. The 

symposium also included the discussion of current issues and trends, as well as sister 

services and international topics. This year we were extremely fortunate to have three 

distinguished featured speakers who all have exceptional experience in leader development 

and US Army officer education. Our panelists were also experts in their fields, and we were 

delighted that thay made the time and effort to present their work.

This eighth volume of proceedings contains the papers or the presentation transcripts 

of the participating speakers and panelists. It includes transcriptions of the question and 

answer periods following the presentations as well. These materials can also be found online at the CSI Web site at http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/csi/csipubs.asp.

These annual symposiums continue to be an important event for those within the Army 

who believe that insights from the past are relevant to current military challenges. The 

attendees have uniformly found them to be of great benefit. We hope that the readers of 

this and past volumes will find the experience equally useful. CSI—The Past is Prologue.

Roderick M. Cox

Colonel, US Army

Director, Combat Studies Institute

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

v

Contents

Foreword........................................................................................................................... iii

Day 1: Keynote Presentation.............................................................................................1

Cultivating Army Leadership: A Historical Overview by 

Brigadier General (R) John S. Brown.....................................................................1

Questions and Answers ...............................................................................................19

Day 1, Panel 1: Antebellum Officer Education, 1800-1865 ..........................................23

Looking Beyond West Point: Life in the Old Army as Education for 

War by Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, Ph.D. ................................................................23

The Development of Successful Non-professional Officers in the 

Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1863 by Steven E. Woodworth, Ph.D. ..................35

Questions and Answers ...............................................................................................43

Day 1, Panel 2: Emergence of a Modern Officer Corps, 1866-1905............................51

The 1891 Infantry Tactics by Perry D. Jamieson, Ph.D. .............................................51

The 1891 Infantry Tactics by Todd Brereton, Ph.D. ...................................................57

Questions and Answers ..............................................................................................63

Day 1, Panel 3: Changing Leadership for a Changing World Role, 1906-1939 .........75

The Leavenworth Schools, Professional Military Education, and 

Reform in the Old Army, 1900-1917 by Tim Nenniger, Ph.D..............................75

So Rigorously Trained and Educated: Leader Development in the US 

Army, 1919 to 1939 by Peter J. Schifferle, Ph.D..................................................89

Questions & Answers................................................................................................107

Day 2: Featured Speaker:..............................................................................................113

History Strengthens by General (R) Gordon Sullivan...............................................113

Questions and Answers ............................................................................................125

Day 2, Panel 4: Conventional and Unconventional Challenges of the Cold War, 1945-

1975 ....................................................................................................................131

Soldiering as an Affair of the Heart by Lewis Sorley, Ph.D......................................131

Soldiering as an Affair of the Heart Leadership: DePuy, Slim, and 

You by Henry Gole, Ph.D. ..................................................................................143

Questions and Answers .............................................................................................149

Day 2, Panel 5: Rebirth of the US Army, 1976-2001...................................................155

page 
vi

Thoughts in Spring on Professional Identity by Richard Swain, Ph.D. ....................155

Presentation by James Carafano, Ph.D......................................................................165

Questions and Answers .............................................................................................173

Day 2, Panel 6: Educating Leaders for a New Era, 2002 to Present .........................183

Mission Command: An Old Idea for the 21st Century by 

COL (R) Gregory Fontenot.................................................................................183

A New “Melody Report” Educating Officers for the 21st Century by 

Kevin Benson, Ph.D............................................................................................191

Questions and Answers .............................................................................................195

Day 3, Panel 7: Sister Services Perspectives................................................................197

Historical and Cultural Foundations of Navy Officer Development by 

Gene R. Andersen, Ph.D. ....................................................................................197

“It was More Than Just Doctrine!” Reflections on the Preparation 

of the US Marine Corps and Its Officers for World War II by 

Donald F. Bittner, Ph.D.......................................................................................205

Questions and Answers .............................................................................................219

Day 3: Featured Speaker...............................................................................................223

US Army Leader Development: Past, Present, and Future by 

Brigadire General Sean B. MacFarland..............................................................223

Questions & Answers................................................................................................231

Day 3, Panel 8: Foreign Perspectives ...........................................................................235

Making Australian Military Leaders: A Historical Reflection Based 

on the Changing Face of Wars and the Australians That are 

Selected to Fight Them by Lieutenant Colonel Craig Burn ...............................235

Finding the Balance Between Timeless Fundamentals and Temporal 

Adjustments by Colonel Jean-Claude Brejot......................................................239

A British Perspective by Colonel Graham Norton ....................................................243

Questions and Answers .............................................................................................247

Appendix A Conference Program.................................................................................255

Appendix B Biographies................................................................................................261

page 
1

Day 1: Keynote Presentation

Cultivating Army Leadership: A Historical Overview by 

Brigadier General (R) John S. Brown

(Transcript of Presentation)

Dr. Wright:

It is my distinct pleasure and honor to welcome Brigadier General Retired John S. 

Brown, who gave more than 34 years of service to the United States Army, and now 

teaches as an adjunct professor and serves as a historical consultant. His most recent duty 

assignment was Chief of Military History for the United States Army. 

Previously, General Brown served as Chief of Programs and Requirements for Supreme 

Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, Executive Officer to the Army Deputy Chief of Staff 

Operations, Commander of the 2d Brigade for his Cavalry Division in Texas and Kuwait, 

G3 Operations through our III Corps, G3 of the 24th Infantry Division, and Commander of 

2-66th Armored Battalion in Germany. He has commanded Army units at every level from 

Platoon through Brigade, and has served on staffs at every level from Battalion through 

Theater. 

General Brown has published, edited, and lectured at home and overseas. Notable 

publications include, Draftee Division, a case study of divisional mobilization in World 

War II, and the forthcoming Kevlar Legions, a history of Army transformation, 1989-2005. 

The author has a monthly column, Historically Speaking, in Army Magazine, and has 

written numerous articles and chapters. And that’s an understatement on General Brown’s 

part—he has written many, many things. 

His education is outstanding—the United States Military Academy, Indiana University, 

United States Army Command General Staff College, United States Naval War College, 

and earned his PhD at Indiana University. Ladies and gentlemen, General John S. Brown.

BG Brown:

Thank you for that kind introduction. Hopefully, everybody can hear me. Well, it’s 

good to see everybody here, and good to see so many old friends and faces, and meet and 

see some new folks. Can I have my first slide? Subject is Cultivating Army Leadership: 

Historical Perspectives. I was asked to give a speech that would kind of speak to the whole 

program, recognizing that we’re going to parse it down into greater detail as we move 

long. And of course, as historians—or as folks interested in history—you know, we’ve got 

a certain responsibility towards the smaller details of who, what, when, where, why, when 

we’re talking about cultivating Army leadership.

One theory holds that there’s kind of timeless principles of leadership, and so that if 

you could just figure them out, distill them, grasp them, that you would be able to have 

a feel for what all leaders need—forever, whenever. I do believe that there are certain 

timeless principles, with respect to leadership. 
2

Keynote Presentation

But I think the story beyond that is a lot more complex, and a lot more given to an 

understanding of culture, of history, of timeframes, of circumstances. And that’s where 

I think we, as historians, can be particularly useful. Because we can work the detail, and 

flesh out a contribution that goes to both the timeless and the time-sensitive. 

Let me go with my next slide. Hopefully you’re looking at the definition of leadership. 

It comes from Army Regulations 600-100, FM 6-22. They’re in synch; they both have 

the same definition. Those are two surprisingly good pieces of work. If you were to read 

through them, you’ll find that they don’t take as long as you might think to get through. 

They’re very interesting, a lot of detail. That’s the defection they proposed for leadership, 

and I think that’s the one that I want to go ahead and use today, just as a starting point.

I would say it’s not a universally-agreed definition—there are other definitions. The 

standard college dictionary, Harcourt Brace, speaks to, “The office, position, or capacity of 

a leader,” as leadership. Of course, then you have to go and define what a leader is. And 

you find the leader, basically, is someone who makes things happen. Another definition 

is, “Authoritarian control or guidance.” But I think that this finer notion of a process of 

influencing people, and having responsibilities both to the mission and the organizing—I 

think that’s something we want to carry forward in our definition.

Some time ago, General Reimer and a number of his four-star colleagues sat together 

in a room, and they tried to articulate the Army values that they believed were timeless, 

and they thought you would believe were. The things they thought were timeless, and they 

came up Army values—we ended up with a card, I don’t know how many of you still have 

the card in your wallet, but you were reminded of the things that the Army considered to be 

its timeless, essential values that all soldiers should carry forward with them.

Now you’ll notice, if you lay out the letters, you get an acronym. And the acronym, 

very curiously, matches up, “leadership.” Now, was that an accident? You know, was it 

divine intervention? No. It was a conscious effort by General Reimer and his colleagues to 

make a connection between the timeless values that they believed represented leadership, 

and the timeless values of soldiers as a whole. And so, there was a linkage. You know, and 

to be a leader, who had to represent these timeless values. Now, these do appear in FM and 

AR 600-100, and they appear in FM 6-22. They’re very thoughtfully contrived. 

But there’s a lot else that appears in the lines. These are also attributes of leadership 

that are taught and sought in our current doctrine that, in my view, are valid, but represent 

items that are time-sensitive and culture-sensitive. And should times and circumstances 

change, the validity of these values will change. For example, solve complex problems. 

At great danger, I’ll paraphrase Frederick the Great, who was the leading soldier of 

his day. And he led an army in a time in which the formula for success was to march 

forward resolutely, and the musketry to deliver a greater volume of musketry of his own. 

And with respect to leadership he said, you know, if you give me something, somebody, 

a young officer—he was talking about the young aristocracy, the Junkers, if you give me 

one of these young men who’s energetic and stupid, it’s OK. He’ll make a fine infantry line 

officer. If you give me someone who’s lazy but smart, that’s great. He’ll do a great job on 

the staff. If you give me somebody who’s lazy and stupid, I can use him too. We’ll figure 
3

Brown

something out. But the one who will be very difficult is the officer who is energetic and 

smart.

In the army of his day, when you marched forward into that musketry fire, and you 

had to be resolute, and you had keep all your men on line, and everybody had a single 

function, you didn’t want a whole lot of creative thinking. You didn’t want a whole lot 

of second-guessing. You didn’t want a whole lot of folks who were trying to work their 

way through the intricacies of a complex problem. You wanted a very simple, methodical, 

trained solution. That was the warfare of his day. It’s not the warfare of our day. So, I think 

that that’s a little bit time-sensitive.

Take another anecdote. Communicate, coordinate, and negotiate with a variety of 

personnel. Certainly, that’s exactly what we’re asking our soldiers to do at almost every 

level. Certainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but preceding that, in the Balkans and all of the 

Operations in which you have the notion of—and it’s a valid one—the strategic private. 

The guy who’s on a blocking position, or at a checkpoint, whose role is so important that, 

in moments, whatever he does can become an international issue. 

But just a few years ago, during Desert Storm, I can remember, you know, our battalion 

was out in the desert, we were in Iraq—we were occupying Iraq. But our instructions were 

very clear to have nothing to do with the locals. To keep them at an arm’s distance. There 

were a very select group of people who were supposed to deal with, talk to, have any 

interface with the locals. Our job there was to occupy the oil fields, and to make sure the 

oil fields were not put into use until such time as Saddam Hussein signed the treaty and 

everything was validated, so that we would leave and go home.

And so, the instructions to our soldiers, at that time, were not communicate, coordinate, 

and negotiate with a variety of personnel. And the expectation was not that it would be done 

at all levels. There was a very, very narrow group of selected soldiers who were responsible 

for doing that kind of coordination, or that kind of interface. And we’re only talking about 

events 20 years ago, I’d say. It’s not Frederick the Great, you know? It’s some time ago.

Adapt to advances in communications technology. For at least 1500 years, between 

the time of the Romans and the time of the late Renaissance, there were no advances in 

communications technology. So, one presumes that the leaders of that time didn’t have 

to adapt to changes in communications technology to be successful. Maintain positive 

expectations and attitude. Obviously, that’s something that’s very valuable to our Army and 

our culture. We like to have people happy. 

But how many of you know Steve Colbert? Yeah, you know, right now, in the aftermath 

of Glenn Beck’s march on Washington, you know, Jon Stewart’s going to have a march 

on Washington that’s kind of going to go the other way. And it’s going to try to be broadminded, and comprehensive, and inclusive. But Colbert says, well, he’s going to have a 

march on Washington too, because he thinks that the imperative, now, is to bring back fear. 

And so he wants to restore the notion of intimidation, fear to the political process.

Well of course, I think he’s joking. You know? But the point is, in cultures other than 

our own, and in times other than our own, there have been other incentives that were relied 

upon to develop the morale, and to exercise the leadership of soldiers in the ranks. And 
4

Keynote Presentation

there are some armies in which fear is the traditional means of gaining compliance and 

exerting leadership. And there was a time in our own Army when fear a higher priority 

than it does now.

A testimony to time-sensitiveness. I would suggest to you that our contemporary 

adversaries have far different techniques of leadership and motivation than we do, to get 

their rank and file to execute the missions that they believe are important. And I don’t think 

that Al-Qaeda sets a huge emphasis upon their soldiers having a positive mental attitude, in 

the way we think of a positive mental attitude.

Finally, another point is pent athlete. You know, in my mind, there are number of places 

in each of the volumes where folks speak of the requirement, the necessity, and the virtue 

of the leader being a pent athlete. To me, this implies he’d have five basic skills, but I’ve 

never found a list in which they actually numerated five. There’s one place where they say 

you have to be a pent athlete, and they list about 30 different things you’re supposed to be 

able to do. And so, the notion that he’s multi-capable is there. But in earlier times, or in 

different times, the list would be different. Your pent athlete would respond to a different 

list. Let me have my next slide.

Leadership is obviously position-sensitive. It depends upon where you are in the 

hierarchy, what your techniques and attributes are. The direct leadership, organization 

leadership, and strategic leadership—that’s the paradigm that appears in our AR and our 

FM. It’s meant, I think, to match up with the levels of [who are?] tactical, operation, or 

strategic. 

Although in my mind, it makes a kind of curious match at the break-off point. Because 

the break-off point between organizational leadership in the book is brigade, you know, 

brigade is the lowest level of organizational leadership. And in my view, that would mean 

a battalion commander would be involved in direct leadership. And my experience with 

privates is that they tend of battalion commander as a pretty lofty position, a pretty distant 

guy. The battalion commander is working through the prism of a trained staff of professional 

soldiers, each of whom have their specialty. 

And so I think the battalion commander, from the point of view of leadership levels, 

is the break-off point between the direct leadership that occurs at the company grade and 

below, and the leadership by the virtue of staff and delegation. That’s more common at the 

organizational level. But the point having been made that there are these levels, I think all 

of you—if you think back through your memories—can think of somebody who is a superb 

company commander. An excellent company commander, or an unmatched company 

commander, who simply did not have the attributes and character that it would have taken 

to command a brigade or a division.

And within our historical inventory, we can find all kinds of folks who made excellent 

division commanders, but failed when called upon to command at the corps or higher level, 

to be theater commanders. And it’s not just that the leadership to be a captain is the lesser, in 

included attributes of the leadership to be a brigade, or the lesser-included attributes to be a 

theater. The character of the responsibility can be so different that you can bring somebody 
5

Brown

who would’ve been a poor company commander who, nevertheless theoretically, would 

make a great theater commander.

In our Army, we don’t test that theory. Because of course, we bring people through the 

layers of command so that they achieve success without ever having someone advance who 

hasn’t proven themselves at the lower level. But in many cultures and armies other than our 

own, folks literally did come in at the highest level. Julius Caesar, for example, had never 

commanded anything other than a boat before he commanded four legions in the Battle of 

Bibracte that began his career in Gaul. And he came in as a senior leader with great vision, 

but served by a highly professional army who absolutely knew what it was, the tactics of 

the time involved. And he was able to think at the highest level without having to worry 

about what happens to the lower level, because his centurions took care of that.

Now, on that subject, when I graduated from West Point, and for most of you who 

graduated from West Point too, you’d been through Military Art, you’d taken all the 

courses, you were perfectly capable of deciding what needed to happen in the Pacific or 

European Theater during World War II. You graduated from West Point as an excellent 

theater commander. What was hard was commanding a platoon. That whole learning 

experience, that whole coming up requires a set of skills that’s different than the one that 

you can get through academics alone. And so what’s the mix? What do you teach? And 

what do you have to learn on the job? What do you have no option for, except that firsthand experience?

Also from our FM, “Leadership is institutional, operational, self-development with 

respect to how it is you derive it.” And we’ve already touched on this a little bit in an earlier 

comment. Institutional, obviously, is what you learn in the schoolhouse, and the things 

that you were taught, and it’s a curriculum that is consciously instilled in the expectation 

that, somehow, you will take something away that will be relevant to your responsibilities. 

Operational is learning by doing. You know, just being a part of the program. You’re on 

the job, and the words we use all gravitate around the notion of on-the-job experience. And 

then self-development are things that you do for yourself outside of the requirements of 

either your job or your education. The things you do to improve yourself.

Now I’d suggest to you that, within our own system, for much of our history, on-thejob training was the way it was done. That these other two options, institutional and selfdevelopment, were much thinner. I think when we get to panel one, we’re going to have 

a great opportunity to kind of go over this. I think Dr. Wayne Hsieh is going to be able to 

speak to us from his background, having written about West Pointers in the Civil War, the 

old Army in war and peace. The notion of the role West Point played in cultivating this 

generational leadership. 

But what we have to remember is that West Point was founded in 1802, and it didn’t 

really start producing general officers until the Civil War. That was the first occasion where 

you saw general officers being produced by the virtue of an institution that was designed, in 

theory, to promote leadership. So for two generations, West Point, really, was a repository 

of engineering skills, of ballistics, of technical skills, and military technique. 
6

Keynote Presentation

And many of your leaders of the time felt that that was the only thing education could 

do for you. And that more to the point, that your cavalry officer and your infantry officer, 

and your line officer was going to be such a person by the virtue of talent, and temperament, 

and character. And that he was going to rise to the top without much need for education. 

That he was going to be the great militia leader, like Green. You know? Or Bedford Forrest. 

And that education was not particularly contributive. But that you did need it for people 

who were going to make maps, and people who were going to build buildings, and people 

who were going to construct fortifications, and people who were going to deal with artillery 

ballistics.

Now, in fact, where we got our general officers was by and large by the virtue of 

political connections. But the West Point leavening proved itself in the Mexican War as 

being a great way to produce very capable junior officers. And by the Civil War, as we’re 

going to see in the panel, I believe, it bears fruit in this proliferation of general officers that 

have marked the course of the notion of institutional education, ever since. 

In that same panel Dr. Steven Woodworth will be speaking to us, and amongst a 

proliferation of other publications, many publications, you’ve got his book, Nothing but 

Victory: The Army of the Tennessee. A great discussion and case study of the war in the 

West, and how that army achieved a very high state of competence and prestige, even 

though it’s often overlooked for the Army of the Potomac. But it’s interesting to note, as 

you take a look at the key players, the big stars, you know, you’ve got people like Grant, 

and Sherman, and Sheridan. These guys were not at the pinnacle of their class as West 

Pointers. They were not, incidentally, on the top of their game as army officers, either, in 

the pre-war Army. And the guys who were the superstars were guys like McClellan and 

Halleck. 

And in the crucible of the Civil War, there was a disconnect that we probably need to 

discuss. And I’m sure panel one is going to address it a lot more than I’ll be able to, here. 

What is the disconnect between the preparations and expectations of army officers before 

the war, and what played out and paid off in the Civil War? Had times changed? Or was 

there a flaw in the leadership that was being developed? And I’m going to come back to 

that point here, in a little bit, when we talk about it today. 

Self development. You know, what exactly is the self development that’s relevant to 

developing leaders? Well you know, for many generations, it was thought to be personal 

character. And the officers of the time had a classical education. And there were not a few 

of them who could read Plutarch’s Lives in the original Latin or Greek. Now of course, 

Plutarch’s Lives, consciously, was an effort to develop standard emulation which would 

allow you to develop worthy military leaders. I mean, now, the reason Plutarch wrote the 

book was, he wanted to provide examples that were worthy of emulating.

Now, when you get into self development that is going to create the officer who’s going 

to command on the field of battle, character is important, but it can’t be everything. And 

for a long time, there was a relative thinness of the literature that was going to be able to 

advance your capacity for self development. Before the Civil War, there wasn’t all that 

much to read in order to develop yourself. A little bit, not all that much.
7

Brown

In our second panel, Dr. Perry Jamieson will be talking about, amongst other things, I 

saw him last night and he said he might mention Crossing Deadly Grounds, his book, The 

United States Army Tactics, 1865-1899. That reading, that fine piece of work, is important 

not just for the tactics that were being developed during the period, but more importantly, 

for the interplay and exchange of ideas back and forth in the professional literature that 

propelled this forward. And so self development, in part, is participation in this process of 

exchanging ideas and the deliberation.

In the same panel, Todd Brereton, who is the author of Educating the US Army: Arthur 

L. Wagner and Reform, hopefully will speak to this period as being a period in which, for 

the first time, education gained parity with experience. As the framework of reference of 

how it was officers were going to develop. But again, when we’re talking about leadership, 

time-sensitive. Or time and culturally sensitive, in some respects. 

Right now, what I want to do is belabor you with a little family history, family story. 

Bear with me, because as hard as it may be to believe, it’ll lead somewhere eventually. 

1912, my grandfather shows up at Battery DeRussy and he walks in to the battery. He’s 

met at the door by a sharp-looking NCO speaking in a little bit of an Irish accent. And 

the NCO says, “Sir, we’re very”, I can’t imitate an Irish brogue, I’d try, but I wouldn’t do 

very well with it. You know, “Sir, we’re very pleased to have you. All the men here are 

very proud to have an academy graduate as their new lieutenant. You’re going to have a 

wonderful career, and we’re going to have a great time, as long as you do your job and let 

me do mine. You go to all the meetings, you tell us what you want to do, you attend to the 

company commander, but when it comes to telling the soldiers what to do, you let me do 

that. Officers lead NCO’s, NCO’s lead men.”

When my father showed up in 1942, it was to the 88th Infantry Division, which was 

the first of the all-draftee division in the combat in World War II, and everything was in 

turmoil. 15,000 soldiers had showed up, they all came across the Camp Gruber site. Out 

of this huge mass of draftees, there was a very tiny sliver of experienced officers. There 

were 200 experienced officers and 200 experienced NCO’s out of the whole mass. And so, 

my father didn’t have a platoon sergeant that showed up and told him what to do. He had a 

young E-6 who he went and found, who upon finding him, he said, “Well oh, I’m so happy 

you’re here. You can help me out. Sir, what am I supposed to do?”

And it was this huge process of the Army trying to grow overnight, from being a small 

organization to being a massive one. And might as well tell you, probably at some point. My 

father had been my grandfather’s aide until such time as he eloped with the boss’s daughter 

and got kicked off of the division staff. And you know, that was what carried him down to 

be in a newly-formed battery with the E-6 as his NCO counterpart. But endearingly, my 

grandfather wrote my father a note shortly before he arrived, and said, you know, he called 

him Brownie, “Brownie, about time for you to show up. Look forward to seeing you. We 

got a big job on our hands, because everybody here knows even less about the Army than 

you do.” So, you know, family pride.

But when I showed up, in 1972 as this 2-37 Armor Battalion in Erlangen, Germany, 

the Vietnam War was winding down, but we weren’t set to Vietnam. My whole West Point 
8

Keynote Presentation

class was sent to Germany, because at that time, Germany was in trouble with respect 

to force structure, with respect to assets, with respect to resourcing, with respect to the 

noncommissioned leadership. The commissioned officer leadership was as good as I’ve 

ever seen. But when you got to the noncommissioned officers, by and large for seven or 

eight years, they’d had a choice of a follow-on assignment coming out of Vietnam. And by 

and large, they would choose not to go to Germany as their follow-on assignment coming 

out of Vietnam.

And so, there was a window of time where you were very underrepresented by 

noncommissioned officers, and the arriving lieutenant, when I arrived, it was the first day 

of the use for alert. And that’s where, you know, Lariat Advance, everybody’s rolling out 

of the motor pool, all of the tanks are supposed to be on the road. Went to find my platoon 

sergeant, he was drunk. The next ranking man after this guy, who was a E-6, was a E-5, 

and he was drunk too. So it was E-4’s and privates. This was a very narrow window of 

time, but a window of time when the noncommissioned officer presence just wasn’t present 

in Europe. And if you want your idea of either hell or purgatory, try commanding a tank 

company without a noncommissioned officer. And so, you ended up with privates and 

lieutenants trying to do each other’s job. 

When my son reports into Vicenza, Italy, the 503d Airborne, he walks into the door, 

he’s met by a sharp-looking NCO speaking with a slight Latin accent. Noncommissioned 

officer says, “Sir, welcome aboard. All of the men are very proud to have an Academy 

graduate as their new lieutenant. You’re going to have a wonderful career, and we’re going 

to have a great time, if you do your job and let me do mine. You go to the meetings, you 

attend to the battalion commander, you take notes, you tell us what you want done. But 

when it comes to telling the soldiers what to do, you let me do that. Officers lead NCO’s, 

NCO’s lead men.” So, how far have we come in 85 years?

I would say though, you know, beyond the charm of having a personal connection with 

each of these folks, who are of course all dear to me, is the kind of larger picture that I 

believe that it gave me an intimate look at the fact that each of these soldiers was walking 

into a different Army.

Under the able supervision of Richard Stewart, right now, I’m working on a book, 

Army Transformation, it was mentioned. We call it Kevlar Legions, subtitled, The Army 

Transformation 1989-2005. You know, to get there, we need to talk about the previous 

transformations of the Army. And you know, when I’m talking about transformations, 

I mean your major changes, your sea changes. Your changes that take your Army from 

being one thing to being another. The expectation of some kind of exponential change in 

the results. Either you’re ten times more lethal, or you’re ten times more capable, or ten 

times less likely to take causalities. And it’s adoption, not just of new technology, it’s also 

socioeconomic change, strategic change, big picture.

These are the transformations I believe have occurred. I believe my grandfather walked 

into an Army for empire. And that that existed from the Spanish-American War through 

1941, with a brief intermission for World War I, and that it was a very special army that 

had some characteristics that we’ll talk about later, that transitioned to be the mobilization-
9

Brown

based Army that we’re familiar with from World War II. That there was a rehearsal for 

the mobilization-based Army in World War I, but the rehearsal didn’t take, in the sense of 

radically altering the Army as it existed on the ground in 1920. But with World War II, that 

second bout of mobilization, followed by your strategic responsibilities in the aftermath of 

the war, did change the Army permanently into the mobilization-based Army.

The mobilization-based Army was coterminous, in some respects, with the early Cold 

War Army. Although the early Cold War Army was substantially different, by the virtue 

of its overseas responsibilities and nuclear munitions. The late Cold War Army was in the 

aftermath of Vietnam, but more importantly to the nature of the Army, it was all-volunteer. 

And then of course, the purpose of my book is to establish that, at some point in time, that 

late Cold War Army itself, transitioned to the digitized, expeditionary Army that we live 

in today.

And I believe that today’s Army is appreciably different than the late Cold War Army, 

and certainly different than the early Cold War Army. And that’s a little bit advanced 

advertisement on the book. But now, let’s take a look at each of those cultures that these 

men walked into. 

The lieutenant of 1912, he was, at the time up front, America, the United States was 

the most egalitarian country in the world. And was in fact in the midst of the Progressive 

Era, and it was in fact supportive of and trying to advance democratic processes. But 

nevertheless, the soldiers of that time were comfortable with and mindful of class and race 

in a way that would make us very uncomfortable today, but was generally accepted as kind 

of the way things were. 

Officers, by and large, were drawn from the middle class. The middle class was 

relatively small compared with the middle class that we have today. There was a much 

larger working class. The working class was the locus from which soldiers were drawn. 

The working class included a very, very high proportion of immigrants, in the case of 

the Northeast. In the case of the South and West, a very large proportion of, essentially, 

agriculturally, you know, folks who had lived and been raised on farms. The officers had 

strikers, but this was nothing unusual, because the middle class had hired help. 

There was a social division that translated itself comfortably into the ways that the 

Army did business. And in a lot of respects, the culture of the time was the reason that the 

Army worked. The most outstanding example, of course, is the high caliber and quality of 

the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry, which were your black infantry and 

cavalry regiments. The NCO structure, there, was incredibly capable because, of course, 

for those individuals, a method of advance, and an opportunity for advance existed in the 

Army that existed nowhere else. There was a ceiling, but it was an opportunity for advance.

Similarly, the high proportion of Irish NCO’s as a character, I mean, Irish NCO’s is 

almost a stereotype of the time, but it had to do with the opportunities that existed. And so 

you had men who had a great deal of talent, that could not otherwise advance in society by 

the virtue of the social structure, who had an outlet for their success by the virtue of being 

the highly-capable Noncommissioned officers that we know from this period.
10

Keynote Presentation

Now, the middle class, the ones who would go to West Point, would become officers, 

along with other aspirations, they put a great stock on personal knowledge, education, 

erudition. Getting to college, not many people went to college, a relatively few went, at the 

time. The education gave them an advantage, with respect to grasping the larger issues that 

they were supposed to apply to the problems that they faced. Up through 1920, advancement 

in the Army through major was by the virtue of competitive examination. You took a test 

to move forward. Because that was true, you had an institutional incentive to be well-read 

that matched up with the social imperative that was already there for people of your class.

The lieutenant of 1912, as he matured, would value school assignments. This wasn’t 

just by the virtue of the kind of Progressive Era instinct towards book-learning, and the late 

19th century professionalization, the major professions, to say, emerged at the time. But it 

also was the fact that the lieutenant of 1912 knew he was going to be a captain for a long 

time. Knew he was going to be a lieutenant for a long time. Knew that he was going to have 

as much troop duty as he wanted, or could absorb. That he was going to see an awful lot 

of soldiers. And the exceptional assignment, the one that would set him apart, the one that 

would give him an opportunity, would be to teach at Fort Leavenworth. Or to teach in one 

of the branch schools. And to have the time to learn, to be educated, to impart knowledge 

to others, to reflect on things.

And so, that generation set a great stock by assignments within the Army school system. 

You know, my grandfather taught here, my wife’s grandfather taught here, Patton taught 

here, Eisenhower taught here. They all taught here at the same time. They all thought that 

this was a great opportunity to advance their professional skills and to deal with things that 

they could not encounter in the course of troop duty. Because of course troop duty, at the 

time, meant company level and below. There was not division maneuvers and battalion 

operations. It was a modest touch.

This Army, the lieutenant of 1912, was committed to imperial service. He knew that 

he would travel around the world within a relatively narrow paradigm of the Philippines, 

Puerto Rico, Panama. If he was assigned within the United States, he’d be in the sticks, you 

know, some Western outpost. And this, incidentally, this exposure gave him the opportunity 

to, I’ll give you an illustrative example of the value that learning added to the equation that 

this guy brought to the Army. 

This was the period of time of the great medical breakthroughs. The reason the 

Europeans were able to colonize Africa during this period, and the United States was able 

to develop the Panama Canal in this period, or the Philippines were effectively occupied, 

is because the American Army, for the first time, along with its other imperial counterparts, 

figured out and conquered disease. The lethal diseases that had taken tens of thousands 

of troops in early eras, you know, Yellow Fever, dysentery, they didn’t exactly eliminate 

them, but they figured them out to the point that you could keep the casualties from them 

exceptionally low. With good reason, the builder of the Panama Canal estimated that, by 

the virtue of medical knowledge, they’d saved 70,000 they otherwise would’ve lost on the 

project. 70,000 lives represent the entire strength of the US Army at the time.
11

Brown

The people who brought this to bear were, of course, the people who were reading 

books, the people who had a little bit of knowledge, the people who were trying to bring 

in this new notion of germ theory to the active build of the Army. The Army officer was 

professionalizing at about the same time that the medical profession was professionalizing, 

and about the same time lawyers and everybody else were becoming professions. 

So when you kind of take a look at it, the noncommissioned officer didn’t have any 

of the time, hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to germ theory. I mean, that wasn’t high 

on his list of things to worry about or think about. But if the lieutenant said, “OK, you’re 

going to put the latrine downstream from the mess hall. You’re going to have the latrine 

at least 100 meters from everybody else. We’re going to put oil on all of these water spots 

where mosquito larva had developed. And all the men are going to wash their hands before 

breakfast.” The NCO didn’t have any strong feelings one way or the other, but if the officer 

said it was going to happen, it was going to happen, and he made it happen.

And that kind of medical discipline was a unique attribute of this generation of officers 

in a way that that it never was before, and really hadn’t been since. We’ve never reached 

the point of having the consciousness of hygiene that this generation had. Where, right 

now, we kind of are of the opinion that doctors are so good, medicine is so advanced, that 

whatever I get, they’ll give me a pill and I’ll be all right. So you know, we don’t worry 

about medical implications in the way that these guys did, because there was no failsafe. 

There was no, you know, once you caught it, you were gone.

The junior officer, the lieutenant of 1942, couldn’t afford the kind of frame of reference 

or attitude, the authoritarian class system that the lieutenant of 1912 lived with. It no longer 

existed. It really didn’t exist in society as a whole, but in particular, it didn’t exist in the 

Army of 1942. Because you didn’t have that very solid, robust cadre of noncommissioned 

officers to run the show in the way that it had been run in the earlier Army. The class 

system, in a lot of respects, had broken down in the Great Depression. The movement, from 

that point on, would ever enlarge the middle class, to the point that the middle class would 

be the dominant demographic, rather than the minority demographic.

And of course, the lieutenant was thrown into circumstances where everybody was of 

relatively little experience, and all kind of things had to be done at once, in the course of 

this massive mobilization. The technique that was settled upon in the 88th Division, and in 

most other divisions, with respect to training, was not that the folks who knew what they 

were doing would teach everything to everybody who didn’t know what they’re doing. 

You know, which is kind of the obvious thing. You’d think that, “Well OK, you’ve got 200 

NCO’s, so they’ll each take X number of soldiers, and they’ll teach them what it is that 

they need to know.”

That was not what was done. The alternative was that you took the lieutenant, who 

you were going to put in charge, and you trained him the night before. He trained his 

subordinates on whatever it is that they were supposed to know. And the same thing was 

true with the NCO. And you know, the formula you had, at Camp Ruby, you had night 

classes where the lieutenants went and learned what it was that they were supposed to 

know. And within a few days time, they were teaching that same material to the privates. 
12

Keynote Presentation

And the imperative was, whether you know it very well or not, you’re in charge, you 

need to take charge. And the people who are going to be serving underneath you need to go 

to you, and see you as being the source of leadership, the source of knowledge, the source 

of guidance. And it reinforced the chain of command as it went along.

This was a generation that developed a huge thirst for troop duty. They wanted to be 

with the soldiers, and the wanted to be as often as they could. And the reason was, things 

were moving very quickly, and ranks moved very quickly, and the expansion of the Army 

was happening at a breakneck pace. And if you missed out on an operational assignment, 

you might miss the next step, because the steps were coming quickly. This was not an 

Army in which you were going to be a lieutenant for 20 years. You had to capture your 

moment, and you had to move quickly.

The generation was defined by World War II. Whenever my father would meet one of 

his colleagues, one of the first questions would be, “Well, where did you serve?” Well, what 

was meant by the question was, “Where did you serve in World War II? What unit were 

you with? What campaign were you in?” There were several generations in which, then, all 

the Chiefs of Staff came through, you know, had crossed Omaha Beach. The World War II 

experience defined them.

One thing I didn’t comment on and should have. The branch experience was very 

distinctive and very unique in the pre-World War II army. And so, coast artillery men, and 

cavalry men, and infantry men lived in very different worlds, and they did different things. 

And it was not at all unusual for an infantryman to do infantry operation, and that was the 

only branch or specialty that was represented. It simply didn’t happen in World War II. In 

World War II, the imperative of combined arms warfare manifested itself and never left. 

Every operation involved engineers, artillery, tanks, tight-knit and very capable combat 

arms performance.

With respect to the occupationist aftermath, this affected the World War II generation 

in a way analogous to the World War II combat experience affected them. But in kind of 

a reverse sort of way. When they were occupying Germany and occupying Japan, this 

generation was automatically catapulted into the unstated mission of helping the Germans 

and Japanese kind of figure out democracy, and civil rights, and Western culture. And 

you know, there was this whole effort in the mind of the United States to re-educate the 

Germans and Japanese in the direction of the virtues that we believed we had. 

But of course, the first thing out of your mouth, if you’re a lieutenant, or a captain, or 

a major, and you’re trying to develop this kind of instruction is, “You know, the reason 

we had to bomb Germany to smithereens is because you all are racist and authoritarian.” 

And then of course suddenly, you reflect as the German asks, “Well what about your black 

soldiers? What about your own race relations?” And this generation came to grips with the 

notions of racism and the notions of authoritarianism. 

This is the period of time in which the integration of the Army began. This is the period 

of time in which the Uniform Code of Military Justice took its present form. Wherein 

which, for generations, the law was whatever the 1st sergeant decided it was. And instead, 
13

Brown

you had a Uniform Code of Military Justice which codified and which had fail-safes. That’s 

the lieutenant of ’42.

World War II was fought by two generations, not one. Maybe more. But in my own 

case, my grandfather and my father both fought, and fortuitously, in the same division. 

And so, you can kind of get a feel for the fact that you had both generations in play at once, 

and you had the character of both generations in play at once. And it was a narrow of time 

in which that could have happened.

One of the articles I’ve written dealt with general officer leadership in World War 

II, and if you take a look at the general officer level, you’ll find virtually all of them 

had faculty experience. My grandfather taught the Dardanelles Campaign, here at Fort 

Leavenworth. And the Dardanelles Campaign, of course, is amphibious landing in the 

Mediterranean, and dealt with all the difficulties and miscarriages that occurred in that 

particularly amphibious landing. This was not a bad set of skills to have when you were 

fighting in the Mediterranean, again, in 1942-45.

Habits of reading and reflection. These guys, remember, they hadn’t really served in 

units above the size of company. They’d never seen tanks or airplanes that actually worked. 

And yet, they had the capability and the imagination to put together the Army groups that 

fought World War II and effectively lead them. They had the capability to fight Blitzkrieg

with capabilities that exceeded those of the Germans who had invented it. They governed 

all these strange lands and different places in the aftermath of World War II.

And so, somehow, they got, by the virtue of their learning and education, the things 

that they could not possibly have experienced, in fact. They all had operational or combat 

experience—not as much combat as you might have thought. A couple of months in World 

War I in about a third of the cases. But they were all very familiar with the artillery-infantry 

combination, and they all had served with that.

Interestingly enough, the litmus between the successful and unsuccessful general 

officers in World War II seems to have been the relative experience with field-grade 

command or high-level staff at that critical point between 1938 and about 1942. There 

were about 20 officers who were either division commanders or corps commanders who 

were relieved in the course of the war. And if you compare them with 20 commanders who 

were demonstrably successful, you’ll find that the successful commanders went through 

their entire interwar experience, had done all of these schools and other things. 

But when the mobilization began, and the Army began growing in earnest, they were 

fortunate enough to be assigned, in many cases, as battalion commanders, and in some 

cases, as regimental commanders. But as the Army expanded, one thing led to another, and 

they went to battalion, to regiment, to division, to corps. And so, as they progressed up the 

ladder, they had a good, strong feel for the commands that were immediately underneath 

them.

You had yet another cohort of officers who were popped onto the high-level staff 

because you need staff officers, and someone has to do it. And they started off on corps 

staff, and then they advanced to theater staff. And they moved, and they stayed in the 

high-level staff. And they become too valuable to move. And then, when they got their 
14

Keynote Presentation

opportunity to be division commanders or corps commanders, they didn’t have the depth 

of experience that would’ve allowed them to succeed. And too many of them failed.

But the combination between the two generations can be illustrated by the example of 

the 88th Infantry Division. Its first combat was Operation Diadem in World War II. This 

was in Italy. The senior officers had a big picture of what was supposed to happen. They 

had the Leavenworth solution, they knew how all of the different parts were supposed 

to be. They deployed their forces on the ground, they had given the guidance of how 

everything was supposed to happen. 

In the opening moments of the campaign, the artillery went in right on time, the troops 

came out right behind the artillery, the troops went right up behind this curtain of artillery. 

They were within 30 seconds of the artillery lifting as they hit the next position. Mount 

Damiano fell, which was the critical piece of the Gustav Line, which is the Monte Cassino 

line. And so, this original battle plan had worked. They broke through, and they broke 

through with minimum casualties, and they were on the road.

But as they broke through, they were trying to get through to the Senger Line, called 

the Hitler Line, the next line of resistance. And they needed to get there before the Germans 

could redeploy to get there. And as this initial breakthrough had succeeded, as the initial 

pieces on the board had worked, as the plan had worked, you began to get this unraveling. 

Because, of course, no plan survives the initial contact with the enemy. And communications 

broke down. Things became difficult. 

All the sudden, the battle migrated from being in the control of the senior leaders, like 

my grandfather, and it migrated down to being in the control of the junior officers who were 

trying to make things happen on the ground, and their noncommissioned counterparts. And 

the communications broke down. There was improvisation that was necessary. Somebody 

figured out that the artillery had the best radios. And that they generally could rely upon 

the artillery men to be in communications with each other if the ground permitted. But the 

ground didn’t permit because the mountains were so steep, and there was such a difficulty 

with the defiles. 

But the artillery also had observer planes, they had spotter planes. So, the spotter planes 

could fly. And so, you ended up with this improvised solution of flying the planes above 

the moving columns, and having the communications come through the artillery forward 

observers who had the radios that would work. Improvised on the ground. 

As the advance progressed, it was quickly determined that you couldn’t advance on 

the roads. The roads were too clogged; the Germans were too smart to let you use them. 

You had to go over the back of hills. Well, you couldn’t get your supplies over. And 

traditionally, campaigns had broken down over supplies. But you had Italian mule tiers, 

you had mule trains. And the solution that had been improvised at the time was, you needed 

to lay as in, with the Italian mule tiers. You need to have something to make sure you 

could work with these guys, so you could get your mule through this absolutely forbidding 

landscape, and keep the pace of the advance going. 

Well, there were some soldiers from Missouri who knew everything about mules. And 

there were some soldiers from New York who were of Italian descent, and knew everything 
15

Brown

about Italians. The Missourians knew nothing about Italians, the Italians knew nothing 

about mules. But between the two of them, they made the liaison that allowed the Italian 

mule team to be a party to the success of the advance.

And so, you had this improvisation that occurred at the grassroots level by the virtue 

of this kind of participate advantagement that was an instinctive characteristic of the 1942 

generation. At the same time that you had a thoughtful, capable, and likely-to-succeed 

master plan that had been designed, with the Leavenworth solution, by men who had been 

in the class of 1912. And had, in fact, participated in the Leavenworth experience to the 

point of having taught on the faculty here. So, a good combination.

The lieutenant of 1972 comes in, you know, that ethnic diversity is the issue. Affirmative 

action is kind of a call sign. And although the Army had integrated earlier, this particular 

period was the time in which the integration, the successful integration of the Army, was 

the priority topic. 

Now incidentally, I’ve missed the opportunity to make a point that I wanted to make. I 

apologize. But when talking about the general officer leadership in World War II, I did want 

to flag panel number three and Tim Nenniger, and his discussion of “The Leavenworth 

Schools and the Old Army.” And Peter Schifferle, and his “America’s School for War: 

Fort Leavenworth, Officer Education, and Victory in World War II.” And the outstanding 

opportunity we’re going to have with these two men to probe into the contribution of 

Leavenworth, through several generations, in creating the intellectual framework that 

allowed us to win World War II. And to provide that overarching capability for having the 

right plan that I spoke to, when speaking of the experience of the 88th Infantry Division.

The lieutenant of 1972 would be a cold warrior. His frame of reference would be the 

Soviet, and the army he would design himself against would be the Soviet Union. Now, I 

say this fully recognizing that the lieutenant of 1971 was coming in when the Vietnam War 

was still in progress. 

I think when panel four gets together, we’re going to have, from Dr. Lewis Sorley, 

Bob Sorley, amongst his other insights, he wrote A Better War: Unexplained Victories and 

Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. I think we owe Bob an enormous debt, 

in that, he’s the first I know of to kind of turn around the paradigm that Vietnam was fought 

by a Cold War Army that just stumbled around in the woods, and got lost in the forest, and 

didn’t know what it was doing. That in fact, the Army in Vietnam indicated a high success 

of adaptation to the circumstances, and a prospect of success overall, but that we walked 

away from the Vietnam experience. And in my own experience, the Vietnam experience 

was not part of the professional expectation of what the future was going to be like.

I think the Army left Vietnam behind, and is rediscovering it now. And I think that 

Dr. Henry Gole, who’s the expert on General William E. DePuy: Preparing the Army for 

Modern War, will capture the frame of reference that we tend to become imbued with, as 

lieutenants of 1971, this notion that we were going to need to deal with a Soviet, or Sovietlike conventional adversarial. That was the mission at-hand. And to their credit, at the time, 

that was true. That was the greatest danger.
16

Keynote Presentation

As a lieutenant, I would already be concerned with career management. And the notion 

of one generation was, “Well, get to the schoolhouse as often as you can.” And the other 

generation was, “Get to troops as often as you can.” By my time, the notion was, “You 

know, you have to get certain things done at certain times. You have to make certain gates. 

You have to be branch-qualified as a major. If you’re a captain, you need to command 

a company just as quick as you can, and as often as you can. You’re going to lose your 

window.” You know, “When’s your school time? You’re going on two tracks. What is your 

other track going to be?”

And so, the whole idea of career management became an issue for the lieutenant of ’71, 

in which, career management hadn’t really been an issue in earlier generations. I mean, it 

wasn’t thought of in those terms. And of course, you affectionately referred to the fellow in 

Washington, who you talked to once a year, as your “career mangler”, you know? Because 

he was the one who was responsible for seeing to you got to the right jobs, and you got the 

right school, and did the right things along time.

Training management and expectation of the GDP. Those were, similarly, tightly 

organized, tightly constrained, tightly choreographed, highly structured. To the Army’s 

credit, it did recognize that the noncommissioned officer level is the most difficult to 

replace. And it’s the most vulnerable to the vagaries of war, deployment, all the rest of that. 

And so, you ended up with a noncommissioned officer educational system, that 

developed over time, that was every bit as effective and capable as the officer’s education 

system, that had long existed. And of course, all of us served as members of alliances. You 

know, wherever we were, that was the expectation. That we would be serving with soldiers, 

from countries other than our own, alongside them. Primarily in NATO.

For my son, the issue was no longer race. That was considered to be resolved. The 

issue was gender. And trying to accommodate circumstances in which you figured out 

whatever the implications were of the Exclusion Policy. And you had, you know, 12% 

women. And this was the social issue of the day. My son’s digitized. Knows how to use 

a GPS, knows how to use Blue Force Tracking, intrinsically knows it, didn’t have to be 

taught it. Could figure it out on the fly. They live in an expeditionary Army. Going back 

and forth overseas at a pace, and with a rotational, is a circumstance that’s unparalleled in 

our previous experience.

Multitasking. It’s not at all unusual for a unit, today, to send the officers off to participate 

in a CPX. The Bradley gunner’s off to shoot at Bradley gunnery under the supervision of 

one set of NCO’s. The infantrymen off to do whatever it is infantrymen are supposed to 

do, under the supervision of another set of NCO’s. And you have the organization, it’s not 

a company or battalion that’s all in the same place at the same time, even during training.

And it’s, of course, professionalized. Professionalized by the virtue of, you know, this 

huge emphasis upon all-volunteer Army. And then the amount of education, and the depth 

of investment that goes into that all-volunteer Army. With panel five, we’re going to be 

able to have Rick Swain talking to us about Lucky War, hopefully, or the Desert Storm as 

the before.
17

Brown

You know, for me, Desert Storm was a culmination of a career. It was the point in time 

in which the Army arrived at demonstrating the capabilities that it truly had. So Desert 

Storm was the after. We’ve gone through all of this, and now we’re at Desert Storm. For 

my son, Desert Storm was before. You know, in Desert Storm, you did all this wrong, and 

you were all screwed up, and these were all the things you couldn’t do. And now, we’re 

going to get so much better, because we’re going to learn the lesson—we’re going to learn 

from all the things you screwed up in Desert Storm.

Well, I think it’s very interesting that we’ll be able to have this expertise on Desert 

Storm, here. Because I really think that, from the point of view of Army transformation as 

I’m writing about it, Desert Storm is the tipping point. It is the litmus.

But along with this professionalization has gone a shrinkage of the Army, and a huge 

reliance on contractors. One of our experts, James Carafano, wrote, Private Sector, Public 

Wars: Contractors in Combat. That’s going to be an opportunity to expose and experience 

the extent to which we have, in fact, contracted out things that the Army used to believe 

were intrinsic to leadership. This is not necessarily a problem. It’s not necessarily wrong. 

But it is, you know, a new aspect to professionalism we haven’t experienced in the past.

I have four grandsons. Every female, in their bloodline, is trying to convince them to 

do anything except go into the Army. And they’ve, of course, intimidated all the males into 

not pushing things too hard. But one of those guys is likely to screw up, and go in the Army. 

You know, the law of averages. If so, he’d be the lieutenant of 20-something. What will the 

Army be like for him? What will the leadership requirements be like for him?

In my view, age diversity is going to be an issue. With a shrinking population of 

traditional military aging, and expanding recognition of the value of health, and exercise, 

and all of that, and a diversification of the kinds of things soldiers are supposed to do. It’s 

inevitable that we’re going to have older and older soldiers, and we already do.

Robotics. Is that the next great wave? What are the implications of globalization? 

Physical criteria, what does it take to make a soldier? Is a soldier who is, you know, 

definition of combat is a soldier who’s flying a drone from Lackland Air Force Base in 

combat. We already know that they’re capable of getting PTSD. So, is that, those are the 

kind of paradigms or circumstances that we look forward to, with this next generation.

And I think that with panel six, Colonel Fontenot and Dr. [Kevin] Benson are going 

to be looking forward, into that aspect of it. You know, it’s not enough to prepare today’s 

leaders for today’s circumstances. We also need prepare tomorrow’s leaders—or anticipate 

tomorrow’s leaders. Anticipate what we’re going to do with the leaders we don’t even have 

aboard yet. And next slide.

Think we’re running to the point of an intermission. I’d just like to conclude by saying 

that leadership is, in some respects, timeless. But in some respects, it is relevant to the 

culture, positions, circumstances, and technology of the time. And the whole point that I 

hope I’ve brought across, with my extended story, is that each of those different armies I 

spoke to required a slightly different mix of leadership skills. There were some things that 

were timeless, but there were a lot of skills and capabilities that were time-sensitive.
18

Keynote Presentation

And I think the historian’s role, and the conference role, will be well-served if we’re 

able to flag up and articulate the timeless. But we’ll also be able to, with sufficient nuance, 

identify those things that are time sensitive, time constrained, or how things have changed 

over time. And if we do, then we are best able to provide the good service of matching 

today’s circumstances with today’s leadership development. 

But perhaps more importantly, anticipating the needs of future leaders, in such 

a manner that we can design the programs that will train them for their roles. And the 

lieutenants of 202X are anticipated before they arrive, they’re not getting their experience 

on the job. There’s something the education system can offer them that prepares them for 

their responsibility. Thank you very much.

Dr. Wright:

Thank you very much, Sir. I’ll just take a moment. I will be very brief, and then we’ll 

go right into the discussion and question and answer session. Thank you again, Sir, for your 

overview of the symposium, and how the topic is going to be developed over the course of 

this event. That the leadership is time, culture-sensitive, and position-sensitive. You gave 

historical examples all the way back to Rome, all the way to present, and the role of West 

Point.

Each generation has a different Army. I thought that was very unique, and very unique 

to say. From 1912 to ’42, ’71 and ’97, able to walk through the time period, and then 

personalize it, that was really neat too, with the family connection to each of those. Came 

full-cycle with the NCO Corps, showed how the NCO’s developed. And also, to look to 

the future. You know, perhaps while the future’s unknown yet, but it’s coming. Our future 

is the history of tomorrow.

So, I will open this up. If you would please, if you have a point to make, or a question 

for General Brown, please raise your hand, I’ll call on you. And again, push that button in 

front of you on the microphone, which will activate it.
19

Day 1: Keynote Presentation

Questions and Answers

(Transcript of Presentation)

Moderated by Dr. Donald Wright

Dr. Wright:

Yes, Sir?

Mr. King:

Sir, Ben King, TRADOC. How you doing?

BG Brown:

Good! How are you today?

Mr. King:

Good, thanks. All these things you’ve touched on, from 1942 on, basically to the 21st 

Century—the Army leader has had to deal with an incredible amount of intellectual and 

social turmoil. From the leavening of the classes in World War II, integration, nuclear 

weapons, communications, the end of the women’s Army Corps, that sort of thing. So all 

these leaders have had to deal with these things, until you get kind of all bunched up into 

the 80’s and 80’s, where you have the Nintendo generation that’s kind of disturbing the 

old class of leaders. Do you see a leveling out now, in the 21st Century, where this social, 

intellectual turmoil that’s been going on in the last half of the 20th Century will be less of 

a challenge in the 21st? I guess that’s a loaded question, but yeah.

BG Brown:

I don’t think so. I think that there are some things that will sort themselves out, and 

there are some things, aspects in which we’ll kind of reduce our expectations, as our place 

in the world settles into a little less, a circumstance of primacy. But I think that our society 

is always going to be in turmoil. And I think, in the immediate future, we’re going to 

have some very huge challenges. With respect, in particular, the demographic pressure of 

fewer and fewer young people to draw from, a broader and broader experiential base that 

they will be bringing into the Army. I think the culture wars, the social wars, the political 

turmoil, I don’t think it will get worse, but I don’t think it’s going to get better. I think it’s 

the kind of social analogy to whatever the law is, that computers get downsized by half, 

with every five years, or whatever.

Mr. King:

Moore’s Law.
20

Keynote Presentation

BG Brown:

I mean, there’s going to continue to be this powerful pressure on us. And so, we’re 

always going to have to draw upon our educational systems to deal with an uncertain and 

ever-changing future.

Mr. King:

Thank you.

BG Brown:

But that’s only opinion, of course. ‘Cause we’re not there, yet.

Mr. Gole:

This is a follow-on to the excellent question—

Dr. Wright:

And excuse me, Sir. Just a moment, if you would. These proceedings are being 

transcribed—it’s something I should have mentioned before—please state your name, your 

organization clearly, so that we can have that on the transcription. And then proceed to your 

comment, Sir.

Mr. Gole:

Henry Gole, disorganized. The question of the “we” of it, and the “I” of it, goes on. 

The question is very, very good, but I’m afraid it’s [terrible?], and if anything, exacerbated 

by what I see around me right now. Projecting into the next year, two, three, four, five, this 

struggle between where one figures his role is as an individual human being, and his place 

in the society, the community at-large, the beat is going to go on. As a matter of fact, I think 

it’s somewhat ominous.

BG Brown:

I agree with everything except your last comment. You know, the ominous part. Yeah, 

I believe the beat will go on, but I think it presents exciting and interesting prospects for 

our children and grandchildren, who know that they will be every bit as challenged and 

inspired as we were. 

Dr. Wright:

Clay?

MAJ Mountcastle:

Good morning, Sir. Major Clay Mountcastle from here at CSI. 

BG Brown:

Good to see you, Clay.

MAJ Mountcastle:

My question is geared, primarily, towards your experience or your opinion from the 

time you spent at CMH [Center of Military History], what was during a very pivotal point 

in our Army’s transformation. You know recently, General (Retired) Bob Scales wrote, 
21

Questions and Answers

in our Army history, an article talking about the Army’s too busy to learn habit it has 

developed recently, with the current OPTEMPO [Operational Tempo] during the Global 

War on Terror. And I was wondering your thoughts on, you know, you were presiding over 

CMH during 9/11, you got to see the Army’s willingness to learn in the years leading up to 

9/11, and then the transformation after 9/11. I have been assuming, recently, that the Army 

is using the Global War on Terror as an excuse to not do something that it really wasn’t 

doing all that well, with leading up to 9/11. Basically, I’m directing that towards your 

digital generation of leadership. How well was the Army officer cohort doing, or taking the 

responsibility of learning its own history, in the lead-up to 9/11, in your estimation?

BG Brown:

It’s an interesting question, Clay. I think that we often, and almost always, as historians, 

have found ourselves a bit put off by the insensitivity to history that the organization, as 

a whole, seems to have. And as you know, your father preceded me as Chief of Military 

History. And one of the insights he shared with me, as we were going through a transitional 

discussion, was the imperative of making sure that the services of historians were visible 

and available within the Army school system. And he had kind of energized a program 

that was called the Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee, DAHAG. He 

had kind of refurbished it into an oversight committee that brought outsight, insight, and 

brought professors from a number of different locations to look in on the Army, see how 

well we were doing, see how well we were writing our history. And what I found was that, 

contrary to our opinion, these outside observers, who had been in venues other than the US 

Army, thought that, on a comparative basis, the Army was creditably attentive to history. 

That it was, in fact, trying to learn from its own experience. And that we were being critical 

of ourselves because we had a frame of reference that was different than theirs, in which 

they weren’t counting, for example, the average student coming into Indiana University, or 

whatever. That is not at all to be dismissive of your point. I do think that we could make far 

more use of history, and far better use of history, and could learn more from our experience. 

And it’s almost become an article of faith that an after-action review, once written, will 

be read once. And that’ll be by the author, you know? Not by the guy who’s got to do it 

again. And so, you know, there’s an awful lot that we are avoiding. But I would say that 

our greatest danger is, if we not only fail to learn from those things that would contribute 

to the immediate event, but also, we fail to kind of step back and take a broad enough view 

to see deep. To allow the lessons we’ve learned from history to apply, not only to current 

circumstances, but to future circumstances. You know, to things that are out there at a 

greater distance. Did I do OK by your question?

MAJ Mountcastle:

Yes, sir, thank you.

BG Brown:

OK.

Dr. Wright:

We have approximately five minutes left. This will end up being one or two questions, 

perhaps. Sir?
22

Keynote Presentation

Dr. Wright:

I’m Don Wright from CSI, and my question has to do with something that’s current right 

now, out there being debated by both military officers and people outside the Department of 

Defense, even. And that’s, what kind of leaders should we, as an institution, be preparing? 

Should we be preparing for the war that we have, or the war that, either, we want, or we 

think is on the horizon? And I think that the comments that you made about Vietnam, the 

Vietnam experience, and other things that we’ve read, that Vietnam really didn’t have a 

major effect on the leader development system, according to system. Certainly below the 

field-grade level. So a general question about, what should the institution, looking back 

at its history, and maybe a little bit forward, how should it be thinking about what type of 

conflict to prepare for? Or should it be focusing on what we have at hand, right now?

BG Brown:

Hmm, great question. In just a few months, maybe a year, there’s going to be a wonderful 

book, called Kevlar Legions, that is going to speak to the very point that you’ve made. And 

the recurrent balance that is struck between having to deal with contemporary circumstances, 

and trying to see deep. You know, for General Reimer, it was Army transformation, and 

the Army after next. You know, there was something that needed to happen right now, and 

there was something that was going to be downstream. For others, there are variations on 

that theme, or that model. The priority always goes to the immediate mission, with respect 

to the psychological energy your senior leaders can spend. Because they have lives on the 

line, people are actually dying, there’s nothing that’s hypothetical. You know, everything 

is happening right now, and needs immediate attention and circumstance. So, that’s where 

your flow of energy and resources are going to go. But you have to set aside somebody, 

you have to parse somebody out who’s sufficiently senior to have clout, authority, and 

access, and also, has a responsibility for seeing deep. And the traditional rule of thumb, 

that the Army staff is dealing with the immediate, and is churning in a squirrel cage of its 

own dealing with the deep future. And that TRADOC sets aside somebody to think of the 

deep future. And so, in answering your question, we really have to do both, but it’s not 

likely to be that the Chief of Staff is going to be able to exclusively focus on either. You 

know, you have the Vice Chief of Staff, traditionally, is given responsibility of running the 

contemporary Army. So he takes all of that off of the Chief. The Chief is supposed to be 

thinking deep, and tries to think deep, but he will keep getting distracted by contemporary 

events. Somebody has to be set aside that is, in fact, your deep thinker, and is preparing for 

that more distant future. And by and large, there have been either exceptional organizations 

that have been set up to do that, like the Objective Task Force, or the Louisiana Maneuvers. 

But beyond that, also, there’s the habit of faculties, and staffs, and schools everywhere to 

generate young faculty members who contribute, by also thinking deep. Was that a help?

Dr. Wright:

Absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our first section for this morning. 

Thank you very much.
23

Day 1, Panel 1: Antebellum Officer Education, 1800-1865

Looking Beyond West Point: Life in the Old Army as Education for War by 

Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, Ph.D.

(submitted paper)

In much of both the popular and scholarly imaginations, the West Point background of 

Civil War commanders had a profound effect on their conduct of the war. In the past year 

we have seen Tom Carhart’s Sacred Ties: From West Point Brothers to Battlefield Rivals, 

which aimed to be a group biography of sorts on young West Point graduates in the Civil 

War, and my own West Pointers and the Civil War, which obviously has implicit within 

its title the idea that that West Point background had a special significance.1

 While as an 

instructor at a service academy, I would like to think that some future historian can draw 

a straight line between what I teach in plebe Naval History and the I MEF commander’s 

Joint Campaign Plan for Operation Iron Hammer in Zorgistan in 2030, but my own guess 

is that a deliberately overwhelmed and sleep-deprived plebe is going to do just enough to 

stay SAT in my course while fending off plebe Chemistry and his or her upperclassmen. 

For similar reasons, historians might wish to be cautious about drawing lines of influence 

between West Point classroom and Civil War battlefields, even if the same individuals 

occupied both spaces at different times in their lives. The antebellum careers of future Civil 

War generals in the “Old Army” had a profound effect on the way they waged war, but 

those effects came not from vaguely remembered lectures in “Old Cobben Sense” Mahan’s 

capstone course on military science, or the close associations built between cadets at the 

academy, but on the more humble minor tactics and administrative knowledge regular 

army officers mostly acquired first at the academy, but later carried with them through their 

time in the “Old Army’s” frontier and seacoast garrisons.

Military schools, like the schools attached to Fort Leavenworth and my own home 

institution at the Naval Academy, share the dilemma of trying to prepare their students 

for the next war. Unfortunately, the only wars we have sure knowledge are wars in the 

past, and the road between the past, present, and future is usually obscured by confusion, 

misdirection, and uncertainty. From the practical perspective of what cadets actually 

learned under the “Thayer system” (named for Sylvanus Thayer, who instituted crucial 

reforms at West Point after the end of the War of 1812), the answer must be that they 

learned little of great use for their roles as senior commanders during the Civil War. Indeed, 

outside of the small numbers of cadets who entered the Army’s “scientific” branches such 

as the Engineers and the Ordnance Bureau, much of what they learned at West Point had 

little relationship to their day-to-day duties in line infantry, artillery, and cavalry regiments. 

A West Point graduate did receive a technical and scientific education second-to-none in 

antebellum America, but as a school for war, much of this scientific education remained, to 

put it bluntly, superfluous.

For most of the antebellum period, only a scant six days of Dennis Hart Mahan’s firstclass capstone course covered issues such as strategy, grand tactics, and other operational 
24

Panel 1

questions. As for the more rudimentary practical military training cadets received, 

which proved far more important, instruction in these subjects had their own problems. 

Furthermore, although substantial amounts of time at the academy were devoted to the drill 

field, a cadet’s marks in tactics constituted in 1833 only 14 percent of a cadet’s standing in his 

class. By 1854, that figure declined to 13 percent. In contrast, in the same year, the academy 

devoted 71 percent of classroom time to math, science, and engineering coursework, which 

was worth 54 percent of the order of merit.2

 In an army without established branch schools, 

practical military training probably should have occupied a higher proportion of a cadet’s 

time at West Point.

Indeed, the academy’s leadership recognized as much, and the first five-year course 

proposed in 1845 allotted more time to practical military training. The academic board for 

that year heartily endorsed reforms “to correct what is felt as an evil, particularly as upon 

no point is public censure found to bear more heavily and with a less disposition to excuse 

its errors, than upon that of professional ignorance.” However, that academic board had 

still stuck by the position that nothing should be taken away from scientific training.3

 The 

five-year curriculum actually instituted in 1854 did use the extra year at the academy to add 

significant time to practical military training, while taking away nothing from the scientific 

curriculum instituted by Thayer shortly after the War of 1812. It is telling, however, that 

the increase in practical military training later provoked a backlash from the academy’s 

engineering-orientated leadership.4

Indeed, the Corps of Engineers formal monopoly on the academy’s administration 

would not be broken until after the Civil War, when the Army finally opened the position 

of West Point superintendent to officers outside the Corps of Engineers. The engineeringheavy curriculum instituted by Thayer and continued by his students, Mahan being the 

most important, had created a culture at the academy where, in John Tidball’s words, 

“it becomes a kind of fixture in our minds that the engineers were a species of gods...

The line was simply the line, whether of horse, foot, or dragoons...For the latter a good 

square seat in the saddle was deemed of more importance than brains. These ideas were 

ground into our heads with such Jesuitical persistency, I do not believe anyone of the 

old [1840s] regime ever entirely overcame the influence of it.”5

 The striking irony of this 

scientific curriculum was that it almost completely ignored the predominant task of the 

nineteenth-century regular army (in terms of years of duty, at least), constabulary duty 

and Indian fighting on the western frontier.6

 The Old Army’s most important, indeed, its 

only professional institution, thus became tied up with only one component of American 

military policy—harbor defense. Considering the fact that there would be no foreign attack 

on American soil between the end of the War of 1812 and Pearl Harbor, the engineering 

focus at West Point ended up wasting much of the Old Army’s limited intellectual capital. 

Indeed, as early as 1822 Alexander Macomb, future commanding general of the army, 

gently admonished Thayer that “you are aware that the character of the institution is Military 

and not philosophical, and while the several branches of the sciences, which are taught at 

the Academy are deemed highly important and essential in forming Scientific officers, the 

main object of the institution is to predominate over all others.”7

 While William T. Sherman 

would be a staunch supporter of the academy in his later years, he would also declare in 
25

Wei-siang Hsieh

an address to the Class of 1869 that “the only schools where war and its kindred sciences 

can be properly learned are in the camp, in the field, on the plains, in the mountains, or 

the regular forts where the army is.”8

 However, even after ending the Corps of Engineers’ 

private monopoly on West Point’s administration, the academy’s curriculum during the 

rest of the nineteenth century remained focused on engineering and the physical sciences. 

Indeed, during the postwar period, the Thayer system became an inbred and stifling dogma 

at the academy in a way it had not been under the influence of the likes of Mahan.9

Nevertheless, as superfluous as this highly technical education was, superfluous really 

is the best way to describe it, because there is no compelling evidence that it actually had 

negative effects on the military performance of future Civil War generals. Some historians 

have attempted to trace the defensive mindset of generals such as George B. McClellan to 

the engineering heavy focus of the West Point curriculum. However, in the “Old Army,” 

with its incredibly weak institutions for the formulation and promulgation of anything 

we would now call “doctrine,” an individual Civil War commander’s attitude toward 

issues such as the utility of entrenchments or the role of the rifle-musket depended more 

on individual preference and personality, as opposed to half-remembered courses at West 

Point. While the defensive mindsets of both McClellan and Henry W. Halleck might be 

connected in some way to the cult of the Corps of Engineers, with D. H. Mahan as its high 

priest, Robert E. Lee’s and P. G. T. Beauregard’s innate aggressiveness certainly was not 

inhibited by his membership in that exclusive fraternity. Furthermore, D. H. Mahan, the 

high priest of the Engineers at West Point, was hardly an apostle of defensive warfare in 

all circumstances, and even the defensively minded McClellan spent part of his antebellum 

career translating and compiling a bayonet fencing manual. Bayonet fencing represented 

an attempt to adapt cold steel, the characteristic weapon of shock tactics and offensive 

action, to both the rise of improved infantry arms such as the rifle musket and the increased 

use of aimed fire.10

Both Sherman’s and Grant’s somewhat checkered careers at West Point also serve 

as another lesson in the uncertain relationship between academic excellence and actual 

leadership ability, or even intellectual creativity. Sherman, perhaps the most intellectually 

gifted officer of the entire century, did well at West Point, but seems to have been somewhat 

bored by the curriculum and more interested in making mischief. His good nature and 

marks earned him some indulgences from the likes of Mahan, but his indifference toward 

cadet regulations led to a regular stream of demerits for minor offenses. Grant’s record of 

general mediocrity at West Point is well known, and he was hardly enamored of the place.11

“Battles and Leaders” in some circles of Civil War studies is almost as disreputable a 

phrase as “drums and trumpets” was during the high tide of the “new military history” a 

generation ago, but that earlier approach to the Civil War struck at a fundamental truth in 

Civil War military history—that because of the weak institutional basis of both the Union 

and Confederate armies, individual commanders had a disproportionate effect on the 

outcome of military operations. While an American commander in Afghanistan and Iraq 

might need to reconcile his intent with a massive military bureaucracy and multiple layers 

of staff officers toiling away at PowerPoint slides in a martial version of Dilbert, while 

coordinating his efforts in a lateral direction with civilian agencies and various foreign 
26

Panel 1

partners, a George B. McClellan or Robert E. Lee could put his stamp on a field army to 

a degree unimaginable in this current age of bureaucracy and electronic communications.

For that reason, a more plausible line of influence between Trophy Point and Civil 

War battlefields can be found in the tight personal connections made between West Point 

cadets during their four difficult years at the academy. West Point’s small classes, fortyto-fifty graduates a year during this period, and its demanding academic and disciplinary 

regime could not help but build strong personal connections (not always positive ones) 

among the institution’s graduates. These were only intensified by the relatively small size 

of the antebellum army. Grant commented in his memoirs on the importance of these 

associations, writing in his memoirs that at West Point and in the Mexican War he “learned 

of the characters of those to whom I was afterwards opposed.” Most importantly, in his 

view, “The natural disposition of most people is to clothe a commander of a large army 

whom they do not know, with almost superhuman abilities. A large part of the National 

army, for instance, and most of the press of the country, clothed General Lee with such 

qualities, but I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal, and it was just as 

well that I felt this.”12

For better or for worse, the high premium West Point graduates placed on antebellum 

associations in the regular army helped solidify the regular army’s extraordinary hold on 

senior command positions in both armies, and this may indeed have had a negative effects 

on command selection during the war. West Point dominated the professional ethos of the 

old army, and the old army’s veterans in turn dominated the high commands of both the 

Union and Confederate armies. Roughly two-thirds of major generals and higher in both 

armies had some sort of experience from the antebellum United States regular army,13 and 

most of these men were West Point graduates. Considering the comparatively small size 

of the academy and the gargantuan size of the citizen-soldier armies they led, this is an 

astonishing proportion.

West Point and the regular army’s officer corps did not exactly overlap, but in 1860, 

over 75 percent of old army officers had graduated from the academy. After 1838, when 

the army had overcome the mass resignations caused by the Second Seminole War, the 

proportion of West Point graduates increased almost every year above the 1838 figure 

of 64 percent.14 Not only did the school on the Hudson educate future officers, it drew 

its instructors and superintendents from the army’s self-styled intellectual elite (including 

Robert Anderson, George B. McClellan, George Thomas, William Hardee, Robert E. Lee, 

P. G. T. Beauregard, among others). Most importantly, its faculty included the Old Army’s 

most noteworthy writer and thinker, Dennis Hart Mahan. Unlike the Navy’s current 

attitude toward Annapolis, a teaching assignment at West Point was both a reward and a 

career enhancing post for officers. The periodic attempts to formulate and revise tactics 

utilized review boards that met at West Point, where they could use the Corps of Cadets as 

a test battalion and the West Point library as a convenient source of military books. Indeed, 

part of the academy’s value was simply as a place where foreign military books could be 

centrally housed and utilized by interested officers—the actual rationale of Thayer’s post 

War of 1812 mission to Europe. For example, and major tactical reforms such as the boards 
27

Wei-siang Hsieh

that formulated the army’s first successful artillery manual and Hardee’s Tactics all met at 

the academy.

Furthermore, in the absence of stable branch schools in the antebellum army, West 

Point had the noteworthy advantage of institutional stability. Unlike the branch schools, 

it was not potentially prey to the Army’s need to police an ever-expanding frontier, or the 

occasional major conflict like the Mexican War or even the wars against the Seminoles. 

West Point cadets did not learn much in their academic classes of direct military relevance, 

but they at least received an introduction to the broader professional life of the regular 

army. For example, during the tactical reforms that led to the promulgation of Hardee’s 

tactics in 1854, some of the cadets who served as guinea pigs showed some awareness of 

the larger professional issues involved.15

For better or for worse, their shared experiences at the academy caused West Pointers 

to have a greater confidence in fellow old army men than even the most qualified citizensoldier generals. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia made it an informal but important 

“rule that professional soldiers could be appointed to command without consideration of 

the Sate of their birth and without regard to seniority except among themselves,” to use 

the words of the author of the most important command study of the Army of Northern 

Virginia. These sorts of policies led to grumbling among volunteer officers in the Army of 

Northern Virginia regarding what they saw as an unfair prejudice in favor of West Pointers. 

Perhaps most striking about Lee’s policies favoring academy graduates was his willingness 

to give only regular army men the benefits of the old army’s heavy respect for seniority.16

In the antebellum U. S. Army, for the most part, seniority governed promotion up to the 

grade of colonel, with each officer waiting his turn. This respect for seniority probably did 

more harm than good in both sections’ armies, even when limited to professionals, and it 

helped result in such mediocre figures as Ambrose Burnside and John Pemberton retaining 

positions of high responsibility through the sheer force of inertia established by their early 

general’s commissions at the beginning of the war.

On the Federal side, while the close-knit relations of McClellan’s West Point trained 

subordinates in the Army of the Potomac is well known, the academy had a strong 

monopoly on high positions even in the more flexible western armies. William T. Sherman 

appointed O. O. Howard to command of the Army of Tennessee over the more senior 

John Logan, perhaps the finest citizen-soldier general in the Union army, after the death of 

James McPherson. Talking of both Logan and Francis P. Blair, Sherman later wrote in his 

memoirs that “both were men of great courage and talent, but were politicians by nature 

and experience, and it may be that for this reason they were mistrusted by regular officers 

like Generals Schofield, Thomas, and myself.” That mistrust, and because “it was allimportant that there should exist a perfect understanding among the army commanders,” 

led to Sherman’s selection of Howard for the position as commanding general of the Army 

of Tennessee.17 Or, as Sherman put it in a wartime letter on a different issue, “we must deal 

with men as we find them and it is not Logans fault that he was a Citizen only three years 

ago, and looks at all questions from another view than a professional soldier.”18

There was some plausibility to Sherman’s position because of the importance of 

agreement and mutual confidence among senior commanders. Furthermore, with West 
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Panel 1

Pointers inevitably dominating both armies’ high command echelons due to the need to put 

them in senior positions from the war’s earliest days due to the absence of any plausible 

alternatives, some degree of inbred self-selection among academy grads was unavoidable. 

From the checkered records of “political generals,” we can perhaps see the benefits of 

some degree of “ring-knockerism.” However, this highlights all the more the failings of 

the West Point curriculum, which self-consciously set out to train the leadership corps 

of any future American army, but diverted so much of the average cadet’s attention away 

from either practical military training or a solid foundation in military history and strategy, 

but instead focused on an overly technical curriculum relevant to only one branch of the 

army. One Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, justified this approach by declaring that “the 

great mission of the Academy is to engraft on the mind of the cadet the principles of a 

thorough scientific military education, and considering the time requisite for this object, it 

is doubtless impracticable to bestow as much attention upon practical instruction as would 

be required to turn out perfect adepts in every branch.”19 Floyd would have agreed with the 

earlier assertion by Erasmus D. Keyes, future Civil War corps commander, that “it has been 

settled that scientific acquirements are the basis of military knowledge.”20

In sum, West Pointers preferred one of their own to occupy positions of command 

responsibility due in large part to what was essentially a prejudice akin to the bonds between 

college alumni or fraternity brothers, as opposed to a rational appeal to some useful body of 

knowledge and expertise that West Pointers exclusively possessed, especially with regards 

to large unit command. At the outset of the war, West Point graduates did have a virtual 

monopoly on the fundamentals of minor tactics and army administration, but these were 

all skills that volunteer officers could learn with enough time and effort, and which served 

as poor predictors of suitability for high command. At times, West Pointer’ prejudice for 

one of their own could remain compatible with productive command climates, as it was in 

the armies under Grant, Sherman, and Lee, but it could also lead to a host of military and 

political problems, as can be best seen in McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Individual 

commanders, not a shared body of substantive knowledge received at West Point set the 

tone in individual field armies.

West Point’s academic curriculum and the common psychological bonds at West 

Point did not affect Civil War generalship in any sort of significant way, but what did have 

profound effects, mostly because it provided the rationale for their early prominence in the 

war, was their virtual monopoly on practical military knowledge at the outset of the Civil 

War. While antebellum West Point should have focused more on practical military training, 

cadets did receive a solid foundation in antebellum minor tactics of all arms, and we should 

not underestimate the importance of this basic tactical training. The miniscule size of the 

antebellum regular army (a little over 16,000 officers and men on the eve of the Civil 

War) and the collapse of the state militia system made even the most rudimentary military 

expertise extremely scarce when open war broke out in April 1861. For all the flaws in 

the old army’s training and institutional structure and the far from uniformly successful 

generalship of West Point-trained generals, regular army men possessed knowledge and 

skills that neither the Union nor the Confederacy could do without. This knowledge did 

not concern itself so much with questions of high strategy, ignored for the most part at the 
29

Wei-siang Hsieh

academy, or the engineering knowledge that dominated the academy curriculum, but the 

most indispensable elements of mid-nineteenth-century military expertise.

How does one keep a field army supplied with the most basic of necessities? How does 

one move troops from one point to another under conditions of extreme stress? How does 

one train troops to use their weapons at a high enough level of competence that they are 

a greater threat to their enemies than their comrades? The historian Richard McMurry’s 

comments on the benefits the Army of Northern Virginia obtained from having a high 

proportion of officers with Virginia Military Institute and West Point educations applies 

to both sections: “Men who had been educated and trained at a military school entered 

Confederate service already knowledgeable about small unit administration, drill, tactics, 

weapons, and other matters. That knowledge allowed them, from the start, to give their 

companies, batteries, battalions, and regiments a higher tone, more thorough training, 

greater confidence, and better discipline than would have been the case if the leaders had 

had to learn their duties after assuming command.”21

While the Army of Northern Virginia also could draw on VMI, probably the strongest 

antebellum military school outside of West Point, the Union had no real equivalent (the 

Norwich Military Academy perhaps comes closest), and even the other southern military 

schools had a far less martial character than the federal school on the Hudson. Like West 

Point, antebellum southern military colleges emphasized the sciences and engineering in 

their curriculums, but unlike West Point, this education was a preparation for middle class 

professional careers, as opposed to service in the regular army.22 Cadets at these institutions 

did engage in close-order drill and guard duty,23 while being subject to a disciplinary 

regime modeled on West Point’s military hierarchy, but it was the original federal school’s 

connections with the United States Army that gave it a strongly martial character.

Whatever the academy’s real flaws as an institution of professional military education, 

West Point along with regular army service provided the best available preparation for 

Civil War high command available to antebellum Americans. While this preparation was 

deficient and would have proved disastrous in an environment such as continental Europe, 

with its large standing armies and professional military establishments, in a war amongst 

Americans who had as a whole seen so little of war, old army veterans became in effect 

one-eyed princes in a kingdom of the blind. Furthermore, it was not just the familiarity 

cadets acquired with basic close order drill, but the important habits of mind the West 

Point experience inculcated in them. In the words of the leading historian of antebellum 

military professionalization, “exposure to the West Point environment drew cadets into a 

professional military ethos, causing them to internalize such military values as discipline 

and regularity, identify with the army as an institution, and, in many cases at least, make a 

strong personal commitment to military service.”24

“Discipline and regularity” were perhaps the watchwords of the West Point experience, 

for better or for worse. The academy could help produce pedantic and militarily problematic 

officers like Don Carlos Buell or Henry Wager Halleck, but it could also train conscientious 

officers like Robert E. Lee. Like the service academies now, the institution had only mixed 

success in preparing officers for command. As Sherman recalled in his memoirs, “at 

the Academy I was not considered a good soldier, for at no time was I selected for any 
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office, but remained a private throughout the whole four years. Then, as now, neatness 

in dress and form, with a strict conformity to the rules, were the qualifications required 

for office, and I suppose I was found not to excel in any of those.”25 In addition to this 

focus on compulsory routine, the academy’s relentless quantification of cadet performance, 

resulting in the numerical rankings of the order of merit, fed into this larger environment of 

professional “regularity,” all combined with a heavy curricular emphasis on mathematics 

and engineering. Indeed, Academy administrators claimed that this technical curriculum 

tended “to exercise and discipline the reasoning facilities,” and that cadets will “be always 

greatly the better for their long continued exercises in a course of investigation and 

reasoning that excludes, absolutely, all specious and sophistical conclusions.”26

This emphasis on regularity could have its drawbacks, but it also helped both armies 

ramp up their logistical and administrative apparatuses to handle the unprecedented (in 

American history) size of both sections’ citizen-soldier armies. The organizational and 

professional reforms that the United States Army underwent in the decade or so after the 

close of the War of 1812 went beyond the establishment of the Thayer system at West 

Point. They included far-reaching reforms in the Army’s logistical and administrative 

apparatus—what the American service called a General Staff, not to be confused with the 

Prussian Generalstab, which had next to no influence on the antebellum American army. 

The sophisticated and standardized procedures of the reformed staff bureaus, including 

strict standards of personal accountability, allowed the army to survive on the frontier with 

limited resources and an execrable transportation network, all while under the eyes of a 

Jacksonian Congress ideologically predisposed to find corruption and waste.27

The importance of this administrative legacy should not be understated. Staff work and 

logistics have tended to be the ugly stepchild of Civil War history, but it is hard to imagine 

the rapid military build-up in both sections during the first years of the war without the 

organizational and administrative experience veterans of the regular army carried into their 

respective services. In the North, the Quartermaster’s Bureau, the most important of the 

Old Army’s staff bureaus, successfully managed a transition to large-scale mobilization.28

Furthermore, both initial heads of the Confederate Quartermaster and Ordnance Bureaus 

were also old army veterans from the same bureaus in the Federal service—Abraham 

C. Myers and Josiah Gorgas.29 Even in the settled regions of the Confederacy, logistics 

remained challenging due to the low population density of the theater of operations 

(compared to Western Europe) and a sparse transportation network. As an invading army 

entering hostile territory, logistical problems posed a special problem for Federal forces. 

Even in the eastern theater, where Union forces could sometimes use seaborne transport, 

logistics presented a real problem, but these problems became especially acute in the 

western theater, after the initial mid-Tennessee campaigns where Federal forces could use 

the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers as secure lines of supply that penetrated 

the Confederacy’s northern frontier. The long term solution Sherman and Grant developed 

through raiding and mobile armies living off the land would require years of development, 

but before such innovations could occur, more rudimentary questions of provisioning and 

supply would need to be established.
31

Wei-siang Hsieh

Returning to the issue at the heart of this conference, however, while logistical 

expertise composed a crucial part of why West Pointers were so valuable to both war 

efforts, cadets learned little about this topic until they became actual serving officers. While 

they did become acclimated to the bureaucratized routines that allowed any modern supply 

apparatus to function—one of the crucial innovations of Winfield Scott’s important Army 

Regulations of 1820 was the inclusion of standardized forms—the academy did not devote 

much attention to the strategic implications of logistical requirements, since it did not focus 

much on strategy at all. And even in the serving army, logistics remained the domain of 

the staff bureaus in Washington, which had a contentious relationship with the line army 

on the frontier.

While I have spent much of this paper criticizing the technical prejudices of the Thayer 

System, the reality is that whatever its failings in content, Thayer executed with relentless 

efficiency his model of military education, giving the academy a sense of identity and 

purpose, while sufficiently immunizing it from political pressure and dissolution. Thayer 

also deserved credit for persuading the American people that his academy at West Point 

presented neither a threat to republican liberties, nor a colossal waste of taxpaper money. 

Indeed, the academy’s heavy engineering emphasis was connected to the Army Corps 

of Engineers’ role in internal improvements, and while militarily problematic, it at least 

provided some political top cover from suspicious Jacksonian congressmen. I would like 

to make clear, though, that from my own reading of the sources, men like Thayer were 

dead serious when they argued for the primacy of the scientific and technical disciplines in 

military education.

Furthermore, while a bright and earnest West Point cadet might receive a vision of 

professional officership overly preoccupied with engineering, he still imbibed a conception 

of military leadership that was fundamentally “professional.” We need not use here 

Huntington’s famous social science model of professionalism, but simply say that at West 

Point, a cadet realized that war presented dangers and rigors, which required study and 

one’s full mental energy. In an American that still worshipped at the shrine of the myth 

of the citizen soldier, and which during the Jacksonian period also believed that society’s 

best leaders came out of democratically elected partisan machines, this trait set West Point 

graduates apart from their contemporaries. When West Point graduates met their first test 

in the Mexican War and were then tested again in a more serious way in the Civil War, this 

starting premise—that political skill in the world of Jacksonian America did not by itself 

suit one for military command—would give West Point graduates a more realistic starting 

point than that possessed by most officers drawn from civil life. 

Even the daily routines of constabulary duty could provide a crucial introduction to 

the daily business of military life, and many future Civil War generals also saw a more 

sustained operational tempo in Mexico. Even at a quiet post on the frontier, an officer 

could not escape such crucial parts of army administration as accountability of personnel 

and property, regular inspection of equipment, provisioning, etc. Frontier realities meant 

that many officers saw service fighting Indians, which in the trans-Mississippi West was 

hard and grueling service. Some officers even managed to find some time for professional 

pursuits—for example, after the promulgation of Hardee’s new infantry tactics in the 
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1850s, one can find commentary on the new manual from an officer posted as far away as 

San Diego, which was literally on the far side of the continent.30

At West Point, cadets received a solid foundation in minor tactics of all arms—the 

crucial baseline of movement and fire on a Civil War battlefield—and in the Army, they 

became familiar with the basic routines of military administration and management. When 

war broke out in 1861, this knowledge put veterans of the regular army far ahead of their 

civilian peers in military knowledge, and made them essentially indispensable. This thus 

ensured their historical significance, although the reality remains that from the standpoint 

of the most effective use of cadet time, West Point’s curriculum looks both inefficient 

and lagging. However, perhaps no generation of men and women ever truly receive an 

education that fully prepares them for the challenges of uncertain adulthood. 
33

Wei-siang Hsieh

Notes

1. Tom Cahart, Sacred Ties: From West Point Brothers to Battlefield Rivals: A True Story 

of the Civil War (Berkley, 2010); Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War: The 

Old Army in War and Peace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

2. James L Morrison, Jr., “The Best School in the World”: West Point, the Pre-Civil War 

Years, 1833-1866 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press), 91, 95-96, 100, 162.

3. Report to Col. J. G. Totten, 7 February 1845, vol. 4, pp. 44-50 (quote on 50), Staff 

Records, U.S. Military Academy Archives, West Point, NY.

4. Morrison, Best School in the World, 114-15, 120. 

5. Morrison., 141-44. Quote on 142-43. 

6. William B. Skelton, An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784-

1861 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 306.

7. Alexander Macomb to Sylvanus Thayer, August 22, 1822, West Point Thayer Papers, 

396-97, Special Collections, U.S. Military Academy Library, West Point, NY.

8. John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier Passion’s for Order (New York: Free Press, 

1993), 441.

9. Morrison, Best School in the World, 147-48.

10 Edward Hagerman, The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, 

Organization, and Field Command (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 6-13, 33; 

Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War, 82.

11. Marszalek, Sherman, 22-28; U Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters, Library 

of America ed. (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1990), 31-32.

12. Marszalek, 129. 

13. Skelton, American Profession of Arms, 446.

14. Morrison, Best School in the World, 15. 

15. Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War, 81-82. 

16. Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command (New York: 

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1943-1944), 3:200; 2: 419.

17. William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Library of America 

ed. (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1990), 559. 

18. William T. Sherman to Philemon B. Ewing, April 21, 1864, in Brooks D. Simpson and 

Jean V. Berlin, Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-

1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 625.

19. John B. Floyd, January 5, 1860, “Instructions for the Board appointed to revise the 

programme of instruction at the Military Academy...,” Board of Officers—Curriculum 

Revision, January-April 1860, part 2, series 15, 4b, box 1, Records of the Academic Board, 

U.S. Military Academy Archives, West Point, NY. 

20. Minority Report, February 12, 1845, vol. 4, pp. 52-56 (quotation from 55), Staff 

Records, U.S. Military Academy Archives, West Point, NY. 

21. Richard M. McMurry, Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay in Confederate Military 

History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 104.

22. Jennifer R. Green, “Books and Bayonets: Class and Culture in Antebellum Military 

Academies” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2002), 6-7, 79. 

23. Green, 91-92. 

24. Skelton, American Profession of Arms, 180. 

25. Sherman, Memoirs, 16. 
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Panel 1

26. Joseph G. Totten quoted in Skelton, American Profession of Arms, 169-70. 

27. On these administrative reforms, see Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War, 34-53.

28. Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861-

1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, 2, 35, 65-71.

29. Richard D. Goff, Confederate Supply (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969), 

8-10.

30. Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War, 87. 
35

Day 1, Panel 1: Antebellum Officer Educatiion, 1800-1865

The Development of Successful Non-professional Officers in the Army of the 

Tennessee, 1861-1863 by Steven E. Woodworth, Ph.D.

(Transcript of Presentation)

Moderated by Donald P. Wright, Ph.D.

Dr. Wright:

Next we have Dr. Steven Woodworth, who received his doctorate from Rice University 

in 1987. He is currently a professor of history at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. 

He is a prolific author with several important works about the American Civil War, 

including Jefferson Davis and His Generals and Six Armies in Tennessee. His topic today is 

the development of nonprofessional officers in the Army of Tennessee during the American 

Civil War.

Dr. Woodworth:

Thank you. Within the history of the American Civil War, the miserable performances 

of political generals have became proverbial. The misadventures of Tammany Hall hack 

Daniel E. Sickles as a Corps commander in the Army of the Potomac at the Battles of 

Chancellorsville and Gettysburg are almost the stuff of legend. Only slightly less famous 

are the mishaps of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks at the hands of Stonewall Jackson 

in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, and then at the hands of Jackson’s attentive 

student Richard Taylor in the Red River campaign two years later. Benjamin F. Butler may 

be more famous for coining the term “contrabands,” with reference to African Americans, 

and for his no-nonsense response to expressions of hostility from New Orleans women. 

But his 1864 Bermuda Hundred campaign was a fiasco. Jefferson Davis may have felt less 

pressure than did Lincoln to put political aspirants in general’s uniforms, but Confederate 

military history nevertheless offers the spectacle of Virginia governorsformers Virginia 

governors, two of themthan Confederate Generals Henry A. Wise and John B. Floyd losing 

West Virginia, in part at least, because each was more intent on seeing the defeat of his 

political rival in a gray uniform than that of his military foes in blue uniforms. Floyd then 

featured in a second and even more disastrous debacle for the Confederacy when he and his 

second-in-command, Tennessee politician-turned-general Gideon J. Pillow, pooled their 

incompetence to doom Fort Donelson, and then abandoned the trapped garrison to its fate. 

In Civil War terms, a political general was a man appointed to general officer rank direct 

from civilian life. Not because of any military skill or qualifications he might possess, but 

solely for the political benefits the president hoped would accrue from the mere fact of 

having him in a uniform with general stars. While it is true that during the course of the 

war, some West Point graduates with years of experience in the Old Army also proved 

unsuccessful as generals, the overall record of the political generals is worse. Their blunders 

were more numerous and/or egregious. The inescapable conclusion, therefore, is that the 
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political generals were failures because they were not adequately prepared and because no 

previous experience of their lives had sifted them as a group and removed those who were 

hopelessly lacking in aptitude, as West Point and the Old Army experience had done, albeit 

imperfectly, for the professionals. Yet the Civil War demanded far more generals than the 

office ranks of the Old Army could reasonably supply, given that a number of the regular 

officers would remain in their positions within the Regular Army, the regular regiments, 

and that some would no doubt already have demonstrated to their superiors that they were 

not adapted for higher rank. Even the number of West Point graduates who had since left 

the service and were, at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War, occupying positions as 

railroad company presidents, educators, or clerks in leather goods stores, those of you who 

are familiar with the biographies of Civil War generals will recognize who those were. This 

combined number was not sufficient to meet the leadership needs of the mass armies that 

the Union and Confederacy fielded during the conflict of the 1860s. Given these facts, it 

was unavoidable that men who had little or no military background in 1861 would rise to 

the rank of general. Not all of them, not even a majority, were political generals. The rest, 

that is, the nonprofessionals who were not political generals—were men from civilian life 

who worked their way up through the ranks to win their stars, and some proved to be highly 

successful generals. 

The Army of the Tennessee, that is, the Union Army, which was formed and saw its early 

service under Ulysses S. Grant, which fought at Shiloh and Vicksburg, and went on to other 

successes later in the war. The Army of the Tennessee compiled an especially impressive 

track record not only in defeating its enemies and achieving its military objectives, but also 

in finding and developing such gifted military amateurs and making them into successful 

generals. The record of its nonprofessional generals stands in stark contrast to the dismal 

performance of political generals in the Civil War, and it is worthwhile considering how this 

came about. I’m going to look particularly at the cases of two of the relatively successful 

nonprofessional generals in the Army of the Tennessee.

Ulysses S. Grant was the most important, he was a professional, of course. Ulysses S. 

Grant was the most important factor in shaping the Army of the Tennessee. He was this 

army’s first commander and he led it for almost two years through some of its hardest 

battles and most significant victories, including Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg. In a 

number of ways, the Army of the Tennessee bore Grant’s stamp throughout the Civil War. 

I might say that as the Army of the Potomac was McClellan’s army long after McClelland 

had been sent into retirement, the Army of the Tennessee was Grant’s army, and continued 

to function in the ways that Grant had taught it and shaped it to do, long after Grant had 

gone on to other things.

One of the most significant of the ways in which Grant shaped the Army of the 

Tennessee was in the composition of its officer corps, and in particular its successful use 

of nonprofessional generals. We have no records of Grant ever holding any formal periods 

of instruction for his subordinate generals, as some Civil War commanders did. One might 

think here of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, without the definite article there, and of 

General William J. Hardee, author of the Army’s prewar tactics manual, who held regular 

periods of instruction for the subordinate officers within his army corps in the Army of 
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Tennessee. We have no record of Grant doing that. Such a practice would have been very 

much out of character with Grant, since he had little use for tactics books, expressed some 

doubt as to whether he had ever read Hardee’s standard prewar tactics manual. Grant 

probably had paid very little attention also to the prewar writings of Antoine-Henri Jomini, 

the most respected military theoretician of that time, at least in the United States Army. 

Grant had almost certainly never read the works of the famous Prussian philosopher of war 

of the preceding generation, Carl von Clausewitz, because, as far as we know, Clausewitz 

had not been translated into English by that time. I’m not aware of any English translation 

of Clausewitz prior to the Civil War. Grant, like most other American-born Civil War 

generals, did not know German. So Grant almost certainly had not read Clausewitz. But 

like Clausewitz, Grant seemed to believe that most knowledge of tactical prescriptions was 

far less valuable in an officer than having a strong mind, well informed by experience and 

historical example. Grant had learned much from his own experience in Mexican War, and 

his observation there of his two great Army commanders, Zachary Taylor and Winfield 

Scott. During the Civil War, Grant patterned his personal style more after Taylor and his 

generalship more after Scott. In developing his subordinates, Grant depended on personal 

example and informal advice, and he used shrewd selection and careful sifting to assure that 

the officers who advanced to important positions within his army were the best available. 

John A. Logan, whom Dr. Hsieh mentioned earlier, was an early case of an officer 

whom Grant selected and developed into an effective general. Logan was a Democratic 

politician from Southern Illinois, and his loyalty to the Union had actually been in question 

during the early weeks of the war. In the summer of 1861, while still a civilian, Logan had 

demonstrated his loyalty and gained Grant’s favorable notice by helping Grant, who was 

then Colonel of the 21st Illinois Regiment, persuade his troops to reenlist for three-year 

terms. The personal leadership qualities and motivational ability that Logan displayed in 

that incident would prove to be among his greatest strengths as a general. Returning to 

his hometown of Murphysboro, Illinois, Logan recruited a regiment of his own, the 31st 

Illinois, and was soon a colonel serving under the command of Grant, who by then had 

made brigadier general. In the November 1861 Battle of Belmont, his first under Grant, 

Logan may well have been one of the officers who allowed his troops to get out of hand 

during the mid-battle lull. Those of you who are familiar with the Battle of Belmont know 

there was an intense initial phase followed by a lull in the captured Confederate camps, 

during which some of the volunteer officers, whose names we don’t necessarily know, but 

Logan was very possibly one of them, lost control of their troops, who thought the battle 

was over. Then there was an intense final phase of the battle, in which the Army, with 

difficulty, recovered from its mid-battle blunders or its blunders during the lull. But during 

the initial phase of the battle and during the very intense final phase, Logan performed 

spectacularly well in inspiring and leading his troops. Grant was apparently willing to 

overlook a beginner’s error in an officer who showed as much obvious aptitude as Logan. 

Grant also seemed to be characterized by a readiness to play the hand that was dealt him, to 

deal with facts as they were and not as he would wish them to be. This is another startling 

contrast to some other generals, notably McClellan, who insisted that everything should be 

perfect, should be as he would wish it to be. Grant took the circumstances that were given 
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to him -- including a number of generals who, simply, initially were not qualified for that 

job, took them where they were and worked with them there.

By the time of the February 1862 Battle of Fort Donelson, Logan was commanding 

a brigade within Grant’s army. He was in the hottest of the fighting there and he did well, 

holding his ground against superior Confederate numbers at the point of contact as long 

as was possible, and then making an orderly retreat. During the fighting at Fort Donelson, 

Logan suffered a severe wound that kept him out of action for several months and caused 

him to miss the Battle of Shiloh. Logan was back in action in time for all of the Vicksburg 

campaign, during which he commanded a division and steadily won more and more of 

Grant’s approval and confidence. Logan’s corps commander, by the way, was James 

Birdseye McPherson, who was a West Point professional par excellence. But Logan, like 

McPherson, was surprised by the unexpected Confederate attack at the May 7 Battle of 

Raymond, Mississippi during the Vicksburg campaign. But he recovered quickly and 

performed ably in beating off that attack. At the Battle of Champions Hill nine days later, 

the decisive battle of the campaign, Logan showed even more of his amazing ability to 

motivate and inspire troops in the midst of battle. Despite his fiery demeanor in combat, 

which led some observers to speculate on his possible state of inebriation, Logan committed 

no serious blunders, and I do not believe that he was drunk at the Battle of Champion Hill. 

His actions all made good sense. He was very fiery and he had a way of inspiring his troops 

that really amazed his contemporaries. 

By the time of the Vicksburg siege, Logan was clearly Grant’s favorite division 

commander. His unit was called on to do some of the hardest fighting, including the battle 

for the first Vicksburg crater, the result of an undermining of Confederate defensive works 

and then their subsequent explosion. When the Confederate stronghold in the Mississippi 

finally capitulated on July 4th, 1863, Grant gave Logan’s division the honor of being the 

first to march into the town. Between 1861 and 1863, Grant had overseen and cultivated 

Logan’s development from a colonel, devoid of military background, through the ranks of 

brigadier general and major general of Volunteers, to the point that Logan had become the 

army’s best division commander and was well on his way to becoming, by the end of the 

war, one of the two or three best nonprofessional generals of the conflict.

Another nonprofessional officer whose development Grant started within the Army 

of the Tennessee and who also appeared to be on his way to success at higher rank was 

William H.L. Wallace. A veteran of brief volunteer service as a junior officer in the Mexican 

War, Wallace had had no formal military training. Not West Point, not anywhere else. 

He was an Illinois lawyer when the Civil War broke out. He raised a company and, as 

usually happened when someone raised a company of volunteers for Civil War service, he 

became the captain of that company, with no further qualifications than that of a successful 

recruiter. His company became part of the 11th Illinois, and the regiment’s other captains 

elected him its colonel, which is also how it worked in the early days. Within the small, 

scarcely division-sized command that was to grow into the Army of the Tennessee, Grant 

was able to interact with his subordinates closely and extensively enough for his example 

to have a powerful, direct influence on his subordinates. That is, they could watch from 

day to day how Grant exercised his command. Wallace did not always agree with Grant’s 
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Woodworth

actions. Sometimes he didn’t think Grant was doing a very good job. But he generally kept 

any negative opinions to himself or shared them, this is how we know about them, with 

his wife, in letters to her. She was his confidant and he could share anything with her. As 

far as we know and as far as we’ve heard from any of the others around Wallace, that was 

where those opinions stayed. It was for him and it was for his wife, and he kept quiet about 

that. But he was obviously watching and thinking a lot about different things that Grant 

was doing. At the same time, the close association within the small command gave Grant 

sufficient opportunity to observe his subordinates in various types of situations so that 

he was able to make excellent selections of those officers who were capable of handling 

more responsibility. Given enough time and close enough association within the intense 

atmosphere of active wartime operations, Grant proved to be an almost flawless judge of 

character and aptitude. 

Those of you who are students of American history and can think on to the Grant 

administration might find this a remarkable statement, because this seems to be the reverse 

of what we see in President Grant. I actually think that the key is that, for Grant to be a 

good judge of your character, he has to work with you on a day-to-day basis, closely, for 

an extended period of time, that is, for at least several months, very closely, preferably 

more, and in fairly intense circumstances. And in those conditions, Grant seemed to make 

decisions about personnel that were almost always right. It’s interesting that later in the war, 

after Grant leaves the Army of the Tennessee, he comes east and he has brief interviews 

with people like Benjamin Butler, who he seems to think he can make into another John 

Logan. And, again, students of the Civil War will gasp. But you know that it’s true. And 

with others. And we find him making some misjudgments. Apparently an interview of 

several hours and a few brief associations was not enough for Grant to make a decision. 

Then he goes on to be president and we find him making a number of bad personnel 

choices. 

Grant advanced Wallace gradually in rank as the erstwhile lawyer learned his craft. Not 

only did Wallace perform well as a commander, he also, as I mentioned before, showed 

good judgment in what he said to others within the Army. Wallace did not always understand 

why Grant took certain actions, but he wisely confided such doubts only in letters to his 

wife. He kept quiet within the camp until he gained a better grasp of the situation. In 

doing so, he showed the loyalty that was a very important consideration for Grant and his 

subordinates. I might add that this, I believe, is a key factor in why Wallace’s namesake, at 

least as pertains to last names, General Lew Wallace, did not advance more rapidly. Some 

of you are familiar with the story of the Battle of Shiloh, in which Lew Wallace’s division 

was encamped five miles from the battlefield and took, as Grant believed, much too long 

reaching the battlefield, covering that five-mile march. We know that Wallace took a wrong 

road and then countermarched and took all day to make that five-mile march that Grant felt 

that Wallace should have made before noon. Some of the discussion about whether Wallace 

was to blame or to what extent Lew Wallace, this is not William H.L. Wallace but Lew 

Wallace, was to blame for this, some of that discussion has turned on whether Lew Wallace 

was justified in taking the wrong road or whose fault was it or what did his orders really say, 

and the written orders got lost, and so on. I believe the real reason that Grant subsequently 

sidelined Lew Wallace and did not promote him any further, did not use him any further 
40

Panel 1

and really shunted him aside, was not so much that Wallace had taken the wrong road early 

that morning, or mid-morning, actually, by that time, but that once Wallace realized later 

in the afternoon that he had taken the wrong road, that he was overdue and long-inspected, 

and that the Army of the Tennessee was in desperate trouble fighting with its back to the 

river, fighting for its life, Lew Wallace made a march that, while it would be considered 

good under normal, routine circumstances, would have been considered a very respectable 

march, was not at all what Grant expected of a situation where your comrades are fighting 

for their lives with their backs to the wall, so to speak. Grant expected a desperate march 

out of Lew Wallace during that Battle of Shiloh. He expected Lew Wallace to push on in 

a hard force march, and what Wallace did was a nice, orderly, decent, respectable march 

under non-pressured circumstances. 

Again, just to interject the contrast here to the kind of general who showed the kind 

of loyalty that Grant did expect during the Vicksburg campaign, when the Navy’s gunboat 

flotilla was nearly trapped during the Sunflower Creek excursion in another attempt to get 

around Vicksburg and several of the Navy’s valuable gunboats in waters far too narrow 

for them to operate were nearly trapped and needed infantry support desperately, General 

William T. Sherman personally led an all-night march to get there, wading through swamps, 

at the head of his troops. Sherman, when he hears about the problem, actually sets out to 

gather up his scattered detachments for this relief march by personally going through the 

swamps in a canoe, gathering these units, getting them together, and marching all night 

through the swamps. That’s the kind of loyalty that Grant expected in his subordinates. 

When the chips were down, so to speak, to use a cliché, I guess, but when the situation 

demanded this kind of intense effort and you did not bring it forth, as was the case with 

Lewis Wallace, Grant would write you off as not the kind of man that he wanted to have 

in his army, whereas men like W.H.L. Wallace showed that degree of loyalty, and of 

course Sherman, par excellence. But Sherman was a professional and I’m talking about 

nonprofessionals. W.H.L. Wallace had, by the time the Battle of Shiloh, risen to brigade 

command. In fact, at Donelson he had commanded a brigade. Unlike Logan, Wallace had 

escaped wounds at Donelson, which didn’t, in Wallace’s personal case, turn out to be an 

advantage. Because unlike Logan, W.H.L. Wallace was present at Shiloh. He performed 

well. Moved his division up smartly, got into line where they were needed, performed stellar 

service, held his section of the line against repeated Confederate attacks, and then, when 

troops on either flank gave way and retreated, Wallace alertly saw the need to withdraw his 

own division to a more defensible position. He was in the act of pulling his troops out when 

he was mortally wounded, and died several days later.

During his relatively brief career in the Army of the Tennessee, Wallace had matured 

rapidly as an officer and made an important contribution to the army’s success. That 

this could take place within the space of nine months speaks well for Grant’s ability to 

select and cultivate effective officers from the men he had available, most of whom were 

nonprofessionals. The examples of these two officers are illustrative of Grant’s ability to 

develop men with little or no military training or background into effective officers. The 

Army of the Tennessee, especially during the early months of its existence, was small enough 

to allow Grant’s example to be effective and to allow Grant to gain a sufficient knowledge 

of his subordinates to select those who would function well at higher levels of command. 
41

Woodworth

Grant’s method of developing these officers was very much a factor of his own overall 

approach to command, and is remarkably similar to ideas that Carl von Clausewitz had 

expressed but that Grant had not read. That is, Grant valued in his subordinate commanders 

a strong mind, and he excelled in identifying those who had a strong mind. Then, also in 

similarity to Clausewitz, Grant favored example and experience rather than precept and 

prescription as means of instructing his officers in the business of war. Think of Sherman, 

or of Sheridan echoing this after the war and saying the best classroom for learning about 

war is in the camps or the forts or the army and so forth. Finally, Grant valued loyalty and 

teamwork. No matter how gifted and experienced an officer might be, Grant believed that 

officer would disrupt the overall function of the Army if he were allowed to engage in 

backbiting or spread dissension within the officer corps or if he failed to respond as needed 

in pressure situations. The end result of Grant’s approach was developed within the Army 

of the Tennessee more and better in nonprofessional generals than surfaced in any of the 

other major armies during the course of the war. 

Well, there’s much more that I could say, and would be interesting to say, but we can 

leave that for the question time if folks have interest in it. Thank you for your attention.

43

Day 1, Panel 1:Antebellum Officer Education, 1800-1865

Questions and Answers

(Transcript of Presentation)

Wayne Wei-siang Hsich, Ph.D.

Steven E. Woodworth, Ph.D.

Moderated by Donald P. Wright, Ph.D.

Dr. Wright: 

Thank you, gentlemen, for the two papers that complemented each other in an excellent 

way. Let me offer a few comments in the form of several questions, and then we’ll turn it 

over to the rest of the audience for their questions, perhaps, or comments. 

First of all, for Dr. Hsieh, as I was listening to your paper, I was thinking about the 

general purpose for this symposium, as Dr. [William Glenn] Robertson, the Director of CSI, 

and I were talking with Mr. Kendall Gott, the organizer of the conference. We are trying 

to link this with what the Army is going through right now, which is sort of a reassessment 

of its own leader development system, especially in light of the last nine years since 2001. 

We’re trying to figure out the big themes that force change on the leadership development 

system. Some of the ideas we came up with were doctrinal change, organizational or 

technological change, geopolitical situations that alter and therefore force the military 

institutions of the United States to rethink what they are and what they’re supposed to do. 

But also, when you look back, you find the institution itself trying to pin certain values or 

attributes or competencies on the leadership in order to create the kind of institution that 

it now needs because of the doctrinal, technical, geopolitical change. In thinking about 

the antebellum period, specifically with West Point, was there any discussion of particular 

values, competencies, attributes, anything similar to this, that West Point was supposed 

to cultivate? Before I let you answer that one, Wayne, one other. To what degree was the 

curriculum at West Point tied to a particular type of war fighting or particular type of style 

of war? But I’m thinking of the decisive battle here that comes out of (inaudible) and the 

Napoleonic experience.

Dr. Hsieh: 

The engineers have a rationale, and their rationale is that war is a science. If any of you 

are familiar with Brian Linn’s book, Echo of Battle, the engineers are the guardians. They 

believe that the American national defense is basically you build lots of really strong harbor 

forts, and that’s all you need to do, and everything is solved. And West Point’s curriculum 

is very suited to that. West Point graduates are great engineers. They have a great, excellent 

technical education. West Point was the first engineering school in the United States. Part 

of that is connected to the perception of war as a science, as a subject to these mathematical 

principles, especially a country like the United States, which (inaudible) in its military 
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44

policy. Also, there is a perception that history and English and things like that are useful. I 

once had a history major at the Naval Academy, one of his engineering professors tried to 

dissuade him from being a history major and told him, “You can read history on your own. 

Why do you need to take history classes in college? You can just learn it on your own. You 

just read it. You don’t need a lab and apparatus and stuff like that.” So the perception is that 

war is a science. There’s a quote I cut and triage here. There’s also a sense that the technical 

disciplines give a mental discipline and rigor. It prevents these sophistical illusions. It’s 

firm and certain, and that’s what you want in officers. That’s linked directly to the scientific 

cast of the curriculum. It does not focus on things like creativity. It does not focus things 

on flexibility. That’s why Sherman has a hard time at West Point. Sherman likes to sort of 

make trouble. Sherman’s sort of a little bit too innovative. The education is very much key 

to the values. But what’s sort of interesting about West Point is that, in this case, one section 

of the Army, by virtue of its control over the academy, is able to take its concept of what 

the Army officer corps should look like and then make West Point conform to develop that. 

There isn’t a very strong sense in the army as a whole as to what do we really want out of 

our officers? You have people like McComb who are opponents to this view but who don’t 

have the same institutional leverage. Is that a good....

Dr. Wright: 

Thanks very much. A question for Steven, as I was listening to your presentation, I was 

thinking to myself, ah, this problem of the political general is unique to the American Civil 

War. And then I remembered my decade of service in the Louisiana Army National Guard. 

I quickly realized it’s not particularly unique to the 19th century. In fact, the Louisiana 

Guard, when it mobilized for Desert Storm and later on, had some severe problems with 

officers who were not competent, did not have the right attributes and skills and talents. 

That’s a story that doesn’t get told a lot and probably speaks more to what the RC, the 

Reserve Component, should be doing with its (inaudible) system. So my question for 

you is, what did the Army learn post-1865, or what insights did it take about the issue of 

political generalship? Was it just basically in the past? Will we never have to deal with this 

again? Anybody writing or thinking about it?

Dr. Woodworth: 

I’m not sure that there was an institutional response. I’m not sure that the nation really 

learned the lesson about political generals, because you look at the Spanish-American War 

and you have political generals. Again, men whom you put in a general’s uniform, you 

hope they’ll win battles. You don’t put the general stars on them because you think they 

can lead your troops to victory. You do that because having them as generals will secure 

the support of one or another faction. In the Spanish-American War, it’s of course all about 

reunification of the country, healing the rifts of the Civil War, so you have Joe Wheeler, 

a former Confederate general, now serving as a general in the United States Army in the 

Spanish-American War, and entirely for political reasons. Because if we make Joe Wheeler 

a general, then Southerners who might be in some doubt as to whether this is really their 

cause, is the American cause our cause? They will know Joe Wheeler is out there so it’s 

OK. So I’m not sure that they did learn that lesson. I think they kind of went right back. 

I think what had to change eventually was that the American people, I think through the 
Questions and Answers

45

progressive era and a growth of ideas about professionalism, had to learn the idea that for 

warfare it would be best to have leaders who are professional at leading in wartime, and 

that we don’t have these sort of general-purpose, natural-born leaders of men sort of things.

Dr. Wright: 

Thank you. Let’s open up to the audience. If you have a question, please just make sure 

you turn on your microphone after I identify you. Sir?

Audience Member 1: 

I was interested that you brought John Logan forward. As you know, after the war he 

did a lot of writing on his own and was famous for the volunteer soldiers of America and 

kind of set himself up as a counterpart and antithesis to Emory Upton, and Emory Upton 

was kind of epitomizing the professionalism and the West Point tradition. Logan was, 

contrary to that, attacking the West Point system as manacles on the volunteer solider. 

Yet Logan was recognized, brought forward, and approved by a West Point grant and was 

brought into the framework that was thought to be the West Point system. I got kind of a 

two-part question, one for each of you. Was Logan biting the hand that fed him or were 

his later views compatible with the views he should have developed in the Civil War? And 

following on that, this West Point tradition, you mentioned as being superfluous. That is to 

say, that it didn’t hurt but it didn’t harm; it was OK. Did you encounter in your research in 

antebellum period conscious attacks on West Point as being adverse to the purposes of the 

armies it served?

Dr. Woodworth: 

With regard to Logan, yes, I would say in part, at least, he was biting the hand that 

fed him. He learned the trade of war from West Pointers like Grant and Sherman, so a 

lot of what he knew that made him successful as a general, he learned from Grant and 

Sherman and other West Pointers. And yes, it was Grant and then also Sherman who had 

promoted Logan to the positions he enjoyed. But Logan never got over July 22d, 1864, or 

the immediate aftermath of that time, when James Birdseye McPherson, commander of the 

Army of the Tennessee, falls in its most desperate battle, the Battle of Atlanta, and Logan 

takes over and leads the great rally and leads it to victory. And when Logan is flirting with 

a vice presidential campaign almost 20 years later and he has that great Atlanta Cyclorama 

painted, it features himself there on the horse, charging in there to lead the rally and save 

the Union. What happened then, he commanded the army, well, for that day. I think in a 

desperate battle, your army is in a desperate battle, fighting for its life right now, and it 

needs to do really hard fighting for the next several hours in a Civil War context, John 

Logan is the man you want to have in command of your army. But Sherman believed, and 

Logan’s most recent biographer, [Gary Acklebarker], agrees with him, that Logan lacked 

the administrative ability. Maybe he couldn’t fill out those forms or whatever it was. Lacked 

the administrative ability to be able to run the Army of the Tennessee on a day-to-day basis 

and keep it functioning well, and so he gave the job to a West Point officer, Oliver Howard. 

Logan was very bitter about that, remained bitter about that and never really got over it. I 

think that’s at the heart of all of Logan’s post-war attacks on West Point.

Dr. Hsieh: 
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46

The great irony is Sherman’s. Yes, there is criticism. To use the classifications Brian 

Linn has used, there are heroes in the antebellum army too. And a lot of these heroes, I 

think, don’t leave as much written material, because the officers who don’t serve in the 

seacoast garrisons of the engineers or on staff duty or aren’t instructors at West Point, 

they’re Indian fighters. Indian fighters par excellence. They are on the frontier, and for 

them, I know [Andrew Berdell] has kind of argued, and I think he’s right, there is kind of 

an informal doctrine, there’s an informal set of rules and hard-earned practical experience 

the Frontier Army has for constabulary duties with regards to the Indians. But I think that’s 

an important part of the Army’s culture. It’s one that leaves fewer written documents and is 

thus harder to pinpoint and maybe doesn’t have the same degree of intellectual abstraction. 

It’s not convenient. It’s not like when you go to West Point and you look at academic 

boards, papers and things like that. But that certainly exists and you see it come up with 

people like [McComb]. You see it in Sherman, which is ironic because I think Sherman 

has this West Point prejudice, but Sherman himself, even if you look very early during the 

Civil War, Sherman is very Uptonian in his insistence on the superiority of West Pointers, 

but he’s also very self-conscious about the importance of practical knowledge. I think it’s 

clear that Sherman never quite drank all the West Point kool-aid. You see that in his time 

as a cadet. He liked making hash. That seemed to be a higher priority for him. That’s the 

illicit food that, illegal cooking, basically, in the room. Sherman was famous for this. He 

was famous for that, not for being at the top of his class, which he was not. So I think you 

definitely have a string in the Army that is suspicious. It happens to be not in control of its 

main professional institution.

Dr. Lewis Sorley: 

I’d just like to suggest that it’s possible to take a broader view of the influence of 

Colonel Thayer and the importance of the Thayer system. I’ll just cite a small number 

of areas in which that seems to me to be the case. First is Colonel Thayer’s personal 

example of integrity and devotion to duty. He served a long time as superintendent. The 

corps cadets in those days were smaller. Every cadet knew Thayer and Thayer knew every 

cadet intimately. They were aware of his example and it was very important. Secondly, 

with respect to the curriculum, without regard to the substance of it, Thayer introduced 

the concept of accountability, daily accountability, as it were for most cadets and most 

subjects. That was an important part of the training and development of cadets. And thirdly, 

Thayer, at minimum, laid down the basis for what was later codified as the honor code and 

the honor system at West Point. All things far more important, it seems to me, than the 

narrower critique of the content of the curriculum and so on in those days. Would you like 

to comment?

Dr. Hsieh:

Sure. I think it is definitely correct to say that Thayer’s legacy, I want to make it clear. 

Thayer’s legacy for me is mixed. I think it’s right to say, though, I’m balanced, considering 

the history of West Point before Thayer and it’s utter confusion and chaos that exists 

there. An utter institutional weakness. It has to be seen as obviously far more positive 

than negative, because Thayer makes West Point a real institution. Without him, without 

his influence, they probably would not have survived that early chaotic period after the 
Questions and Answers

47

War of 1812. Although, of course, he was supported in a very important way by people 

like Secretary of War Calhoun. One of Thayer’s great virtues is his tremendous sense of 

purpose, and as such he attempts to basically import the (inaudible) technique, and in many 

ways does that. He looms very large in the history of the academy because, even after his 

departure. He actually leaves due to a disciplinary dispute with President Jackson, but even 

after his departure, people are very strongly influenced by his legacy, and it’s clear that 

West Point, under him and his tutelage, sort of benign, conservative regime, for lack of a 

better term, and I put no pejoratives on that at all. West Point runs very well. 

But I do think the content could have certainly been different. History is a great 

example. Thayer himself believed that things like history were kind of important but, again, 

something that you could learn yourself. You have examples from, already, the European 

staff colleges in France and Germany of a greater focus on strategic thinking. And you have 

figures like Mahan who’s extremely widely-read and extremely intelligent, who knew stuff 

about strategy. But by being bound to a very technical conception of military education, 

those subjects were in effect crowded out. Mahan even had interesting things to say about 

Indian warfare. But he was always so wedded to the system he grew up with that he could 

never find enough time in his capstone class to add very much on that. I think for serving 

officers, that would have been perhaps useful. The West Point experience was important 

because it was rigorous and it was demanding and it inspired a certain code of service 

and dedication in its graduates. But you can be rigorous and demanding and have the 

curriculum be adjusted better to maybe fit the needs of the service. That would basically be 

my response. And there are discussions within the academic board. There are discussions 

within curricular review. And as I said, it’s recognized by academic boards. That’s why 

they add the fifth year, because there’s a recognition that you need these other subjects. 

What should have just been done is cut some of the science and engineering out. At the 

end of the day, it was very hard for people who had grown under the Thayer system to be 

willing to acquiesce to what they would have seen as a repudiation of his legacy, although 

arguably it wouldn’t have. Which is actually kind of what happened to West Point later. 

West Point still has a strong technical core, but it’s in many ways more flexible than we are 

in terms of history. There’s the military art sequence. We have a one-semester plebe naval 

history class, or plebes never remember because they’re plebes and they have other things 

to worry about than me. I do think it is still right to say that the curriculum certainly could 

have been adjusted, especially because there are figures during the period who talk about it. 

By the way, the five-year program dies in many ways because it’s too long and hard. 

Mahan himself talks about this. Cadets are too exhausted at the end of the fifth year. It 

really dies because of the Civil War, but they’re already going to get rid of it earlier. That 

shows why the science and engineering classes should have been drawn down, so you 

could have still kept it at four years. And the choices then made that, OK, we’ll discard the 

fifth and just keep the strong engineering, technical side. 

Audience Member 3: 

This is for Dr. Hsieh. I enjoyed your paper, by the way. Didn’t Mahan run, as an 

extracurricular activity, a thing he called the Napoleon Club, which exposed a lot of people 

to at least the strategic and operational level of war under Napoleon?
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48

Dr. Hsieh:

We know the club exists. It’s never been demonstrated to me with any degree of 

satisfaction how much effect it has. We know some officers know Jomini. Beauregard 

is a great example. Halleck is a great example. But what’s interesting is some of these 

professionally-orientated officers don’t do that well in the war. I think it’s in Sherman’s 

memoirs, there’s a great, great line where he talks about talking with Halleck and they talk 

about the Donelson/Henry campaigns and the line of operation. It’s clear you see there the 

utility of these things. We know Stonewall Jackson read a lot of, was very interested, even 

as a cadet, in history. But what is the effect of this? There isn’t very much strong evidence 

of that. Grant read novels when he was at West Point, which is sort of the 19th-century 

equivalent of watching television. Stonewall Jackson’s super serious, reading history. 

Grant, the greater general, is playing video games. That’s essentially, you don’t have video 

games back then, so you read novels. Herman Highway and Archer Jones have made a 

big deal about Jomini. It never struck me as persuasive, because there is not, I don’t see 

evidence of this really having that much of an effect. That’s not to say the Napoleon Club is 

part of that. There is this constellation of officers who read a lot on their own, but again it’s 

so mixed as to the effects. McClellan is very well-read and is very up to speed on European 

military developments. McClellan ends up being not a very good general, in all honesty, 

or, as my mentor Gary Gallagher said, “George B. McClellan is a great general everywhere 

except for the battlefield.” Lee is pretty up to speed. Lee knows things about, for example, 

the French staff system. Serves as a superintendent. So there you have a positive example, 

but in other places I think the legacy is very ambiguous. I’m very leery of putting too much 

causal weight on those sorts of things.

Mr. Rich Kyper: 

Rich Kyper from the Army Counter-Insurgency Center. We can’t have a discussion 

about political generals without talking about John McClernand. You focused on Logan 

and Wallace, who in a panoply of political generals were pretty low. More nonprofessional 

soldiers. But then you put the McClernands, Butlers, Banks in an entirely different level 

of politician. So while you rightly talked about Grant mentoring, for lack of a better word, 

these nonprofessional soldiers, it was clear that he had a different approach to the Banks, 

the Butlers, the McClernands of the world, who had achieved significant political status 

prior to the war. Granted, there were some egos involved with those three. But do you 

see any difference in Grant’s approach to mentoring nonprofessional soldiers versus clear, 

absolute political appointees during the time you mentioned? And of course what’s ironic 

in all of this is McClernand didn’t like Grant, he didn’t like West Pointers. Used words like 

“gall” and “wormwood,” referring to them, but his son Edward then graduated from West 

Point, received a Medal of Honor against the Indians, and retired as a brigadier general. 

Do you see Grant’s approach as being on two different levels to these sorts of political, 

nonprofessional appointees?

Dr. Woodworth: 

First, to clarify, I would not define John Logan or W.H.L. Wallace as political generals, 

because in the context of the Civil War, I define a political general as a man who’s appointed 

direct to general officer rank from civilian life without prior qualification for that, and who’s 
Questions and Answers

49

appointed to that position because the president hopes that this man being in the general’s 

uniform will draw the support of some particular constituency within the population. 

That’s not to say that generals didn’t sometimes profit from political help, including Grant, 

including Sherman. That’s not to say that other generals didn’t have political ambitions, 

including Logan and possibly others. Maybe even W.H.L. Wallace. McClernand, however, 

does fit the bill of the political general. He was a major political figure before the war. He 

absolutely had political aspirations. For him, it was all about politics, and his appointment 

was about politics. Did Grant treat him differently, then? I would say yes and no. I would 

say that Grant dealt with McClernand as he did with Loganwho were both very similar 

politically, of course. I think he dealt with McClernand as he did with Logan to the degree 

that McClernand’s different rank allowed that and to the degree that McClernand was 

teachable to that. I think the ego thing does come in there. After all, McClernand is the 

man who goes back to Illinois and makes his speech and says, “I thank God that I was 

born a natural-born soldier, impervious to fear.” I think that reflects an ego there that is not 

going to be very receptive to instruction. I think the contempt for Grant that McClernand 

shows early on, and quite early on, his desire often expressed to get out from under Grant’s 

command and to be in an independent command. I think this made it difficult for Grant to 

teach McClernand, difficult to deal with McClernand. And I think that fairly early on in the 

process, and I’m not totally sure when, I think after Belmont, maybe after Shiloh, I’m not 

really sure, Grant sees McClernand as a burden that he’s going to have to bear. Grant again 

accepts the situation as it is and he works with it as it is. He recognizes that Lincoln, for 

reasons of state, has seen necessary to inflict this political general on him. And part of what 

Grant has to do, as well as suffering the degradations of Mr. Pemberton and Mr. Johnston 

on the other side, is also to deal with Mr. McClernand on this side, and McClernand’s ego. 

That’s not to say that McClernand did not have real talents as a general. He was somewhat 

a leader of men, actually. But I think Grant, early on, starts to realize that he’s just going 

to have to work with this as a man that he’s going to have to put up with and he’s going 

to have to deal with. Try to use him if you can, but not quite the same way he would with 

Logan and W.H.L. Wallace, whom he can see as protégées, whom he can develop and 

really make into effective generals. 

Dr. Wright: 

I think we have time for one more question.

Audience Member 5: 

Dr. Woodworth, you mentioned that Grant built the Army of the Tennessee’s officer 

corps. How much did Henry Halleck either interfere with him or give him a free hand in 

terms of building that officer corps?

Dr. Woodworth:

That’s a good question. Halleck certainly interfered with Grant in terms of Grant’s 

operations until Halleck was sent east and got a little education during the summer of 1862 

campaign. An education in his own inability, really, to make things happen operationally. 

And then Halleck backed off and gave Grant a lot more operational freedom after the 

summer of ‘62. Prior to that, he certainly was interfering operationally. He had some input 
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50

in terms of personnel. For example. Halleck sent James B. McPherson, who had been an 

officer on Halleck’s staff, sent him to Grant to serve on Grant’s staff before the Donelson 

campaign, Henry and Donelson campaign, apparently chiefly to serve as Halleck’s eyes 

and ears to make sure that Grant was staying on the wagon vis-à-vis alcohol. It’s interesting 

that after McPherson then sends back his report to Halleck that Grant was indeed remaining 

abstinent of alcohol, Halleck then spreads the rumor to McClellan that Grant had returned 

to his former bad habits. Halleck certainly had some input personnel-wise. But again, 

Grant worked with what he had. He worked with McPherson and he made McPherson 

into one of his favorite generals. McPherson, of course, was a professional. I would say 

minimal, but Halleck had some input in terms of personnel, but not a very large amount. To 

a large degree, Halleck, like Grant, worked with the people and promoted the people that 

he wanted to promote, as far as I can tell.

Dr. Wright: 

OK, I think we’re out of time. Please join me in a round of applause for our panelists.
51

Day 1, Panel 2: Emergence of a Modern Officer Corps, 1866-1905

The 1891 Infantry Tactics by Perry D. Jamieson, Ph.D.

(Submitted Paper)

Alben Barkley, who was President Harry Truman’s vice president, once offered the 

opinion that the best audience is one that is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk. 

I’m looking to you for two out of three of those qualifications.

Whether the audience, or the speaker, is drunk or sober, a lot can be said about the 

modern officer corps that emerged in the United States Army between 1865 and 1905. 

But it can’t be stated in twenty minutes. Narrowing the topic, much can be said about the 

army’s thinking about tactics, as just one example of the emergence of a modern officer 

corps. But that can’t be covered in 20 minutes, either.

So, given the time available, I am narrowing the topic farther, to the most important 

single event in the development of US Army tactics during this period: the publication of 

the 1891 infantry manual.

A board of officers prepared this work to address a problem that had been developing 

since the Civil War. During that conflict battalions nearly always were volunteer regiments. 

They typically fought as parts of brigades, in two-line, close-ordered formations that 

aligned by the soldiers touching elbows. The firepower of Civil War infantrymen armed 

with rifled muskets and artillerymen with improved field pieces challenged the traditional 

drill books. Five months after Appomattox, one veteran described what had happened: 

“The introduction of the rifled Parrott field pieces, and the rifled muskets made a change of 

tactics absolutely necessary; and the text-books passed into obsoleteness.”1

After the Civil War Lieutenant Colonel Emory Upton, an intense student of everything 

from battlefield tactics to military policy, took up the challenge of preparing a new infantry 

drill book that would address the threat posed by increased firepower. Lieutenant Colonel 

Upton’s main innovation was to introduce a system of “fours,” blocks of four men. After 

hours of training together, these groups of four soldiers could deploy rapidly from marching 

column into fighting line, and could march by the flank, wheel, or perform other movements 

before or during contact with an enemy. Faced with more dangerous battlefields, Upton’s 

fundamental answer was that these blocks of four men would create and change formations 

under fire more quickly than individual infantrymen could. 

Upton’s second innovation was to permit infantry battalions in some cases to deploy in a 

single line, rather than the two-line formation. Drawing on his Civil War experience, Upton 

pointed to the wartime successes won by dismounted cavalrymen armed with repeaters. He 

believed these examples proved “that one rank of men so armed is nearly, if not quite, equal 

in offensive or defensive power to two ranks armed with the Springfield musket.”2

Upton first published his infantry drill book in 1867, at his own expense. A Civil War 

veteran of all three arms of the service, he also became interested in what 19th century 

soldiers called an “assimilated” tactics. This was a system of commands and formations 
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that were compatible among the infantry, artillery, and cavalry. Upton and three other 

officers prepared three “assimilated” manuals, one for each arm of the service, which were 

authorized by the War Department and published in 1874.3

Upton had taken some important steps beyond the Civil War drill books, but the 

firepower problem he had addressed continued to grow. During the late 19th century, 

the deadly menace that firepower threatened against advancing infantrymen continued 

to increase. Breech-loading repeaters, Gatling guns, breech-loading field artillery, 

sophisticated entrenchments, metallic cartridges, fixed ammunition, smokeless powder, 

and other technological advances promised to make future battlefields more dangerous.4

By the 1880s, the most casual observers were aware of these dramatic improvements 

in weapons. Many officers recognized that the army would have to move its ideas about 

tactics beyond the experience of the Civil War and the contributions of Upton. No one 

was more aware of this than the soldier-scholar Arthur L. Wagner. In his publications and 

his teaching here at Fort Leavenworth, Wagner pointed to the need for tactical changes. 

He warned against headlong advances and emphasized the virtue of flexibility. Wagner 

stressed that attackers must be ready to make flank rather than frontal offensives, to make 

the best use of cover, and to take advantage of any weakness shown by a defender, such 

as low morale or faulty deployments.5

 (We will be hearing more about Arthur Wagner’s 

contributions from Dr. Todd Brereton.)

The reform that Wagner and others wanted to see began in January 1888, when Secretary 

of War William C. Endicott directed that a board of officers study the tactics of each of the 

three arms of the service. (Again in the interest of time, only the infantry will be considered 

here.) Lieutenant Colonel John C. Bates, who had been a company officer during the Civil 

War, chaired this board and 1st Lieutenant John T. French, Jr., of the Fourth Artillery served 

as its recorder.6

 Six other officers, two from each arm, completed the panel’s membership. 

The best known among the group was Captain Edward S. Godfrey, a highly respected 

cavalry veteran of the Little Big Horn and other Indian campaigns.7

The board began meeting in February 1888, in Washington, D.C. In late March 1889 

the panel moved to Fort Leavenworth, so that it would be close to the School of Application 

for Infantry and Cavalry, which had been established here in 1881. (We will be hearing 

in our next panel from Dr. Tim Nenniger about the Leavenworth schools during a later 

period.) The 1889 board of officers could not find enough room on the post, so its members 

took offices and quarters in the town.8

 They finished their work in December 1890 and 

the next month sent final drafts of tactical manuals for infantry, cavalry, and artillery to 

the adjutant general.9

 The Leavenworth manuals survived a review process which was far 

more bureaucratic than any earlier such works, and were approved in 1891 by Secretary of 

War Redfield Proctor and President Benjamin Harrison.10

The Leavenworth board produced an infantry manual in two parts: a “Close Order” 

section and an “Extended Order” one. The fundamental idea was that the soldiers would 

march and maneuver in close order and then would fight in extended, or loose, order. The 

“Close Order” part of the 1891 manual provided for a group of eight men, a corporal and 
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Jamieson

seven privates, to move in close order while marching during a campaign or maneuvering 

into battle.11

The second part of 1891 manual, the “Extended Order,” included the greatest innovations 

offered by the Leavenworth board. While the “Close Order” provided for a group of eight 

men, the “Extended Order” clearly labeled these seven privates and a corporal a “squad,” 

introducing the term to the combat tactics of the United States Army. Moreover, this second 

part of the manual based the battle tactics of the infantry on having these squads fight in 

loose order. The “Extended Order” section deployed the soldiers as skirmishers, spreading 

them out to minimize the targets they would present to the destructive firepower of breechloading repeaters, Gatling guns, and improved artillery.12 The 1891 manual declared that 

the “squad is the basis of extended order. . . This instruction, on account of its importance, 

will be given as soon as the recruits have had a few drills in close order.” The Army and 

Navy Register explained this dramatic innovation to its readers in September 1891: “With 

these tactics the line of battle disappears...The fighting line will consist of a series of 

squads as skirmishers, the normal number of men in a squad being eight.”13

In addition to these specific innovations, the work of the Leavenworth board scored 

another achievement. It represented the United States Army’s first true tactical manual, as 

opposed to drill book. From the Revolutionary War until 1891, all of the officially authorized 

volumes described formations and they explained how they were to move from one place to 

another. From the days of Baron von Steuben until Emory Upton, the army had drill books. 

It did not have tactical manuals: works that would advise officers how to take advantage of 

terrain, or how to maneuver and engage their troops in order to gain advantages in battle. 

The army lacked a volume that would instruct combat leaders, as Upton himself had put 

it, “How to fight.” “What we call ‘Tactics,’” grumbled one artilleryman in 1887, “no other 

nation in the world dignifies with that name.”14 Theorists had offered their opinions on this 

broader subject in many private publications, but the Leavenworth board’s volumes were 

the first official works to give officers true tactical manuals, advising them “How to fight.”

Today it might seem obvious that the 1891 manuals offered significant improvements 

and represented the army’s logical next step beyond Upton and his Civil War predecessors. 

In their own day, they were not universally viewed that way. When word leaked out from 

Leavenworth about the extended order formations that the board members were developing, 

critics began to snipe at the infantry manual while it still remained in draft.15 The criticisms 

increased after the War Department adopted the new tactics. In 1893 Inspector General 

Brig. Gen. Joseph C. Breckinridge claimed that most officers found the close-order drill 

satisfactory, but did not like the extended order formations. The prevailing view, according 

to General Breckinridge, was that the loose-order tactics required too many leaders: an 

NCO would accompany every squad, while a battalion retained its traditional number of 

company officers. Moreover, the new manual gave these junior leaders too much authority 

and, under the stress of combat, the system would break down in confusion.16

Despite Breckinridge’s negative views, many officers perceived the benefits of the 

Leavenworth tactics. In December 1890 the Army and Navy Register offered its first 

assessment of the volume. Its reviewer declared: “In our judgment, the board has done 

good work and has been guided by sound and safe principals.” This officer recognized the 
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new volume’s fundamental achievement, its use of squads in open order as the basis of 

the infantry’s battle tactics, and praised this innovation. A later reviewer for the Register

complimented the Leavenworth board “that in the matter of tactics it has effectually 

prepared us for war.” 1st Lieutenant Lyman W.V. Kennon, an aide to Major General George 

Crook who shared that general’s interest in tactics, also praised the new manual.17

Lieutenant Kennon, the Army and Navy Register’s reviewers, and many other officers 

appreciated the achievement of the 1891 infantry tactics. Faced with the danger of increased 

firepower that threatened attackers, the Leavenworth board of officers had devised a 

reasonable solution. They gave the United States Army its first tactical manual, as opposed 

to a drill book, and they introduced the combat squad to the infantry. They allowed small 

units of soldiers to maneuver in loose order, with as much flexibility and control as possible 

on battlefields in the era before electronic communications. Their 1891 work on infantry 

improved on the manuals of the Civil War and of Upton, endured to serve as the army’s 

authorized tactics during the Spanish-American War, and represented a landmark effort. 

William A. Ganoe, in his master-work survey of the history of the United States Army, 

labeled the years after the Civil War the “dark ages.”18 There is no question that the service 

faced serious problems during this period. Personnel strengths and monetary budgets 

were low. During Reconstruction, the Army was given a mission that was impossible 

to accomplish, without angering, disappointing, or even endangering large groups of 

Americans. In the case of the Indian wars, it was given an assignment without the support 

of adequate resources or a political consensus. The units of the army were dispersed and 

isolated. There was no foreign threat compelling enough to jar the president or Congress 

into addressing any of these problems.

And yet it would be mistaken to think of the post-Civil War years as a backwater in the 

army’s history. During this era, as often during peacetime periods when the service labored 

with limited resources, it produced forward-looking officers. The army’s examination of its 

infantry tactics provides just one example of how, during the late 1880s and early 1890s, 

innovative thinkers were moving a great institution toward a new century.
55

Jamieson

Notes

1. Veteran, “Change of Tactics,” Army and Navy Journal 3 (September 23, 1865), 75.

2. Perry D. Jamieson, “Crossing the Deadly Ground: United States Army Tactics, 1865-

1899” (London and Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1994), 9-10.

3. Jamieson, 6, 9.

4. Jamieson, 128. The endnote accompanying this text gives many sources on the 

improvement of weapons during the late 19th century. Jamieson, 198-199, note 46.

5. Jamieson, 73.

6. Special Orders No. 14, January 18, 1888, Roll 601, Records of the Board on the Revision 

of Tactics, AGO File 526 AGO 1880, M-689, National Archives, Washington, DC; Francis B. 

Heitman, “Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army,” 2 vols. (Washington, 

DC, 1903), 1:199.

7. Special Orders No. 14, January 14, 1888, and memoranda of the Bates Board to the 

Adjutant General, December 1, 1890, Roll 601, Records of the Board on the Revision of 

Tactics; Heitman, “Historical Register,” 1:461. 

8. “The History of Our Tactics,” Army and Navy Journal 25 (February 11, 1888), 570; 

Special Orders No. 68, March 23, 1889, Roll 602, Records of the Board on the Revision 

of Tactics; memorandum of the Board on the Revision of Tactics to the Adjutant General, 

December 1, 1890, Roll 601; Records of the Board on the Revision of Tactics; “The Tactical 

Board,” Army and Navy Journal 26 (April 20, 1889), 685. See also “New Drill Regulations 

for the Cavalry,” Journal of the United States Cavalry Association 3 (1890), 286; “The United 

States Army,” Army and Navy Register 10 (April 6, 1889), 209; Army and Navy Register 10 

(July 27, 1889), 365; and Army and Navy Register 11 (October 4, 1890), 633. 

9. LTC J.C. Bates to the Adjutant General, December 2, 1890, and January 15, 1891, Roll 

601, Records of the Board on the Revision of Tactics. 

10. Jamieson, “Crossing the Deadly Ground,” 100.

11. Jamieson, 103. 

12. Jamieson, 103, 104. 

13. United States War Department, Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army 

(Washington, DC, 1891), 186; “The New Tactics,” Army and Navy Register 12 (September 26, 

1891), 609. 

14. Emory Upton to William T. Sherman, January 30, 1880, Roll 26, General 

Correspondence, William T. Sherman Papers, Library of Congress; John P. Wisser, “Practical 

Instructions in Minor Tactics,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States 8 

(1887), 130. See also “Nomen,” “Army Correspondence: Misuse of the Word ‘Tactics,’” Army 

and Navy Register 9 (June 2, 1888), 349.

15. Thomas H. Ruger to the Adjutant General, July 1, 1891, Roll 601, Records of the 

Board on the Revision of Tactics; “The Work of the Tactical Board,” Army and Navy Journal 

28 (November 8, 1890), 166.

16. Annual Reports of the War Department, 1822-1907, M-997, National Archives, Report 

of the Inspector General, September 28, 1893, Roll 80, 4:719. 

17. “The New Drill Regulations,” Army and Navy Register 11 (October 11, 1890), 649; 

untitled, Army and Navy Register 11 (October 18, 1890), 665; L.W.V. Kennon, “The Tactical 

Board and Its Critics,” Army and Navy Register 11 (December 27, 1890), 828-829. 

18. William A. Ganoe, “History of the United States Army” (New York, 1942; reprint, 

1964), title of Chapter IX, 298.

57

Day 1, Panel 2: Emergence of a Modern Officer Corps, 1866-1905

The 1891 Infantry Tactics by Todd Brereton, Ph.D.

(Transcript of Presentation)

Dr. Brereton:

Well it is really a great experience and pleasure and honor for me to be here, particularly 

at the place that was largely created by Arthur Wagner, this man right here. And so for me, 

in a way, this has come full circle. I’m his biographer. And now here I am, I’m talking about 

him at a place where he spent many years, and took lots and lots of work in accomplishing. 

Well, let me ask you a rhetorical question that I don’t expect an answer to, but feel 

free to pop in there. What makes a good combat leader, or for that matter, a commander 

of regiments, brigades, or entire divisions? What is it? What really is leadership? Is it an 

innate talent that some individuals have and others do not? Can leadership be taught to 

someone who isn’t a natural leader? How can you tell if someone’s not a natural leader? Or 

is leadership simply an academic discipline in which one can learn and internalize a group 

of discrete abilities? 

Now I’m sure most of you know, I did not, having been out of the Army since I was 22 

when my father retired. But in today’s Army, from what I understand, and it certainly looks 

this way when you look around for it, in today’s Army, leadership is explicitly taught. The 

United States Military Academy, USMA has a rigorous leadership training program and 

even offers a major in leadership: “Hey, what’s your major?” “Leadership, dude.” 

ROTC cadets pass through a leaders training course and a leader development and 

assessment course. The Army has an official leadership doctrine, which is executed by the 

Center for Army Leadership and TRADOC, which together have, and I quote, “The goal 

of successfully synchronizing all leadership and leader development policy.” This involves 

in part the integration of core leader competencies, which suggest to me anyway that 

leadership is considered by the Army to be an abstract concept that has definable qualities. 

Now the edifice that is the US Army’s leadership doctrine of course took a long time to 

build. And there was a time when the quality of leadership and its attainment was a matter 

of fierce debate. The period in question of course is the late 19th Century, particularly the 

1880s and 1890s. 

In this debate, two opponents faced each other over the Army’s post Civil War 

character. Traditionalists, and I don’t have General Ord up there just because I think he’s 

a cranky, old general. He looks great. But again, two opponents faced each other over 

this issue. Traditionalists, conservatives, mostly Civil War veterans, who, as Dr. Jamieson 

has pointed out, preferred the close order because it was easy and it was comfortable, 

and it reminded them of the old days, but traditionalists sought to preserve the doctrine 

of inspired leadership, which they claimed was a characteristic in American wars, while 

progressives, the post-Civil War newbies who had come to age in their graduation from 
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West Point after 1866, ’67, thereabouts, the progressives wanted to introduce new methods 

of training and learning. 

For more than 20 years, these diametric sides clashed over innovation and custom. 

A principal bone of contention was over the preparation of junior officers through the 

creation of a variety of service schools. 

So here we are at the Command and General Staff College. Here we are, at a place 

where leadership is the core of its curricula. And as you surely know, everything here was 

created in 1881 by order of William Tecumseh Sherman. The school he established, the 

Infantry and Cavalry School, became a focal point for tactical and organizational reform, 

all of it concentrated upon the necessity to educate officers in the art of war.

Between 1886 and 1905, the champion of that idea was Arthur Lockwood Wagner 

who argued that good combat leaders were made, not born, and they were made through 

rigorous education and applied military theory and historical knowledge. An 1875 graduate 

of West Point, where, I should add, he accumulated an astonishing 731 demerits, I don’t 

know what you have to do or how bad you’ve got to be to amass that many. One other 

individual had the most. Was it Custer? 

Audience Member: 

Custer had a lot.

Dr. Brereton: 

He had a lot. I hope he had more than Wagner. I mean, but when you consider, one 

of the demerits was for having buckets of beer in full view in his dorm room. And he 

graduated 40th out of 43 in his class in 1875. But from small beginnings, great things grow. 

Wagner graduated from West Point in 1875. And he arrived at the Infantry and Cavalry 

School in 1886, where he quickly established himself as the Army’s preeminent authority 

on tactics, military organization, reconnaissance, and as the Army calls it today, lesson 

learning. He relentlessly promoted the concept of postgraduate officer education and he 

demanded that officers should be scholars as well as soldiers. Scores of lieutenants passed 

through his classes, and many more read his works, all of which infused the Army with his 

ideas. In many ways, the Fort Leavenworth of today is Arthur Wagner’s creation. And it is 

really difficult to conceive of its present status without his contribution. 

In his most important work, Organization & Tactics, published in 1894, Wagner argued, 

“Our best military lessons must be sought in the history of wars that were fought under 

conditions most similar to those likely to be encountered by us in the near future.” Now 

to ensure that those lessons were properly understood, Wagner was aided by Eben Swift, 

who introduced to the Infantry and Cavalry School the so-called applicatory method. Swift 

took the lessons that Wagner and other instructors taught in the classroom and had students 

apply them in real-time situations. Student officers utilized the Leavenworth garrison to 

practice map orientation, reconnaissance, patrolling, and mock combat. 

Quoting instructor William C. Carter, Ronald Machoian notes that the result was, 

“...a happy combination of theory and practice exercise that was the foundation for a new 
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archetype of soldier who can, on the field of battle, with its turmoil and strange scenes, turn 

theory into practice.”

Now while not directly teaching the principles of leadership, Wagner and Swift 

nonetheless were introducing a new leadership doctrine for the Army which Carol Reardon 

has called safe leadership, and Harry Ball has termed responsible command. In Wagner’s 

own words, his goal was to create junior officers who could, “...make command decisions 

based soundly on an appropriate principle of war.” 

In Organization & Tactics, Wagner added that such an education would, “...furnish a 

standard from which an officer in action can vary according to the conditions presented, and 

not leave him altogether without a guide.” Wagner’s methodology eschewed discrete rules 

for leadership and command in favor of flexible guidelines based on historical precedent 

and field practice. 

Tim Nenniger remarks that Wagner, “...wanted to immerse officers in the details of 

a variety of tactical situations where they could draw their own conclusions regarding 

a proper course to be pursued.” Wagner then required mental discipline and reflective 

capacity from his students, complemented by historical knowledge of a variety of combat 

situations. Eben Swift’s role in the educational process transformed Wagner’s academic 

lessons into applied knowledge. Swift himself argued that, “Principles are best learned by 

their application, rather than by the abstract study of the principles themselves.” “Such an 

approach,” he said, “takes longer than the other methods of study, but its results are more 

lasting.”

The applicatory method was a global course of study which combined academic lessons 

and strategy, tactics, military organization, military geography and logistics with practical 

map exercises, tactical rides, and small unit wargaming known at the time as Kriegspiel. 

Such a comprehensive curriculum, Wagner concluded, provided officers with, “...careful 

training in the many branches of human knowledge which are now used in every feature of 

the profession of arms.”

Harry Ball calls this a significant accomplishment, which, “...offered systematic, 

formal command procedures and a means by which officers could be schooled in those 

procedures.” Now, there was certainly plenty of support for the mission of creating a 

responsible educated officer corps within the Army. But Wagner and Swift were not without 

their critics. Wagner in particular faced a reactionary backlash to his methods, chiefly from 

aging Civil War veterans who countered that the leadership expressed between 1861-65 

had required no formal education. As Mark Grandstaff notes, “Those elevated from the 

ranks to commissions did not see the need for military training. They had gained theirs 

through experience, something that all the book learning in the world could not obviate.” 

Well, the undoubted exemplar of this argument was James R. Chester, a Scottish 

immigrant whose personal bravery had propelled him through the ranks in the Civil War 

from private to captain. His wartime leadership wasn’t founded on book learning, and 

neither was that of hundreds of volunteer officers. “Experience cannot be purchased 

[hand?],” he argued. “The art of war is a trade to be learned. And actual war is the best 

school to learn it in.” Now Wagner slyly agreed with this sentiment, suggesting that, “If a 
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nation were constantly engaged in hostilities, it could always find qualified military leaders 

among its veterans.” The problem, he added was that, “...such schools of perpetual warfare 

do not exist,” hence the need for peacetime education and training. 

Still, Chester’s challenge was a potent one. And the question remained; did it make any 

real difference if an uneducated officer was promoted from the ranks yet made a first class 

combat leader? Moreover, he asked, could leadership even be taught? He didn’t think so. 

“In battle, men need leaders more than commanders. Leading is unlearnable. The leader 

must be born to the business. His power is a patent of nobility and he holds it from the ruler 

of the universe.” 

In that vein, any of you like that out here? We were talking about egotism earlier. If you 

need to get something off your chest, now might be the...OK. 

In that vein, Chester took a very dim view of educated officers whom he despairingly 

called kriegspielers. Accordingly, he argued that, “The spirit of command cannot be 

educated into a man. Education and training can only produce routine officers, organizers, 

drill masters, disciplinarians, and kriegspielers, but never commanders in the spiritual 

meaning of the term.” So that’s what you’ve been doing here.

Such an officer to Chester was a sham, able merely to make himself heard. The real 

commander, on the other hand, is felt as well as heard, and must be obeyed. Because of 

this innate, almost irrational nature of leadership, Chester concluded that, “Appointments 

to military command should be made with spiritual discernment, lest the minds of the 

appointees be garnished with all of the professional jargon of the schools.” 

can imagine, Wagner found arguments like these ludicrous, and he met them with 

scorn. He noted here in this vein, “It would be interesting, but hardly profitable to speculate 

upon the probable condition of the art of war if every commander had to learn the art from 

his own experience. Such an officer would have to be as old as Methuselah, engage in a 

hundred wars and pass through every grade from private to field marshal.”

“Expertise that could be translated into practical application was vital,” he urged. But 

should the Army prefer Chester’s method? He argued then, “Let us come out frankly and 

say that military study is prejudicial to an officer. Let us warn young officers to avoid 

study and caution them never to put a pen to paper. Then being devoid of all evidence of a 

studious interest in their profession, they may possibly be recognized as practical men and 

escape being stigmatized as theorists.” 

Wagner’s colleague, William H. Carter, echoed these sentiments, but was more 

circumspect. “Purely practical soldiers are apt to formulate false theories,” he wrote, 

“...while theorists are quite apt to make false application of good principles. A happy 

combination of theory and practice should give the best results.” John William De Forest, 

writing in The Atlantic Monthly, concurred: “The solemn fact is that to know much of the 

science of war, the cleverest man needs years of study and experience. And other solemn 

fact is that we had better look for supreme guidance to experts and to experts alone.” 

As wrongheaded as Chester’s criticisms seem today, it is really unfair to judge him 

too harshly, although it is fun. A critical look at his complaints reveals that he wasn’t 

condemning military education for itself. Rather, he mistakenly believed that education 
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Brereton

was becoming a substitute for leadership, whose qualities he considered to be spiritual. 

When describing the attributes of combat leadership, Chester employed the language of 

mysticism, suggesting that leaders possessed a motive power, an invisible factor, spirit, a 

mysterious power, moral force. For Chester, it followed that the execution of such talent 

in battle, which he called genius, was nearly unstoppable. While kriegspielers might be 

successful, only a commander with genius could truly conquer. It was this native ability 

that, “...sustains the warrior in battle and gives him victory in the end.”

According to Chester, “It is the spirit that fights. It is the spirit that conquers.” This 

notion of inspired leadership so dearly held by officers of the Civil War generation, is 

uncomfortably similar to the ideas of Ardant du Picq whose theories ultimately led France 

to the disaster of August, 1914. 

Now what Chester called genius Wagner called, “...merely human wisdom applied to 

human knowledge.” Now whatever it was, innate ability or the accumulation of knowledge, 

it had to be correctly applied when it mattered most. Chester’s solution was to await the 

providential appearance of natural leaders who would then lead the nation to victory. It had, 

after all, worked in the Civil War, and similar claims were made for the Mexican War, the 

War of 1812, and the American Revolution.

So should then The United States await the next, more violent and chaotic conflict 

hopefully expecting natural military leaders to emerge from the din of combat? How many 

soldiers might die in the meantime? How many blunders would be committed? What if 

no leaders equal to the task emerged? These were the sort of questions that motivated 

reformers like Wagner and SwiFort 

Chester’s response to them was that no gifted leaders would emerge if the nation 

somehow did not deserve them. He claimed that, “...education and what is called the 

art of war is not essential to success as a military leader,” even as advances in military 

technology were proving him wrong. Now war was faster and deadlier, and the battlefield 

more terrifying and sophisticated. Wagner cautioned that there are officers who pose as 

practice soldiers, in effect to despise all theory. But what would happen if someday they 

find themselves compromised on want of knowledge, not from want of talent? 

Well, Wagner and his reform-minded colleagues understood only too well that the 

traditional trial and error approach to war in an era of modern weapons was simply 

indefensible. Secondhand while it might be, the experience of Königgrätz and Sedan had 

taught them that. 

But still the question, what should be learned? Wagner didn’t deny the existence of 

natural leaders. He knew they were around. You could see them in military history. Chester 

believed that such individuals controlled the spirits of their men silently, mysteriously, 

magnetically, which was all fine, but what then? What did a real captain do with that? 

Certainly there was aptitude for leadership, but in combat, that alone was an insufficient, 

perhaps even dangerous attribute. Talent, even genius was all to the good, but it had to be 

properly developed before it could be applied. 

The first necessity then was to understand leadership in context. For Wagner, that 

meant understanding how it was expressed. Wagner’s perception of the development of 
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leadership and command skills was strongly historical in nature. He wanted to learn from 

what others did. All of his significant books and many of his articles stressed the need to 

learn from military history and to take conceptual, but not specific lessons from military 

success and failure. When Wagner expounded upon infantry, cavalry, and artillery tactics, 

he based his observations on battle and campaign histories which provided guidance, but 

not strict instructions on what to do in combat. His aim, he suggested, was to select the 

best established theories of European tactical authorities, to illustrate them by a reference 

to events in our own military history, and to apply them to the touchstone of American 

practice in war.

In the ninth edition of The Service of Security and Information, Wagner’s second book, 

and the ninth edition came out in 1900. In that edition of The Service of Security and 

Information, Wagner observed that, “American experience in the Spanish-American War 

had evolved nothing radically new.” Yet, he continued, the campaigns had, “...afforded 

some valuable illustrations of the application of old principles to new conditions.” 

So what about those conditions? Writing about this in 1889, Wagner asserted that, 

“In no profession, trade, or calling have the discoveries and inventions of modern science 

received a more extended application than in the art of war. As a result, the officers of the 

present day require a greater degree of professional and scientific preparation than ever 

known before in the history of war.”

Although Wagner himself had never experienced combat, he knew enough from 

studying the art of war that in battle, “...conditions vary in nearly every respect. No two 

battles are fought in the same way. And the mostly carefully matured plans have to be 

quickly altered to meet new and unforeseen circumstances.” It was the unpredictability 

of war that hastened Wagner to emphasize training, practice, and historical knowledge 

as a means to prepare men for it. Skeptic though he was, James Chester was inclined to 

agree. He admitted that even for a military genius, “...such training is necessary to his full 

professional equipment.” 

Such training, its attainment, discernment, and application is the proper legacy for 

Arthur L. Wagner, and the school he helped to build. Indispensable in his day and revered in 

ours, Wagner, in a real sense, was the intellectual father of military thought and leadership 

education in The United States Army. Referring in 1889 to the work of the Infantry and 

Cavalry School, Wagner hoped that, “It is not too extravagant to believe that the time will 

come when the seed planted at Fort Leavenworth will have grown into a great tree.” Look 

at it now. Thank you very much. 
63

Day 1, Panel 2: Emergence of a Modern Officer Corps, 1865-1905

Questions and Answers 

(Transcript of Presentation)

Perry D. Jamieson, Ph.D.

Todd Brereton, Ph.D.

Moderated by Curtis King, Ph.D.

Dr. King:

Thank you very much. I appreciate both presentations, excellent. Rarely does a 

moderator get lucky enough to have presentations so closely connected, physically of 

course with Arthur Wagner, but just conceptually the idea of changing the way you educate 

officers, the way you change doctrine and tactics. Both fascinating presentations.

metimes moderators, you know, exercise a privilege of first question. I have some, but 

I’m going to hold back. I'll open to the audience. I did want to make one comment, a note 

here. Early, Dr. Brereton, in your presentation, can you tell if someone is not a natural born 

leader? Having seen many OERs in my day, I think a lot of us assume that you can do that. 

How accurate that may be, I’m not sure. So I'll leave that comment alone. Questions from 

the audience, please. 

Question 1:

I was interested in your discussion of the natural born leader, the instinctive leader, 

and kind of Chester’s whole, you know, lineup. And it seems to me like he’s envisioning 

or talking about the regimental commander or the Teddy Roosevelt or somebody out in 

front, you know, with a, you know, waving the sword. But of course to get things done in 

the Army, there’s a hierarchy of leadership. And in particular, there’s non-commissioned 

leadership. 

Did anything that Chester envisioned or that Wagner, on the opposite side, spoke of 

speak to developing that non-commissioned officer level? And when you’ve had a chance 

to answer it, I’d like, Todd, I was hoping that we could hear something from Jamie about 

crossing the middle ground. Because you had some very definite roles for the NCO to play 

in the literature you were speaking to. 

Dr. Brereton:

Well, Chester had very decided views on the lower ranks. And he did not view them 

very favorably. And one of the particular incidents brought up in passing by Jamie’s 

presentation was that he despised what was known at the time, as a result of the extended 

order, he despised what was called individualism in combat
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64

And the idea that ordinary soldiers, or even NCOs would be able to control a squad, 

much less a platoon was a radically wrong idea. Power and command rested only in the 

hands of officers. And officers commanded; NCOs and enlisted men followed. And they 

followed as a result of inspired command of the natural abilities of those captains and 

above. I don't know how many lieutenants fought during the Civil War. But he did not trust 

ordinary soldiers to be able to think for themselves on the battlefield, to be able to assess a 

combat situation and say, “That’s where I need to go, but this is where I’m here. And there’s 

an obstacle in my way. How do I and my teammates approach that and maneuver around 

it to strike the enemy?” He simply did not fathom that ordinary soldiers would be able to 

think that kind of problem through. They had to be led. 

Question 2:

Did he have any practical military experience?

Dr. Brereton:

Oh yes. He started as a private in the Civil War and rose all the way through the ranks 

to captain. He covered himself in glory, if I’m not mistaken, at the Battle of Kearneysville 

and won a battlefield promotion there, and went on through the ranks, so quite a remarkable 

soldier in many ways. And it’s a shame that there’s not more known about him. 

Dr. Jamieson:

I did brush up against this, but I never really addressed it in my paper, so thanks for a 

helpful question. I quoted General Brackenridge, who was Inspector General at the time, 

as saying that he thought a lot of. He thought most officers were critical of this idea of 

NCO leadership, critical of the 1891 IDRs. But there’s a kind of code working here. What 

I quoted was, he says, “A lot of these officers say, this will create too many leaders,” that 

in other words, you’ll have NCOs with this new responsibility. They will become leaders, 

but will also still have of course the traditional battalion leadership. Well that’s, of course, 

a kind of code for saying, “We don’t need these NCO leaders,” where today we would say, 

not only is this inevitable, it’s a good thing. 

Question 3:

Prior to the Civil War, we have Army doctrine expressed in terms of the Army 

regulations and drill manuals. Dr. Jamieson has talked about the resistance to even a 

rudimentary tactics manual. Arthur Wagner’s books on theory were essentially privately 

published. Could each of you talk about the factors that inhibited the development of real 

tactical doctrine, real operational doctrine in the late 19th century Army? 

Dr. Brereton:

Well, I personally, and Jamie would know better than I on this because he’s written 

so much on it, but I don't get the impression that has yet promulgated as official. There 

certainly is unofficial doctrine, principally through the works that Wagner wrote and used 

as textbooks at the Infantry and Cavalry School. But, you know, I don't know about the 

artillery school. I don't know about any other post schools. Certainly the War College, 

when it was established in the early 1900s, had its own curriculum. 
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65

But as far as, this is how the Army fights and, you know, a doctrine espoused by an 

organization like today’s TRADOC, that doesn’t come around until Pershing really starts 

getting after it during World War I, between, you know, Pershing in March and, how will 

the Army fight? 

Dr. Jamieson:

Yeah, in the field of tactics, and of course there are other areas you could consider, you 

can answer the question from the basis of looking at other fields. But in tactics, the point 

I’m making is that essentially from colonial times through even Upton, although Upton 

was more sophisticated than Civil War works, the idea is to tell the men what position to 

get into. It’s to describe formations. And then it’s to tell them how to move, how to march 

and how to maneuver in battle. 

So I’m identifying that as really a drill book, that this really isn’t tactics. It doesn’t 

advise a combat officer, as Upton put it very succinctly, how to fight. Now you can argue 

there’s implied within Hardee’s tactics or Casey’s tactics a larger tactic. There is in fact a 

larger tactics implied here. If you line these men up in close order formations, regiments 

in two-line formations, brigades in two-line formations, and a few hundred yards between 

one brigade and another as a division advances, of course there is an implied tactics there. 

And certain things are liable to happen or not happen.

But to address this as really a tactical manual, I would argue it just isn’t there until 

1891. And then I think Todd is right, that even what we read in 1891 is sort of how to take, 

we would regard as just kind of common-sensical. And we would hope some Civil War 

and Mexican American War officers and others generations earlier would have already 

recognized this, how to take advantage of ground and other obvious common-sensical 

things. 

I kind of foot-stomp it because there it is in print in 1891. And you won’t find it in 

Upton, Hardee, or Casey. But I think Todd is right; it doesn’t really come to fruition 

(overlapping dialogue) until the new Army period. 

Queston 4:

A favorite topic is one you’ve both addressed, to whether leaders are born or made. 

You could argue, I think, that the existence of the entire Army school system represents 

the conviction, or at least the hope that they could be made. This morning, General Brown 

pointed out that at the lower echelons, command can be directly applied. Whereas if you 

get, I think you said beyond battalion, John, it has to be largely indirectly applied. So I’m 

wondering if either of you in your research has formed any views as to whether that higher 

level leadership might require a different and maybe more spiritual qualities that perhaps 

fall into the realm of born, not made. 

Dr. Brereton:

Yeah. I don't know. I don't think Wagner ever really went there, to be honest with you. 

He did want majors and more senior officers to attend the new War College, which he also 

taught at. It was, I think, co commandant for two years before he died in 1905. And that’s 
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66

one of the great tragedies is that he died so really young. He was about my age when he 

died, and that’s a scary thing to think about. 

But as far as the spiritual component and trying to develop and nurture that, whatever 

it is. Although Wagner, as I mentioned, recognized that there were such things as natural 

leaders, he, I think that his impression would have been or his conviction would have 

been to train them in certain techniques and sufficient academic knowledge with applied 

applications so that their natural ability would enable them to better incorporate those 

ideas, doctrines, and historical knowledge into combat, into leading other men. 

Dr. Jamieson:

I think the only thing I could add to that or I would add to that would be that I think in 

the late 19th century Army, a lot of officers are looking to and appreciating senior officers 

who we would say mentor them. In the old Army, professor Woodworth, Steve Woodworth 

mentioned this morning, Grant patterned himself in appearance and command style on 

Taylor, but in operational terms, on Scott. Officers have probably always done this, learned 

from senior officers. But they weren’t looking to these people, I don't think, to mentor 

them. But I think this is another part of the story, emerging officer corps in the late 19th 

century, Upton clearly is mentored by Sherman. So this is, I think, another emerging role 

for senior leaders. 

Mr. Ben King:

Hi, Ben King from headquarters, TRADOC. Aren’t we talking here about really a 

revolution in the concept of leadership? You know, as General Brown discussed this 

morning, like, 18th century, Frederick the Great wants the guy that’s not too bright and 

not too ambitious. And there are a lot of Civil War leaders who were that way, whether 

political or not. But what their purpose was, to be on their horse, to provide inspiration for 

the men and attract bullets. And when he said, “Follow me,” they were going to follow him, 

because he provided that positive example. 

However, by the end of the Civil War and into the late 19th century, you have a revolution 

in weaponry. You have revolution in tactics. And so you have to have a revolution, maybe 

I’m overusing the word, in the concept of leadership. And isn’t that what we’re talking 

about? Because it’s almost like, and this is maybe a little stretching it, it’s the armies in the 

early 18th century when all of a sudden you have to have a non-commissioned officer if to 

do nothing else than beat these guys back into ranks when they want to run away. You have 

to have somebody at the lowest possible level that understands the tactics, understands the 

battle, and needs to provide that very low level of leadership. 

So it seems to me that we’re having that same kind of revolution in the end of the 19th 

century, where leadership is no longer being on your horse and providing inspiration for the 

men in the line, linear tactics. You have to have somebody that understands the tactics. And 

you have to have somebody that understands, I hate to use this word, doctrine, I'll explain 

in a minute, and understands the drill so the unit can be successful in combat. 
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67

And so I think that we’re talking about, you know, really apples and oranges, the apples 

being what happened in the Civil War, and the oranges as what happened later in Upton’s 

manuals and the manual of 1891. And I'll just make a comment on doctrines.

Our first major doctrinal piece did not occur until the field service regulations of 1905. 

And one of the problems we had in developing doctrine is the fact that we did not have the 

units to do it. And if you read the manual, it basically says, you know, division is consisted 

of so many regiments. And later on, the regiments could be partially militia regiments. But 

we really did not have enough units to make an entire division. So we couldn’t practice 

it. We couldn’t experiment with it. And even the large maneuvers of 1904 in Manassas, 

which took, like, something, 26,000 men, we still couldn’t get a grip on it, because we did 

not have those permanent units. And I think that’s one of the problems we have in the late 

19th century. We just don’t have the kinds of units we needed to develop that intellectual 

organization. 

Dr. Brereton:

It’s my impression that during Wagner’s day, there really was no sense of a concept of 

leadership in the way certainly that we understand it today. And my impression really is 

that Wagner and his colleagues on either side of this debate really saw this as a command 

issue, rather than necessarily a leadership issue that could be inculcated in junior officers 

and expressed on the battlefield and improved. So frequently, in the writing of certainly 

reformers in the Journal of the United States Military Institution, JMSI, Journal of the 

Military Service Institution, the assumption, generally speaking, is that commanders will 

lead, that they will know how to lead, and that with the proper tools, they can lead. 

But as far as an actual leadership doctrine, no, I don't see it. Although men like Chester 

certainly talk about it in the terms that you mentioned. 

Question 5:

I’d just like to make a comment, partly about that and about leaders and senior leaders. 

I think the context of the 19th century Army, where you have the demographic hump that 

you mentioned, you have Civil War veterans on one side, and then a new generation of 

lieutenants coming in that are going to serve 20 years as lieutenants, junior captains through 

this kind of thing, creates an uncertainty, you know, creates a division in the Army. 

I suggest, too, the other reference to the fact that you go from one to two company 

posts, to by the end of the century, maybe a whole regiment on a post, if you’re lucky, kind 

of thing changes the demographics. And all this creates an uncertainty as to what is war. 

And what is the future of the war? And what is the role of the Regular Army in that war? 

And therefore, what is the role of the regular officer in that war, kind of problem. 

As a biography of John Schofield, he generally looked at leaders as an intellectual 

exercise, that the training of leaders was self-training, that an officer didn’t have the 

intellectual energy to go study things, then you were going to have serious problems. Not 

that he didn’t believe in the value of Leavenworth, and not that he didn’t believe in the 

value of the practical school at Fort Riley. As a matter of fact, he was the defender of the 

practical school at Fort Riley.
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68

But he also was the guy that says, in the absence of consensus, in the absence of 

certainty, then we’ll use the military service institution and its articles and people presenting 

papers among peers. I'll create lyceums to have officers present papers and senior officers 

mentor the junior officers to these things. And that finally you can see in how he does 

business. Even in promotion boards, he says, “No, I’m not going to say that the Arthur 

Wagner manual is going to be the standard for the promotion boards. Since there is no 

manual, we’re going to leave it to the judgment of the senior officers to ask pertinent and 

relevant questions to the junior officers about what constitutes promotion.” So in a sense, it 

is the sheer uncertainty that says, “OK, self education is the most important characteristic 

of a leader.”

Dr. Brereton:

I’d just respond. I’d say that what I’ve seen in the history of the Army’s tactics gives 

kind of a case study example of the larger point you’re making. I think in revolutionary 

days, we thought we’d brought one of the international experts over here from Europe and 

he taught General Washington’s troops the drill. So the tactical problem is solved. And then 

we had Scott’s tactics. The problem is solved. Casey and Hardee, the problem is solved. 

Upton, the problem is solved. 

What I see in the late 19th century Army for the first time is an awareness that we may 

take our best shot at this, but finally we’re up against a battlefield so dangerous that a lot of 

us are willing to say, “We’re not really sure we’ve solved this.” You know? You may study 

this a long time and there may just be no way to get around this, that this firepower we’re 

moving against is too much for us. 

So I think your theme of uncertainty is a good one. It’s certainly reflected in the Army’s 

attitude about tactics. I see a definite change in the late 19th century. I don't see officers, 

the Mexican War, Civil War era musing about this the way they do in the late 19th century. 

Dr. Jamieson:

Arthur Wagner’s goal, practically for the Army as a whole was to move it away from 

non-military engagements like strike breaking and fighting Indians, garrisoning posts, 

defending harbors, things of this nature, and to return it to its core mission, which was to 

fight war. Well, if we are going to fight war, we are going to have to know how to fight war. 

And in order to do so effectively and successfully, then we’re going to have to have certain 

tools. And those tools are going to have to be taken largely from those people who we may 

wind up fighting in an increasingly dangerous age. I’ve been told by some individuals that, 

you know, well really, all Army reform in the late 1800s occurred in a vacuum because it 

didn’t matter. 

Well, you can say that now. I mean, hindsight is golden. They certainly did not know 

this. And the reformers of the Army certainly wanted to move the Army away from those 

non-military tasks to, what’s an Army for? If we’re going to have it, then we should train 

it appropriately. 

Question 6:
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69

One of you all mentioned the Spanish-American War. I think it was you, Dr. Brereton. 

And I’m curious about these other case studies that were available, at least by 1905, which 

is the South African case study and the Manchurian case study, which are closely being 

examined by European counterparts. So did The United States Army, anybody in the US 

send observers to either the Boer War or the Russo-Japanese War? And perhaps in the next 

panel, this will come out. And if they didn’t, that’d be interesting to know. And why didn’t 

they? Did they learn, take any insights from these? 

Dr. Brereton:

I really don’t know, frankly, to be honest. I’m ignorant on that. But I can tell you that 

Chester wrote about the South African War and came to the conclusion that extended order, 

the open order, individualism could not work. We have to have close order ranks to fight 

these battles, in order to develop the volume of fire that is necessary. And despite the fact 

that, you know, all of these...You know, by the 1890s, you’ve got rows of soldiers behind 

fortifications shooting repeating arms. So no, I haven’t seen that.

Dr. Jamieson:

The only thing I’ve seen is American officers primarily looking at the SpanishAmerican, their own Spanish-American War influence. And it’s the same questions. Are 

we going to have aimed individual fire? Or is volley fire better than aimed individual fire? 

Are we ever going to be able to have direct artillery fire? You know? Is the bayonet finally 

dead? You know, the same kind of arguments were going on in the late 1860s and ‘70s 

based on Civil War experience. There’s the same kind of argument back and forth after 

1898, that as Todd put it, you have sort of two schools. You have a Wagner school and a 

Chester school. And you pick whatever question you want, the bayonet, saber, whatever, 

this kind of thing. It’s not resolved anymore by the Spanish War than it was resolved by 

the Civil War.

Dr. Brereton:

Now, Wagner was in Cuba and later Puerto Rico. And think it’s in 1899, he did publish 

a report on the Spanish-American War. In that, in a very, very slim volume, he came to 

the conclusion that everything that he had said in, you know, The Service of Security & 

Information and in Organization & Tactics, and in some other articles that he had read, 

everything that he had written had come true, that the effect of smokeless powder was 

not going to be a big deal, that the extended order was right, that it could, despite the 

dispersion of the fighting line, that those soldiers armed with repeating rifles would be able 

to overwhelm a well organized defense behind fortifications, that the artillery needed to be 

indirectly observed, all of these things. And he makes these notices in this book, you know, 

one, two, three, four, you know, and goes right through the list of all of the improvements 

in weapons and tactics and whatnot, and how they all combine, and how he was right all 

along. 

Dr. Schifferle:

Pete Schifferle, School of Advanced Military Studies. The answer to the Boer War is, 

I’m not sure. I think probably not a very robust observer group, if any, probably because 
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70

of the nature of the war being, one, fought by the British. The US had kind of a love/hate 

relationship with the British Army at the turn of the century. But it was also a mostly guerrilla 

war and probably a little dangerous for an observer to go to the Boer War, considering the 

nature of the fight. 

The Japanese, Russo-Japanese War was very heavily observed by US officers. Some 

of the most famous officers of the period ended up as observers over there. Primarily I 

think not so much the Russian, they were observers usually on the Japanese side. And I 

think it was because of the fear of the great yellow peril, that Japan was considered, even 

in 1904/1905, Japan was considered a future threat from across the Pacific. Interestingly 

enough, in the ‘20s and ‘30s, a goodly number of the student papers written at Leavenworth 

were written on the Russo Japanese War. Even with the experience of the AAF behind 

them, they were still looking at the 1904/1905 experience as an exemplar of how Asiatics 

fight, for example, given the language of the time. 

Dr. Brereton:

One of the conclusions, I have read some of the articles by individuals who wrote about 

the Russo-Japanese War in JMSI. And some of the conclusions are, yes indeed, the closed 

order, double rank can work if you just throw enough men at your objectives. 

Dr. Schifferele:

Yeah. There was a lot of concern from my memory of the reports back that very much 

a case of uncertainty about how to win, that they saw the Russians doing certain things 

that should have worked and didn’t. They saw the Japanese doing things that should not 

have worked, and worked, and basically came back with quick rapid fire artillery, indirect 

fire artillery, machine guns, barbed wire, stabilized front warfare, so to speak, but were not 

exactly sure how to turn it into an effective offensive. 

Question 7:

In late 19th century, matter of fact, it took until 1914 for the Command General Staff 

College to translate the two volumes of Balch’s tactics. And I was wondering, was there 

any influence from things like that, or any foreign thing? Because Balch goes into a great 

deal of detail, especially on automatic weapons and things. And obviously he did not 

understand how devastating a machine gun was. But nonetheless, he recommends, you 

know, platoon of machine guns per... So did he have any influence, or that sort of thing 

have any (overlapping dialogue; inaudible) -- 

Dr. Brereton:

He did read Balch. I understand that Wagner could read German. He also read 

Clausewitz, and he incorporated both of them in Organization & Tactics. The closest that 

Wagner got to a machine gun of course was a gatling gun which he saw in action in Cuba. 

Question 8:

I would like to address a question to both gentlemen, maybe from somewhat different 

angle. Preface this by saying I’m interested in this question or influenced by the fact that 

Combat Studies Institute will be doing some activities with TRADOC in the coming week, 
Questions and Answers

71

which is a bureaucratic, not in a negative sense, but a bureaucratic organization dealing 

with doctrine, leadership obviously. We know that. 

But the key is, we’re looking at people like Wagner and maybe Upton to a degree, or 

other reformers. We’re studying here mostly are—Almost exclusively we’re looking at 

combat leadership. But they have to exercise a certain leadership to get reforms through. 

Can you comment on their ability to fight against the naysayers, to get a large—it’s not 

nearly a large as we are today, but, bureaucracy to make drastic changes if possible? The 

new regulations, 1891, how much fight was there? And how much effort, leadership did it 

take to just win over, to get through? So both gentlemen, if you could comment.

Dr. Jamieson:

That’s a helpful question in my case, because again, I brushed against this, but I didn’t, 

in the time I had here today, think it would be helpful to spend a lot of time on it. So thanks 

for coming back to that.

I mentioned in passing that the drill books before this, in an earlier period—and they 

were drill books—will be adopted by the Army much more readily and much more simply. 

If Secretary of War Jefferson Davis thinks Hardee’s tactics are good enough, they’re good 

enough. And that’s pretty much the end of the matter. What we see with the 1891 IDR, I 

mentioned, was by far and away, much more bureaucratic review process. Today, by our 

standards, this would be the first work of this kind that was staffed, that generals were 

busy, and they’d only have time to read this. So junior officers would read this first. And 

the 1891 works were staffed, as I recall, through all three (inaudible) certainly I’m certain 

to say through the infantry.

And so ultimately, as I mentioned, they’re signed off on by the Secretary of War and 

the President of The United States. But I’m pretty confident that President Harrison didn’t 

spend a lot of time reviewing all this. It’s interesting, because it tells us something about 

the history of the Army. The Army’s becoming much more bureaucratic.

Dr. Brereton:

Wagner certainly had a role in the 1891 IDR. He was a consultant. He was at Fort 

Leavenworth teaching in the Infantry and Cavalry School at the time, although I have 

really no idea. I haven’t seen what exactly his role was in the formation of that. Maybe 

you’ve found out. But if you have, please let me know. But as far as getting his actual 

reforms implemented, of course none of those really came to pass until the root reforms, 

and the creation of a general staff and the War College and many other things that many 

reformers, including Wagner, wanted to achieve and had been unable to for any number of 

reasons, mostly because of the bureau system of the Army, you know, simply would not 

let them.

But to the degree that Wagner was able to get anything accomplished, it was primarily, 

if you don’t mind my saying, through nagging. He wrote and wrote and wrote. And he 

wrote letters to people. He wrote books. He wrote his articles, which were, in some cases, 

vituperative, against those who opposed him, Chester being one in particular. Another, 
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72

what’s his name...? I want to say Edward [Wisser?]. I can’t remember the fellow’s name. 

But Wagner just whined a lot.

He also cultivated friends. And this was the Army of that time where you really, in some 

cases, an officer like Wagner, who had no combat experience, he rose through the ranks on 

the strength of his intellectual and academic abilities alone, Wagner needed patrons. And 

so he went to men like Adna Chaffee and J. Franklin Bell, and cultivated their ability to cut 

through the red tape and to get things done for him that could not otherwise have gotten 

done. 

Dr. King:

I know from the staff ride perspective, because I work on the staff ride team, that it took 

even Swift to really execute what Wagner had conceived of. 

Dr. Brereton:

Well, there’s also the fact that Wagner died young. He died right when all of his reforms 

had come to fruition. And then he croaked.

Dr. King:

We have time for a few more questions. Yes, please?

Dr. Hsieh:

Yeah, Wayne Hsieh, US Naval Academy. You mentioned sort of Wagner, and you see 

this trend let's say with Upton too, a desire to get the Army away from strike breaking, from 

fighting Indians and insurgents. But I was thinking, you know, Brian Linn’s characterization 

of, in a lot of ways, that the Army is sort of willfully ignoring what its actual imperial 

constabulary mission is, especially after the Spanish-American War. I mean, that’s what the 

Army ends up actually having to do.

And I think it’s fair to say, as I read it, Linn comes down pretty hard on the Army. I 

just wanted to get what your—I mean, do you think that’s a fair criticism? I mean, is this 

the Army insisting on just fighting wars it wants to fight, not these messy, imperial policing 

measures which unfortunately it’s stuck with? Or is there a rationale that’s really given 

that’s defensible, that, you know, institutions like Leavenworth shouldn’t have to worry 

about that, that’s not necessary and not appropriate?

Dr. Brereton:

Well, to some degree, I look at the early creation of Infantry and Cavalry School as 

giving those reform-minded officers something to do. Many of these officers did not want 

to be on the frontier. Wagner hated his work with the 6th Infantry during the Nez Perce 

campaign and up in Fort Robinson, way the hell up there in North Dakota. But many of 

these reformers despised the kind of work that they were doing, but also understood that 

that’s all we’ve got. 

So what they became engaged in really was this famous search for a mission, which has 

been written on in a number of fora for that period. And they were looking for something to 

do. They needed somewhere else to go, and they also, men like Wagner, Swift, some others 
Questions and Answers

73

need to come to mind at the moment, but don’t. But they understood what an Army was for. 

They didn’t see their Army doing what they thought an Army should be doing. It’s not that 

they anticipated overseas combat or even war with a foreign aggressor. But there was also 

the possibility, well, you know, England can still get here, and the Germans are building a 

big fleet. Did you know, by the way, that, you know, Chile had a larger navy than that of 

The United States Navy in the 1870s, up 'til the early 1880s? So there’s that whole point of, 

what are we doing here? We want to go from here to there, and we need to push the Army 

to seeing our point of view. 

Dr. Hsieh:

Let me just ask a follow-up. I mean, you bring up the Navy. And this is kind of an 

interesting point, because, you know, my department recently had an interesting paper 

seminar. And Bob Love, who’s actually a Naval historian, is really of the position that 

the Navy really doesn’t have an opponent of late 19th Century. A lot of these “Mohanian” 

reforms are really the products of professional self-aggrandizement, to put it bluntly. Right? 

I mean, you know, how much of it is, you know, and the Army looking for a mission, but 

did it arguably already have a mission and just was trying to ignore it? You know, that its 

civilian political masters (overlapping dialogue) were.... 

Dr. Brereton:

The difference between the Army and the Navy of course is that the Navy builds things. 

I mean, they build these big, hulking steel monsters. And that looks good and it gives The 

United States prestige. We’re beginning to expand globally. We’re taking Hawaii. We’re 

taking, what is it, Guam and got to have a two ocean fleet, and all of these things. And it’s 

glamorous to do this. I mean, it’s also a great source of patronage. Particularly in the Navy 

Department, you got all of those contracts and things of this nature. It really looks good. 

But what does the Army have? They’ve got horses and mules. They don’t even have the 

Krag-Jorgensen yet. I mean, for heaven’s sake. You can’t spend any money on the Army. 

But you can sure as hell spend money on the Navy.

Dr. Jamieson:

I think it is fair to say, these Army thinkers in the 1880s and ‘90s who were interested in 

some of these questions are, for the most part, overwhelmingly for the most part, assuming 

a conventional war. What they’re interested in, what the 1891 IDR assumes of course is a 

European opponent. And so what they come up with is fine for the war with Spain. It’s fine 

for the Philippine War at first. And then when the war becomes a non-conventional war, I 

think in fairness to them, we have to say they do go back to their Indian fighting experience 

and some other things. And there are some interesting connections there. Well, to fight the 

Philippine War, after it becomes a guerilla war, wouldn’t it be a good idea to have some 

Native help? You know? We used Indian scouts to, we had native warriors help us find and 

fight our opponents, the Apaches and on the Plains. And there are some of those kinds of 

connections and drawing on earlier experience. But I think the basis of your question is 

factually right, that in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the overwhelming interest was in, let’s think about 

what it would be like if we had to fight a large conventional war.
Panel 2

74

Dr. Nenniger:

Tim Nenniger, National Archives. Particularly after 1900, when Leavenworth reopens, 

in terms of the curriculum, they’re really not looking at what’s going on in the Philippines 

in terms of the military art courses. They’re really looking at big battles, European style. 

The models they’re studying, as often as not, are the Franco-Prussian War. But in some of 

the subsidiary courses in the curriculum, including military law, of which there’s a military 

government component, at the time, they taught foreign languages, at least on occasion. 

Most of the students took Spanish. And some of the other subsidiary courses, there was a 

sense that some of this is going to be immediately practical when I get assigned with my 

regiment to the Philippines. But the larger focus in the military art courses completely 

ignored that, completely ignored, you know, the Indian fighting experience. I think it was a 

response to the overall changing nature of military organization and military technology at 

the time, not any problem that would be on the immediate horizon on most of the student 

officers.

Dr. Connelly:

I want to make a comment about the bureaucracy there. The US Army of the 19th 

century was an incredibly decentralized institution. You know? I said before the Civil War, 

you have the unifying idea of the Army regulations, you know? You know, that’s one of 

the few unifying things. To a certain extent, West Point creates a values agenda for the rest 

of the officer corps. But it’s very decentralized. And it truly is, doctrine is the opinion of 

the senior officer present, you know? And it could be the first lieutenant, you know, that’s 

running the operation. 

So that one of the things that becomes significant about the 1891 thing is, is yes, it 

was intentionally bureaucratic. It is taking a thing that had been done before, boards, right, 

putting together a board to try to take all these disparate elements of the Army and all 

these opinionated general officers who were essentially peers and colonels and majors, you 

know, because many of these majors are as old and has as much Civil War experience as 

the colonels and the generals, taking this army of almost near peers and trying to beat out 

an answer, trying to come to some sort of conclusion. So the very fact that it is bureaucratic, 

the very fact that it’s disputatious, you know, and it goes back and forth is reflecting that 

reality of an Army that has no institutions of authority, if you will. 

Dr. King:

I think we’re towards the end of our time. Do you have any comments about that last 

(overlapping dialogue) remark?

Dr. Brereton:

No. Thank you all, very helpful questions.
75

Day 1, Panel 3: Changing Leadership for a Changing World Role, 1906-1939

The Leavenworth Schools, Professional Military Education, and Reform in 

the Old Army, 1900-1917 by Tim Nenniger, Ph.D.

(Submitted Paper)

The period from the end of the Indian Wars to World War I saw the evolution of 

the U.S. Army from a 25,000 man frontier constabulary to a modern professionally led 

force with 2 million men fighting in a coalition war in Europe. This also was a period of 

developing professionalism in the officer corps, creation of professional military education 

schools, and nascent efforts to foster reforms that would improve the quality of Army life 

and organization. It was also a period when the roles and missions of the U.S. Army were 

rapidly changing, when technological and organizational changes were affecting the art of 

war, and when qualities of knowledge and experience were evolving for individual officers 

to be considered true professionals. 

A number of professional military education institutions had their genesis in this period. 

The Artillery School at Fortress Monroe, which reopened in 1867 after closure during 

the Civil War and taught the technical aspects of artillery, by the 1880s also examined 

“the general progress of military science.” In 1891, to provide basic instruction for junior 

lieutenants and a more general forum for professional discussion, John M. Schofield, 

Commanding General of the Army, ordered creation of lyceums (later known as “garrison 

schools” or “post schools”) at all posts housing troops of the line. The last decades of 

the 19th century also saw creation of the Engineer School of Application at Washington 

Barracks, the School of Submarine Defense at Fort Totten, and in 1887 the School of 

Application for Cavalry and Light Artillery at Fort Riley.1

 But there was no professional 

military education system, no connection between the schools, no progression from one 

level to another. Moreover, there was no system of selection for attendance which was 

largely in the hands of individual unit commanders, who often did not send their most 

competent officers. 

Leavenworth was arguably the most significant of these schools at this time. In 

1881 William T. Sherman, Commanding General of the Army, established the School of 

Application for Cavalry and Infantry at Fort Leavenworth. Modeled on the existing school 

for artillery officers at Fort Monroe, Leavenworth was to provide young infantry and 

cavalry lieutenants with a practical course in small unit tactics and administration. By the 

mid-1890s the school had broadened and deepened its curriculum, attracted good officers 

as faculty and students, and largely overcome its early reputation as a “kindergarten.” The 

basis of the Leavenworth system was the “applicatory method,” practical problem solving 

as a means of learning tactics. It had been introduced at the school by Captains Arthur 

L. Wagner and Eben Swift, two of the Army’s acknowledged intellectuals of that period. 

Leavenworth closed in 1898 on the outbreak of the war with Spain. 

It reopened in 1902 as the General Service and Staff College, a one-year remedial course 

for newly commissioned lieutenants; it graduated two classes. (Over 1000 officers, with 
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little previous military education or training, had been commissioned during the Army’s 

expansion in the wake of the Spanish-American War and Philippine Insurrection.) But after 

a fundamental reorganization in 1904 Leavenworth became two one-year schools with 

only the best graduates of the first year advancing to the second. The first year course, titled 

the Infantry and Cavalry School (after 1907 the Army School of the Line), encompassed 

military engineering, foreign languages, military law, and especially military art. During 

the first year students practiced troop leading of mixed tactical units up to division in 

size. At the second year Army Staff College military art predominated, with emphasis on 

general staff duties, logistics, and operational control of units as large as an army corps. 

Also during this period there was growing recognition that if military art did not have 

an “intellectual” content, it was at least a field that required study, contemplation, and 

practice from its practitioners if they wanted to be considered professionals. Articles on 

tactics in professional journals, books on recent military campaigns, and translations of 

similar works from foreign military writers proliferated at this time, with such stalwart 

Leavenworth instructors as Wagner, Swift, Matthew F. Steele, John F. Morrison, and 

Arthur L. Conger among the most prolific officer-authors. Their participation in these 

activities largely contributed significantly to the growing reputation of Leavenworth as an 

intellectual center of the Army, where matters of tactics, operations, and doctrine were not 

only learned but, within limits, debated.2

In order to improve military art instruction at Leavenworth, in the early 1890s 

Swift introduced a technique adapted from the German Army of analyzing and solving 

tactical problems. It required students systematically to follow a series of steps to solve a 

problem and to prepare written orders that would make the solution clear. What began at 

Leavenworth as a means of instruction, however, evolved to become the “five paragraph 

field order,” which by the time of World War I was the standardized form used by the U.S. 

Army to convey operations instructions on the battlefield. Whether ordering the advance of 

an infantry company or a field army, the process, the analytic technique and sequence, and 

form were the same: (Paragraph 1) general situation; (Paragraph 2) objective; (Paragraph 

3) disposition of troops and tasks assigned component parts of the command; (Paragraph 

4) logistic instructions; (Paragraph 5) communications instructions.3

 Another activity 

in which Leavenworth staff and instructors became involved was the preparation and 

dissemination of Field Service Regulations, which became the military “bible” by which 

the army in the field organized, trained, and operated. It contained in essence the Army’s 

description of the nature of combat and became its doctrinal statement on how to fight. In 

1905 Captain Joseph T. Dickman of the General Staff, but a recent Leavenworth tactics 

instructor, translated and adapted German Army regulations to the U.S. Army’s needs. 

The value of such a manual to the course of instruction then being followed at the Infantry 

and Cavalry School and the Army Staff College was clear; at a minimum it would serve 

as a measuring rod against which students could be measured in graded tactical problems. 

Consequently, Leavenworth staff became intimately involved in preparing the several 

subsequent revisions, which in part were an effort to “Americanize” editions of Field 

Service Regulations (published 1908, 1910, and 1914) that were issued prior to World War 

I.4

 The reputation of Leavenworth as an intellectual center of the Army, the essence of the 
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five paragraph operations order, and the involvement of Leavenworth staff and faculty in 

preparing the Army’s capstone doctrinal manuals continue to this day.

The development of professional military education was a central element in the series of 

reforms initiated by senior War Department leaders, both civilian and military, particularly 

during the period Elihu Root was Secretary of War (1899 to 1903). Russell Weigley nicely 

captures Root’s overall focus: “Reserves, planning, and command were the essentials of 

a better Army.”5

 Improving the preofessional qualifications of individual officers was an 

important ingredient in insuring the success of all three areas. Root and William H. Carter, 

his principal military adviser, tried to establish a system of Army education where before 

only several independent, basically unrelated Army schools existed.6

 They attempted to use 

military education as a means to further aspects of their reform program, namely creating 

a trained body of officers to man the newly created War Department General Staff, to 

improve the professional attainments of militia officers which was part of the overall effort 

to link the separate state militias more closely with the Federal government. 

Between the Spanish-American War and World War I, the postgraduate military 

education system inaugurated by Secretary Root seemingly was more successful than other 

elements of his reform program—efforts to strengthen War Department administration and 

improve the nation’s military reserve system. During that period Army schools encouraged 

a heightened awareness of the intellectual content of military art among the professional 

officer corps, which in turn led to improved individual expertise, particularly in the realm 

of conducting combat operations with large units. But in many of its particulars, the 

postgraduate school system did not develop as Root had wanted. Who went to the schools, 

at what point in their careers, and why they went, had a marked impact on the reputation 

and broader influence of the post graduate schools. Who did not go and why were also 

significant. An examination of the students at the schools at Fort Leavenworth, will indicate 

how Root’s system, once established, functioned and will reveal some shortcomings which 

limited its intended effect.

The best graduates from lower level institutions, garrison and branch schools, were 

to go to Leavenworth for combined arms training. For many officers, Leavenworth was 

their first experience away from their own branch. The best graduates from Leavenworth, 

in turn, were to go on to the Army War College, the apex of the Army school system. For 

these reasons, Leavenworth was central to how effectively the entire system functioned.

A major element of Root’s reform program was to increase subordination of the state 

militias (the National Guard) to federal, essentially Regular Army, control. Although the 

Dick Act, passed by Congress in 1903, did not go as far in that direction as Root would 

have liked, it did authorize the federal government to mobilize state National Guard units 

to repel invasion and maintain internal order. The Act further recognized the organized 

militia as the country’s first-line military reserve. In return for this recognition, the militia 

of each state had to meet minimum federal standards of efficiency. The Regular Army 

became responsible for assuring these standards were met and for providing weapons, 

equipment, and instruction to state units.7

As one means to foster cooperation, as well as to raise standards, the Dick Act authorized 

militia officers, on the recommendation of their state governors and with the approval 
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of the President, to attend Army schools. Implicit was the mutual benefit of Regular and 

militia officers undergoing instruction together and to serve as a means to break down 

mutual hostility. Thus in the wake of the Dick Act, the prospect of militia attendance at 

Army schools, particularly Leavenworth, had a generally favorable reception.8

Early in 1903 Secretary Root ordered his staff to draft a detailed plan to enroll militia 

officers in Army schools, thereby fulfilling Section 16 of the Dick Act. The response from 

the organized militia was enthusiastic, with state governors initially recommending 89 

officers for appointment to the service schools. But authorities on the newly created General 

Staff and at Leavenworth, which was the school all parties assumed most of the militia 

officers wanted to attend, had reservations. First, there were insufficient quarters at Fort 

Leavenworth to accommodate more than a handful of militia. Additionally, many Regular 

officers were skeptical that militia officers could materially benefit from the Leavenworth 

course without any prior military schooling; a qualification most lacked. Further, the 

Regulars doubted the militiamen understood what would be expected of them. As one staff 

study reported “...many of these militia officers have expressed a desire to go these schools 

without an appreciation of the real nature of the requirements of student officers...”9

Because of the limited capacity of the Leavenworth schools and questions about the 

qualifications of potential students from the militia, the War Department modified the 

original plans regarding attendance. State governors had to screen carefully, by means 

of written examinations if possible, all militia officers they recommended to the War 

Department. Because of lack of quarters, bachelors were preferred and no militia officer 

could bring his wife or other dependents. Most importantly, the authorities at Leavenworth 

would administer an entrance examination to any militia officer who had not graduated 

from one of the Regular Army garrison or branch schools, as would have most of the 

Regulars in attendance. The result was about as predicted by General Bell, the Leavenworth 

commandant after he had convinced the General Staff of the necessity of these changes: “I 

don’t suppose it is possible we will have any militia officers next year, but if we do it will 

be few of them.”10

In late September 1904 the first group of militia officers, only four, arrived at Fort 

Leavenworth for examination prior to admission to the Infantry and Cavalry School. As 

many Regulars had predicted, they all failed. Not only did they lack knowledge of basic 

military subjects, they knew “nothing about geometry, trigonometry, or algebra,” all required 

for military engineering courses. Despite his persistent skepticism about the wisdom of 

admitting militia to Leavenworth under any circumstances, General Bell did not want to 

humiliate the individuals involved. He also worried about fostering good relations between 

the militia and Regular Army only a year after passage of the Dick Act. Consequently, 

Bell had the four officers admitted to the garrison school at Fort Leavenworth to pursue a 

specially designed course of study that would qualify them for the Infantry and Cavalry 

School the following year. All four officers concurred in Bell’s plan, although only two 

actually completed the course and entered Leavenworth the next year.11

Despite his accommodation with the militiamen, when the question of militia 

attendance once again arose in 1905, Bell declared: “I honestly don’t believe there is a man 

in the militia in the United States, who has had no instruction in post schools, who can pass 
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the examination for admission here, and there are devilish few of them who could take 

the course successfully if they come here.” But four of the five militia officers assigned to 

the class entering the Infantry and Cavalry School in August 1905 did pass the qualifying 

examination. An instructor described one of them as a “cracker-jack” who would make 

many of his Regular Army classmates “hustle” in competition. Another observer, more 

optimistic than General Bell, believed the education of militia officers in the service 

schools to be “an interesting experiment.” He thought that although it had potential to end 

in disappointment, it could become a valuable feature of American military policy. The 

answer to that proposition was soon at hand.12

In June 1906 the Infantry and Cavalry School class, which included the four militia 

officers admitted to Leavenworth in August 1905, graduated. One of the militiamen, Capt. 

W.O. Selkirk of the Texas National Guard, had performed quite well. His class standing 

in the first year course, 19 of 50, qualified him as a “distinguished graduate” eligible to 

continue for a second year of instruction at the Army Staff College. He also did well at that 

institution the following year. But Selkirk was very intelligent and unusually diligent in his 

studies. Unfortunately, he was unique. The other three militia officers in the class of 1906 

graduated near the bottom—45th, 47th, and 48th of 50. These officers at the bottom of the 

class all failed one or more subjects over the course of the year and had to be reexamined 

in those subjects in order to qualify for graduation. Moreover, one of the three, Lieutenant 

Charles N. Akeley of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, made a number acrimonious 

charges against Regular Army instructors who he considered prejudiced against the militia. 

His conduct, believed by some to be characteristic of neither an officer nor a gentleman, 

and the defensive response by Leavenworth authorities hardened attitudes on both sides. 

The experience did little to engender cooperation between the Regular Army and militia 

that joint attendance at Army schools was supposed to foster. Yet it did much to reinforce 

the skepticism among the Regulars about the professional ability of the guardsmen, while 

confirming the belief among the guardsmen that the Regulars were indeed prejudiced 

against them. Despite Root’s grand plans, only four militia officers graduated from the 

Infantry and Cavalry School at Leavenworth between the Spanish-American War and 

World War I, all with the class of 1906, and only one, Selkirk, went on to the Army Staff 

College.13

The unhappy experience of the class of 1906 essentially ended the “interesting 

experiment” of militia officers attending Leavenworth. It did not completely deter all 

from trying to gain admission, however; several in subsequent years tried but failed the 

admission examination. Neither did it end all efforts by which the militia might benefit 

from the Leavenworth experience. For instance, the Academic Board at Leavenworth rated 

all graduates on their suitability as inspectors and instructors with state militia units. A 

number of graduates in subsequent assignments performed such duty. In addition, many 

recent graduates immediately after leaving Leavenworth served on temporary duty as 

umpires, observers, and instructors at at militia maneuvers and summer training camps. 

Some Leavenworth faculty also assisted state units with instruction at their officer training 

schools; John F. Morrison, best know of the service school instructors of this period, was 

in particular demand. On at least one occasion Leavenworth held a three-month course to 

prepare 22 Regular officers for duty with the militia. Interestingly, there was a continuing 
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perception among some militia officials that despite the acrimony surrounding the class 

of 1906, something positive was happening at Leavenworth from which they could learn 

and benefit. As a New York officer put it in 1914: “We would like to have the spirit of 

Leavenworth among our officers.” This was difficult to accomplish, however, without 

actually attending the school. Root had a good idea. It simply did not work out as he had 

planned.14

If the Army educational system was one means for the Regular Army to reach out and 

improve the militia, Secretary Root also saw it as the principal mechanism for improving 

the Regular Army officer corps itself. The selection procedures for each school and the 

progression of the most qualified graduates from one Army school to the next highest 

level were critical to the effective functioning of Root’s scheme. The order establishing the 

system stated: 

Especial attention will be paid to the records made by individuals at each step of this 

progressive course, in order that those most deserving shall be given further opportunity 

for perfecting themselves in the profession of arms, and that the Nation may have at all 

times at its disposal a highly trained body of officers and may know who they are. 

Root wanted to assure that all students a particular level had a common base of 

knowledge or similar military experience. This was particularly important at the higher 

level schools, namely Leavenworth and the Army War College, from whose graduates 

Root and Carter, expected those selected for the War Department General Staff would 

come. In several respects implementation of the system again fell short of expectations.15

Army regulations required regimental commanders to select “the most promising 

lieutenants and captains” from among the best graduates of their garrison schools to 

attend the Infantry and Cavalry School. But shortly after the 1904 reorganization of 

the Leavenworth course, one officer wanting to attend the Infantry and Cavalry School 

complained of his regimental commander: “It is as I feared. He does not want to send any 

Captains to the school, basing his decision on the grounds that captains and graduates of 

West Point do not need this detail and none but officers from the ranks or civil life should 

be sent.” If all regimental commanders made selections of that basis, Leavenworth would 

again become a “kindergarten,” the place for the “regimental idiot,” and the entire system 

of Army postgraduate education would be endangered. The best officers would not have 

an opportunity to attend Leavenworth, and thus would not be selected for the Army War 

College or for service on the General Staff. General Bell, at that time commandant at 

Leavenworth, wanted regimental commanders to abide by the regulations and threatened 

to return to their regiments any unqualified officers sent to the schools.16

When some colonels recommended “poor material” for the next Infantry and Cavalry 

School class, Bell carried out his threat and refused to accept them. Well placed friends 

in the War Department backed his action. As a result and because students in the class of 

1904-5 informed officers in their regiments of the situation, in most regiments selections 

procedures improved. A few units even used competitive examinations to determine their 

representatives. Leavenworth and War Department officials were intent on straightening out 

those colonels who ignored the regulations on selection, for as one officer on the General 

Staff put it: “That once done, we will get the cream of the whole Army into the school.”17
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It had occurred to some that as the Leavenworth curriculum improved and became 

more advanced, lieutenants and junior captains would receive less immediate benefit 

from the course than would senior captains and field officers. As company and battalion 

commanders, the “seniors” were better able to apply what they had learned in leading, 

instructing, and training their troops than were lieutenants. Moreover, few lieutenants 

would be serving as General Staff officers. One recent graduate wrote in 1906: “Get a lot 

of the captains and you will have men that can do something. Some few old moss backs 

will not go under any conditions but get a good percentage of graduates in a regiment and 

the influence of the moss backs will be nil.”18

Despite some objection from the “moss backs,” from 1904 to 1916 most Leavenworth 

students were captains. The War Department changed regulations in 1907 to permit 

only captains and majors to attend the first year school. In 1912, however, the so-called 

“Manchu Law” limited the number of years officers could spend away from their regiments 

on detached service, such as was required to attend Leavenworth, the War College, or serve 

on the General Staff. Because this reduced the number of eligible captains and majors 

available to attend the first year School of the Line, fifteen lieutenants were admitted to the 

1913-14 class. The three remaining classes before World War I, however, again included 

only majors and captains. Largely as result of these admissions policies, Leavenworth had 

a much greater effect upon captains than upon field grades. Between 1905 and 1916, 432 

Regular Army officers graduated from the Infantry and Cavalry School/School of the Line. 

(The size of the Army officer corps throughout that time was about 4000.) Of that total 307 

were captains, 83 first lieutenants, 27 second lieutenants, and only 15 were majors, or field 

grade officers.

Regulations required infantry, cavalry, and field artillery regiments in the continental 

United States annually to submit to the War Department the names of two officers eligible 

(having served five years) and willing to attend Leavenworth. The Chief Signal Officer, 

the Chief of Engineers, and the Chief of Coast Artillery, each could nominate one or two 

officers from their branches. From this group of nominees the War Department General 

Staff selected the first year classes at Leavenworth, which averaged 36 students. Because 

admission to the second year Army Staff College was, with a few exceptions, limited to 

honor and distinguished graduates of the first year course, the second year classes were 

much smaller, averaging 21 students, predominately infantry and cavalry captains.

There were factors besides regulations that determined whether an officer attended 

Leavenworth. On at least three occasions the marital status of the prospective students 

determined size of classes. Married officers could not be admitted to the school unless 

there were sufficient quarters available for them and their families. The requirements of 

regiments detailed for overseas service and after 1912 provisions of the Manchu Law, 

limiting time an officer could serve on “detached service,” kept other individuals away. 

Commanders of regiments soon destined for the Philippines usually discouraged their 

officers from seeking the detail. Other commanders, who believed too many officers from 

their units were already on detached service, did the same.19

Not all officers who were eligible wanted to attend the schools. For them the professional 

advantage did not outweigh the effort required to graduate. Attacks on the Leavenworth 
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system discouraged some potential applicants. In 1907 a regimental commander warned 

that the schools’ reputation of putting a premium on “liberal memorizing” made it difficult 

to get qualified officers from his unit to attend. Because previous graduates were so critical 

of the school, George C. Marshall was the only officer in the 30th Infantry who applied in 

1906. The next year not a single captain in the 5th Cavalry was “enthusiastic” about the 

detail. Fear of not making the Staff College class kept other away. Some officers believed 

that failing to graduate high in the first year course hurt a reputation more than not going 

to Leavenworth at all.20

Laziness overcame ambition to keep others from applying. The effect of years of 

boredom and routine in the garrison army led a cavalry officer, who did not want to go 

to the school, to describe his intellectual condition as “semi-fossilized.” Numerous other 

officers, believing they could not physically stand the stress of the academically rigorous 

first year at the schools, declined the detail for reasons of health and age. Rumors of broken 

health, nervous breakdowns, severe eye strain, and even suicides, had enough basis in fact 

to deter the less enthusiastic. Still other eligible officers procrastinated. Concerned that 

they were unprepared, they requested the detail “sometime in the future” after individual 

study improved their professional knowledge. Few who passed up the detail were later give 

a second opportunity to go.21

But generally most eligible officers were interested in attending the schools. The 

difficulty was to get them to commit to attend in a particular year. In 1907 the Adjutant 

General polled regimental commanders to determine the number of officers interested 

in attending Leavenworth during the next five years. Replies from forty-four regiments 

indicated only two regiments had no one interested, five had only one officer interested, 

and the other thirty-seven had several who wanted to go. In 1910 the Adjutant General 

received 325 affirmative and only 150 negative responses to a similar question put to 

eligible captains. But when the Adjutant General tried to get commitments for the 1910-

11 academic year, only thirteen officers in the twenty-three regiments polled showed any 

interest. The situation in the 4th Infantry was typical: “Neither Captains Dorey or Coleman 

desire detail this year. Captain Coleman would take it if he cannot get in next year. I have 

not been informed by any Captain who wants it.”22

Among officers who did go, personal motivation was most important for securing the 

detail. As one put it: “I also saw that the science of tactics consisted of something more 

than ‘fours right’ and ‘fours left,’ and that there were other problems to solve before I could 

consider myself efficient. It was necessary for me to have some aid to accomplish the task so 

I decided to try and get the detail to go to Fort Leavenworth.” Leavenworth’s reputation as 

the “intellectual center of the Army” attracted others. Billy Mitchell desired an assignment 

to the post for some time before becoming commander of the experimental signal company 

associated with the Signal School at the post. Later, he sought and obtained detail to the 

School of the Line and became the first Signal Corps officer to attend the Staff College. 

For most officers, assignment to the schools was a very individual matter; as one said, it 

seemed to be the “best thing for me at the time.” Many saw potential career benefits from 

successful completion of the course, particularly when more senior officers encouraged 

them. A Line School graduate frankly stated: “I fully understood the advantages the school 

present to an ambitious officer.”23
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“Connections” were sometimes as important for getting an appointment to Leavenworth 

as ability. General Bell, as commandant and subsequently as Army Chief of Staff (1906-

1910), frequently played a role in selecting students. Although he criticized others for 

trying to use influence to get a detail to the schools, Bell himself played the game and 

was susceptible to pressure. When one student, whose father had already successfully 

influenced his selection for the School of the Line, tried for another school detail, Bell 

opposed his appointment because of the previous pressure. Bell’s aide assured the officer; 

“General Bell is too big a man to allow any personal feelings...to influence him in his 

official action.” Yet at the bottom of the office copy of that letter, Bell had scribbled: “He’ll 

never enter if it depends on my recommendation. J.F.B.” Regulations and ability aside, 

friends in the right places did no hurt when seeking admission to Leavenworth.24

For the most part, officers attending Leavenworth in the years before World War I 

were mature professionals with more than average career motivation. Initially the schools 

probably appealed more to younger officers who saw it as a means of quickly attaining 

career goals. Eventually older officers “saw the light,” wanted “to get into the game in 

earnest and for that reason [went] to the schools as a preliminary step.”25

But importantly, many perceived it as only a preliminary step. They assumed that good 

performance, as indicated by high class standing, at Leavenworth would lead in turn to 

selection for the Army War College and possibly duty on the General Staff. Root and 

Carter clearly has assumed such a progression when planning the postgraduate education 

system from 1899 to 1903. Almost immediately following the 1904 reorganization to a 

two-tier institution, the Infantry and Cavalry School/School of the Line and the Army Staff 

College, Leavenworth began graduating small annual classes of skilled, highly motivated 

officers. Arguably Leavenworth graduates were the best equipped officers in the Army to 

fill important command and staff positions in the War Department and in the field. But 

many officers at that time believed Leavenworth graduates were not getting an adequate 

opportunity to compete for such positions. In particular, Leavenworth graduates were 

not going to the Army War College or serving on the General Staff in anywhere near the 

numbers they should have been had Root and Carter’s progressive system been adhered 

to closely. Indeed, some thought that many selected for those institutions were relatively 

untrained, if not unqualified.26

Between 1904 and 1917, 251 Army officers attended the War College. Only forty-five 

were products of the post-Root reform Leavenworth schools. And eight of that number had 

graduated so low in the first year course that they did not qualify for the second year Staff 

College course. For such officers to go to the War College was an obvious perversion of 

the progressive features of the school system planned by Root and Carter. Of the remaining 

War College students, fifty had graduated from the much more elementary pre-SpanishAmerican War Leavenworth, while the vast majority, 156 officers, were not graduates of any 

advanced postgraduate institution. Similarly, 202 officers served on the War Department 

General Staff from 1904 to 1916; but only twenty were post-Root reform Leavenworth 

graduates. Again, most of those on the General Staff, 112 officers, had no postgraduate 

military education at all. Age and lack of seniority were the principal factors inhibiting 

the regular progression of qualified Leavenworth graduates to the War College, then to 
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the General Staff. Few field grade officers went to Leavenworth, where most students 

during this period were captains and lieutenants. The newly created General Staff had an 

immediate need for field grade officers and senior captains to perform its multi-faceted 

duties. It could not wait for the post-1903 Leavenworth graduates to mature and become 

eligible for assignment. Consequently, more senior officers, without the knowledge or 

experience Leavenworth should have provided, went to the War College to prepare for 

duty on the General Staff.

In 1908 Brigadier General W.W. Wotherspoon, the President of the War College, 

complained to Major John F. Morrison, senior Military Art instructor at Leavenworth, 

that all War College students should first have gone through Leavenworth. Wotherspoon 

observed that the few Leavenworth graduates who did progress to the War College 

invariably performed much better than those who had not gone to Leavenworth. Because 

Wotherspoon had recently reoriented the War College course, he was especially aware 

of these shortcomings. Under its original president, Brigadier General Tasker Bliss, the 

War College in effect operated as an adjunct to the War Department General Staff, with 

neither an established curriculum nor a specified length to the course. Bliss assigned 

students independent studies on a range of organizational, strategic, and political-military 

topics. When he became president, Wotherspoon changed that, establishing a course of 

study that stressed the strategic employment of large forces in field operations and geopolitical planning. Wotherspoon recently had brought Major Eben Swift to the War College 

from Leavenworth, where he had been assistant commandant, to introduce the applicatory 

instructional techniques used at Leavenworth to the War College. As a result, students had 

to know the techniques for preparing an estimate of the situation, systematic issuance of 

operations orders, and tactical map study. As Wotherspoon pointed out, previously many 

War College students lacked such skills.27

Equally important, Wotherspoon wanted to establish the principle that Leavenworth 

graduation was required for attendance at the War College in order to prevent “sisters, 

cousins, and aunts from using their influence...to get their friends [or relatives] into what 

they consider a position of ease and comfort.” Too many recent War College students had not 

been “up to the mark,” according to Wotherspoon. Their sole motivation for attending was 

that they had wives with money and social ambition who wanted to have an “opportunity 

to shine in Washington.” Those shortcomings made uniform instruction at the War College 

difficult. In addition, well-prepared War College students with a Leavenworth background 

were held back by simplified instruction done for their less-prepared classmates. And he 

wanted a means to assure that each War College student had the Leavenworth “seal upon 

him.”28

Wotherspoon, therefore, recommended that selected field grade officers, likely to be 

sent to the War College but who because of age or seniority were not graduates of the 

post-1904 Leavenworth, be sent there for an intense but abbreviated course in military art. 

Authorities at Leavenworth, particularly Morrison, and at the War Department, including 

then Army Chief of Staff J. Franklin Bell, enthusiastically supported the proposal. Morrsion 

saw an opportunity to spread Leavenworth doctrine and influence. Bell had long asserted 

that Root’s military education system would not succeed unless senior officers supported 
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Nenniger

it. Wotherspoon’s suggestion seemed to offer several interrelated benefits. For six weeks 

in 1908 and for three months each winter from 1911 to 1916, the War Department sent 

field grade officers to Leavenworth for the special course; just over one hundred attended, 

with about half of each special class subsequently going on to the War College. Although 

Leavenworth, the War College, and the field grade officers in attendance, all benefited 

from the special course, more junior officers who had submitted to the rigors of the one or 

two year regular Leavenworth course were not so impressed. They labeled it the “get rich 

quick” course.29

Between 1903 and World War I the postgraduate military education system did not 

entirely function as planned by Root and Carter. The failure to sustain militia officer 

attendance at Leavenworth and the perceived need to create a special class for field officers, 

both clear indications of shortcomings of the system, suggest that for those attempting to 

reform the Army getting the human equation correct was often the most difficult problem 

to solve. Neither officers who were potential students at the Leavenworth schools, nor 

more senior officers commanding regiments or supervising staff sections in the War 

Department completely accepted the potential of, or in some cases even the necessity for, a 

professionally educated officer corps. Success in that regard did not come until after World 

War I, when, then Army Chief of Staff, John J. Pershing again reformed Army professional 

military education, establishing clear entrance requirements; requiring graduation from 

branch schools in order to progress to the Leavenworth General Service Schools, and 

graduation from Leavenworth prior to admission to the Army War College, and selection 

for the General Staff. Pershing eventually brought to fruition the system that Root and 

Carter had planned.
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Notes

1. Timothy K. Nenniger, “Early Army Professional Military Education System,” in William 

E. Simons (ed.), Professional Military Education in the United States: A Historical Dictionary

(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), 121-124.

2. Timothy K. Nenniger, The Leavenworth Schools and the Old Army: Education, 

Professionalism, and the Officer Corps of the United States Army, 1881-1918 (Westport, Conn.: 

Greenwood Press, 1978), especially 34-50.

3. Ibid., 45-48; John McAuley Palmer, Washington, Linclon, and Wilson: Three War 

Leaders (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company Inc.: 1930), 294-99.

4. Nenniger, Leavenworth Schools, 127-28; Edgar F. Raines, “Major General J. Franklin 

Bell and Military Reform: The Chief of Staff Years, 1906-1910” PhD Dissertation, University 

of Wisconsin, 1976, 470-80. 

5. Russell F. Weigley, The History of the United States Army (New York: Macmillan, 

1967), 315.

6. Good discussions of the “Root reforms” include William Harding Carter, “Creation 

of the American General Staff: Personal Narrative,” in 2d Sess., 69th Cong., Hearings before 

the House Military Affairs Committee, The National Defense (Washington: GPO, 1927), 507-

517; Ronald G. Machoian, William Harding Carter and the American Army: A Soldier’s Story

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006), 98-198; William R. Roberts, “Loyalty and 

Expertise: The Transformation of the Ninereenth Century American General Staff and the 

Creation of the Modern Army,” PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1980, 208-268. 

7. “An Act To Promote the Efficiency of the Militia,” Appendix F to 1903 Annual Report, in 

Five Years of the War Department: 1899-1903: As Shown in the Annual Reports of the Secretary 

of War (Washington: GPO, 1904), 490.

8. See the 1901 Secretary of War Annual Report, which among other benefits refers to 

“instruction by and with” Regular Army officers; in Five Years of the War Department, 162-63 

and 167-68.

9. Report of LtCol. James Parker (Assistant The Adjutant General), May 30, 1903; 

MajGen. S.B.M. Young, 2d Ind. To Parker’s report, June 10, 1903; Secretary of War to The 

Adjutant General [TAG], June 25, 1903, all in AGO 487284; Memo for the Third Division War 

Department General Staff [WDGS], April 15, 1904, AGO 1086586; Memo Report 136, Third 

Division WDGS, August 15, 1904, AGO 915980, Adjutant General’s Document File, 1890-

1917, Record Group 94, National Archives [hereafter AGO..., RG 94].

10. BrigGen. J.F. Bell to TAG, January 27, 1905, File 537; Bell (in D.C.) to Maj. W.W. 

Wotherspoon (at L.), May 14, 1904, Miscellaneous File; Bell (at L.) to Wotherspoon (in D.C.), 

October 14, 1904, Misc. File; all Army Service Schools Document File, 1901-1918, RG 393 

[A.S.S. File..., RG 393].

11. Bell to LtGen. Adna R. Chaffee, October 5, 1904, Misc. File, A.S.S. File, RG 393; Bell 

to TAG, October 8, 1904, AGO 1146007, RG 94.

12. Bell to Wootherspoon, April 14, 1905, Misc. File; Col. C.B. Hall to Bell (in Paris), 

August 25, 1905, File 685, A.S.S. File, RG 393; Annual Report of the Inspector General, 

Secretary of War Annual Reports, 1905 (Washington: GPO, 1905), 450.

13. Maj. Eben Swift to Wootherspoon, June 28, 1906; Wootherspoon report on militia 

discrimination, June 29, 1906; Bell to TAG, July 6, 1906, AGO 1146007, RG 94. 

14. Capt. H.F. Elsasser to Congressman C.O. Lobeck, August 22, 1913; Chief of Militia 

Affairs Division, 2d ind. to Elsasser to Lobeck, August 27, 1913, AGO 2071594, RG 94; 
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Nenniger

Commandant Army Service Schools, Annual Report, 1911 (Fort Leavenworth: Army Service 

Schools Press, 1911), 12; File 4037, A.S.S. File, RG 393, contains several requests for Morrison 

as an instructor; LtCol. R.F. Malton to Secretary Army Service Schools, September 29, 1914, 

File 8220, A.S.S. File, RG 393.

15. War Department General Order 155, November 27, 1901; Carter, “Creation of the 

American General Staff: Personal Narrative,” The National Defense, 507-17.

16. Capt. F.J. Koster to Col. A.L. Wagner, February 17, 1905; Wagner to Bell, March 3, 

1905; Bell to TAG, March 18, 1905; File 537, A.S.S. File, RG 393.

17. BrigGen. W.W. Wootherspoon to Bell, July 10, 1905, Misc. File, A.S.S. File, RG 393.

18. Capt. R.F. Walton to Secretary Army Service Schools, September 10, 1906, File 5341, 

A.S.S. File, RG 393. 

19. Commandant to TAG, September 2, 1911; TAG to Commandant, April 3, 1912; 

Commandant to TAG, July 8, 1915, File 537, A.S. S. File, RG 393.

20. Col. H.A. Greene to TAG, February 14, 1907, AGO 1203201/X, RG 94; Notes on 

transcript of interview of Forrest C. Pogue with George C. Marshall, April 4, 1957, in author’s 

possession; Adjutant 5th Cavalry to Capt. George VanHorn Moseley, April 13, 1907, Scrapbook 

(1889-1911), Moseley Papers, Library of Congress; Capt. G.W. Moss to Adjutant 15th Cavalry, 

January 17, 1910, AGO 1624501/7, RG 94. 

21. Capt. H.F. Reuthers to Moseley, August 15, 1908, Scrapbook, Moseley Papers, LC.

22. The surveys of the regiments are in AGO 1203021 and AG) 1566073, RG 94; 

Commanding Officer 4th Infantry to TAG, August 14, 1910, AGO 1566073, RG 94.

23. Lt. G.A. Wieczorek to Secretary Army Service Schools, May 19, 1905, File 2076, 

A.S.S. File, RG 393; Alfred E. Hurley, Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Airpower (New York: 

Franklin Watts, Inc., 1964), 10-13; author interview with Col. Fay W. Brabson (USA, Ret.), 

January 10, 1970, Walter Reed Army Hospital, D.C.; Capt. A.U. Falkner to Adjutant 1st Field 

Artillery, January 21, 1910, AGO 162449/2, RG 94. 

24. Bell to Koster, July 20, 1905, File 3924; Secretary Army Service Schools to Lt. C.A. 

Dougherty, May 1, 1909, and Bell’s note on letter received from Dougherty, File 4427; Bell to 

Lt. C.F. Busseche, May 17, 1905, A.S.S. File, RG 393.

25. Pogue interview with Marshall, April 4, 1957; Secretary Army Service Schools to Capt. 

C.D. Rhodes, March 29, 1911, File 2094, A.S.S. File, RG 393. 

26. For an example of the criticism of the qualifications of those selected for the General 

Staff, see the statement of John McAuley Palmer, in The National Defense, 341-56.

27. Harry P. Ball, Of Responsible Command: A History of the Army War College (Carlisle 

Barracks, Pa.: Army War College Alumni Association, 1983), 105-43.

28. Wotherspoon to Morrison, March 30, 1908, File 943-a22, Army War College 

Miscellaneous Correspondence, 1903-10, RG 165.

29. The “get rich quick” course is discussed in detail in Nenniger, The Leavenworth Schools 

and the Old Army: 121-25; in this I mistakenly attributed the original idea for the short course 

to Morrison, but subsequently discovered the Wotherspoon letter (March 30, 1908) in which he 

clearly spells out to Morrison the need for remedial action. 

89

Day 1, Panel 3: Changing Leadership for a Changing World Role, 1906-1939

So Rigorously Trained and Educated: Leader Development in the US Army, 

1919 to 1939 by Peter J. Schifferle, Ph.D.

(Submitted Paper)

Author Note: 

Material for this paper was drawn from America’s School for War: Fort Leavenworth, 

Officer Education, and Victory in World War II by Peter J. Schifferle (c) 2010 by the 

University Press of Kansas. Used by permission of the publisher.

The World War has made of the Army a great school. We are all of us its 

instructors. We receive instruction in subject matter and take courses in methods 

of instruction that we may pass our knowledge on to others most efficiently. 

Indeed, is it not a fair premise to say that in time of peace the major part of the 

work of the armed forces is instruction? To this end the appropriations are made, 

to this end all the organization is accomplished and administered—that men may 

be instructed to battle proficiency.

Major Frederick Pond, Pennsylvania National Guard,“Supervision of Instruction,” 

Infantry Journal, January 1930

The development of leaders in the interwar Army was significantly different than the 

situation faced by the Army in the second decade of the 21st Century. A different legal basis 

for the readiness of the Army, the grudging acceptance of this new statute by the officer 

corps, the stagnant, but equitable, promotion system, a dissimilar training system, and a 

general disregard for teaching leadership or command at the officer education system are 

all noteworthy differences. However, the structure of the officer education system was 

nearly identical to today’s schooling arrangement. The differences, though, were greater 

than the similarities.

Preparedness and an Impecunious Army

General Pershing conceived the next war as a war of the entire nation, not of just the 

regular army. In his address to the 1920 graduating class of the General Staff College, 

Pershing declared:

It would seem pertinent to emphasize the great importance of general staff instruction 

and its bearing upon the future war efficiency of the army. Indeed, we should say upon the 

war efficiency of the country, for it is the nation with all its resources including the army 

that makes war.1

Pershing, and Congress, and to some extent, the American people, understood that, if 

war came again, the entire resources of the nation would be required to fight and win. But, 

without immediate enemies, with no perceived current threat to the national existence, the 

maintenance of a large force was politically impossible, indeed not even desired by anyone 

in authority. The maintenance of a large, regular force in time of peace would have been 
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unique in American history, and was not contemplated for long by Congress. The lesson of 

the World War—that it took the mobilization of the entire nation—presented Congress with 

a new requirement for national security in the immediate post-Armistice period. The new 

policy that resulted was, in the words of Allan Millet and Peter Maslowski, “A reasonable 

response to the risks of the 1920s.”2

The National Defense Act of June 4, 1920 established a novel military policy for the 

United States. This act, a result of a vibrant debate in 1919 and early 1920, conceived of 

the military as a preparatory force, and established the expansion base for a war of national 

mobilization, not for a force ready for immediate combat. This concept, a small regular 

army designed as a school house for both the National Guard and a large reserve force, and 

consisting of an unusually large proportion of commissioned officers, did not match the 

perception of some regulars, but was the appropriate military policy for the nation.3

Given the spirit of the times, Congress proceeded to under-fund the Army it had 

designed. Although the 1920s were a time of national economic prosperity, they were 

not years of affluence for the army. Concerns over seemingly petty financial issues were 

reflected in the professional journals. The June 1923 edition of Infantry Journal included a 

note from the Chief of Infantry that asked the readers to:

Look about the orderly room. Our eye rests on the typewriter, among other things. 

You know how hard it is to get a typewriter repaired, or to get a new ribbon for it. Has the 

machine been oiled and cleaned every week as required by regulation? If the ribbon is a bit 

worse for wear, i.e., makes a weak impression—has it been turned over? Think of what it 

means when all the orderly rooms in the Infantry want a new ribbon.4

Hardly the concerns that should have forced the major general in charge of the infantry 

branch to write an article for his professional journal, but indicative of the lack of resources 

the army struggled with throughout the interwar period.

The central core of the army, the officer corps, survived these two decades of scarce 

resources and the failure of all efforts to generate universal military training or peacetime 

conscription. Officers found refuge from the problems of typewriter ribbons in the mundane 

life of the Army—troop duty in dusty little posts scattered around the country, occasional 

more challenging assignments to China, the Philippines, Hawaii or Panama, and repetitive 

assignments as either students or instructors with the newly refashioned officer education 

system and in support of the National Guard or the Reserves.5

 In 1929, as reported in 

Infantry Journal, nearly half of the infantry field grade officers and captains were assigned 

as instructors or students in the officer education system. Of these officers, one in ten was 

at a branch school, one in twenty at Leavenworth or the War College, and more than half 

were teaching ROTC, the Reserves or the National Guard.6

These mundane daily activities of the army, including the education of the officer corps, 

were themselves not necessarily vulnerable to budget cuts or Congressional mandate, if 

sufficiently protected by the senior officers of the Army. The senior officers, unable to 

change the portions of the Army that required extensive resources, chose to change, and 

maintain, those things within their purview— including the army educational system.7
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Schifferle

Acceptance of the New Army

Two related factors led to the eventual acceptance of the new role of teacher and student 

as the norm for professional officers. One was the continued declarations by General 

Pershing of the need for a new form of professionalism in the officer corps. In an Army War 

College graduation speech published in Field Artillery Journal in 1923, he called on the 

graduates of the Army War College to develop “a breadth of vision essential to the efficient 

Army officer of today.” He continued;

In no other army is it so imperative that the officers of the permanent 

establishment be highly perfected specialists, prepared to serve as 

instructors and leaders for the citizen forces which are to fight our wars. 

The one-time role of a regular army officer has passed with the Indian 

Campaigns and the acquirement of colonial possessions. Our mission 

today is definite, yet so broad that few, if any, have been able to grasp the 

possibilities of new fields opened up by the military policy now on the 

statute book.... There are officers, fortunately in constantly diminishing 

numbers, who cannot turn their minds from concentration on a diminutive 

regular army, successfully, and gallantly fighting the country’s battles as in 

Cuba and the Philippines, or serving at isolated stations along the Mexican 

Border. Those days have not entirely passed away, and probably never will 

pass, but they are now of secondary importance in the general scheme of 

National Defense.8

The other voice was that of Congress, ready to spend sufficient funds for officer 

education, but not to maintain a large ready force.

This change in the profession generated a spirited debate in the professional journals. 

Cavalry Journal led with an editorial in its October 1921 edition entitled “The Task of 

Teaching.” Calling on its readers to embrace that “we have entered upon a large field that 

may be characterized as ‘teaching duty,’” and to understand that, in time of peace, this was 

not only necessary, but natural for Army professionals. That the editor felt compelled to 

write “Reduction Must Not Effect Cavalry Spirit” for his very next editorial comment was 

emblematic of the shift in the profession from duty with units to education.9

 The debate had 

been stimulated by an article in Infantry Journal in May 1921 by Major Bernard Lentz, a 

frequent contributor to the journals in the 1920s. He asked, “Who is Going to Soldier When 

Everybody is Going to School?” His answer was a cautionary note to the army that the 

soul of the profession had to continue to be troop duty.10 Elbridge Colby, another prolific 

contributor, responded, explaining that Lentz’s critique reflected a misunderstanding of 

the purpose of the officer education system. The system was designed to not just begin the 

education of officers, but also to require them to continue self-development for their entire 

careers. The in-house schooling was not to replace either self-study or the experiences of 

troop duty, but to enhance both.11

Major Lentz returned to the discussion, this time in a 1932 article entitled “The 

Applicatory Method.” Lentz, although still critical of the lack of proper teaching skills, and 

methods, at Army schools, was now much more accepting of the need for officer education. 

Where earlier he had called for a reduction in the length and number of courses, now he 
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simply called for optimizing the educational experience through high quality educational 

methods.12 He wrote, “The schools have been worth all the money and all the efforts we 

have expended,” and, writing of his earlier article condemning excessive officer education, 

“’fools who came to scoff, stayed to pray’ now aptly describes the change of sentiment that 

has taken place”13

The funding of the officer education system permitted the construction of large school 

facilities at Fort Benning in the 1920s for the infantry and at Fort Sill in the 1930s for 

the field artillery. Usually overlooked by historians of the period, the relatively large 

investment of funds in the officer education system was an essential part of the competence 

of the US Army in World War II. Although it is difficult to precisely determine the amount 

of resources expended on the Army schools in the interwar period, given the nature of 

the published financial records, it is clear the schools consumed a significant proportion 

of the available resources. Fort Benning, created towards the very end of the World War, 

for example, consumed more than a million dollars in the construction of the school 

facilities for the Infantry School.14 After the war, new construction at Fort Benning for the 

Infantry School consumed some 12 million dollars in the 1920s, and at Fort Sill, nearly 10 

million dollars were spent during the Depression.15 A major construction project had been 

completed in 1916 at Fort Leavenworth, so there was no comparable expenditure of funds 

for the Command and General Staff School in the period.16 Nearly half of all regular army 

officers were assigned to various school duties, and with pay accounting for 40 percent of 

the annual Army expenditures, the schools consumed a sizable proportion of officer pay 

funds through the period.17 Although the operating expenses of the schools were minimal, 

averaging less than $100,000 for all schools annually, the investment was in construction 

and personnel, and these were considerable.18

Promotion’s Very Slow

The 1920 National Defense Act did pose some serious challenges for the officer corps, 

including stagnant promotions, poor training opportunities with troop units, and, despite 

relatively robust experimentation, little procurement of new equipment for the ground 

forces. The almost stagnant system of promotions in the 1920s and 193s was a major 

crisis for the leaders of the Army, and had some effect on the sense of professionalism of 

the officers themselves. This stagnation was generated by an artifact of the World War—a 

‘hump’ in the officer corps’ promotion list. The accession of thousands of officers through 

rapid commissioning after April 1917 generated a large population of junior officers who 

remained in service through World War II. From a strength of 5,960 regular army officers 

in April 1917, the commissioned strength of the Army reached some 203,786 by the 

Armistice.19

As explained in official War Department testimony before the House of Representatives 

Committee on Military Affairs;

The dominant feature of our present personnel is an abnormal group of about 5,800 

officers, considerably more than half of the present promotion list, who were inducted 

into the service between November, 1916 and November, 1918, and who therefore, vary 

in length of commissioned service by less than two years.... The great bulk of them fall 

within narrow age limits. Under normal conditions the entry into service, and consequently, 
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Schifferle

the difference in length of commissioned service, of this large group of officers would have 

been spread over a period of about 20 years, and they would be similarly graded by age. 

Practically all of our difficulties are due to the existence of this “hump” in our personnel.20

This hump of officers was 55.4 percent of the total number of commissioned officers 

in 1926, and would still be there, like the pig in a python, upon the outbreak of World War 

II.21 Despite various studies and proposals for reducing the hump, and thus accelerating the 

stagnant promotions, only the onset of Protective Mobilization in 1940 solved the problem, 

with its attendant increase in promotion possibilities, at least in temporary rank.

The effect of the hump and the National Defense Act upon promotions was intense. 

Although efforts were made to have promotions occur to “first lieutenant at three years of 

service, to captain, ten years; to major, seventeen years; to lieutenant colonel, twenty-two 

years; and to colonel, twenty-eight years,” this was not achieved for the officers in the 

hump.22 As told in many of the memoirs and biographies of the officers of the interwar 

Army, promotions were exceedingly slow for the officers in or “behind” the hump. 

Promotions, when they occurred in accordance with the statute, occurred by strict seniority. 

The promotion system in the interwar period was based on a classification system of officer 

evaluation reports. Under this system, officers were designated by their superiors as either 

Class A officers, qualified for promotion in due course; or as Class B officers, officers who 

should be removed from service for any and all reasons. The Class B category was used 

rarely, and officers categorized in Class B could appeal their categorization all the way to 

the White House. As a result, although the officer corps population usually exceeded 12,000 

in the period, only 350 officers were eliminated from the service under this classification 

system from 1920 to 1937.23 Officers were always promoted to the next grade, by seniority, 

unless they had been separated from the service under a Class B Board.24

Selection by quality, or by merit, was extremely controversial in the interwar army, and 

never became a matter of course. In the words of ‘Agrippa II’ in a 1939 article, promotion 

by selection “just does not work equitably and satisfactorily to all concerned.” Promotion 

by seniority had one great advantage—everyone was treated the same. The only promotion 

that was considered influenced by “who you knew” as opposed to “what you knew” was 

promotion to general officer. With only 68 general officers authorized by statute from an 

officer corps of almost 9,000, and with mandatory retirement for age at age 64, the chance of 

making general for someone in the hump, was, in peacetime, remote indeed. The ‘Agrippa’ 

article pointed out that in the hump, officers would be retired for chronological age while 

still majors and lieutenant colonels, leaving a great gap in senior officers by 1949.25

Many other authors joined in this debate which raged from 1921 through 1940. Part of 

the initial debate was the proposal of a single, Army-wide, list for promotion. After passage 

of the National Defense Act of 1920, the Army formed a board of officers, who created, 

from June 1920 to January 1921, in strict accord with the statute, the single promotion list 

for all Army officers. In an effort to educate its readers, Infantry Journal published two 

very informative and detailed articles about the statute and the board proceedings.26 The 

editor felt so strongly about the ‘One List’ issue that he wrote that it was necessary for 

national defense—without it, training of draftees for the next war would be very difficult.27

Eventually accepted by the Army officer corps over complaints by some branches, who 
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thought they were being slighted, the single list remained the law through the period. 

The majority of the debate continued to be about the hump. Completely unresolved by 

several efforts to accelerate attrition, offer early retirement, and other proposals, the hump 

slowly ground forward with each passing year, gradually having small numbers of officers 

promoted to the next grade by pure seniority, off the single list. It was, at least, impartial.

In addition to slow promotions for officers in or chronologically “behind” the 

hump, there existed a perception that officers who had served in France would receive 

preferential promotions. This perception on the part of many officers who had not served 

in France in 1917 or 1918 was moderated by the huge numbers of officers who had not 

had the opportunity, yet remained in service. On the day of the Armistice, slightly more 

than half of the mobilized army had been shipped to France.28 The percentage of regular 

army officers who deployed to France was even less than that of the overall army, since a 

disproportionate number remained as part of the training and mobilization establishment. 

Many junior officers, as well as the majority of field grade officers (the grades of major, 

lieutenant colonel and colonel) had remained in the continental United States, preparing 

the remaining divisions for deployment in late 1918 and throughout 1919.29 Examples of 

the attitudes of these officers, and their desire to learn from those who did deploy, and their 

awareness of having “missed the war” are related in their memoirs. Many reported that 

they made every effort to join the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), usually without 

success, and they understood that they “hadn’t gotten into” World War I.30

Assessing the proportion of officers who served in the AEF would have mitigated 

some of their concern. Of the class of 1915 from West Point, 102 of the class of 164 (62 

percent) were sent overseas by Armistice, but only fifty-six (34 percent) served in actual 

combat duties in France. Sixty-two (38 percent) of the class were never sent overseas.31

This assessment was corroborated by Brigadier General Lytle Brown, Director War Plans 

Division, War Department General Staff, who wrote in a December 14, 1918 memorandum, 

that military instruction in the post-war army should begin with the “nearly 60 percent of 

the regular officers who had not had service in France.32

The Officer Education System

Future combat realities were the prime, indeed usually only, subject of the officer 

education system. After World War I, the army officer corps understood that competency in 

the craft was largely a matter of skill in handling large formations in both stable defensive 

and mobile offensive operations. They also appreciated their sense of obligation for 

preparedness, for basic competence, especially in a society where the desire to never again 

fight a major war rapidly deteriorated to an article of faith of “never again.” 

Immediately after the World War, senior officers, both in the AEF and in the 

War Department, discussed re-establishing the officer education system disrupted by 

mobilization. A group of officers met in Treves (Trier) Germany in the spring of 1919, and 

began a series of conversations, orders, boards and meetings that established a new and 

comprehensive officer education system.33 This system remained intact through protective 

mobilization in 1939-1940, and itself became the basis for a hugely expanded officer 

education and training system for the World War II mobilization. On the eve of that conflict, 

at least one observer saw the system of officer education to be the very foundation of Army 
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officer professionalism, with every officer fully schooled in multiple courses. In the words 

of Major John H. Burns, “It is doubtful if any professional group are so rigorously trained 

and educated as the American officer.”34

In the busy days of demobilization and transfer of many officers back from the AEF, 

the War Department General Staff circulated a seventy page comprehensive draft plan for 

re-establishing the schools on March 8, 1919.35 It recommended a comprehensive system 

of officer and soldier education, from pre-commissioning through colonel-level instruction. 

Included in this plan were discussions of West Point education, of company grade officer 

education at division schools, branch instruction for officers and some noncommissioned 

officers at Special Service Schools, usually with a course for lieutenants and a more 

advanced course for captains and majors, and two General Service Schools, one school 

of the line for general staff officer education for duty with large units and a General Staff 

College for education in War Department-level general staff duties.36 The Special Service 

branch schools and the two-stage General Staff education would be adopted and remain the 

hallmarks of officer education for the next two decades.37

Critical to the post World War development of programs of instruction were the lessons 

of the AEF, including the value of staff processes and the absolute requirement for a general 

staff system to cope with the new realities of modern war. George C. Marshall wrote to the 

Commandant of the Army War College in 1920; 

“My observation of the General Staff work in France, particularly at G.H.Q. and 

in the First Army, and my recent experience at the War Department in connection with 

Army reorganization, has caused me to feel that one of the most serious troubles in our 

General Staffs have been the failure to follow the proper procedure in determining a policy 

or plan.”38 Marshall continued “we would do well if we could obtain examples of this 

character of General Staff work” for use as instruction aids.39

General McAndrew, commandant of the War College, distributed copies of this letter 

to his faculty.40

In the post-World War era, the War Department took several steps towards harmonizing 

the officer education system. These War Department efforts usually took the form of officer 

boards, convened to investigate certain challenges and recommend solutions to the Chief 

of Staff. The first board ordered to investigate the school system after its initial post World 

War establishment was the McGlachlin Board, convened in February 1922.41 The board, 

charged by Pershing to investigate the entire school system with a view towards decreasing 

the expenditures for the programs, making the system as efficient as possible in an era 

of decreasing resources, and improving instruction for the National Guard and Reserves, 

traveled to every Army school in the country and met with representatives of every chief 

of branch in Washington. A later board, chaired by Colonel Fiske, convened in Washington 

in late July 1922. The Fiske Board made recommendations which delineated the border 

between the Army War College and the Command and General Staff School as the line 

between armies and above, which would be taught at the War College, and corps and 

divisions, which would be taught at Leavenworth.42
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After the various boards had made their recommendations the outline of the 

school system remained intact for the next fifteen years. Officers, the majority of them 

commissioned in peacetime from West Point, would attend a branch basic course, normally 

eight months in length, within the first several years of their active duty. Later, if selected 

by their branch, they would attend a branch “advanced course.” Still later, if selected by 

their branch, officers would attend the school at Fort Leavenworth, focusing studies on the 

Army division and corps in combat operations. After the most selective screening, a few 

officers would then attend the Army War College, the last step in officer education, where 

studies were at the Army, Theater, and War Department levels.

The mission of the Army War College changed in the interwar period from advanced 

general staff training, primarily under the leadership of Major General James W. 

McAndrew, to education for command while Brigadier General Edward F. McGlachlin, 

Jr., was Commandant and then to preparation for war and conduct of war under the 

command of Major General William D. Connor.43 Instruction, under Connor, became a 

series of large-scale problem solving exercises, with the students divided into committees. 

Each student committee was responsible for a significant contemporary military problem. 

After a month of study and research, each committee prepared a staff study, briefed the 

entire War College class on the problem and their recommended solution, and received the 

benefit of a student and faculty critique.44 Although there were frequent lectures by visiting 

experts and dignitaries, the students only infrequently were taught in classrooms. The War 

College was less an academic institution and more a problem-solving extension of the War 

Department, to whom it reported. The students were expected to learn, but that learning 

occurred in extensive problem solving, usually of real-world problems given to the War 

College by the General Staff.45

By July 1925, the mission of the schools at Leavenworth was established by issuance 

of Army Regulation 350-5—a mission that remained intact for the next twenty years. The 

Leavenworth School was ordered to;

Prepare officers for command and general staff duty by training them in the following: 

1. The combined use of all arms in the division and in the army corps.

2. The proper functions of commanders of divisions, army corps, and corps areas 

and the techniques of exercising command.

3. The proper functions of general staff officers of divisions, army corps, and corps 

areas and the technique of general staff concepts.46

The critical role of combining the arms of divisions and corps, of commanding these 

formations, and of serving as the general staffs of these formations, was Leavenworth’s 

and no other institution of the interwar Army. Despite efforts at training, maneuvers and 

Command Post Exercises, and despite a growing and robust sense of professionalism, 

officers in the interwar period had to rely on the education system for preparation in 

division and corps operations.

The Untaught Curriculum—Command and Leadership

At Leavenworth in the interwar period, the school leadership frequently discussed 

the question of whether to provide an education for commanders or staff officers. These 
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discussions usually began because of either external or internal criticism that the school 

was over-emphasizing staff skills and paying insufficient attention to the skills required 

of senior commanders. The consistent response was a conflation of the two sets of skills, 

usually worded in an argument that general officers must know the skills required of their 

subordinate general staff officers, and those general staff officers of divisions, corps and 

armies required the knowledge and skills of the generals commanding these formations to 

be effective general staff officers.

One example is the discussion in the 1922 Annual Report by Brigadier General Hanson 

Ely, school commandant. Reacting to apparent external criticism, General Ely endorsed the 

comments by the Assistant Commandant, Colonel Drum, and the Director of the General 

Staff School, Colonel Willey Howell, that the “command phase of the instruction here 

has been strongly emphasized.” However, he continued that the faculty “realized that all 

commanders to be fully efficient must have detailed knowledge of staff work and that 

all staff officers to be fully efficient must have intimate knowledge of the commander’s 

viewpoint.”47

In the same year’s report, in response to an “impression [which] seems to exist that 

these schools are primarily intended for training officers in general staff duties,” Colonel 

Hugh Drum, Assistant Commandant, concurred with General Ely’s commented. Drum 

wrote “it is our conviction that the efficient commander must know general staff work 

and the efficient general staff officer must know and have the commander’s viewpoint.” 

Any distinction between command and staff education, or capabilities, according to Drum, 

“does not rest on theoretical knowledge or training, but, rather, on personal qualities and 

mainly on the factors of experience, judgment, personality, leadership, determination and 

aggressiveness. However, the fundamental training should be the same for both classes of 

officers.”48

Colonel Willey Howell, Director, General Staff School, continued this discussion in his 

report that same year. Howell stated that the “ability to command” is based three elements, 

the “physical, the psychological, and the professional. Some of these may be acquired in 

a school; some may not.” Howell agreed entirely with the inherent requirement to educate 

both future commanders and future staff officers in the same manner. He reported; 

But so far as any school can be concerned in the development and furtherance of the 

growth of military leadership, there can be no practical difference between the training 

required for command and that required for general staff duty, since the fundamental 

difference between the two is not one of professional qualification but one of personality 

and there is little a school is able to do in respect to the development of personality in 

mature men.49

These arguments also found fertile ground in the professional journals. Perhaps most 

evocative of the debate was an exchange in Infantry Journal in 1935 and 1936. Begun 

by ‘Mercutio’ in the “Cerebrations” column in May-June 1936 with a call for making the 

bottom 10 percent of the school classes into senior commanders, since only they had “men 

who think and who think along original lines,” and the typical officer in the 90 percent 

category was a “slide-rule tactician, a mechanical brain-master, a canned commander,” 

the response was spirited.50 Another author, ‘Singlebars’ responded with a critique of 
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‘Mercutio.’ This time, the argument was that commanders needed to be intelligent, and the 

bottom 10 percent of ‘Mercutio’s’ Canned Commanders had; 

Forgot[en] the mission. The mission of the student is to get an “s.” 

[satisfactory rating] The mission of the school is to teach the right dope. 

Let the student learn, let the teacher teach. If you don’t like it, do it 

anyway, because that’s the system and that’s the way to get high command. 

If you’re so smart that you know a better solution than the school’s old 

obvious solution, you’ll know it in time of war...intellectual capacity is 

essential for high command and in direct proportion to the highness of 

the command....Commanders must have mental and physical force. Foch 

called it ‘habit of command.’51

These authors did not seem to draw any distinctions between future commanders 

learning the art of war and future senior staff officers learning the art of war. Both appear to 

have required mental and physical energy, and both required knowledge of the “brick and 

mortar of battle.” The debate in the journals, or rather, the lack of debate, reflected in two 

articles on the role of command and staff, one written in 1920, the other in 1940. In the first 

article, Major R. M. Johnston wrote “Our Army at the present day is in even greater danger 

than the German that the Command may become unduly subordinated to the Staff. Both 

functions are essential and complimentary; they both call for an improved system of Staff 

training and of high military studies.”52 Twenty years later, ‘General Gripe’ wrote:

No one can deny that the Command and General Staff School does a fine 

job of teaching men how to analyze a military situation, appreciate the 

value of terrain, make reasonably sound decisions, get out a complete 

order and in doing so, act either as a commander or as one of his G’s. It 

teaches the relation between the command and staff by showing how the 

command gets out a directive for a movement and how the staff amplifies 

this directive into detailed order.53 Command and staff were combined, 

because they were complimentary skills, not antithetical approaches to the 

“brick and mortar of battle.”

Analysis of the class schedule for the two-year course, 1934-1936, shows, rather 

starkly, that staff work predominated. Of all courses taught in these two years, listed on the 

schedule by fifty different types, ranging from equitation to legal principles, only one course 

was devoted to leadership. The course in leadership, taught in the first year, encompassed 

five hours of 2,211 class hours in two years.54 Although leadership as a discussion point 

was raised in other classes, a review of the course material, the faculty instructions, and 

student comments all support the assessment that leadership was not a subject taught at 

Leavenworth. The Army senior leaders in the interwar years either believed that officers 

with more than twenty years of service knew how to be leaders already, or leadership was 

innate character, and could not be trained.

Discussions of staff skills dominated the academic courses. A course entitled “Strategy” 

focused on issues more appropriate to a staff officer than a commander. In 1929-1930, 

the Strategy course discussed the campaigns of Napoleon, the American Civil War, and 

the Russo-Japanese War. An analysis of the discussion material reveals that the students 
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assessed and evaluated logistics and administration much more frequently than issues of 

leadership. Even when required to discuss the decisions of the historical commanders, they 

were required to discuss their problem solving “objectives” rather than their leadership or 

command influence.55

The 1923 edition of the Field Service Regulations also conflated the skills of the 

commander and of the general staff. Addressing the role of the commander, this manual 

discussed the estimate of the situation in terms identical to those taught at Leavenworth:

In estimating a situation, the commander considers his mission as set forth 

in the orders and instructions under which he is acting, or as deduced by 

him from his knowledge of the situation, all available information of the 

enemy... conditions affecting his own command...and the terrain, weather, 

climate, morale, and other factors in so far as they affect the particular 

military situation. He then compares the various plans of action open to 

him and decides upon the one that will best enable him to accomplish his 

mission.

 In general, it is the function of the staff to elaborate the details necessary 

to carry the decision into effect.56

However, on the next page of the manual, the duties of the staff are expanded to 

include all of the duties of the commander identified in his estimate of the situation. In 

particular, the duties of the chief of staff, the officer in charge of the formation general staff, 

enumerated “powers of supervision, coordination, and control in the commander’s name 

are coextensive with this responsibility and are exercised to the extent that he [the Chief of 

Staff] deems necessary to its discharge.” The role of the staff was to serve as an extension 

of the commander, primarily in the areas of control, supervision, and coordination. Limits 

to the staff’s power were established only to the extent that those limits would not imperil 

accomplishment of the mission, and according to doctrine, the Chief of the Staff, not the 

commander, determined those limits.57 This blend of the duties of commander and staff, 

while it could be problematic if personalities clashed, could also be an effective form of 

teamwork in a division or a corps.

The Leavenworth texts made some clear distinctions between the responsibility of 

command and the duties of the general staff. According to the 1923 “Command, Staff 

and Tactics” text, the commander was “a leader of men.” His authority was his “lawful 

exercises over subordinates by virtue of his rank or assignment.” His duty was to “produce 

individual or collective military action or non-action on the part of subordinates, regardless 

of the will of the latter.” The staff were “the personnel who help the commander in the 

exercise of the functions of command by professional aid and assistance.”58

Students at Leavenworth would learn the functions of commanders and staff 

simultaneously in the interwar period, in part because the doctrine required intimate 

integrated knowledge of the staff functions by the commander, and of the commander’s 

requirements by the staff officers. Leadership, the very essence of command, was not 

taught in the courseware, since the faculty believed command an innate skill, certainly not 

educable in forty-year old professional officers.
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Training

Unit training in the interwar period was not up to the professional standards of the 

officer corps. Many officers criticized the lack of resources available for unit training and 

many methods were discussed to optimize what resources were available.59 However, at 

the end of these two decades, the standard of training for field units in the regular army 

was woeful. The standard for National Guard units was even lower. Most evocative was a 

piece in the February 1926 edition of Infantry in which the author awakens from a dream 

of effective training to face another morning of training his battalion with “a total of four 

or five squads available for instruction! Oh, hell!”60

Despite recommendations to make the most of training under the resource constraints 

of the period, many officers complained about the lack of resources, particularly soldiers, 

to train. Leading these complaints, by the 1930s, was the voice of Major General Douglas 

MacArthur. As Chief of Staff from 1930 through 1935, MacArthur advocated for additional 

funding, but to little effect. The Army’s budgets never allowed for anything other than 

skeletonized units, despite relatively robust expenditures for the Air Service and officer 

education.

Calls for additional resources were frequent in the interwar journals, but so were 

observations that the economies of the National Defense Act, and subsequent minimal 

appropriations, were the proper policy for the United States, if perhaps carried to an 

unfortunate extreme of parsimony. As the president of the Reserve Officer’s Association 

wrote, in a 1926 edition of The Infantry Journal;

The essence of the National Defense Act is that it brings the expense within reasonable 

limits by eliminating all those things which can be done within a reasonable time after the 

declaration of war and provides for obtaining and having in readiness only those things that 

take a long time to obtain and prepare.61

One of the rare bright spots for unit training in the interwar period was the occasional 

large unit maneuvers and command post exercises conducted on an annual basis for some 

units. Although criticized in the journals as being generally unrealistic, these maneuvers did 

offer training opportunities for the officers assigned, and for the readers of the professional 

journals, where the results of maneuvers were frequently published. Maneuver reports 

began soon after the end of the war in Europe, initially about the training of the American 

occupation forces in Germany.62 In 1924, Major Adna R. Chaffee reported on the 1923 

maneuvers of the First Cavalry Division in a very detailed and lengthy report. Conducted 

in the vicinity of Marfa, Texas, on land “roughly that of the land area of the state of Rhode 

Island,” the maneuver included road and rail movement, both horse drawn and motorized, 

of the entire 1st Cavalry Division. Using radios for communication, the division deployed 

distances in excess of 200 miles to the training area. Upon arrival, umpires oversaw the 

two-sided maneuvers, which included eight days of force-on-force maneuver.63 Maneuvers 

like this one continued throughout the interwar period, usually at the division level, but 

occasionally involving smaller organizations.64

Many of these events introduced to the participating officers, and subsequent journal 

readers, many of the issues involved with long distance troop movements, command and 
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control over significant distances, and forming cohesive organizations from a polyglot 

group of smaller organizations. For example, the First Army concentration, which occurred 

from August 17 to 31, 1935, formed units from two corps area commands and five different 

divisions into a coherent training effort focused on “combined field exercises, training 

in logistics, and testing active units of the Regular Army as to rapid concentration.” 

Colonel Conrad Lanza, author of this report, one of the more prolific authors in the period, 

concluded that the maneuvers demonstrated both the need to update training regulations 

and that motor equipped units would “make circles around foot troops.” He recommended, 

as did most observers, that more maneuvers, with larger units, and more appropriated 

funds, should be conducted to improve the training level of the entire force.65

Command Post Exercises were also conducted in the period, but reported on less 

frequently than maneuvers. Designed to provide training for unit staffs, without the 

expense involved with large unit maneuvers, these exercises were held frequently, 

including National Guard units and officers of the Organized Reserves.66 That these 

exercises were useful as a training program for modern war is demonstrated by the critique 

of Command post Exercises raised by General H. S. Hawkins, a frequent contributor to The

Cavalry Journal.

67 Hawkins complained that the army had “gone wild over command post 

exercises.” He believed that all such exercises were based on the trench warfare system 

taught to the AEF by the French, and that the “we have continued to use this method ever 

since our ‘successful’ campaign in France.” Declaring that commanders must get away 

from the telephone and go to see for themselves what is happening, Hawkins appeared to 

forget his article was about exercises that did not involve troops or terrain.68

A special category of Army officer experience, neither experiment, nor maneuver, nor 

command post exercise, but a large scale practice run for mobilization, was the Army’s 

involvement in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Involving huge numbers of young men, 

organized into camps by Army officers and soldiers, this experience was an important 

adjunct to the other professional events of the late interwar period. Numerous articles 

explained to the readers how to conduct camp administration, how to lead large groups of 

young men using the character of military leadership without the stick of legal authority, 

and how to publicize the Civilian Conservation Corp experience for the good of the Army.69

Significant time spent in officer education, limited troop unit training, some degree of 

overseas duty, and nearly non-existent promotions were the reality of the interwar army. 

The same reality developed a profound sense of professional dedication amongst the 

officers who either experienced the Great War, heard about it in the officer’s mess, or came 

of age as young officers in the 1920s and 1930s. This sense of professionalism, dedication 

to duty, and awareness of the need for individual preparation, coupled with a national 

defense policy that made nothing else possible until crisis, generated the “wonder” of the 

World War II victory.70 Many historians believe the National Defense Act of 1920, and the 

appropriations in the 1920s and 1930s left America woefully unprepared for the next world 

war.71 However, within the Army officer corps, a new sense of purpose, and a new idea of 

how officer competency was created altered how the American officer corps itself gained 

and maintained its professional competence.
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Notes

1. “Address of General Pershing,” “Addresses Delivered at the Graduating Exercises, 

General Staff College, June 29, 1920,” MHI, AWCCA, 1919-1920, Box Curriculum 1919-

1920, Volume VI: Special Course Volume VIII Field Exercises, 3. Also see Allan R. Millett, The 

General: Robert L. Bullard and Officership in the United States Army, 1881-1925, (Westport, 

CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), for the discussion of post-war National Defense policy on 439-

449.

2. Kreidberg and Henry, Military Mobilization, 377-380; Allan R. Millett and Peter 

Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, 

(NY: Macmillan, 1984), 363-372, quote from 363.

3. Summerall Testimony to House Committee on Military Affairs, December 16, 1926, 

printed in “Promotion and Retirement,” Report of Secretary of War on Promotion and Retirement 

in Pursuance of the Provisions of Section 4 of the Act Approved July 2, 1926, 69th Congress., 

2d sess., 1926, (GPO, 1926), 307.

4. Notes from the Chief of Infantry, Infantry 22, no. 6 (June 1923): 680-681.

5. See Edward M. Coffman, The Regulars: The American Army, 1898-1941, (Cambridge: 

Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2004). 

6. Of 2,307 regular infantry colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors and captains on active 

duty, 622 (27 percent) served in units, 319 (14 percent) served overseas, ninety-one (4 percent) 

served on the staffs in Washington, D.C., and 1125 (49 percent) served in some capacity in 

the Army education system. 262 (11 percent) served at the Infantry and Tank Schools, 101 (4 

percent) at Fort Leavenworth, sixty-two (2 percent) at the Army War College, and, by far the 

largest numbers, a total of 647 (28 percent) served with the Reserve Officer Training Corps 

detachments, 281 (12 percent), the National Guard, 198 (9 percent), or the Army Reserve, 

168 (7 percent). Notes from the Chief of Infantry, “Duties of Infantry Officers,” IJ 34, no. 1, 

(January 1929): 80.

7. See Millett, Bullard, 439-442. Also, see Cooke, Pershing and His Generals, Chapter 10. 

8. Current Field Artillery Notes, “General Pershing on the United States Army,” FAJ 13, 

no. 4, (July-August 1923): 360-362.

9. Editorial Comment, “The Task of Teaching,” Cavalry Journal 30, no. 125, (October 

1921): 416-418. Cavalry Journal hereafter cited as CJ.

10. Major Bernard Lenz (sic), Infantry, “Who is Going to Soldier When Everybody is 

Going to School?” IJ 18, no. 5, (May 1921): 441-443. A filler piece on the closing page of this 

article was a reprint from Harper’s Weekly entitled “The Reduced Army.”

11. Captain Elbridge Colby, Infantry, “The School of the Officer,” in Varied Ground, IJ 19, 

no. 3, (September 1921): 327-328.

12. Major Bernard Lentz, “The Applicatory Method,” IJ 19, no. 6, (December 1921): 604 

-609, quotes are from 355.

13 Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Lentz, Infantry, “A Decade of Army Schools,” IJ 39, no. 5, 

(September-October 1932): 355-357.

14. Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 1921, (GPO, 1921), Table 1.

15. Lieutenant Colonel A. B. Warfield, Q.M.C., “Fort Benning, the Home of the Infantry 

School,’ IJ 33, no. 1, (June 1928): 573-580; Major Edwin P. Parker, Jr., Field Artillery, “New 

Construction at Fort Sill,” FAJ 24, no. 1, (January-February 1934): 5-14.

16. See Elvid Hunt, History of Fort Leavenworth, 1827 – 1937, second edition brought up 

to date by Walter E. Laurence. (CGSSP, 1937), 261, 269.
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17. Of 2,307 Regular infantry colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors and captains on active 

duty, 622 (27 percent) served in units, 319 (14 percent) served overseas, ninety-one (4 percent) 

served on the staffs in Washington, D.C., and 1125 (49 percent) served in some capacity in the 

Army education system. Numbers and percentages from Notes from the Chief of Infantry, 

“Duties of Infantry Officers,” IJ 34, no. 1, (January 1929): 80.

18. The $100,000 figure was for 1922. Report of the Secretary of War to the President, 

(GPO, 1922), Table 1.

19. Title of this section taken from “Benny Havens,” a West Point song written in 

1838, available on http://www.west-point.org/greimanj/west_point/songs/bennyhavens.htm. 

Accessed 16 June 2007. Promotion and Retirement, 306-307. Kreidberg and Henry, Military 

Mobilization, 221, 247.

20. Promotion and Retirement, 2.

21. Promotion and Retirement, 23-24 and 31.

22. Promotion and Retirement, 8.

23. Edward M. Coffman and Peter F. Herrly, “The American Army Regular Officer Corps 

Between the World Wars,” Armed Forces and Society 4, no. 1 (November 1977): 58.

24. A very useful summary, and interpretation, of the ‘hump’ from the perspective of June 

30, 1938 is ‘Agrippa II,’ “Promotion,” CJ 48, no. 3, (May-June 1939): 200-203. Quote is from 

202.

25. Agrippa II, “Promotion,” 202-203.

26. Captain Thomas Marshall Spaulding, “The Creation of the Single List.” IJ 17, no. 2, 

(August 1920): 132-141 and Major Thomas Marshall Spaulding, Coast Artillery Corps, “The 

Promotion List,” IJ 18, no. 4, (April 1921): 356-361.

27. See Colonel G. V. S. Quackenbush, Infantry, “One List for Promotion,” IJ 16, no. 1, 

(July 1919): 17-18. Editor’s comment is on 18.

28. Troops in the United States and its overseas possessions numbered 1,679,000 (some 46 

percent of the total), while troops deployed to France numbered 1,944,000, with some 10,000 

at sea enroute to France. Kreidberg and Henry, Military Mobilization, 307.

29. By November 11, 1918, only 36 percent of all officers listed in the official Army 

Register were or had been assigned to the AEF. US War Department, The Adjutant General’s 

Office, Army Directory, November 1, 1918. (GPO, 1918).

30. See, for example, Chynoweth, Bellamy Park, 84 and 115; and Kenneth S. Davis, 

Soldier of Democracy: A Biography of Dwight Eisenhower, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 

Doran & Co., 1945), 178.

31. Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair, A General’s Life: An Autobiography, (NY: Simon and 

Schuster, 1983), Chapter 5, page 680, note 10.

32. Brigadier General Lytle Brown, Director War Plans Division, War Department General 

Staff, “Memorandum for the Chief of Staff, Subject: Occupancy of quarters by officers not on 

duty at the Army Service Schools, Fort Leavenworth,” December 14, 1918, NAII, RG 165, Box 

No. 13, Folder 58, Army Service School, 1.

33. Major General James McAndrew, “Introductory Remarks bys the Commandant,” 

“Addresses Delivered at the Graduating Exercises, General Staff College, June 29, 1920,” 

MHI, AWCCA, Box Curriculum 1919-1920, Volume VI: Special Course Volume VIII Field 

Exercises, 1.

34. Major John H. Burns, “The American Professional Soldier,” IJ 47, no. 5 (SeptemberOctober 1940): 418-423. Quote from 422.

35. “Memorandum to accompany proposed revision of Article XIV. Compilation of 

Orders – embracing the subject of Military Education,” Office of the Chief of Staff, War Plans 
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Division. Cover letter dated March 8, 1919, signed by George F. Baltzell, Colonel, General 

Staff, War Department Office of the Chief of Staff. NAII RG 407, Box 808, folder 352 (10-13-

19) to (10-4-18).

36. “Memorandum - Military Education,” 1-3. 

37. Brigadire General Lytle Brown, “Memorandum for the Chief of Staff, Subject: 

Occupancy of quarters by officers not on duty at the Army Service Schools, Fort Leavenworth,” 

December 14, 1918, NAII RG 165, Box No. 13, Folder 58, Army Service School..

38. Letter, George C. Marshall, Washington, D.C., July 9, 1920 to Major General James W. 

McAndrew reproduced in Bland, Soldierly Spirit, 195-196. Letter available in MHI, AWCCA, 

Box 003 062.1 1.34, Letter, George C, Marshall to Major General McAndrew, July 9, 1920, 

with marginal note in pencil requiring copies to be furnished to directors at the War College.

39. Bland, Soldierly Spirit, 197.

40. Bland, Soldierly Spirit, 197. Corroborated in “Notes of Conference of Directors General 

Staff College, July 12, 1920,” MHI, AWCCA, Box 003, 062.1 1.34.

41. A very useful summary of the McGlachlin and Fiske Boards, and a précis of student 

selection criteria for the Leavenworth Schools and the Army War College are found in 

“Memorandum for the Chief of Coast Artillery, Subject: Operation of the School System with 

Special Reference to the Coast Artillery Corps, December 28, 1931.” Located in NAII RG165, 

WDGS G-1 (Personnel) Numerical File 1921-1942, 12311-12675, Box No. 85, Folder 12585-

12600. Both Boards are also addressed in Ball, Responsible Command, 180-186 and 194-195.

42. U. S. War Department, “Special Orders No. 175, July 28, 1922,” and “Letter of 

Instructions for Board, August 16, 1922” paragraph 2 and 3. Documents found in NAII RG 

407, Bulky Packages, 352.01 (9-5-22) (1) Pro. B/O Record Board of Officers, Package No. 

1066. Hereafter cited as Fiske Report. The service schools, each run by their own branches, 

were required, according to the board’s recommendations, to “train competent leaders of [each 

branch’s] units and provide instructors for the Regular Army, National Guard, Organized 

Reserves, R.O.T.C. and C.M.T.C.” Fiske Report, 5, 12, and 15. There also existed, for a brief 

period, an Educational Advisory Board, but it was ineffectual. Educational Advisory Board, 

“Report, 22 October 1924.” NAII RG 407, Box 806, Folder 352 (11-3-24) to (10-30-24). This 

appears to have been the only formal meeting of this Board. See discussions for the 1925 EAB 

in NAII RG 407, Box 806, Folder 352 (7-28-25) to (11-24-24); for the on-again-off-again EAB 

of 1926, see RG 407, Box 808, folder 352.01 (10-13-25) to (6-26-25). For the 1927 EAB, see 

RG 407, Box 2045, which contains the records of the June 20, 1927 Corps Area and Division 

Commander’s Conference.

43. The role of these commandants, and others as well, is told by George S. Pappas, 

Prudens Futuri: The U. S. Army War College, 1901 – 1967 (Carlisle Barracks, PA: The Alumni 

Association of the US Army War College, 1967), 89-129.

44. Much higher quality analysis than Pappas is Ball, Of Responsible Command, 210-214.

45. Ball, Responsible Command, 212-213.

46. US War Department, “Army Regulations, No. 350-5, Military Education,” Washington, 

D.C., July 1925, 8.

47. AR, 1921-1922, 16.

48. AR, Assistant Commandant, 1921-1922, 23-24.

49. Director, General Staff School, AR, 1921-1922, 49-50.

50. “Mercutio,’ “Canned Commanders,” in Cerebrations column, IJ 42, no. 3 (May-June 

1935): 269.

51. ‘Singlebars,’ “Canned Commanders – Continued,” Cerebrations column, IJ 43, no. 1 

(January-February 1936): 74-75.
105

Schifferle

52 Major R. M. Johnston, Historical Section, G.H.Q., AEF, “Staff and Command,” IJ 16, 

no. 1 (July 1919): 88-92. Quote from 92.

53. ‘General Gripe,’ “Wishful Thinking,” CJ 49, no. 4 (July-August 1940): 349-359. Quote 

is form 349.

54. CGSS, “Summary of Schedule (By Courses),” (CGSSP, n.d.), CARL Archives, 

typescript located in files for CGSS, 1935-1936, “Schedules.” Also see CGSS, Index to School 

Problems, Series 1919-1920 to 1932-1933, (CGSSP, 1933), passim; Course Schedules for 1928-

1929; 1929-1930; 1934-1935; and 1935-1936, located in the CARL archives. The quantification 

done from this source is supported by Dastrup, who, although using a different categorization, 

states that in 1938-1939, “practical work accounted for 744 out of 1073 scheduled hours for 

the (single) year,” Boyd L. Dastrup, The US Army Command and General Staff College: A 

Centennial History, (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, n.d., c. 1982), 76.

55. Examples drawn from analysis of conferences ST 203, 205, 207, 211, 214 and 215 in 

CGSS, 1929-1930, Second Year Course Conferences: Command, Staff and Logistics; Strategy; 

Military History; Field Engineering; Military Intelligence; Methods of Training; Military 

Geography; Political Economy, (CGSSP, 1930), 196-234.

56. FSR, 1923, 4.

57. FSR, 1923, 5.

58. GSS, Command, Staff and Tactics, special edition, (GSSP, 1923), 22-24.

59. Lieutenant Colonel J. E. Lewis, Field Artillery, and 1st Lieutenant Champlin F. Buck, 

Field Artillery, “An Additional Training Medium,” FAJ 27, no. 4, (July-August 1937): 302-304.

60. Among many examples, see Major L. D. Davis, Infantry, “What Strength Units?” IJ 26, 

no. 3, (March 1925): 247-251; Captain Richard M. Sandusky, Infantry, “Skeletonized Drill,” 

IJ 28, no. 4 (April 1926): 406-409; Colonel P. L. Miles, Infantry, “Training of Peace Strength 

Units,” IJ 35, no. 4, (October 1929): 336-339; and the satirical piece by Major Ralph E. Jones, 

Infantry, “These Recent Factors,” IJ 28, no. 2, (February 1926): 148-151, in which the author 

awakens from a dream of effective training. “Oh, hell!” quote is on 151.

61 Brigadier General John Ross Delafield, Ordnance Reserve, “National Defense of the 

United States,” IJ 28, no. 2, (February 1926); 145-146. Quote is from last paragraph on 126.

62 Major C. B. Hodges, General Staff, “Fall Maneuvers, 1921: American Forces in 

Germany,” IJ 19, no. 6, (December 1921): 620-625.

63 Major Adna R. Chaffee, General Staff Corps, “The Maneuvers of the First Cavalry 

Division, September-October 1923,” CJ 33, no. 135, (April 1934): 133-162.

64 Brigadier General H. B. Fiske, “Maneuvers of the Second Division,” IJ 31, no. 3, 

(September 1927): 225-235; Major George S. Patton, Jr., Cavalry, “The 1929 Cavalry Division 

Maneuvers,” CJ 39, no. 158, (January 1929): 7-15; “The Cavalry Maneuvers at Fort Riley, 

Kansas 1934,” CJ 43, no. 184, (July-August 1934): 5-14; and Major James T. Duke, Cavalry, 

G.S.C., “Third Army Maneuvers, Fort Bliss, Texas,” CJ 47, no. 6, (November-December 1938): 

528-535.

65. Colonel Conrad H. Lanza, “The First Army Maneuvers,” FAJ 25, no. 6, (NovemberDecember 1935): 540-565. Quotes are from 541 and 565. Conclusions are on 565. See 

Lieutenant Colonel John S. Wood, Field Artillery, “Maneuvers and the Umpire System,” CJ 48, 

no. 3, (May-June 1939): 208-209 and Hanson W. Baldwin, “Maneuvers Reveal Deficiencies,” 

CJ 48, no. 5, (September-October 1939): 390-391.

66. Examples of reports on CPXs include The Regular Army Infantry, “1st Division 

Command Post Training,” IJ 34, no. 4, (April 1929); 429-430; The Organized Reserves, “The 

Command Post Exercises,” Infantry 34, no. 2, (February 1929): 214-215; Colonel W. K. Naylor, 

Infantry, “Command Post Exercises,” IJ 36, no. 1, (January 1930): 83-85; Colonel Arthur S. 
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Panel 1

Conklin, General Staff Corps, “III Corps Area Command Post Exercise, Fort George G. Meade 

– 5-19 July, 1930,” IJ 37, no. 3, (September 1930); 237-242; Colonel Conrad H. Lanza, Field 

Artillery, “The First Army CPX,” FAJ 27, no. 6, (November-December 1937): 405-414.

67. See below for more articles by Brigadier General (retired) Hawkins, and for a brief 

description of his service in the World War as Chief of Staff of the 35th Division during its 

disastrous experiences in the Meuse-Argonne.

68. Brigadier General H. S. Hawkins, “Command Post Exercises,” IJ 35, no. 4, (October 

1929): 339-345, quotes are from 340 and 342. 

69. For a few examples, see Major John J. Bohn, Cavalry, “The Civilian Conservation 

Corps,” CJ 42, no. 178, (July-August 1933): 41-42; Corporal George Chancellor, 1st Cavalry 

(Mecz), “The C.C.C. at Fort Knox, Kentucky,” CJ 42, no. 178, (July-August 1933): 36; Colonel 

Duncan K. Major, Jr., “Yes, Sir, the Army Can!” IJ 40, no. 4, (July-August 1933): 283-288; 

Representative James W. Wadsworth, New York, “The Army Gets the Job,” IJ 40, no. 4, (JulyAugust 1933): 292-293; Captain Leo Donovan, 12th Infantry, “The Establishment of the First 

Civilian Conservation Camp,” IJ 40, no. 4, (July-August 1933); 245-249; and Captain George 

A. Hunt, 16th Infantry, “Army Publicity Objectives in Connection with the C.C.C.” IJ 40, no. 5, 

(September-October 1933): 330.

70. The most recent, and in some respects, the most comprehensive discussion of this issue 

is in Coffman’s The Regulars, Chapter 7, “The Army in Limbo.” For the professionalism and 

competence of Regular Army officers, see the works of Keith Bonn, Peter Mansoor, and John 

Sloan Brown, among others.

71. See, as a single example, Abrahamson, America Arms, 186.
107

Panel 3, Day 1: Changing Leadership for a Changing World Role, 1906-1939

Questions & Answers

(Transcript of Presentation)

Dr. Tim Nenniger, Ph.D.

Dr. Peter Schifferle, Ph.D.

Moderated by Dr. Rick Herrera, Ph.D.

Dr. Herrera:

Gentlemen, thank you for two very good presentations. Ladies and gentlemen, rather 

than hearing from me, let’s hear from you. Yes?

Audience Member 1:

Dr. Schifferle, it seems to me a conclusion one can draw from your presentation is 

that the Leavenworth model in the interwar period is exactly the wrong kind of model we 

should be looking for today. 

Dr. Schifferle:

Yes and no. The yes part, in other words, it is the wrong model, is we have a different 

(inaudible) system. We have a different form of an army. It’s not expansible. In fact, we’re 

now beginninsg to think that we could not expand it if we wanted to expand it. And the form 

of the threat is also questionable. The focus on a European threat, which brought US Army 

in the Pacific to some kind of issues in 1941, ‘42, now we’re faced with the globalization 

of that kind of threat. We’re not exactly sure what the post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan threat is 

going to be. But corps do what corps do and divisions do what divisions do. I would argue 

that what we ought to teach here is what divisions and corps do, are there any questions. 

And we have lost that focus. We have turned the Leavenworth school into a, well, OK, 

everybody’s good idea instruction base. And we teach too much at too little depth to really 

serve our majors well. I think that’s been true since at least 1983, when General (inaudible) 

did his staff study, which resulted in the production of SAMS, to be a school where only 

division and corps operations are taught. So it’s kind of yes and no.

Audience Member 2:

Would you then posit that we need a joint school that is in the hierarchy or progression 

in schools, then?

Dr. Schifferle:

I think reinforced and more rigorous jaws would be appropriate. There’s been a lot of 

discussion and monographs written about how far down you have to teach joint. I think 

part of that question is how far down do you have to teach joint and to what level of rigor, 

length of time spent teaching joint, do you have to teach joint. I think the first question we 
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should ask, since this is an Army school, (inaudible) one. Because this is an Army school, 

we should ask, what do we have to teach Army majors to be in their last really tactical and 

operational school they’re going to attend?

Dr. Herrera:

Yes? Would you go ahead and press the button?

Audience Member 3:

If I could (inaudible). Your opening quote was, “Which war, which rank.” Now that 

we’ve kind of transformed a little bit and we are brigade-centric, I think that makes an addon to it. What is our focus as we’re developing leaders?

Dr. Schifferle:

Well, to be blunt, that depends if you believe the bumper stickers. For a brigade-centric 

Army, we certainly are keeping division and corps headquarters employed. Brigade-centric 

in the ‘20s and ‘30s was taught at Fort Benning, Fort Riley. Taught at the branch schools. 

I wonder where we’re teaching brigade operations today. And are we teaching enough 

brigade operations wherever it is we’re teaching brigade operations? I’m not certain we 

know what the transformed brigade really ought to be educated at. I think it’s a very good 

question.

Audience Member 4:

I had a follow-on to your comment on your observation that divisions and corps are 

continuing to operate and continuing to be deployed. That is true. But I think you’ll find 

they’re very different in nature than their previous nature in that headquarters are cellular, 

they’re scaled down. They don’t have the overhead built into them intrinsically. They don’t 

inherently have the logistical structure of the previous divisions. The logistical assets that 

used to be associated with a division and most of the combat support assets really have 

been farmed down to the brigade. As far as your observation on whether or not brigade 

operations are being taught and where they should be taught, if it’s not being taught here, 

I’m concerned. This would seem to be the place, because the brigade is now the operational 

chip on the board. But that’s an observation. A question I was going to ask to both of you 

was that coming through your conversation, I ended up with a little bit of a negative feeling 

about our, I believe you represented your feelings of what Leavenworth had accomplished 

and where we’re going and what we’re doing in a bit of a negative light. I’m wondering 

how we square that with a comment by Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins and others who 

were World War II veterans and came out of it and said World War II was won in the Army 

school system, because this very tiny cadre of senior officers, or professional officers, or 

officers that hadn’t experience at all, did in fact successfully pull together an 18 millionman Army and deploy it and succeed in combat. I’m wondering was Collins wrong in 

giving as much credence as he did to the Army schools?

Dr. Herrera:

Tim, would you start out with addressing that so we can do it chronologically?
Questions and Answers

109

Dr. Nenniger:

I don’t think Collins was wrong. I read Pete’s book a couple of months ago. I certainly 

got the impression from “America’s School for War” that, while not everything they taught 

during the interwar period was relevant to what they did between 1941-1945, without the 

Leavenworth experience we would have been a lot further behind. I remember a quote 

from General Quesada, who was an Air Corps officer who attended Leavenworth in the late 

‘30s. He was quite positive about his experience at the schools, which was unusual because 

a lot of the Air Corps officers that went weren’t so positive, partly because they weren’t 

getting the tactical school experience from Maxwell in the Leavenworth curriculum. One 

of Quesada’s criticisms wasn’t really a criticism at all. He said, “We just couldn’t anticipate 

the scale of operations we were dealing with, the distances we were dealing with, in a 

multi-theater war. It’s not what we learned wasn’t applicable. It’s what we didn’t anticipate 

that we weren’t taught.” I think that’s probably the dilemma in any kind of educational 

experience, certainly in PME. You can’t always anticipate what the future will bring.

Dr. Schifferle:

I think I gave you the wrong impression if I gave you the impression that Leavenworth 

was not responsible for the victory. I think Leavenworth was the only place the victory 

was enshrined, if you will. That we would not have been able to have competent corps 

and division commanders without Leavenworth. I began my dissertation, which has a dim 

resemblance to the book, I began my dissertation with the thought that I would investigate 

the staff officers of the US Army as having come from Ford Motor Company and General 

Motors and General Electric. I thought the Army had to rely on outside educated officers, 

managers, in order to succeed, because we didn’t have that much throughput from the 

Army school system. I was right and I was wrong. Every general staff officer of every 

division and corps that I surveyed in the ETO was on active duty in 1938. They were 

all professionals. But the Leavenworth graduates were only the commanders, the deputy 

commanders, the commanders of artillery, and the occasional chief of staff at the division 

level. Every general staff officer was not a Leavenworth graduate. I think what happened 

is that the commanders trained their staff officers to be staff officers based upon what they 

had learned at Leavenworth. Because there was really no place in the Army, in the ‘20s and 

‘30s, to learn those skills except at Leavenworth.

Audience Member 4:

Didn’t Leavenworth run kind of a crash program during the course of the mobilization 

wherein the division staff were brought here and trained? So although the division staff 

officers weren’t Leavenworth graduates in the sense of the two-year course, they benefited 

from the Leavenworth faculty having taught them for a month or so?

Dr. Schifferle:

Yes. Two photographs on the cover of my book. One photograph is [Omar Bradley] 

with the staff of the 82d Infantry Division and the other photograph is a large classroom 

in World War II. In World War II, we graduated something approaching 19,000 graduates 

from Leavenworth. Some of those graduates were in the new division course, but we only 

cycled through about a third of the divisions. It was too late in the cycle for the active 
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110

divisions and the initial National Guard divisions, so we caught the tail end of the National 

Guard and all the active divisions, and then we stopped the program. About two-thirds 

of the divisions. That was a three or four-week course, but it was focused specifically on 

those divisions’ challenges. It included some discussion of training. It was about an hour 

and a half at the commandant’s house about how you should train your division once you 

go back to it.

Audience Member 5:

I still subscribe to Army Times. If the impressions I gained from reading that publication 

are correct, we seem to have a very formalized and robust system of senior mentors now for 

fairly senior commanders. These are apparently senior retired officers who are brought on, 

maybe in a continuing relationship even with one given commander. Could the panelists 

comment on the extent to which that supplements or takes the place of the deficiencies in 

the kind of education that you were talking about a little earlier? Contemporaneously.

Dr. Schifferle:

I’m not really sure I’m qualified to talk on that. Our students at SAMS go out to become, 

effectively, the general staff officers of divisions and corps. We now have graduates at 

every rank from four stars down. But I have not really engaged the more senior of those in 

a conversation about their mentorship by more senior officers still. I really don’t think I’m 

qualified to talk about that.

Dr. Nenniger:

I think a lot of interest in military mentorship comes from General Eisenhower’s 

nice little memoir called At Ease. The accolades that he gives to Fox Conner as being 

his mentor when they served together in Panama. I must say, perhaps it’s my historical 

roots, but I’m a little bit skeptical, because there are other stories in At Ease that are not 

necessarily entirely accurate either. The one source that we have for Fox Conner being a 

mentor of Eisenhower is Eisenhower’s At Ease. I’m unaware of other sources that speak 

to that question, which isn’t to entirely say that it’s wrong. It’s just that I’ve yet seen a 

whole lot of other corroborating evidence. There were several other stories in At Ease

which are very interesting, including Eisenhower saying how Fox Conner rigged things 

so he could get to Leavenworth, because he was on the outs with the Chief of Infantry, 

who, as Pete describes, the branches were the ones that set up the lineup of who they were 

going to recommend to the schools. Eisenhower says that Fox Conner told him to take an 

appointment in the Adjutant General’s department so that the Chief of Infantry wouldn’t 

have any say in the process of Eisenhower going to the school. It’s completely untrue. I can 

find you the documentation in the National Archives where, from the get-go, Eisenhower is 

on the list for the Chief of Infantry, and although he did serve as a recruiting officer briefly 

under the Adjutant General, he was not on the Adjutant General’s list for Leavenworth. I’m 

a little bit skeptical of one-source stories like mentorship of Fox Conner and Eisenhower.

Dr. Schifferle:

One of the things I wanted to research when I began the process was what is usually 

referred to as General Marshall’s desire to fix Leavenworth when he became Chief of 

Staff. That, I think, is in the bucket of apocryphal stories. Because General Marshall had 
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111

an opportunity to name the commandant. He named General Lesley McNair to become 

the commandant. They had an office call in Marshall’s office. McNair came here and there 

was basically an exchange of about three letters between McNair and Marshall for the 

entire period of McNair being in charge of Leavenworth, and they basically consisted of, 

“Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing a great job.” So then I went to, OK, what 

did McNair do when he was commandant? And basically he did the same thing as previous 

commandants had done: taught division and corps operations, are there any questions? He 

surveyed the students. The students said get rid of the horses. He got rid of the horses. But 

other than that, he kept doing what he was doing. George C. Marshall was happy with that.

Audience Member 6:

This is a question mostly for Dr. Schifferle, but Tim, you can add to this if you think 

you have something that is appropriate. Peter, you mentioned that, and I quote, “Arthur 

Wagner kind of lost.”

Dr. Schifferle:

Based on your presentation, yeah.

Audience Member 6: 

It’s not that I take that personally.

Dr. Schifferle:

No fisticuffs yet, please.

Audience Member 6:

My question is, what happened to the reform impulse that was so strong during the late 

Gilded Age and even the very, very early Progressive Era? The intellectual ferment, the 

debate over which way are we going to go? Are we going to go left, are we going to go left, 

are we going to have this, are we going to have that? Why did it go away, or did it?

Dr. Schifferle:

I think that’s a great question, because it allows me to get into some areas that are 

in the book but not in the presentation. The inaugural faculty issue, the fact that, I can’t 

remember. I think there were 14 or 18 instructors at Leavenworth in 1919. All 14 or 18 

came directly from the AEF. It wasn’t just that that imposed an AEF-focused World War 

I-style of warfare solution set. It was that, from the inaugural faculty, every senior member 

of the faculty except for two or three for the whole period were drawn from that inaugural 

faculty. A major on the inaugural faculty will come back as a colonel in charge of a 

program. A colonel in the inaugural faculty will come back as a brigadier general in charge 

of the school. So the lock on the intellectual system was of that inaugural faculty. But they 

were in general agreement about the nature of the challenge in World War I. Incompetent 

staff officers. And they knew that Leavenworth was the training school for staff officers, 

therefore they should train competent staff officers. But the literature of the period, the 

journals of the period, are just alive. I wish our journals were like those journals now. The 

journals of the period infantry cavalry and field artillery are just alive with intellectual, 

artistic, creative ferment about the nature of the officer corps, the nature of education, how 
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112

do you deal with civilian conservation corps camps, who’s our next threat, what’s the war 

going to look like, the motorization mechanization armor warfare tanks. It’s just a live with 

all of that. So the intellectual ferment is there. It’s not in the schools, per se, but it’s in the 

literature that students and instructors are writing for in the journals.

Audience Member 6:

So then do you assume or can you demonstrate that that ferment from the diff journals, 

did that filter into the instructors at Leavenworth? Is that ultimately inculcated into the 

lessons to students at Leavenworth?

Dr. Schifferle:

Yes, whether it’s a direct lift from the journals or it’s a lift from the experimentation 

that we were doing. By 1937, there was a student text entitled “The Mechanized Division 

Tentative.” So 1937, long before anybody’s ever really thought about a panzer division, 

we’re teaching basically an armored division here at Fort Leavenworth as part of the course. 

And we had been dealing with mechanized brigades in the curriculum, in the exercises, 

since, I believe, ‘26. I think in mid-’20s, this was our first exercise where they put officers 

in the role of the German right hand army during the execution of the so-called Schlieffen 

Plan. They have them go through it the way it was done in 1914, and then the next day they 

bring the students in and they say, “OK, now what would you do if you were a mechanized 

force?” That’s going on in 1925 or ‘26.

Audience Member 7:

This is a question for both of you. Dr. Nenniger started among the earliest of the root 

reforms, which was the creation of the post schools. Dr. Schifferle then talks about the 

Leavenworth system being built on the existence of all armed branch schools at the infantry 

school and the armor school. To what extent is the creation of the branch schools one of the 

greatest unsung professional military education developments of this period?

Dr. Schifferle:

The books need to be written. There’s books on the posts. There’s books on the 

branches. But I am not aware of monographs on each of the schools with the same kind of 

holistic appreciation to take it from formation through the end of World War II. I just don’t 

think they’re there yet.

Dr. Nenniger:

I agree.
113

Day 2: Featured Speaker:

History Strengthens by General (R) Gordon Sullivan

(Transcript of Presentation)

Mr. Ken Gott:

Ladies and gentlemen, our featured speaker today is General (Retired) Gordon Sullivan. 

When I was a young lieutenant, he was the Chief of Staff in the Army and we all looked 

up to him with adoration and was just an incredible man. General Sullivan is currently the 

President and the Chief Operating Officer of the Association of the United States Army, 

headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. Since assuming the presidency in 1998, General 

Sullivan has overseen the transformation of the Association into a dynamic, 100,000-plus 

individual and 500-plus sustaining member organization that represents soldiers’ families 

in the defense industries. For those of you in service or retired, you are very familiar with 

the good things that AUSA does.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Quincy, he was commissioned a 2d 

Lieutenant of Armor and awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Norwich 

University in 1959. He holds a Master of Arts degree in political science from the University 

of New Hampshire. His professional military education includes the United States Army 

Armor School basic course and advanced courses, the Command and General Staff College 

and the Army War College.

General Sullivan retired from the United States Army on 31 July, 1995 after more than 

36 years of active service. He culminated his service in uniform as a 32d Chief of Staff. 

He is a co-author with Michael V. Harper of Hope Is Not a Method, published by Random 

House in 1996, which chronicles the enormous challenges encountered in transforming the 

post-Cold War Army through the lens of proven leadership principles and a commitment 

to shared values. He is Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Norwich University and the 

Marshall Legacy Institute, and was formerly a director on the boards of Newell Rubbermaid, 

Shell Corporation, Institute of Defense Analyses and General Dynamics.

General Sullivan is married to the former Gay Loftus of Quincy, Massachusetts. They 

currently reside in Alexandria, Virginia. He has three children and three grandchildren. He 

is an avid reader, amateur historian and active sailor and sport fishing enthusiast. Ladies 

and gentlemen, please welcome General (Retired)s) Gordon Sullivan.

GEN Sullivan:

Well it's nice to be with all of you. General MacFarland, nice to be with you. John, 

good to see you. Many friends, colleagues from days past. It's always great to come to Fort 

Leavenworth. Two of those children by the way, two of those grandchildren have roots here 

in Leavenworth, Kansas, having, being really part of the Davis family from Leavenworth 

which has been here since the 1800s. So I still have roots here in Leavenworth, in addition 

to a real love for this school and what happens here at Fort Leavenworth. I had many fond 

memories about my days here, some of which we were just discussing, days hunting and 
114

Featured Speaker

just being here. Participating in a triathlon when I was the Deputy Commandant and as you 

know, some of you may know, one of the events of a triathlon is a swim. It seemed like a 

good idea to swim in the duck pond since it was there. Two years later the medics decided 

that that wasn't such a good idea since every goose from Toronto to wherever was camped 

out in that thing, and I remember looking up when we were standing there in our suits and 

the numbers on our arms and Mark Hertling was standing beside me and I think he was the 

captain of the West Point swimming team, and I quickly found out what that meant but we 

didn't know any better so I think it's been changed though if there still is such a thing as a 

triathlon out here.

Okay, so anyway it's nice to be with all of you. I've got some thoughts which I want 

to give you, some of which, a lot of which you know and I'm not going to bore with what 

an amateur historian may know about the origins of this place and so forth. Is Tim here? 

Yeah, right there. Dr. Nenniger is here. God forbid, I mean he's one of the living experts 

on what happened here back in the 1800s. So I'm going to give you my views about life 

and Army leader development, and I think it rests on three pillars and I think those pillars 

are still talked about, that is in the individual; the individual has a role in his or her own 

education and development, and the institution, places like Leavenworth and Fort Knox 

and Fort Benning always had a major role. And last but not least, and equally as profound, 

the units of assignment. TRADOC has certainly since the '70s, since it's inception, been 

instrumental in the melding of these three into a powerful triumvirate, and I think that while 

the system sometimes operates at reduced efficiency because of operational needs, that is 

reduced student output and student flow, the fact of the matter is that this triumvirate of the 

school, the individual and the units of assignments is very important. Now I never intend 

to say much more about that but suffice it to say, I think looking forward that the TRADOC 

schooling system and the situation that the United States Army finds itself in because of 

what happened back in the '70s is in better shape today with its non-commissioned officer 

education system, its officer education system, warrant officer education system, than we 

were in 1973 and '75. However you may feel about input and output on the schooling 

system, and people receiving constructive credit and so forth and shortened courses the fact 

of the matter is the structure is here upon which to build going forward.

I get that question a lot by the way; I just returned from Schofield Barracks. I was with 

the 25th Division, and while they actually feel very positive about their accomplishments, 

and many of them are going back for their third or fourth tours and the next rotation, one 

of the questions on their mind is, are we in as bad a shape as you were in '73, '74, and '75? 

And the answer to that is a resounding no. It's not the same Army. In my view, it's a much 

stronger Army with much greater depth because of the schooling system and the way in 

which the Army approached the education and training and development of our young 

people, and I believe that system is still here and it certainly needs and it will receive 

attention, but there is a reason to believe that all leaders who are responsible for the Army 

education system know this and are working hard to respond to increasing demands as our 

forces return from certainly Iraq and Afghanistan, which remains a question. New York 

Times this morning is full of that; we're now going to get a complete inside look into what 

Bob Woodward found out about how so-and-so thought so-and-so was a jerk and blah blah 

blah. But the fact of the matter is we still don't know how that's going to turn out.
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Now just as I don't intend to dig into the guts of the Army leader development system, 

I'm not going to give you any tutorials on the historical record of the development of the 

Army education system. Tim Nenniger, as I mentioned, and Glenn Robertson by the way, 

and many of you in this room, are much more versed in that subject than I am and if I started 

to get into it, you'd laugh me out of the room. I do know that Eben Swift's, I do know of his 

work by the way, I wonder sometimes and I actually did when I was a Chief, ask a question, 

is it time to take a look at the five paragraph field order? Well that brought everybody, 

it's kind of like, okay, Chief, great, let's move. You know, how about if we worry about 

something else. So agreed, agreed. We did and that was the first and last time I mentioned 

that, however I'm not sure where we are today frankly. I don't know and that's just kind of 

out there. But Eben Swift, as you know, is fundamental. He was a very catalytic person for 

the Army and his applied method has been used here at Leavenworth forever and I think 

it's probably one of the more powerful aspects of this education system and it has been. As 

he said in 1908 in the opening of the War College, "Armies in fact have been more efficient 

than ever before in the history of the world. Although they have been trained in times of 

peace, their efficiency is due principally to the improved methods in which the leadership 

of troops has been studied and learned," and he was talking about in the schoolhouse and 

looking at battles and so forth and the staff ride and so forth. And Swift is an important 

character in the history of the Army. Certainly the lyceum at Agawam, while interesting, 

has little application today when we're not regimental-based in our home station training. 

But Glenn and I were just talking on the way in about just quickly mentioning the virtual 

staff ride and I believe some of the virtual staff ride techniques which are being developed 

will be applicable to colonels and so forth with their people and that will be very important 

going forward.

Now...the applied method is in fact the intellectual bedrock of this institution, as is 

the historical record. I looked at the tables as I was coming in here and I think back to my 

time here as a Deputy Commandant, that table is about three times the size as anything 

that was here then. What's happened here is enormous and it's a result of dedicated people 

who appreciate the history of the United States Army and they understand the role that it 

plays in the development of our officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers. It's this 

appreciation to which I will speak and I'll begin noting that our history as an Army, as 

an institution combined with operational, tactical and historical records and first person 

accounts of sacrifice is or should be the well from which everyone who considers themselves 

a professional drinks. Sadly in my view, and my career is probably testament to that, the 

appreciation of the role of history and the developmental process and as an aid for serving 

leaders has really waxed and waned during my professional life. Thankfully after Vietnam 

a revitalized history program was created and staff rides at the Combat Studies Institute, 

Leavenworth papers, Military History Institute, School of Advanced Military Studies, all 

were based on a in-depth look at the history of the Army. The 230-year history thereabouts 

of our Army is what it is. It's what it is. And while we from our present vantage point 

might choose to wonder why such-and-such was done or not done, the fact of the matter 

is it was done. And why was it done? What was the context in which it was done and can 

we learn from that? Eisenhower and Robert Murphy in North Africa. Very complicated, 

very complicated relationship. By the way, reading Murphy's book is pretty interesting 
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when it comes to thinking about general officers operating in an alliance and operating 

closely with the State Department. There's some things to learn. What I learned was when 

Eisenhower showed up in Gibraltar after that horrible trip coming out of England, he was 

standing there in the bunker smoking a cigarette, reached in his pocket and pulled out six 

coins, one from each of the six Allies who would invade North Africa. By the way, not a 

bad technique. Of all you can say about Eisenhower, he was focused; he had six coins in his 

pocket representing each of his allies and it probably wasn't lost on those who worked for 

him that this gent really means business. And he did. And he did. Not a bad insight. Kind 

of trivial, but you know what? In that business at the top, things like that work.

I applaud the energy which has been devoted to this conference. I'm coming here 

next week, not here, but I'm coming to Kansas City to talk to General Dempsey's senior 

leadership conference and I note that it's starting off with a visit to the National Museum 

of World War I. Any conference conducted by a four-star general which will take the time 

to go to this museum with his leaders indicates it's a perfect manifestation of how he feels 

about history and the development of our people. That is not a throwaway event. It's very 

significant. And I think you all know that; I'm not telling you anything you don't know 

about how four-stars operate but that tells you a lot about him and how the Army feels 

about our history.

The question I will try to answer is how to create professional Army leaders with 

a lifelong appreciation of our heritage so that in their contributory years, they can take 

strength through the application of both doctrinal concepts and understand the technological 

characteristics of equipment, and understand the well spring from which the courage 

of their troops flows. This was, has always been a challenge and it will continue to be 

a challenge; that is to create professional leaders who appreciate the fact that history, a 

reading of history and an understanding of history, is very important. Now I'm not here to 

suggest I know what truth is, even with a small T. I'm just like most people, kind of trying 

to do my best as I go through life. You're the experts; many of you are the experts and you 

can draw judgments about these programs better than I. I just want to reflect on how hard 

it is to keep history in the vanguard of leader development and how difficult it is, if not 

only to keep it in the curriculum but to keep it vibrant, relevant and interesting. Taught 

by qualified and experienced faculty who can stimulate young people, young officers and 

non-commissioned officers, to read their history. Now I was commissioned in 1959 as was 

mentioned. I came into the Army having been influenced by General Ernie Harmon, Major 

General Ernie Harmon of...World War II and World War I; he was actually a mounted 

calvaryman in World War I with the 2d Calvary Regiment. One of the few mounted US 

units other than the artillery. Well I don't want to get into that; let's just say the Calvary 

unit. There weren't many mounted calvary units in the expeditionary force and he was a 

troop commander. I was influenced by him and the retired officers and non-commissioned 

officers who surrounded him up at Norwich. And we all felt their presence. I mean these 

were good soldiers, highly decorated and as you might expect, friends of his, colleagues of 

his that he had a lot of respect for.

So I graduated and went down to Fort Hood, Texas, the 2d Armored Division, which 

was really not a division; it was a sham. I quickly found that out when I arrived. We were 
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actually training troops. It was an advanced individual training operation. I was in the First 

Battalion 66th Armor; at the time my battalion commander was a Big Red One veteran and 

all of the company commanders were Korean War veterans, some of them actually were 

for one reason or another happened to be World War II veterans. You know what, other 

than going to the bar, one never talked about history. The 66th Armor carried lineage from 

World War I, World War II; had been in Germany. The division gyroed back to Hood. You 

know, the battalion commander was a Big Red One veteran; certainly he must have had 

something to say but he never said it. We didn't know anything about the way, the second 

World War or the Korean War, which was [actually] only over for six years; it's kind of 

strange. It was like it never existed so lo and behold I was assigned to the 1st Calvary 

Division next and it was in the western corridor in Korea and it was like, okay, well here 

you are. I mean the 1st Calvary Division, one of the most highly decorated divisions in the 

United States Army for its service in the Pacific in World War II, the Korean War and I went 

to another tank battalion with five tank companies because it was a Pentomic Division, and 

we didn't talk about it.

Now you have to ask yourself...we were getting rid of the pinks and greens and going to 

Army green. Modern Army green. That transformation said a lot about the Army's sense of 

history. The Army turned its back on its history. Modern Army green, Pentomic Divisions, 

Army and Defense Command, atomic cannons, one of which is perched up on the rimrock out at Junction City between Manhattan and Junction City. Honest John Rockets, Red 

Stone missiles. I looked out of the Quonset hut and there was a Davy Crockett. Was that it, 

the Davy Crockett, the football on the end of a stick? I mean by this Quonset hut, I mean it 

was kind of like out of body experience. You know, the symbol was, look you guys aren't 

going to be doing what you used to do; we're changing it and all of that is past. So we didn't 

talk about our history; it was like it wasn't important.

Now I know you all look at the errors of history much differently than when we 

change uniforms but it certainly appeared that we were going from one Army, forgetting 

about all of that which had gone before, and moving in to a new era. You know, I am the 

quintessential Cold Warrior by the way. I was in the Army when the Wall went up and when 

it came down so when I look at my experience in the Army, I probably look at it differently 

than some of the historians do. The pre-Vietnam Army that I joined, which might be a 

way of categorizing it, might be a lot better than the Army that came out of Vietnam but 

it didn't make the most of its leaders and the most of its potential for training all of us and 

developing us. Now I understand the next war. I learned this probably in Fort Knox, maybe 

even before I came in the Army, that the next war isn't going to be like the last one. Okay, I 

got that. I'm not sure, by the way, that that's so hard to understand. North Africa wasn't like 

Italy in World War II and it certainly wasn't like southern France or northern Europe . It 

wasn't like the Philippines or whatever, or the islands in the Pacific. And by the way, Iraq is 

not like Afghanistan; we were just talking about that right outside. It's completely different 

and it's not the same. It's not the same terrain, obviously, and the issues are different and the 

people in the Army have to understand that and they do. J. Lawton Collins, 25th Infantry, 

Guadalcanal, and he winds up taking corps ashore at Normandy in 1944. And he did it. 

By the way there's others who didn't, which I don't need to go into, who couldn't make 
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the transition, but interesting enough, I'm not sure that couldn't make the transition is the 

judgment; it might be that the ones who should have listened wouldn't listen to him because 

he hadn't been one of them in North Africa, Italy, southern France. You decide. You're the 

experts. Not me. You decide.

So anyway in every case, leaders had to figure out how to make things happen with 

combined arms operations, operating with allies. And they learned how to lead citizen 

soldiers which was an art unto itself, which John's famous book has told us about. They 

formed and led competent staffs and they work with the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corp 

and our allies in productive ways. It wasn't easy by the way just because Eisenhower was 

walking around with six coins in his pocket. Didn't quite get it. He had to do something 

about it. But they learned to plan, execute and drill down in their battles in ways that 

men such as Arthur Conger, who was Colonel Arthur Conger, who was involved with the 

development of this place; Eben Swift and a fellow by the name of John Bigelow who was 

a captain writing about probably what is the most in-depth look at Chancellorsville as a 

teaching tool, what he developed. And they were the ones, actually Bigelow, probably and 

Cottington. They were some of the bedrocks from which Glenn developed his staff rides.

Now I would just say as an aside, I've been on staff rides with John Marsh when he 

was the Secretary of the Army; General Carl Vuono who would get us up on a Saturday 

morning, it was pouring rain, and we still went. It actually rains in war too so we got that. 

I mean we got that message, which we actually understood that before we went but at any 

rate, it's sort of like General Dempsey doing what he's doing. We went out together and we 

listened to him or we listened to Mr. Marsh and it was and is important, and I still go on 

staff rides, probably three or four a year and it's a way for me to stay linked with my, with 

our, profession.

So from my point of view, lots of things that were strong in the pre-Vietnam Army 

were weakened, you know, some of them were weakened by the Vietnam experience. But 

the study of history wasn't one of them because it wasn't there to begin with. It had to be 

revitalized by people such as you in this room and there are some people who participated 

in that. We sacrificed our history on the altar of “modernity”. Frankly, at least from this 

guy's perspective, we didn't talk about it; it was like it didn't exist. I never had anyone stand 

up, well there is an Army flag but the battle streamers aren't on it, and point at the battle 

streamers and say, look here, look here, this is your Army; this is the Army you are a part 

of. And you need to feel proud about that and you carry those streamers. It's kind of like 

the picture I just saw of the West Point "Duty, Honor, Country" speech by MacArthur. And 

often the clouds, often the clouds are who? Well Grant, Pershing, infantrymen, so forth, 

young lieutenants, young captains; it's kind of there. And that's the, I believe, the kind of 

environment we are trying to create or we should be trying to create so that people who are 

professionals call themselves professionals think of their history in that way.

The dedicated leaders that put us on track to rebuild the Army understood the importance 

of teaching history to leaders. Back in the days before CSI was founded, General DePuy 

decreed that all Leavenworth students would take three tactics electives. The evolution 

of combined arms warfare was one of them and plenty of the other offerings had a good 

dose of historical case studies. There was still a need to study thermal nuclear warfare but 
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there was a healthy appreciation for history and our leader development programs and 

some of it at the heart of it was values. Some of it was working on values. An appreciation 

that had faded about 1940 and didn't really return until about '73, '75 in there. But in those 

early days, the emphasis was on tactical matters and the Army did little to use its history 

to develop improved strategic and operational capabilities in its senior leaders and I don't 

want to get into the development of FM105 and how what was handed off to General Starry 

and so forth. Just suffice it to say that history was not necessarily, well some, World War II 

history was but at the tactical level.

By the time I came to Leavenworth as the Deputy Commandant in 1987, the Combat 

Studies Institute was going strong. Denny Frashe, Colonel Denny Frasche was in charge. 

Was sort of in charge, that's hard to say down at Combat Studies Institute who's in charge; 

I know Glenn is but things kind of happen. Roger Spiller was there and others. I don't think 

Roger Cirillo was there at the time. Now I believe that in those days this appreciation of our 

history flourished. And I believe we sustained this level of excellence beyond the end of 

the Cold War and as I've said many times, the history of the United States Army has given 

me strength throughout my—the latter phases of my time in the Army. It means something 

to me and I want to share some thoughts with you. These are kind of personal insights and 

I've spend a lot of time thinking about this. I was, I don't know, it feels like a hundred years 

ago I was asked to do this, make these remarks. It's not that long ago; it's about six or seven 

months, I think moved around a little bit. So I've had time to think about this.

I sent a woman around the Army when I became the chief and she's an academic and 

an observer. She has a couple of Ph.D.s, one of which in evolutionary biology, and she's 

a quantum physicist and so forth. She had written a book called Leadership in the New 

Science, name is Meg Wheatley, and the special ops guys were pretty into her at the time 

and they gave me the book, said, you ought to read this book, chief. So I did and essentially 

the basis, the foundation upon which the book is based is that living organisms modify 

themselves, I'm not going to teach you evolution, but they modify themselves based on 

stress and, you know, those that can modify themselves survive. So I got it. Okay, so I 

said, got a hold of her, talked to her for about a couple of hours, said, okay, what are you 

doing? You got a few weeks, go around the Army. We paid the bill, gave her a guy named 

Eli Rosner who was a major at the time; said, Eli, take her around the Army, bring her back 

and have her tell me what she found. So she walks into the room and we sit down at the 

round table and she said, sir, I can give it to you real short. You guys don't know what you 

know. So I probed her a little bit and really what she was saying was what I think might be 

readily apparent to all of you. The US Army has done so much that it's possible to overlook 

what we have done because there's no way for us in our daily lives to necessarily retrieve 

it so that we can contemplate. Now I understand all about Ernie May and thinking in time 

and the danger of going down this line of reasoning. But the Army has done a lot and there 

are a lot of insights that people at all levels can use; this is how so-and-so wrestled with 

that problem.

Okay, now along that vein, and I told Bob [Sorley] this some time ago, and some of 

you may even have heard me say this. Every morning when I was in Washington, I would 

leave the house at some ungodly hour with my dog, Minnie, and she and I would go out 
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and she'd schlep for chipmunks and I'd kind of get my head screwed on for the day and 

we would walk the perimeter so to speak. But at leaving Quarters One, I would walk by 

the miniature portraits of every Commanding General of the United States Army from 

Washington on and every Chief of Staff. By the way, you ought to try that some time. It's 

pretty daunting to walk by those pictures because there are some real giants and needless 

to say, it's humbling but it was also a source of inspiration and as I would go by if I was 

wrestling with a problem, I would see someone there that would cause me to want to 

understand how that person, Marshall, for instance. You know, the famous 1939 operation 

when Poland gets invaded by the Wehrmacht, you know, when I had time I had no money; 

now I have, you know all about that. But how did he do it? How did he do what he did and 

how did he make the points he needed to make to generate the resources that he needed? 

So Marshall was important; his days at [Fort] Benning and many other things and his 

struggles with the president and the Allies, you know, Marshall said no to North Africa, 

no to Italy. I mean he was actually no, no, no and then all of a sudden, you know, he wants 

to go in in '42, all of which you know, and by the way he stuck with it. Character counts. 

Character counts. He stayed at his position, stuck with it and served this country proudly, 

and with honor. There's a real lesson there. I mean he said no many times, which may be, 

according to his son, it's one reason, according to Eisenhower's son, and there's another 

source on the same subject said, that may be one reason Eisenhower became the Supreme 

Allied Commander and not Marshall. But I don't want to get into that because I don't know 

enough it to draw that conclusion.

Okay, so at any rate, one of the things I thought about and Chris Gable with his 

book Louisiana Maneuvers, it all happened to come together at the same time. Louisiana 

Maneuvers became a touchstone for me as I tried to organize ourselves to get things done 

while I was the Chief. General Abrams, of course his picture is there and General Abrams 

lives in Quarters One because it was where he essentially died, and obviously a very 

important figure to any of us who fought in Vietnam. What I thought about it actually it 

was not when I saw his picture, the portrait there, it was actually not what he did in World 

War II which I knew. Everybody that was an Armor officer knew that. By the way, we're 

doing away with the 37th Armor; I guess we're sacrificing that for some, somebody's got 

some notion somewhere in this hierarchy about what unit should stay and which should 

go. Hello out there in America or in America's Army. So anyway, that's going on and I 

understood all of that and I understood what he did, you know, throughout his career but 

what really resonated with me was him in the officer corps in the Army when he was the 

Chief of Staff because we were in bad shape and his steady guiding hand was critical to the 

rebuilding of the United States Army. And we owe him a real debt of gratitude and people 

can learn a lot from what he did. One of the most famous episodes was actually something 

that just came up recently. I had mentioned to General Caslen one night at a casual dinner 

that in my memory, there was some sort of a oh, I don't know what you would call it; I don't 

want to overplay it, but the students at Leavenworth were very up in arms about the war 

in Vietnam, about how it ended and how things went and the values and so forth and how 

things worked in the divisions. General Cushman, Lieutenant General Cushman, who was 

the Commandant at the time, set up some seminars. We had a conference on the “Ethos of 

the Army” or something like that and somehow some generals in Washington were sent out 
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to participate. These were all Vietnam generals, Vietnam era generals, general officers. And 

they came and the students actually asked them tough questions. And they told them, look, 

you know, somebody said, well this kind of stuff went on, you know, packets of medals. 

Everybody got a Distinguished Service Cross and so forth and so on, and they said, no they 

didn't and apparently some major said, well it did, sir, and it happened in your division. 

Boom, boom, boom, and sort of outlined it. Well General Abrams hears about this because 

somebody went in and whined to him about how they were scuffed up out here so Abrams 

was coming out to give a speech anyway and he apparently didn't say anything in the 

speech. He told them what he wanted to tell him and then he took Q & A. And I think he , 

I didn't know him personally but I think he really knew exactly what he was doing; then he 

had this Q & A and in that people asked some of the same questions to him. Probably more 

respectfully to him than they did, I would suspect. And when he went back to the airport, 

he told General Cushman, I think the young majors are great; they are doing good. Okay. 

Caring, caring, leadership. There's a real lesson there. There's a real lesson there for people 

who will be in leadership positions as we phase out of these wars, to listen, listen carefully 

and to understand the concerns, and I believe that the system is such and the leaders today 

are such that that comes second nature because of what happened then. But those kind 

of insights are important. What about Malin Craig? Malin Craig set things up, he set the 

stage for Marshall. Now who pays any attention to Malin Craig? I know everybody pays 

attention to MacArthur but how about [John L.] Hines? Hines is the same one up there 

beating up on the Congress, beating up on the president. Hey, listen, we're too small; you 

are sacrificing our readiness for other things. MacArthur said one of the worst things that 

ever happened was the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps]. Now it may be a great thing 

for the country but it wasn't for the Army; he made sure he said that because he gave away 

all kinds of property and so forth and so on.

I sometimes wonder, although I've never gone into it, the role of J. Lawton Collins, 

Omar Bradley and even Ike after the war and what happened in June of '50. I'll let others get 

into all of that but all of these giants, for me, because a source of inspiration and intellectual 

strength, as did obviously the chiefs I knew personally. In fact, my days as the chief were 

actually deeply involved, not only with many forward looking things but the history of our 

Army and the relationship of senior leaders with Allied leaders, diplomats and politicians 

became my life; it became my life. And I knew who to turn to. I would turn to Hal Nelson 

and Bill [William A.] Stofft and others, but you can't afford not to have an appreciation 

for the history of the United States Army. And I did know who to turn to to ask for help 

and by the way, sometimes I ask them to come with me to battlefields. I didn't know why 

I wanted to go to the battlefield but they would ask me, well what are you worried about? 

What are you doing? And I'd tell them so they would take me someplace and we'd walk 

over these battlefields, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania down into the Wilderness where it's 

hard to think about anything but trees. How the hell did they get in here? But, you know, 

Gettysburg, Antietam and it became a way of revitalizing my soul to get back to the history 

of the United States Army because by the way, it dawned on me the first time I testified 

that, okay, well, geez I don't know that I, you know, go up on Capitol Hill to get beat up 

over some obscure issue. Well I said to myself, well how would you have liked to have 

been Grant, Sherman, or Sheridan to go up and testify before John Gordon? That's John 
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Gordon of Georgia, not my grandfather. That's, you know, remember Old John and I'm up 

there begging for money from the southern senators for the US Army. Okay, so I said, well 

if they could do that, I can do what I got to do so off I went.

I don't want to bore you anymore with my journey but I will tell you a little story. I was 

in Saratoga last Saturday night speaking to the Army National Guard of New York. Famous 

outfit, needless to say. The Zouaves at Antietam, you know, the firefighters and you all 

know about that history. So anyway I talked to them, pumped them up a little bit about what 

they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Performed magnificently, one of the iconic pictures of the 

war in Afghanistan is a Chinook with its rear landing wheels on a hot house up in some god 

forsaken valley in Afghanistan. I mean it's a huge feat of airmanship and very courageous, 

so I talked about that with them. So I left Saratoga Springs early on Sunday morning 

to drive up to Norwich to Northfield and I crossed into Vermont at Whitehall, which is 

actually was called Skenesborough in the 1700s; that happens to be the name he listed as 

the home of the United States Navy and I'll tell you why in a minute. But as I was crossing 

the river, I was thinking about these remarks and as I looked out you go right from the river 

valley to the mountains of Vermont and what do I think about? I don't think about scenery; 

I think about terrain. How would I move up this valley? How would I do this? How would 

I get across this river? And then I see the sign "Skenesborough-Whitehall." That happens 

to be where Benedict Arnold built the tin gondolas, the gunboats, which he used to keep 

the British away from Ticonderoga and Saratoga and the Hudson River the first time they 

made the attempt, so he delayed them for a year. It dawned on me that scenery is terrain and 

the history is like that MacArthur picture to me. It's like the mural at West Point. You can 

not be a senior leader in the United States Army and not have an appreciation for all of this 

which has gone before us. It's a transcendent thought; it's a transcendent thing that happens 

and I believe what you people do here at the Combat Studies Institute and what happens at 

Leavenworth and other places, and what happens in the units when the commanders walk 

the grounds of Leavenworth and stand in front of the peach orchard and ask their officers 

where was Lee? This was the main attack, where was he? Not to make a value judgment of 

where he was but to understand the calculus Lee used not to be with Longstreet but to be 

with his two inexperienced corps commanders. That's a hypothesis, by the way; I have no 

idea why he was where he was. But the imponderables are worth thinking about with your 

officers and non-commissioned officers, and I think senior leaders and the school house are 

where the lessons are learned. And I can tell you when I first came in the Army, that was not 

the case. And I will never forget that I was a captain in 1964 enrolled in the Armor Officer 

Career Course; there were 12 of us, one of whom was Andy O'Meara; Bill Carpenter, Don 

Smart. These were all men who were commissioned about, in '59, '58. Each of us had been 

in Vietnam as advisors and do you think anybody at Fort Knox gave two hoots and a holler 

about the 12 of us in the back of the room? No way. No way, we were irrelevant. This is 

'64, '65. We're irrelevant to people who had been training in Europe who could say “Ulm”, 

with the proper, you know, diction and so forth and so on; we didn't know anything about 

Ulm or Friedberg or all of that. What we knew about, what I knew about was Moon So Ni 

[sp?], the 1st Calvary Division and a fake 2d Armored Division, that's what I knew. Hey, 

what's Sullivan, what do these guys know? Well, you know, we graduated in '65 and by 

'70, you know the rest of the story, many of them had been, some of them killed, wounded, 
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severely wounded and so forth and so on. I can tell you gents, without an appreciation for 

the history of the United States Army, what we have done and what we will do, we have 

real problems. We have real problems.

So what is my recommendation? Well my recommendation is to continue to do what 

you're doing and not lean farther forward in the foxhole and shoot faster and so forth 

and so on but just encourage the dialogue between people who have been in Iraq and 

Afghanistan, and the good and the bad, and get the good and the bad out and I know you're 

doing that. Robust lessons learned program, CALL [Center for Army Lesson Learned], 

Company Command dot com, all of that is going on. Articles for publication, it's going on 

all the time. Revitalize staff rides; encourage the commanders to do staff rides, real, virtual 

and constructive. Unit histories, unit events, company battalion brigade and divisions. I 

must say this 37th Armor, I just heard about that, that's troublesome and it is troublesome 

that we tend to gloss over the experiences of men in combat, men and women in combat 

by changing all the time. The 172d out of Alaska. One day it's in Alaska, the next day it's 

the 172d. We had men and women fighting and dying in that outfit and they want to keep 

it. God they sent a group of wives, I think, down to talk to somebody about it and lo and 

behold we wake up and there's something else. Things count, symbols count; it counts to 

have a Big Red One on your shoulder or a 1st Cavalry patch or 101st, 82nd, 3d Infantry 

Rock of the Marne. These things are intangible sources of strength. I mean after all, the 

troopers of the 7th Calvary said that to each other in the Ardennes. We were beaten once 

before, we won't be beaten again. It works. It works. Dining ins, dining outs, you know.

Look, people want to be like Mike. If my battalion commander or if my squadron 

commander, my brigade commander and division commander is talking about this stuff, 

guess what? Officers want it, young officers want to emulate them. In 1981, Major General 

Walt Ulmer stood up at a gathering of officers and wives in Hanau, at Fliegerhorst and he 

said something which frankly, is one of the most important things any officer ever said 

to me. To the group. He didn’t say it to me. He quoted the Sherman letter, March 18, '64, 

which went to Grant. Sherman wrote Grant a letter. Grant is in Culpepper, Sherman's down 

in Memphis. So Sherman says, get out of Washington; come out here, the war's going to be 

won out here. There was probably some truth in that but Grant obviously didn't go. Wasn't 

going to go for many reasons. Then down in the letter he says, throughout the war you 

have always been in my mind. I have always known if I were in trouble and you were still 

alive, you would come to my assistance. How profound. I'll tell you, I have taken that to 

heart ever since. I got that from Walt Ulmer in a smoky place in Hanau, Germany, a social 

event and I have never forgotten it. I believe that thought is what motivates soldiers, sailors, 

airmen and Marines and members of the Coast Guard to do what we do on battlefields all 

over the world. When the CG says it, huge legitimacy. Do not let anyone tell you the Army 

is anti-intellectual. It's not true. What is true, in my mind, is that the Army, the United 

States Army is action oriented. Action oriented. Ideas are critical. Innovation is critical. 

Brains count. Brains and courage. There is no substitute for brains. But brains must be 

leavened with experience, plain old common sense, love of soldiering. Read Mike Malone. 

You want to read about love of soldiering, read him. I'm at Schofield Barracks, what do 

I think of? The screen doors closing, breaking starch, Brasso, Kiwi shoe polish, sweat. 

That's what I think of. Mike Malone made us think about that again. Long rides in buses 
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across Georgia. Why we love the Army; why it's a part of our life, and I believe reading 

and thinking those thoughts requires brains and character, and you build resilient minds, 

adaptive and creative minds and resilient, courageous soldiers by your programs here at 

Fort Leavenworth. And you ought to feel good about it and gear up for the future because 

it's on us. And my reading suggests to me that in spite of what the politicians might like, 

we are in for the long haul in the United States Army, in the Marine Corps and the special 

operating forces because people who operate on the ground, in my view, are the strategic 

weapon for the 21st century.

That's what I have to tell you troops. I love the Army. I'm proud to say I'm an American 

soldier. And I know it's going to sound strange for a Norwich guy to say this but the older 

I get, the more I feel as if somehow I am a member of a profession...that is characterized 

by the phrase, "The long gray line." There's a long line of us and you may not think about 

yourself in that way if you are not a West Point graduate but you really are part of this long 

gray line of men and women who have served America. Thanks a lot to all of you.
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Questions and Answers 

General (R) Gordon Sullivan

John:

Sir, thanks for a fascinating speech. One of your emphases upon history, I think, that 

thrills all of us. One of the most striking examples of the use of history that I'm familiar 

with is your LAM Task Force, your Modern Louisiana Maneuvers and could you share 

with us a little bit about your thought processes and the historical precedent that you were 

emulating and the extent to which history influenced your decision to transition the Army 

by the virtue of that mechanism.

GEN Sullivan:

Yeah. That's a great question. I obviously knew, I knew a couple of things. First of all, 

the General Vuono and I was the ops and then the vice so I was involved in this but it was 

him who drove it, created the physical. He created the plans to do the physical downsizing 

of the Army. You know, we dropped 500,000 in a relatively short period of time and we 

wanted to maintain continuity with the past as much as we could. We worked very hard to 

treat people with dignity and respect, those who were staying and those who were leaving, 

because those who were staying had to know that the ones who left were taken care of and 

were not just dumped like Vietnam, and we wanted to do all of that. So I became the chief, 

you know, he told me the day before I took over on the 19th of June of '91, which was the 

day before I sat at his desk and he said, Sully, I don't want to say tears were rolling down 

his face but it was pretty emotional. I'm going to make it sound like it wasn't but it was. He 

said, “It's different here than it is there and you'll find that out tomorrow”. Well I did. It was 

different. It was different waking up the next day.

Okay, so I struggled to find a way to exercise what I think is one of my strengths, my 

leadership. I had to find a way to talk about a future for the Army and to operationalize 

that so that people might understand it that there is in spite of this downsizing, which was 

unsettling to the Army, that there was a way ahead. And I couldn't quite come up with the 

device which I needed. And about that time, Chris's book was published. I mean I knew 

about the Louisiana Maneuvers but I mean I knew about it and I knew about the, you know, 

the tank destroyer and how we shouldn't have done it but the maneuvers themselves said, 

well, tank destroyers are pretty good. All of that, I knew that but the book came and then I 

really got into it and I said to myself, this is it. This is it, because it will give me a way to 

think about the future with the laser and the digital communications and digital processing 

and focal plane array and blah blah blah, all of this stuff, which was very embryonic at 

the time, although based on digits. But it sounded sterile to talk about digits. And I felt 

that I had to have a way that those who knew the Army could say, okay, we understand 

what the guy is doing. I'm not completely sure that everybody did but, you know, since I 

was the senior officer present, that's the way it went. A piece of the action was this tank 

destroyer thing. I believe they probably wouldn't have bought the tank destroyer if they 
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Featured Speaker

had some of the simulators and simulations that were here so they could have it run it over 

and over again and said, woah, wait a minute; this is not going to do it. And I thought that 

the experiments that we could do were actually more sophisticated than what they had and 

what they had was Louisiana and Mississippi and that kind of stuff, and that we could do 

it in a different way. But still do it and get into the head of the Army that there was a future 

out here. You know, first job of the chief is to keep hope alive. Frankly, there was a lot of 

that, and I think sometimes people have felt, well the guy was a cheerleader and so forth 

and so on but I felt and I still do feel that when you're redistributing ammo on the fire base, 

you're not giving everybody the harsh reality of what this really means. You know, they 

don't expect you to be walking around saying, well, okay, I got this from Sullivan over 

here, you know, I took it off him who's dead and I'm giving it to you, you know. What you 

expect is, okay, we're going to get out of this thing and this is what we're going to do to 

get out of here. And that's what I thought I had to do as the leader; I did not look at myself 

as just some mythical figure up in the Pentagon. It was my war. Did I want to be out in 

Whereverland? Yeah, sure, that's what I really wanted to do and I never thought I would 

be the chief. And I said, okay, that's what I'm asked to do, that's what I'll do. And I was 

honored to do it but I figured I had to treat it as my war and think of it that way and the 

Louisiana Maneuvers was a way to do that.

I said I have to have a way to talk about the future. So we'll do the experiments and I 

could exercise whatever talents I had as a leader through it. You know, it wasn't different 

times and so forth, you know, thinking in time , the purists would say, well he overdrew it 

or this or that. Task Force Smiths became a mantra; somebody wrote an article about that. 

This guy sounds like a Buddhist. Well by the way we have never failed. The US Army, in 

spite of all of that, has never failed the country since so...yes?

Henry Gold:

I don't have a question, I have a statement and I want to thank you for what you said 

today about soldiering being a love affair. I want to thank General Brown for personalizing 

an intellectual exercise that was punctuated by his personal involvement, an affair of the 

heart. I was very pleased to discover that Bob Sorley's title of his talk today, which I just 

discovered yesterday, is called "Soldering as an Affair of the Heart." That has motivated 

me through my entire life and I want to thank you. Those three distinguished gentlemen for 

sharing my feelings. Thank you.

GEN Sullivan: 

Yeah. Yeah, it's, I think at some point in your journey as a soldier you make the swap. 

You just, it just happens. I tried to think about when it did, I can't. I don't know when it 

happened but it does. And you can not think about your life anymore as just one person; 

you're a part of this huge organization and it is an affair of the heart. I mean why would 

somebody who's 73 years old on a beautiful sunny day in northern New England think of 

what he's looking at as anything other than scenery? I'm thinking about actually climbing 

those hills. How would I have soldiers do it? That's more than this. It's this. Who else, 

anybody else?
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Questions and Answers

Audience Member 1: 

Sir, I got a question and it's a little bit off topic so I apologize but I've been in a lot of 

correspondence with (inaudible) at this center about the proper role for a retired general 

and what are the limits?

GEN Sullivan: 

Well, you know, I pride myself on an interesting position because I run the Association 

of the US Army, so sometimes my opinions are contrary to that of the Pentagon, like pay, 

healthcare, so forth and so on, so but I have an institutional reason to say what I say and 

I know it may be, oh, parsing. But I think that, you know, for obvious reasons I think it's 

okay. I think, and there may be somebody who disagrees with that but I think that some 

of what we heard was off the ranch. I don't think that some of what we heard was what 

we would expect of a retired general. I think as Rick [Swain], nice to see you, Rick, I see 

you there under that moustache; I didn't recognize you initially, he wrote a very interesting 

piece on all of that. I think it was beyond what one would expect and this constant drum 

beat by a couple of them is somewhat troublesome. Distinguished officers in their own 

right, and I can't quite figure it out. And I think that this critiquing of senior leaders in 

uniform and second guessing and so forth for general officers is over the line. And constant 

appearing on TV as the world's living expert about events which you might even not even 

understand, I think is frankly beyond the pale too. I don't like it. I don't like it. I'm not sure 

frankly how they can rationalize some of what they've said. General Vessey said once, take 

advantage of a perfect opportunity to keep your mouth shut. (pause) I don't know what are 

they saying about it? Since this is a dialogue, what's West Point saying about it?

Dr. Sorley:

Well I was talking to...do you know Don Slander?

GEN Sullivan: 

Don Slander, yeah, hell yeah.

Dr. Sorley: 

(inaudible)

GEN Sullivan:

He can't. It doesn't work. You're coming in weak and distorted, Bob which is a great 

Armor expression when— 

Dr. Sorley: 

Broken and stupid is the other one. But, yeah, thanks. Of course this would be the one 

that doesn't work, but what they are saying, sir, out there is that how you are really bound 

not to say anything that will damage the institution in any way. If you are, attain the title of 

a professional, you are a steward of that profession for the rest of your life essentially and 

once you take off your uniform, you still have an obligation to those that are still in it not 

to in any way harm it. So I guess it's the do no harm rule.
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GEN Sullivan:

I can tell you, that is a much more elegant expression of it than what I was stumbling 

through. I believe the most important thing to be able to say to anybody is, I'm an American 

soldier and proud of it. And to think that someone, some senior general would critique 

someone who he probably had a role in creating...I mean I don't get it. I don't get it. That's 

my way of thinking about it. I just don't get it. And I don't like it, and I don't think it should 

happen. And Rick, I mean his paper, have you read his paper? It's a very good paper. I mean 

we're still on the payroll in a crass sense but it's more important that it transcends money. 

That's not to say you might not have an opinion about something but, you can have your 

opinions but it just depends on how you talk about your opinions and where you talk about 

them.

Dr. Sorley:

And what was the, of course the context of this is if you disagree with the policy, there 

are those who say, well General (inaudible), you don't get to contradict judicial policy. And 

there's the school of thought that says, well, who has a more informed opinion about how 

the policy translates into operations than the retired general officers? So that is a positive 

attribution to the public discourse. To have an actual expert opinion and not self-appointed 

pundits and self-appointed experts who spend 72 hours on the ground and therefore know 

all there is to know.

GEN Sullivan: 

Well some of those who are doing it are those expert opinions. I can tell you the week 

after I walked out of the Pentagon, I didn't know what was going on. I'm in the Pentagon a 

lot and I talk to people a lot. I don't think I'm a, I mean I understand the broad outlines of 

what's going on in Afghanistan and what happened in Iraq but it's vicarious. I did not use 

Marshall, that business about Marshall and saying to the President of the United States and 

our British Allies, I don't think we should go to North Africa; I view Italy as a sideshow 

and in a sense, you know, you could argue that it was although in another sense. There's 

two sides to that coin and then of course his desire to invade the continent in '42...but he 

gave his opinion and he didn't go to the Washington Post or the New York Times and say, 

well I told the President this. He kept his mouth shut. Colin Powell, by the way has any 

stage he wants and people pay him tons of money to be on any stage that he wants, and 

he doesn't have anything. He doesn't critique anybody; he goes along. And you know the 

example I give to people at Carlyle? The question has never come up here. It's normally 

Carlyle. General Shinseki said what he said in the course of his duty. He was asked three or 

four times and he finally gave an answer. He was obliged to do that, give me your personal 

opinion. When he retired is when you see the mark of the man. He was offered tons of 

money to write a book for political reasons and he didn't do it. Character counts. Character 

counts and I believe most officers can process what I just said. Character counts.

Mr. Gott: 

Sir, our time has ended for this panel. I'd like to introduce the Director of the Combat 

Studies Institute, Dr. William Glenn Robertson who would like to say a few words, sir.
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Questions and Answers

Dr. Robertson: 

General Sullivan, we thank you for those most inspiring words. I heard last night that 

we had made a great faux pas in that we had not gotten you a copy of our latest publication 

on the current conflict in Afghanistan, A Different Kind of War, done by our Contemporary 

Operation Studies team. So on behalf of General MacFarland, the LD&E community, 

Combat Studies Institute and the Combined Arms Center, I'd like to present you with this 

copy of "A Different Kind of War."

GEN Sullivan: 

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thanks. It means more to me to get it this way 

than to get it some other way so thanks a lot. Thank you.

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Day 2, Panel 4: Conventional and Unconventional Challenges of the Cold 

War, 1945-1975

Soldiering as an Affair of the Heart by Lewis Sorley, Ph.D.

(Transcript of Presentation)

Mr. Ramsey:

OK, we’ll begin now with the next panel. Panel number four today will deal with 

conventional and unconventional challenges of the Cold War, 1945-1975. We have two 

former soldiers and practicing historians. I happen to know them both from a previous life 

and have the greatest respect for both of them. We’ll have Dr. Sorley first and he’ll give his 

presentation, and then we’ll have Dr. Gole.

Dr. Lewis Sorley was a graduate of the Military Academy. He was experienced in 

armoring armored cavalry units. He also worked with the CIA. He taught at the Military 

Academy and the Army War College, and he received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins 

University. He’s written numerous books; among them are biographies of Creighton 

Abrams, General Howard K. Johnson, and General Brown mentioned his well received 

book A Better War, which deals with Vietnam. I just want to mention that he’s done three 

edited works, one of which CSI published last year, a two volume study called Press On: 

The Selected Works of General Donn A. Starry. Dr. Sorley’s presentation today is titled 

Soldiering as an Affair of the Heart. Now, Dr. Sorley.

Dr. Sorley:

Well, you know the old saying in Vaudeville, never follow the dog act. But I have to tell 

you, I am honored to follow my friend Gordon Sullivan, and I told him outside that I have 

heard him speak many times and I have never been more moved than I was this morning. 

If that was not straight from the heart about what it means to be a soldier, then I’m never 

going to hear anything like that. It’s also a good lead-in to what my good friend Henry Gole 

and I want to talk about. Everybody who stood up here practically has said something about 

what it means to come back to Fort Leavenworth, and I’m going to follow in that mode.

I came here at the age of four. My father was a student officer, and we lived in the 

Beehive. The Beehive in those days was a residential building, full of kids and dogs and 

bicycles and a great place to live. And I think this is the earliest thing I can remember on 

my own, as compared to, you know, what you hear your parents talk about, and it was the 

Stable Sergeant who came on Saturday morning with ponies, and we stood at the curb with 

a nickel in our mitten, and Corporal then Isaac Harris, a Buffalo soldier, long OD (olive 

drab) overcoat with rows of brass buttons, came with the reins of ponies in his hand, and 

we gave him the nickel and he put us on the pony and took us once around the Beehive, 

which if you’re four looks like a pretty long trip. And I thought about him for many years, 

and I was talking about him once when my sister was visiting and was at my dinner table, 

and she said, “Oh, Bob, I think you have a picture of him in your baby book.” I don’t know 

if they have baby books anymore; I haven’t looked at mine in 25 years, but I ran down in 
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Panel 4

the basement and got it, and sure enough, there’s a picture of Corporal Harris with the reins 

of three ponies in his hand. On the left pony is Buzzy Glinch, age four, later my classmate 

at West Point; on center pony is me; and on the other pony, we haven’t figured out who 

that kid was yet, but I hope we can someday. Anyhow, you know that they closed the 

Beehive as a residence and later rehabbed it and reopened it as a gaming center, so I asked 

Leavenworth if they would accept a gift from me, and they said they would, so we had this 

blown up and nicely framed, and if you go in the foyer, you don’t even have to have the 

clearance to go inside, just go in the foyer of the now Beehive Gaming Center or whatever, 

you’ll see this picture of Corporal Isaac Harris, nicknamed Horse because of the ponies. 

And I learned about him, I kept tracking down more and more about him. I learned about 

him from General Truscott’s great memoir, The Twilight of the United States Cavalry, 

and to my delight I learned that he didn’t just get the nickels we kids gave him but that at 

Christmastime the fathers gave him some real money. And so he’s commemorated there, 

and I think the plaque says something like this: “In memory of Corporal Isaac ‘Horse’ 

Harris, whose Saturday morning pony rides brought joy to a generation of Army kids.” So 

that’s my early Leavenworth recollection, and I love to come back here, especially since 

I got a little short shrift. The Army, in its wisdom, sent me to the Naval Command and 

Staff School, and that was fun but not as, I would’ve loved to have been here, too. I wish 

I could’ve done both.

I want to say something about John Brown, who got this conference off to such a 

wonderful start, and I told him last night at dinner that I was delighted that every succeeding 

speaker had found some reason to make reference to the remarks that John began with, and 

John mentioned an experience in his early service when he took command of a tank platoon 

and had some very inadequate subordinates there, and he’s such a gentleman that he didn’t 

rat me out as the battalion commander at that time, but that was me. (laughter) And John, 

I’m very sorry I wasn’t able to do more for you then, but that’s what we had! But you 

handled it, you handled it really well, and I’ve always been proud of you. And I will say 

this, too, since General Sullivan gave us such an eloquent testimonial not only to the utility 

but to the power of historical example and historical recollections, the Army in Europe 

at that time, we’re talking very early 1970s, was really in a terrible state. It was short of 

everything there was to be short of, and the soldiers that we had were, a lot of them anyhow, 

had been enlisted or drafted. They had served a tour in Vietnam, and then they were within 

months, literally, of being eligible for discharge, but to keep our NATO numbers up instead 

of sending them home or putting them somewhere in the States they sent them in Germany, 

maybe three, four months to serve. And they didn’t want to be there, of course; what they 

wanted to be was out of the Army and home, and frankly I didn’t blame them. In an effort 

to motivate these young soldiers I tried to learn all I could about the history of that battalion 

because it was a direct lineal descendent of the battalion Colonel Abrams had had in World 

War II, the 37th Tank Battalion, and, in fact, this battalion, 2d Battalion, 37th Armor, was 

directly descended from B Company of the 37th Tank Battalion that had been commanded 

by a great soldier named Jimmy Leach, a later Chief of Armor Branch. So, you know, I 

went to Bastone and learned all I could about that. I wrote a little three or four page history 

of the battalion, had that mimeographed, passed that around, gave little talks on this and 

that and the other thing to the officers and the sergeants and the soldiers, and I wish I could 
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tell you that that had a big effect but frankly I don’t think I influenced anybody very much, 

in large part because we were turning over about a quarter of the outfit every 90 days, 

because, you know, these youngsters would finish their three, four months, and then they’d 

go home and be discharged. And it wasn’t just us, it was pretty much that’s the way it was 

in Germany in those days. But the one, I’ll say, saving grace is that in the process of that I 

influenced myself considerably, so much so that when I later looked around and I didn’t see 

anybody telling what I thought was the great story of Creighton Abrams, not only in World 

War II but thereafter, and eventually I thought I would try to do that myself. So anyway, 

John, I’m very proud of what you’ve accomplished since then, and I wish I could’ve gotten 

you off to a happier start, but that’s the way it was!

John Brown:

That was only momentary. The next day was much better. (laughter)

Dr. Sorley: 

I also wanted to thank you for explaining something to me that I’ve wondered about 

for a long time. You showed the acumen for leadership, and then, you know, loyalty and 

all those things, and I had always wondered why they had their seven things, and why they 

had two of them were two words instead of having nice, clean one word for each one, and 

I think I now understand. They didn’t put just ‘courage’, they put ‘personal courage’ so 

they could have something started with a P, so thank you, thanks for explaining that to me! 

I’ve wondered about that for years. And I would like to give myself a little credit, also: I 

once invented an acronym, a very useful acronym. As cadets we were, of course, taught 

the principles of war, and we were supposed to be able to regurgitate those on command, 

and so I invented the following acronym: MANEUVER US MOOSES. (laughter) So 

‘maneuver’ is one of them, of course, U is unity of command, S is one of their three S’s. 

You can make it whatever, maybe simplicity, and then you go on, mass objective and so on 

spells MOOSES. Well, everybody can remember MANEUVER US MOOSES, so a lot of 

my classmates are very proud of me for that, and so now I’ll consider myself a connoisseur 

of acronyms, thanks to you.

I really enjoyed yesterday, and I would characterize what we talked about yesterday 

maybe as dealing primarily with institutional approaches to leadership and the teaching of 

leadership, and so today I would like to talk about an individual approach to leadership and 

the teaching of leadership, and maybe you could look at those as two ends of a spectrum. 

You know, General Sullivan talked about the school and the unit and the self study as the 

three pillars of education, not only in these fields but, I think he’d agree, in all professional 

fields. So no big surprise to anybody here, at least anybody who knows me, I would like to 

talk about Creighton Abrams, and I want to talk about some of the examples of his leading 

by example at various levels, and then maybe draw from that some analysis of the quality 

of, qualities of leadership he exemplified and what that had to do with the concept and 

teaching of leadership during the years that he served.

You know, yesterday we played around a little bit with the age old question of whether 

leaders are born or made, and I think the respectable middle ground is that there are some 

of each, and maybe you could argue also that no matter whether they’re made you can 
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maybe improve on what they start with, and I suggested that the whole premise of our 

school system is that yes, leaders can be made, or at least improved. And I believe that, or 

I wouldn’t be here. So I hope that you will agree with that, too. 

A soldier who was with Abrams in World War II, Lieutenant Colonel, then Abrams 

Commanding Officer of 37th Tank Battalion later said, “Colonel Abrams never talked 

much about leadership, he just exampled it,” and I thought that was a nice formulation. 

Abrams was commissioned in the Cavalry in 1936 when he graduated from West Point, 

and he was assigned a troop duty in the famous 7th Cavalry, in those days, of course, still 

the horse cavalry. And as almost everyone here knows, I’m sure the Depression era Army 

was a very austere organization, and the unit that Abrams joined, like many, perhaps most 

in those days, was, interesting to me, short-handed in soldiers but up to strength in horses. 

Now, I’m not sure why, but what that meant was, you know, horses can’t just lie around. 

They have to be exercised, and so the way they would do this is they would go out, a soldier 

would ride one horse and he’d have two on leads, so he’d exercise three horses on one go 

round, and they were out doing this one day, they’re moving across the desert near Fort 

Bliss. Abrams was at the head of the column and one of the soldiers with him was a new 

private who was named Sanford, and Sanford was having a little trouble with his horses. 

So he started around one side of a sand dune with the horse he was riding, and those he was 

leading decided to go around the other side. Brief tug of war, inevitably, of course, lost by 

Sanford with the result that he ended up being pulled out of his saddle and dragged across 

a sand dune, which, of course, was covered with mesquite and cactus, and this roughed up 

poor Sanford no little bit. I’m telling you this because Abrams is a brand new officer. You 

know, he’s been through West Point, and that’s about it, and he used this mishap to apply 

what I later learned was a technique he used throughout his career, and that was to make 

an example of somebody he thought was doing a good job. So when the troops had gotten 

back to stable and they looked after the horses, Abrams lined his soldiers up, and he said 

to them, “You men can take Private Sanford here as an example.” They pulled him right 

off his horse, but by God, he didn’t let loose of his lead horses. Sanford told me 40 years 

later this had a tremendous effect on him. “There I stood,” he said, “with my ass full of 

mesquite and cactus stickers but just proud as hell.” (laughter) Well, more to the point, it 

had an impact on all those other soldiers. Here’s a lieutenant, a brand new lieutenant and 

a brand new private, and he’s holding this guy up as an example. And I could give you a 

number of other cases of that, but I think that was a wonderful technique. 

Even in those early days of his service Abrams demonstrated another quality that he 

would later describe as an essential attribute of successful leadership, and I happen to agree 

with this so I’m going to quote it to you, too: you have to like soldiers. And often he would, 

in illustrating this point, he would recall an occasion, again at Bliss when he’s a brand new 

officer, when he is the Duty Officer. And late one evening some soldiers who had been on 

pass in town, El Paso, and had enjoyed themselves quite a bit, came back to post with a 

couple of alligators that they had borrowed from the El Paso Zoo. (laughter) This is going 

to be trouble. They put these alligators in the basement of one of the barracks and tossed 

in a couple of smoke bombs and locked the door and pulled the fire alarm. Well, before 

long the Post Fire Department arrives, and, of course, so does the Duty Officer, Lieutenant 

Abrams, and the Fire Department arrives. They’ve been chopping down the doors with 
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their axes and hosing down the premises, and Abrams described this later with some relish. 

He said, “The Fire Department came in and they knocked down the doors and they got 

in there with their hoses and the alligators and the smoke, and,” he says, “it was really a 

mess.” And he added, “Of course, you can’t authorize that kind of thing,” but you could 

hear the smile in his voice when he said it. No real harm was done. I guess the alligators 

made it back; I don’t know that. But Abrams enjoyed soldiers, and he had a lot of stories to 

tell about them, and many times those stories were at his own expense. I’ll just ad lib one 

very briefly because it’ll illustrate that aspect of it.

Abrams is later commanding the great 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, and down in 

one of the squadrons a master sergeant is court marshaled for some offense, and he is 

busted all the way down to private first class, and he had considerable service, and Abrams 

reviews this and he concludes that that’s too harsh, and so he amends that to only one 

grade reduction and he takes the sergeant into his headquarters, you know, regimental level 

headquarters, and he has him in and he gives him a heart to heart talk, and he decides to 

put him in charge of the post theater. And he says, “Now sergeant, I’m giving you another 

chance. Go and make a better life for your family.” This is about, let’s say, the 20th of 

December. On Christmas Eve the sergeant absconds with the proceeds of the theater and 

never seen since. (laughter) Abrams tells that story on himself. I rather like that. I know 

some general officers who probably never admit anything went wrong on their watch.

The young officers, Abrams and Bruce Palmer, Jr. and others of their ilk in these late 

1930s units, they understood that they were in the last days of the horse cavalry. There 

were many things they found valuable there, and yet as World War II approached and a 

newly forming mechanized corps came along, lots of them volunteered for service with 

that, Abrams among them and Bruce Palmer and others, and so before long, 27 years old, 

just six years out of West Point, Abrams took command of a tank battalion, and he trained 

them hard. In training preparatory to going overseas on the gunnery range Abrams or one 

of his battalion staff officers would ride on the back deck of the tank to observe how the 

crew performed and what they did on the gunnery range, and they’d coach and critique. 

Well, some of the company commanders came to Abrams and they said that it made them 

nervous to have a staff officer riding the back deck of their tank. “Well,” Abrams said, “if 

that makes them nervous, what are they going to do when the Germans start shooting at 

them?” And so that was the end of that complaint. And Abrams set some fairly demanding 

standards for how quickly you had to get off the first round and get a first round hit, how 

quickly you had to get off the second round. Before long, the company commanders are 

back. They say the standards are too tough, it’s impossible to do that in the time that 

Abrams said, specified. So Abrams gets some members of his battalion staff and he forms 

them into a little impromptu tank crew and they do a couple dry runs, and then they go out 

with him as a tank commander and they go through the gunnery course and show how it 

could indeed be done within the parameters that he had established. And so that was the 

end of the complaints on that front. And that’s the way it went.

The battalion that Abrams took into combat, 37th Tank Battalion, had as its motto 

“Courage conquers,” and I’m going to say if ever a unit lived up to its motto it was this 

one. I once gave a talk based entirely on unit mottos and what they revealed about Army 
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values, and I had a lot of fun putting that together, but John and I later served in the unit 

and wore the crest that said “Courage conquers,” and I was always very proud about that. 

And when they got into combat, staff officers at higher levels, division and corps, later 

revealed that, and they would set their radios to Abrams’ frequency just to be entertained 

by his hard driving brand of leadership. Said a tank driver from his battalion, “I can recall 

during our tank battles Abe was right alongside of our tank, giving orders to my tank 

commander and having a ball, shooting tanks like the rest of the boys. He would mix in 

wherever the toughest battle was. It made us feel more like fighting harder when you could 

see a great man like Abe right alongside of you.” As the conflict neared its end the 4th 

Armored Division’s commander wrote, “The brilliant combat record of Lieutenant Colonel 

Creighton Abrams constitutes one of the sagas of this war.” His command was the first to 

cross the Moselle River, he led the advance which resulted in the relief of Bastogne, and 

his was the first element in Third Army to reach the Rhine. In the process Abrams won two 

distinguished service crosses, two Silver Stars and a battlefield promotion to Colonel, but 

he gave the credit to his soldiers, writing near the war’s end to his wife Julie to say, “I have 

traveled in gallant company.” 

Now, I would like to say that despite these impressive battlefield accomplishments, what 

continues to move me most about Abrams as a combat leader is how his men remembered 

him. “I have fond memories of the kind of man Abrams was,” said one of his maintenance 

sergeants. “He never made things more difficult and unhappy than they were, as did some 

of the officers of far less rank.” A tank commander said, “I remember his big smile and 

hard handshake when I got my Silver Star.” And another, “When he smiled, his smile 

was complete.” Remembered a radio operator who wrote to Abrams many years later, “I 

have never forgotten your strong sense of values and magnetic feeling of leadership. I still 

respect you as a soldier and love you as a fine human being. I teach children to grow up to 

be like General Abrams.” I ask you to imagine being a commander in combat, and tough 

combat and continuous combat, and inspiring that kind of admiration. His reconnaissance 

sergeant, who I got to know quite well and was with Abrams all the way, spoke of his 

essential modesty. “He was,” he said, “no changed from a captain to a colonel.” Said 

another, writing to Julie Abrams after her husband’s death, “Abe had a tremendous effect 

on me when we and the world were young. His strength of character and kindness he was 

wont to show to civilian soldiers, such as myself, is a memory I cherish. The time I spent 

in his command I consider to be the most fortunate period of my life.” And said another, 

a company commander, “I consider that Abe was one of the major forces influencing 

my life. I often think about him, even today.” This was many years after Abrams’ death. 

“His memory has never left me.” A lieutenant from one of the division’s armored infantry 

battalions, later a lieutenant general, this is Dewitt Smith, for whom I served at the War 

College, said, “As a very senior officer, Abrams seemed much the same,” as he had known 

him in World War II, “a little older, of course, a little chunkier, perhaps more reserved, but 

the essential qualities remained unchanged: moral courage to go with the physical courage 

of another day; dignity; strength; a sense of humor; philosophical; total integrity; and great 

wisdom. Above all, integrity and wisdom.” “Character counts,” General Sullivan told us.

Shortly after the end of World War II Abrams was back in Europe and in command 

of another tank battalion, this one called the 63d, the only tank battalion in the European 
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theater in these early days of the Occupation Army. He wasn’t too happy with that at 

first. His outlook was he’d commanded a tank battalion when it counted, in combat, but 

he soon found out that commanding one in post World War II Europe was a lot more 

challenging than commanding one in Germany, where all you really had to worry about 

was the enemy. But he pitched into it the way he pitched in to everything else. He had an 

Adjutant. Some of you will know the name, Hazard, who later became a colonel. Hazard 

was the S1, the S2, the S4, the S everything basically, because the other staff officers were 

not too sharp. Abrams would take officers out of the companies if he didn’t think they 

were performing too well, and he’d put them on his staff where he could sort of help them 

along. So Saturday mornings, we worked until noon on Saturdays in those days, Saturday 

morning Abrams would come in and he’d say to Hazard, “Well, what are we going to be 

dissatisfied with this morning?” And Hazard said, he came in with his overcoat on and his 

helmet on, and he looked like he was going to Bastogne, but he’s going out to inspect the 

companies. But in the process of setting high standards and being exacting in insisting 

that they be met, Abrams also, and this is crucially important, I think, made it fun and 

challenging and exciting. There was a young lieutenant in that battalion that later became 

a general officer who told me that he didn’t go on leave for two years. Why? “I was afraid 

I’d miss something,” he said. 

Over the years, from what I’ve told you now what I’m about to tell will come as no 

surprise, I’m sure, over the years Abrams emphasized the overwhelming importance of the 

soldier. “People are not in the Army,” he said over and over again, “People are the Army.” 

And often elaborating he would add, “By people I do not mean personnel. I do not mean 

in strength. I do not mean MOSs. I do not mean files. I do not mean any such categories 

that deal with people as a commodity. I mean living, breathing, serving human beings. 

They have spirit and will, and they have strengths and weaknesses, and they have names 

and faces. Whatever is accomplished,” he said, “is accomplished with people. They are the 

heart of our preparedness, and this preparedness as a nation and as an Army depends upon 

the spirit of our soldiers. Without it we cannot succeed.”

A closely related matter was tradition, and again, Abrams was passionate on the topic. 

“Tradition is important for an Army, for our Army,” he told members of the Old Guard. “It 

gives us pride in ourselves and our abilities, it helps us set great standards, it instills faith 

in ourselves and in the country, and,” he added, “management cannot do this. Efficiency 

isn’t the only requirement. We need to form links with the past, a past that gives us real 

pride, deep pride.” Senior civilian officials of the Army were among those influenced by 

the Abrams example, especially as they moved up into the higher ranks. One of these was 

Paul Ignatius, who was then an Assistant Secretary of the Army. When he was new in 

his job he made his first trip to visit the Army in Europe. Abrams was then commanding 

the 3d Armored Division, one stop on the Ignatius itinerary. The unit was in training at 

Grafenwöhr. As Abrams took Ignatius around to visit various companies and platoons, said 

Ignatius later, “General Abe never intruded himself between me and the immediate unit 

commander. They would arrive at a unit, land the helicopter, and General Abrams would 

disappear, and I must say,” continued Ignatius, “that I did not find in subsequent visits an 

officer in all of the services who was willing to do that. He wasn’t there, standing there 

listening to what they were saying or coaching them in their answers, and I felt that this 
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was an indication of the confidence he had in his people, and really the confidence he had 

in himself.”

The first time Abrams went to this chapel serving the 3d Armored Division Headquarters 

after taking command of the Division, he found that they had no choir, so the next Sunday 

he showed up in choir robe with hymnal and processed down the aisle right behind the 

chaplain, a choir of one. Next Sunday, full choir, full chapel. Everyone wanted to see 

Abrams in a choir robe following the chaplain down the aisle, result of his example.

Like most senior officers, as Abrams went around the division visiting various elements 

he often met soldiers he had served with on earlier occasions. One of those in the 3d 

Armored Division was Sergeant Love, a platoon sergeant. I’ve spent much effort trying 

to find Sergeant Love but never succeeded, I’m sorry to say. Abrams said to Love, “Well, 

how are the troops that you’ve been getting in?” And Sergeant Love told him, “They were 

great,” he said. One was a young man who wanted to be a tank driver, but to have a driver’s 

license you had to be a high school graduate, so Love had enrolled this young soldier in 

a GED program, and sometimes on the weekend he’d stop by the house and Mrs. Love 

would help him with the math. Another newly assigned soldier had been very homesick, 

said Love. He was about the age of Love’s oldest son, and so they’d have him over to the 

house for dinner every week or so, and the two boys became friends, and that helped a lot 

with the homesickness, and so on, stories illustrating that Love knew and cared about every 

soldier entrusted to his leadership. When Abrams got back to his headquarters that evening 

he was talking with the division sergeant major, I mean, excuse me, Judge Advocate, and 

he said to his top lawyer, “If we had more Sergeants like Sergeant Love, you’d be out of 

a job.”

Later Abrams would go back to Europe and command V Corps, next higher level 

up from 3d Armored Division, and he had 3d Armored Division as one of the divisions 

under his command then, and demonstrated that despite being elevated to that level he 

still focused on the soldier. So during the course of a winter maneuver he happened on a 

young trooper who, if you’ve been to Europe this will resonate for you, inexperienced in 

operating on the high crowned roads that were now icy and wet, had managed to slide his 

tank off the road and into a deep ditch. Abrams stopped his Jeep and he went over to talk to 

the tank driver. “Having trouble, son?”, he asked. “Yes, sir,” said the soldier disconsolately. 

“Here, let me show you how,” said Abrams. With that he took the youngster’s place in 

the driver’s seat, gunned the engine up to such a pitch that the crowd which had gathered 

thought the transmission would surely be ripped out of the hull, and Abrams neatly popped 

the tank right out of the ditch and up on a road. “There,” he said, “see how it’s done?” “Yes, 

sir,” said the tank driver. “Think you can do it?”, said Abrams. “Yes, sir.” “Good,” said 

Abrams, and with that he reversed the tank back into the ditch, climbed out, got in his Jeep, 

and without another word or backward glance drove away. (laughter)

Now, I’ve been giving you anecdotes about exampling leadership, as one young soldier 

once said about it, but as he became more seniored, just as we saw General Sullivan here 

today, Abrams also, of course, was asked to talk about leadership, and there were some 

few points that he came back to again and again, and many had to do with the essential 

elements of principled leadership. “Nobody on the face of the Earth can take honesty away 
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from anybody,” he said. “If you’re going to lose it, you’ve got to give it up yourself.” He 

had these sayings that, you know, the people picked up and repeated around, and so one 

of those dealt with what I’ll say, I’ll call essential modesty. He often said, “There’s no end 

to what can be accomplished if you don’t care who gets the credit.” His wife Julie told me 

he got that from General Marshall, which I would like to believe is the case. That’s a nice 

lineage. Asked another time to speak about leadership, Abrams stressed his conviction 

that leadership in our Army involved service. “What the country needs, what the country 

expects: it is,” he stressed, “beyond material compensation. Nobody can buy it and nobody 

can sell it. It has to come from the heart.” And thus, one of his favorite sayings, “Soldiering 

is an affair of the heart.” 

When he was invited to West Point to talk to cadets of the First Class about leadership, 

Abrams told them, “What you are about to come into this summer,” when they graduate 

and were commissioned, “is a kind of service which in my opinion is what the country 

needs and, to a large degree, what the country expects. You cannot be compensated or 

reimbursed for it in a material way. There isn’t a salary that is adequate for what is needed 

and expected. What the country needs and expects from you as leaders just isn’t for sale 

anywhere in the world. Nobody can buy it and nobody can sell it. It has to come from the 

heart.” Like most senior officers, Abrams frequently had occasion to testify before some 

element of the Congress. A famous anecdote concerns an occasion when, as Vice Chief of 

Staff, he was a witness at hearings on the proposed Army budget, and, you know, they go 

from one topic to the next to the next, and so someone asked him whether the Army needed 

a new handgun to replace the Model 1911 caliber 45 pistol that was then still in use. “Well,” 

responded Abrams, evaluating the 45, “it all depends on the circumstances. In a crowded 

elevator there’s no finer weapon.” (laughter) And I’ve seen the transcript, and they move on 

to the next item. And I see the hook is coming here, so I’ll move quickly now.

Years later, still on the Congress for a minute, in a tribute to Abrams after his death, 

a Senator McIntyre recalled those occasions when Abrams had been a witness. “In the 

veritable sea of uniforms, faces, and voices that flows before the Committee each year,” said 

the Senator, “his voice stood out. His voice, unlike some, was not loud, not overbearing, 

not pompous, not righteous, not indignant, not demanding. No, his voice was quiet. His 

thoughts were personal and candid. He spoke modestly with force and meaning.” I submit 

that that, too, was an example of leadership by example. Abrams spent, as I’m sure you 

know, five years in Vietnam, the last four as commander of American forces there, and 

during that time our forces were being drawn down. I believe, and there are good historians 

here; try me on this, I believe Abrams may be the only example of the commander of 

an expeditionary force who sent his Army home before himself. And so as these units 

went, Abrams would go and talk to them, units that sometimes had been there for years on 

end, and he told them goodbye and he thanked them for what they had done. An example 

was the 1st Infantry Division, in which he said, “In a changing world, changing times, 

and changing attitudes, the 1st Infantry Division represents a constancy of those essential 

virtues of mankind: humility, courage, devotion, and sacrifice. The world has changed a 

lot,” he said, “but this division continues to serve as it had in the beginning, and I choose 

to feel that this is part of the cement and the rock and the steel that holds our great country 

together.” And then, I’ve heard the recording, a husky voice, husky with emotion, he closed 
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by quoting back to them the division’s own great motto, “No mission too difficult, no 

sacrifice too great, duty first.” 

Finally, it was time for Abrams himself to say goodbye, and on the last night in 

Vietnam, speaking to fellow officers in the command mess, Abrams told them this: “The 

longer I serve, the more convinced I become that the single most important attribute of the 

professional officer is integrity.” As you know, Abrams went on to be Chief of Staff of the 

Army, and to put it on the road to recovery after the long ordeal of Vietnam. Abrams died 

after just under two years in office, after which General Jack Vessey, former Chairman 

of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this: “When Americans watched the stunning success of 

our armed forces in Desert Storm, they were watching the Abrams vision in action. The 

modern equipment, the effective air support, the use of the Reserve components, and, most 

important of all, the advanced training which taught our people how to stay alive on the 

battlefield were all seeds planted by Abe.”

I’m going to skip ahead now because I don’t want to use more time than I should. 

I’ll just say this: I interviewed probably 5 or 600 people over the course of a number of 

years in working on the Abrams story. Since he died before he retired they weren’t able 

to do the usual end of career interviews at the Military History Institute that they do with 

senior officers. Lieutenant General Dewitt Smith was the commandant then, he’s the one 

I quoted about the younger Abrams and the older Abrams, so he cranked up a special oral 

history program called The Creighton Abrams story, and pairs of student officers went 

around and interviewed people. Over time 55 different people were interviewed, including 

General Abrams’ widow and his sister and people who served with him at every level of 

command, and different, you know, groups of students would do this as one year would 

end and another year would start and so on, and over time they realized that they were only 

getting very positive stuff and they were getting worried that they would be criticized that 

they had just done a puff job, so they began to tell their interviewers, the people they were 

interviewing, interviewees, this and ask them, you know, “Isn’t there anything on the other 

side?” And they got to George Patton, the younger, who had known Abrams very well, 

including from the 63d Tank Battalion post World War II. And Patton says, “Oh yeah, hell 

yes.” He said, “Abe had his faults just like any of us, but not very goddamn many of them,” 

and that’s all he would tell them. (laughter) And so, you know, I tried in the books that I 

have written about him to say the things that I thought I had deduced, and one of them was 

you wouldn’t want to encounter him very early in the morning. He got off to a rough, you 

know, sort of a rough bear start, and he did drink a lot and enjoyed it, and people liked to 

drink with him. Nobody would ever say that it had adversely expected his performance of 

duty, and I haven’t found any examples where I thought I could say that it had, and that was 

about it. You know, that was about all that I could find. 

When he died, as I said, General Smith was the commandant at War College, and he 

had a monument erected there. If you’ve been to Carlisle Barracks I’m sure you’ve seen 

it; it’s just a chunk of rock, really, and it’s just right outside the main entrance so every 

student will see it every day when he or she leaves the college, and has on it these few 

words of Abrams’ own: “There must be,” he said, “within our Army a sense of purpose and 

a dedication to that purpose. There must be a willingness to march a little farther, to carry a 
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heavier load, to step out into the darkness and the unknown for the safety and well being of 

others.” Even now, 40 years later, I think that is his message to us from beyond the grave.

I’ve been talking about leadership by example and the teaching of leadership by 

example. I know that not all of us can be Creighton Abrams or be like Creighton Abrams, 

but what I think we can do is learn from and be inspired by the example of someone like 

Creighton Abrams, and in that most magnificent of all Army recruiting slogans, do our 

dead level best to be all that we can be. Thanks very much. (applause)

Mr. Ramsey:

Thank you, Dr. Sorley. Our next presenter is Dr. Gole. Henry spent a lot of time 

overseas. He was an infantryman in Korea. He served two tours in Vietnam as a Special 

Forces officer. He also taught at the Military Academy and the War College. He has a 

degree, a Ph.D. from Temple University. He’s written several books, and one of the latest 

one has to do with General DePuy, and his presentation today is Leadership: DePuy, Slim, 

and You. Now, Henry.

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Day 2, Panel 4: Conventional and Unconventional Challenges of the Cold 

War, 1945-1975

Soldiering as an Affair of the Heart Leadership: DePuy, Slim, and You by 

Henry Gole, Ph.D.

(Transcript of Presentation)

Dr. Gole:

Thank you, Bob. First, thanks to the organizers for keeping this on track, well conceived. 

Interesting to me that General Brown’s remarks, General Sullivan’s remarks—which I 

hadn’t heard, obviously, I had no idea what Bob was going to say—have all emphasized 

the unit dimension, which happens to be the thing about military service that matters the 

very most to me. I’m happy to see a lot of, not a lot, a few old, familiar faces, and some new 

ones. I’m pleased to share this session with Bob Sorley. Besides being a gentleman and a 

scholar and an old friend, who I first met in the archives of the Military History Institute, I 

don’t know if he remembers that; that was our initial meeting, at Military History Institute 

in the old building, in the old attic, and he was plowing through some stuff for Abrams, and 

I was working on a book having to do with more plans. I’ve known him since then, and I 

think I can say without fear of contradiction that no one knows the officers who rose to the 

top of the tree, the Four Stars, the Three Stars, in the period from the ’60s through the ’70s, 

’80s, and probably until this day. Most recently he’s produced the book, edited the book on 

General Starry, which got a very, very intelligent and positive review in the latest [edition 

of] Parameters by Greg Fontenot.

As I thought about today I thought I’d take a very small bite of a very big apple called 

leadership, and I conceived of this as my advice to aspiring young leaders, not a company 

of academics, in which connection, by the way, I felt sad to look around and to listen to this 

very powerful commentary by former Chiefs of Staff of the US Army and there are only 

30 or 40 people in the room. I was almost wounded at that. But that is not my business. My 

advice to the aspiring leader is called Leadership: DePuy, Slim, and You. Every American 

recruit in basic training takes about one or two days before he pronounces on the subject 

of leadership. The polite form of his expression of disapproval typically includes “fowled 

up” or words to that effect, alliterative words to that effect. He and almost everyone else 

are prepared to speak on the topic of leadership. Apparently, personal experience and 

individual genius permits us to do that. Additionally, we can find whatever we want in a 

cookbook by Caesar, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, or some other great captain, 

simply turn to the right page and get on with it, and if we’re too lazy to read the cookbooks 

there are legions of experts prepared to consult and conduct seminars at your place or 

offsite, dispensing wisdom via PowerPoint presentations on organizational effectiveness, 

management, and leadership. Shake a tree and the latest theories and current buzzwords fall 

like leaves in the tree in the fall in the wind in Pennsylvania. Or you can hire a motivational 

speaker whose charisma will have us crossing the line of departure on time while smiling 

and singing Onward, Christian Soldiers. In brief, there’s no shortage of gurus out there. 
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The opinion comes to us from staff colleges, business schools, academic disciplines, and 

from people who famously succeeded as leaders, but despite all that help here we are today 

still trying to get it right. 

I think I’m here because the gray beard and a few books I wrote, one on DePuy. I’ll 

be happy to tell you about DePuy. Be comforted in the knowledge that as I reflected on 

what I might say today that could possibly be of use in cultivating leaders, the words of 

my favorite poets came to mind, among them Alexander Pope who wrote Fools Rush in 

Where Angels Fear to Tread. I’ll try not to be foolish. My remarks will not satisfy those 

raised in our Chicken Little’s Military subculture who find the sky falling every day, the 

sky is always falling, those who believe that if something is worth doing that it’s worth 

overdoing, and that we need to pull up plants every day to check the roots to see how well 

the plant is growing. We are a very impatient subculture. Some of what I learned about 

DePuy in my research leaped out as insights into his leadership, note the emphasis on “his 

leadership.” Not all of the insights are of particular use to you and to me. Here are several: 

Be born smart as hell. DePuy was. Be raised in the 1930s in the upper Middle West, with 

values like hard work, honesty, respect for others, a deep sense of responsibilities, values 

in consonance with that time. DePuy was. To learn how this all works, tune into the Prairie 

Home Companion, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all 

the children are above average. Be a 2d lieutenant six months before a big war, and advance 

in grade as the Army increases by a factor of about eight in a few years. Be successful as 

an infantry battalion commander in combat. Pin on your Distinguished Service Cross, three 

Silver Stars, two Purple Hearts, serve as a division G3, be recruited by George Patton to be 

his aide, and do all of that by the time you’re 25 years of age. Obviously, we can’t all do 

what DePuy did. We can’t all be like Mike, as General Sullivan said.

Toward the end of an interview with General Paul Gorman several years ago I told 

him that my research was leading me to conclude that DePuy, more than anyone else, fixed 

my broken Army in the post-Vietnam period. I asked if Gorman agreed. He did so without 

reservation or qualification. I put the same proposition to General Donn Starry. He paused, 

thought it over, and pronounced from Olympus with his usual precision, “I can accept that 

statement.” Starry and Gorman played a major part in fixing my Army. Either of these 

enormously talented four star generals could’ve claimed credit for themselves for fixing 

that Army. They did not make that claim, though I would give them much credit for it. 

Gorman further stated that without DePuy it might’ve taken a generation to fix the Army. 

With DePuy’s leadership it began when DePuy kicked the hornet’s nest in the mid 1970s. 

Are you checking your bestsellers list, “kick the hornet’s nest?” I thought that was a nice 

term.

The next question I asked Gorman was as logical as it was simple-minded: “What 

leadership traits might we identify in DePuy that made him effective, some clues he might 

pass on to young aspiring leaders?” Norman said it would be a mistake to mimic DePuy; he 

was unique. That was the point of my cryptic description of DePuy’s personality, boyhood, 

and early experiences. Gorman was warning us not to try to make imitation DePuys out 

of our officers; it wouldn’t work. Few of us have his combination of intelligence, focus, 

intensity, and once he decided on a course of action, ruthlessness. He was also lucid in 
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explaining abstract concepts and detailed programs. In brief, he got more than his share of 

talent. I think DePuy’s son got the essence of the man exactly right, as we discussed aspects 

of the father’s personality. He called his father an autonomous man. Most of us need a pat 

on the back from time to time, but General DePuy didn’t seem to need that. We like the 

approval of our peers. That didn’t seem to be terribly important to him. In his professional 

life, General DePuy was subject to his own rules, but I want to be very clear about this: he 

was not a difficult subordinate. In fact, he was the very model of loyalty. And as a boss, 

he was scrupulous in examining all aspects of an issue and in listening very carefully to 

the talent that he assembled around him. However, once convinced that he hade taken the 

right course of action he was supremely confident and persuasive in execution. Some saw 

this as arrogance. He was unique, and I would tell the prospective young leader, “So are 

you.” Gorman’s observations about DePue reminded me of something Field Marshal Sir 

William Slim said in a presentation here at Fort Leavenworth on 8 April 1952. He said, 

“Command is an intensely personal affair.” He was addressing command of an Army or an 

Army group, but he made it clear that he thought what he said applied to command at any 

level. It has to be exercised by each man in his own way. 

He ended his talk emphasizing, “Be yourselves, because no imitation is ever a 

masterpiece.” I commend the May 1990 issue of Military review to you for Slim’s distilled 

wisdom in just ten pages called Higher Command in War. That issue also contains several 

other excellent articles on command, May 1990. For an extended lesson on leadership, 

read Slim’s Defeat Into Victory, possibly the best World War II General’s book. He began 

by saying, he begins his book by saying the very four best commands are a platoon, a 

battalion, a division, an army. How’s that for setting the hook? I had to ask why those and 

not some others. Clever rascal, he starts that way. 

See what George MacDonald Fraser has to say about Slim in his memoir of World 

War II, Quartered Safe Out Here. See what John Masters says about Slim in his personal 

narrative, The Road Past Mandalay. His soldiers loved the man for his honest and 

unpretentious good sense, what we used to call in the Brown Shoe Army “old shoe.” It’s 

entirely likely that you will forget what I say and you will misplace the notes that you take 

at this symposium. Don’t worry, they’ll turn up when you put in for your TDY or for your 

next PCS, but do yourself a favor: read Slim, Masters, and Fraser as they look at the same 

Burma campaign through the eyes of a rifleman, a middle grade professional officer, and 

the commanding general. They are fuel for your ruminations about leadership and good for 

your soul.

I think Slim and Gorman are absolutely right by all means: be yourself. Pearl handled 

pistols work for some generals. So does toting an M1 rifle or hanging hand grenades on 

one’s chest. Thespian rhetoric served at least one famous general very well, and shouting 

is probably still in fashion. My friends and I as young officers noted with irony, “When 

in doubt yell and shout,” but the Prussian officer’s model rings true: Sein Stap Sein [sic], 

literally, “Be rather than appear to be.” Perhaps better, “Essence not appearance” is a better 

rendering in English. Of course, this is the very opposite of cultivating an image. It means 

being true to yourself. But most of us prefer a human model, leadership personified, to 

theoretical constructs or laundry lists of principles or cardinal virtues. I’ll highlight some 
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formative experiences that shaped DePuy, and with a great deal of caution I’ll leave you 

aspects of the man to consider in your own self-analysis, major or lieutenant colonel. 

DePuy learned early in his career how not to train and how not to lead. Commissioned 

from ROTC in 1941, he participated in wasted training opportunities in the United States 

that continued in England where he noted that the terrain wasn’t very different in England 

than from what it was in Normandy. Poor training was compounded by mostly inept leaders 

at all levels. He was taught extended order, a skirmish line, an assault technique that was a 

bad idea in 1863 and did not improve with age. Paying the butcher’s bill in Normandy was 

no doubt in part due to close combat with a very skilled enemy, but DePuy saw American 

lives wasted as a result of inadequate training and poor leadership. Those early lessons 

made a deep and permanent impression on him. His 90th Infantry Division stumbled so 

badly it was almost disbanded by Omar Bradley after the Normandy experience. Then, 

according to DePuy and other senior leaders, including Patton and Eisenhower, it became 

a very good division. The transformation was bought with American blood as the rapidly 

expanded US Army sought combat leaders at all levels. At the division and regiment level 

the solution was to relieve commanders until the right men were found. DePuy credits his 

third in a succession of division commanders in a very short period of time, Raymond D. 

McLean, with saving the division. Colonel George Bitman Barth did the same for the 357th 

Infantry after his predecessors had failed. Barth remained DePuy’s model of a great troop 

leader for the entirety of DePuy’s life.

Barth succeeded a man DePuy described as “a horse’s ass of the worst order,” “a 

goddamned fool, a disaster.” DePuy had a way with words. By the way, he really rarely used 

profanity or blasphemy, but this was a special case. The sixth was otherwise at battalion. 

There the junior officers in their twenties who were good at war stepped up to battalion 

command. Brave and skilled battalion commander Major Ed Hamilton, much admired by 

DePuy, said that in the period 5-12 July 1944, “I lost five company commanders, two 

killed, three wounded, one week.” Hamilton himself lost an eye in battle in September. 

DePuy said that in the first six weeks of the Battle of Normandy his division lost 100% 

of his soldiers and 150% of his officers. In the rifle companies, that translates to losses 

between 200-400%. I teach at the War College in the springtime, I teach an elective, and I 

and my students always marvel at the sheer numbers of people killed and wounded in both 

the First and Second World War, which is almost out of our imagination as contemporary 

soldiers.

Those losses in Europe, the Second World War, compared with the worst of the last few 

months of World War I. Twenty of the 61 divisions in the European theater of operations 

had a personnel turnover rate of 100% or higher. The 90th, with 196%, was sixth on the 

list of infantry divisions. At the officer corps in Czechoslovakia, marking the end of war 

on 8 May 1945, the first time that all of the officers of the 357th had assembled since their 

days in England, an artillery battalion commander who was present made this observation: 

“There wasn’t a single company commander who left England who is still present. Only 

the service company commanders hadn’t changed.” Memories of losses that he attributed 

to poor training and leadership shaped DePuy’s behavior for the rest of his professional 

life. “My regiment simply did not perform, not withstanding the heroic efforts and tragic 
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Gole

losses among the lower ranking officers and the bewildered troops. The value system of 

the 90th Division did not identify and eliminate officers before they had done their grizzly 

work.” He would not allow that to happen on his watch. DePuy’s regimental commander 

at the end of the war, John Mason, said that DePuy was “by far the best combat battalion 

commander and natural leader of men I have known.” DePuy found his calling in close 

combat.

The leaders who fought in Normandy and were still standing in May of 1945 were 

very good. Some people are very good at war. DePuy was such a person. Not all of us 

are. DePuy took lessons from his combat experience. He got rid of leaders who did not 

have his complete confidence. They didn’t have to screw up, they just lacked his complete 

confidence and he would fire people. That was particularly evident in his command of a 

division, and he gave responsibility to young tigers who showed initiative, energy, and 

smarts. That is evident in his later leadership of a large and complex organization. There 

is a personal component constant in DePuy’s behavior. It was most often called focus or 

intensity. 

Due to time constraints we skip over some interesting stories: his CIA detail during 

the Korean War; his attitude about military professional schools, he didn’t think much of 

them; a second opportunity to command an infantry battalion; affection for the British; 

battle group command; permanent fascination with tactics; staff jobs in Washington; and 

his private life. We can return to those topics in the Q&A if you’d like, but for now let’s go 

to Vietnam.

From 1964-1966 DePuy served as MACV J3 in Saigon where he enjoyed General 

Westmoreland’s complete confidence, and he served once again with his old friend from 

World War II, Richard G. Stillwell. As a brigadier general in a relaxed and contemplative 

moment with a trusted assistant, he described how he would do things in the best of all 

possible worlds. He scoured the Army to find the 12 brightest and most articulate majors in 

the Army and put them in 12 cubicles without portfolio, no S1, S2, S3, S4. As issues arose 

that he needed, and he needed a staff study, a position paper, or an answer for the boss, 

he’d distribute to the problem to the right major with basic guidance saying, “Now you run 

with the ball and tell me what to do in 5,000 words or less.” Later, in the Pentagon from 

1969-73, he organized just such a collection of young and creative self-starters in the grade 

of lieutenant colonel in a studies group led by a colonel. They were regarded by some in 

the building as unguided missiles. I happened to be in the building at the time, by the way, 

but they enjoyed DePuy’s protection. As he prepared to take command of TRADOC, he 

told then Lieutenant Colonel Max Thurman to go to the Personnel Office and get the 20 

brightest colonels you can find, the 20 brightest lieutenant colonels, and the 20 brightest 

majors. “Then,” he said, “we can run the other 100,000 in the command.”

As TRADOC commander he again tasked an ad hoc cell of his bright young guys to 

write the early drafts of the 1960s, the 1976 FM100-5. Historian Richard Swain—present 

with us at the conference but he’s AWOL right now, for which I’ll take him to task—says 

that the reaction to DePuy’s version of that FM produced a decade of doctrinal debate that 

was the richest professional dialogue in the US Army’s history, and he ranks DePuy with 

Marshall as a master trainer. I think he’s probably right. I also think that the germ of the 
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notion of small ad hoc cells to address critical issues came from what he saw in the bright 

young tigers in combat in 1944, 1945, and it was refined as he matured and took on great 

responsibilities in our very large and complex organizations. In brief, the most creative 

people may not be the most senior people. Some people perform routine tasks superbly, but 

for special jobs you want to get special people, and he was not particularly attentive to the 

grade of the people who got the job done for him. 

DePuy commanded the Big Red One [1st Infantry Division] from ’66-67. His relief 

of subordinate commanders got him a lot of attention in Washington and in trouble with 

Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson. So did his prodigious use of artillery, particularly 

harassment and interdiction fires, that is, unobserved fires. As a consequence, upon his 

departure from Vietnam DePuy did not get the job at Fort Benning that he wanted; he 

wanted to run the Infantry School and train young infantry officers. In fact, Johnson didn’t 

know what to do with him and didn’t have a job for DePuy in his Army. At this point, 

Westmoreland intervened by telling Wheeler, Chairman of JCS, that DePuy was available 

for assignment to the JCS staff, thus, in Westmoreland’s own word, thus saving Bill DePuy’s 

career. By taking him out of the chain of command of the Army, JCS staff job.

It was my intent to make two major points about DePuy’s leadership, both of which 

stem from his formative World War II experience, his relief of subordinates in combat, 

and his inclination to go with bright and energetic young officers, even of the highest staff 

levels. He prepared his bureaucratic battlefields as carefully as he prepared his battlefields 

in 1944 and ’45 and in Vietnam in 1966, 1967. I did not dwell on his political skills, his 

power of persuasion, or another aspect of his leadership, perhaps chief among them, a 

degree of intensity and focus on the business and hand that actually frightened people. That 

returns us to Gorman’s observation: DePuy was unique. It would be unwise to imitate him. 

He also emulated Slim’s admonition to “be yourself.” It’s equally unwise to think you must 

pack a pearl handled pistol. Not all of us can go to the top of the heap. Some of us will 

have that happy combination of experience, training, and the right genes, and don’t forget 

pure luck. DePuy was lucky that Westmoreland was in a position to intervene, recommend 

him to Wheeler in 1967. So far, World War II luminaries would’ve retired as anonymous 

lieutenant colonels without the big buildup of that big war. That point recalls the toast in 

the British Officer’s mess regarding advancement and greed. “Here’s to a bloody campaign 

and a sickly season.” 

It should be very obvious that there’s no template for leadership that can be taken off the 

shelf and be applied to your current command issues. Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower, 

Bradley, Patton were very, very different men. Leadership seems to be like happiness in 

the sense that both are byproducts of what one does, not an objective. Slim doesn’t put it 

exactly that way, but he does advise that we trust our professional leadership experience, 

the military schools, and the accident of our individual uniqueness. This is not very far 

from theory and practice applied. My personal bias is to add: read, read, read, and don’t 

omit fiction from your reading list. Thank you. (applause).

Mr. Ramsey:

Thank you both very much for some very interesting comments. We are open now for 

questions.
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Day 2, Panel 4: Conventional and Unconventional Challenges of the Cold 

War, 1945-1975

Questions and Answers

(Transcript of Presentation)

Lewis Sorley, Ph.D.

Henry Gole, Ph.D.

Moderated by Mr. Robert Ramsey

Rich Kuyper:

Henry, about DePuy. I’m Rich Kuyper, Army Counterinsurgency Center. Those of us 

who were lieutenants and captains in the late ’60s, knowing we were going to Vietnam 

and be platoon leaders or infantry company commanders, knew two things about the 1st 

[Infantry] Division. One was the DePuy Fort, and the other was the word you used about 

DePuy himself, and that was ‘ruthless’. There as a concern among some of us that we 

would end up in the 1st Division either under DePuy or under leaders who were emulating 

this ruthless reputation that he had. Fortunately I did not. My concern about the stories 

that we hear about DePuy and carrying around spare company commanders and battalion 

commanders in his helicopter, I think about my experience as an infantry company 

commander. The first battalion commander, we’d come back from an operation and he 

would take us, you know, when I’d come back, shower, eat, meet him literally under a tree 

and a couple of chairs, and we would talk about the operation. It was a mentoring, learning, 

critiquing, advising, helping, developing attitude that that particular battalion commander 

had, and I think it helped me and I felt comfortable, you know, because sometimes I really 

did screw the pooch on operations, but he didn’t hold it against me. It was to take that and 

development. The second one was, to use a technical term, an asshole who did not do that, 

had no interest in developing subordinates. Tell him that you screwed up and you were 

gone. So there was this stark contrast, and the more I learned about DePuy the more I came 

to equate him to the second guy from the leadership perspective. Now, forget FM 100-5 

and all of that. And the more I learned about him the more I thought, “What a great example 

of somebody I do not want to be like.” So I get a little uncomfortable sometimes when we 

don’t necessary lionize DePuy but we don’t focus on what Bob talked about, as treating 

soldiers as human beings and taking young officers and helping them develop. And I’ve 

always viewed DePuy very negatively because it seemed to me that was his approach: no 

development, but only ruthlessness.

Dr. Gole:

Needless to say, DePuy was a highly contentious figure at the time, and to this day. In 

the book I tried to be balanced. He was so offensive to so many people at the time that one 

future lieutenant general, when a major told me that he was going to contact, he attended, 
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he was on DePuy’s staff in a secondary position as an Assistant 3, a G3, and he said he 

was going to blow the whistle on DePuy to the Department of the Army IG because of 

DePuy’s abuse particularly of staff officers. DePuy would hop in a plane and spend a day 

on the battlefield, come back, and his deputy went out and did the same thing. They would 

have firsthand experiences and see what was going on. They’d sit down, have a drink, chat, 

and then go in for a brief. The briefers didn’t know as much as the principals, and they 

were continually, regularly abused by the commanding general and deputy, his assistant 

divisions commander. So it is true that he was one tough SOB. There’s no question about 

that. I’m not going to try to legitimize it, but those numbers that I recited from World War 

II, the bloodbath, convinced him that as a commander if he suspected that Captain Smith 

or particularly Lieutenant Colonel Jones couldn’t cut it, he would relieve them. He didn’t 

have to have cause. Department of the Army became well aware of this, too. The staff of 

the Army, as Bob would tell us, became keenly aware of this. As a matter of fact, they 

started to dilute the price of relief by DePuy, like it wasn’t the same as relief by anybody 

else. There were second chances.

For example, I read through, as you probably know, I don’t mention the names in 

the book; there’s no reason to defame people, but he relieved about 13 people, most 

of them rate of lieutenant colonel, some commanders, some staff officers, but most of 

them commanders. There was an incident in which an artillery battalion commander was 

relieved. He was on that list that I was aware of, but most of these people are long dead. I 

was already a captain and a major in that war. These fellows were lieutenant colonels and 

commanded battalions, so most of them are no longer living. I ran down one and I called 

him down in Alabama from Pennsylvania, and I said, “My name is Henry Gole. I’m writing 

a book about General DePuy and I’d like to get some information about him.” The guy 

at the other end said, “I don’t have anything good to say about him.” I said, “Sir, I’m not 

looking for something good to say about him, I’m looking for something true to say about 

him. May I have your permission to call you in 24 hours? Will you have time to think about 

the good or bad things? I called him back the next day. He was on the ground when there 

was a screw up. Wasn’t his screw up. He was the nearest artillery battalion commander. 

He was told to get in the chopper and straighten that out, so he went out and straightened 

it out. When he returned, he was relieved by his DIVARTY commander, and the person 

in question said, “I was relieved because if my DIVARTY commander didn’t relieve me 

DePuy would’ve relieved him.” This was an interesting story. I called Donn Starry, and in 

the course of the conversation the first go around I asked him about relief questions, and 

he said, “There was a guy, can’t think of his name. He was screwed by DePuy. He was an 

artillery man, and later on he commanded very well in a different corps area.” I got back to 

Starry and I said, “I just spoke to Colonel X,” and he said, “Yeah, that’s the guy!” He was 

called Skeeter. “That was Skeeter so-and-so.” So it’s absolutely true that DePuy was cruel, 

merciless in relieving people.

At the same time, there were company commanders and battalion commanders who had 

an absolute affection for him. There was some development or cultivation of these people 

in their eyes, not very visible, because he felt, and his difference with General Johnson, 

who didn’t have a job for him when DePuy was to leave Vietnam, his difference was this 

question, I believe General Johnson thought it was unreasonable, and he said, “I don’t have 
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151

enough lieutenant clonels to keep the 1st Infantry Division in battalion commanders.” And 

so, and DePuy, as General Johnson spent Christmas of ’66 with the Big Red One, and it 

was there that there was a confrontation between DePuy and General Johnson, guess what? 

General Johnson won. DePuy did not get the assignment that he wanted to command at 

Fort Benning. 

There were others later. Now, you were talking about the division command and combat. 

I could take this story to later staff situations, but General Sid Barry said of DePuy, in 

combat in Vietnam he was very confident. Later, he behaved as though he was a borderline 

case of arrogance. I don’t know if I’ve sufficiently addressed your question.

Unknown male: 

If you will permit me, I would like to relate a personal anecdote with General DePuy 

that I had as a captain in headquarters TRADOC.

Dr.Gole:

I was looking for the...Where were you three or four years ago when I needed you?

Unknown male: 

Hiding! (laughter) In 1975 I was assigned as a law and order officer for headquarters 

TRADOC, and one of my duties was to close the personnel control facilities, the deserter 

processing centers. As the Vietnam War had already run down we were getting fewer and 

fewer deserters and we were closing these facilities. And the following year, ’76, I was told 

the commanding general wanted to see me concerning the closure of the personnel control 

facilities, and I was the “subject matter expert” on it. So I went to DePuy’s office with a 

colonel who was the XO of DCSPER, and I don’t remember his name. I’d have to look on 

the manning chart, but we walked in the general’s office. He kind of looked in my direction, 

greeted the colonel. We sat on the sofa. And the colonel proceeded to give him all kinds 

of wrong information, including calling them personnel confinement facilities, which they 

weren’t, and a bunch of other stuff. And the general thanked him and sort of looked in my 

direction. I felt that I was kind of translucent, being only a captain in DePuy’s presence, 

and I left. And it really made me wonder about DePuy from that point on, because there 

I was, the so-called subject matter expert in that one particular thing, and he never even 

asked me a question.

Now, from a career and personal point of view I was glad because as this colonel was 

telling him all this wrong information, I was literally saying, “Please, God, don’t let the 

general, you know, ask me a question,” because I wasn’t about to say, “Well, what the 

colonel told you was just, you know, inaccurate,” but I wasn’t going to bring it up, but I do 

because of all the comments made. There was certainly nothing godlike about him, and I 

think he had a tendency not to listen to company grade officers. I think his confidence was 

in field grades and in higher, and whether you were an SME or not, it was the rank that he 

was listening to and that was it. And that’s just my impression, and that’s....

Dr. Gole:

Yeah. Of course, I don’t challenge what you said for a moment, but I will cite some 

things that I was told by, for example, General Paul Gorman on this subject of a star system 
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and listening, to whom he listened. As a matter of fact, he didn’t listen at TRADOC, he 

didn’t listen very seriously to some generals. Paul Gorman told me that consistent with 

what I said about DePuy way back when he was a brigadier, said, “Give me, you know, 

those majors,” and he did that again and again and until the day he retired. The boathouse 

gang at TRADOC was such a collection of rather junior guys, but rather junior meaning 

majors, lieutenant colonels. I don’t know if there were any captains in that bunch.

But Gorman told me everyone knew who was on the good guy list and who wasn’t, 

who was the first team and who wasn’t, and Gorman said it had to be demoralizing to those 

officers who were not on the hotshot list. Break, Pentagon, earlier, studies group, lieutenant, 

mostly lieutenant colonels, some majors, six or eight of them under the supervision of the 

colonel, protected by DePuy, Friday. In the good old days before the sanctimonious SOBs 

took over, DePuy would periodically stick his head into this studies group where Colonel 

Segal apparently had a bottle of Scotch and some makings for a martini, feet up, PM, five, 

six, chat. And DePuy would loosen his collar and be one of the boys and chat, to the point 

someone said “So-and-so isn’t carrying his weight” or something like that, and DePuy said, 

“Oh, just a minute, just a minute. Be gentle. Be kind,” is what he said, “be kind.” He said, 

“You know, we have people in this building—this building’s filled with people who went 

where we sent them in World War II. They went where we sent them in Korea. They went 

to Vietnam, and they’ll do their daily salute and do whatever we tell them to, and they’re 

ordinary types. They should be treated with a great deal of consideration.” What he was 

saying was there are fast movers, and when I want something really done that’s why I turn 

to guys like you, but don’t be critical, usually of older men, don’t be critical of those guys. 

They’re ready to do their duty, but they’re ordinary types, and he would assign, those are 

my words, ‘ordinary types’, and he would assign them routine tasks rather than the golden 

boy tasks. That’s what I learned about him.

Mr. Ramsey:

Sure, yes, one more question. Yes, sir.

Unknown male:

We’ve heard two very different leaders described, or at least I have the impression, and 

I was wondering if I could turn to Bob and ask him to comment on DePuy, and perhaps also 

since Abrams. There must have been some kind of an overlap there. Did Abrams have an 

opinion on DePuy. I mean, he was much senior to him, but....

Dr. Sorley: 

Ten days ago I turned in the manuscript of my Westmoreland biography, which I’ve 

been at work on for several years. Earlier, as you know, I wrote a biography for L.K. Johnson 

when he was, who has already been mentioned here in connection with his interactions 

with DePuy. I think when General Abrams came back to be Chief of Staff of the Army he 

was not favorably disposed toward General DePuy, but he changed his views considerably, 

largely because of the positive aspects of DePuy’s capabilities that were demonstrated 

to him primarily in the context of planning for reorganization of the Army that led to the 

breakup of Continental Army Command and, as you know, the development of Forces 

Command and TRADOC. I know a lot about General DePuy, and I consider him one of 
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153

the most complex biographical subjects I can imagine. I think Henry showed great courage 

in taking it on. I know some things about him that are very good, and some others that are 

very bad. Some of those have been brought out here, especially by your comments, which 

I thought were very insightful. 

When General [Westmoreland] took command of the forces in Vietnam DePuy was 

the J3, as Henry mentioned, and it’s very clearly that primarily DePuy and secondarily 

Stillwell were the authors of the strategy of attrition and the search and destroy tactics that 

Westmoreland employed, and after the war was over, to his great credit in my opinion, 

General DePuy said forthrightly and without trying to make any excuses, and in writing in 

military publications, “We were wrong. We were wrong in our assessment of the enemy 

and his staying power, we were wrong to think we could, by killing enough of the enemy, 

dissuade him from further aggression, and it is now clear that the approach we took never 

had any chance of success.” He said those things in writing. I consider that very courageous, 

and by way of contrast, General Westmoreland could never bring himself to make that 

same admission. I’d just say that.

Dr. Gole: 

May I just make one point about what Bob said? Some of what DePuy’s behavior as 

division commander can be explained by the situation and the location of three corps, the 

distance between Saigon and the Cambodian border, and the fact that the enemy had owned 

the real estate between Saigon and the border, particularly along the border, which wasn’t 

very clear anyway, and DePuy was convinced that local ragtag regional forces, various 

kinds of indigenous military organizations couldn’t handle it. The enemy was sending the 

first team in his direction, not far from Saigon, and he thought it was necessary to use 

American main force elements against enemy main force elements because of the situation 

in three corps and the border and what had existed the previous decade in the VC buildup 

of infrastructure, and so he thought he didn’t have much choice. He had to go get them 

first or nothing good was going to happen. Of course, you may remember at this time in 

the war an enemy tactic would be to move into a big town or a small city, take over for a 

very short period of time, punish in the cruelest way the local authorities, and then vacate 

the premises, and, of course, that memory didn’t go away with the VC troops who were 

moving away. It would be remembered that you better play ball with the indigenous people 

and not play ball with the Americans. So that’s just a partial explanation of the heavy 

handed behavior of DePuy with his division at that time and place.

Mr. Ramsey:

OK. Thank you both for your comments and your presentations. Thank you very much.

155

Day 2, Panel 5: Rebirth of the US Army, 1976-2001

Thoughts in Spring on Professional Identity by Richard Swain, Ph.D.

(Submitted Paper)

Moderated by MAJ(P) Clay Mountcastle

Mac Coffman, who could not be here this year because he is recovering from ankle 

surgery, began his classic social history of the Army with the words: “The Old Army is 

the army that existed before the last war.”1

 By that reckoning, I have belonged to several 

armies. I joined the local Army Reserve at the age of 17, in 1961. The Berlin Wall went up 

that year. It was my first realization that I might actually be required to do more than attend 

six months active duty for training, weekend drills in Palatka, Florida, and summer training 

at Fort Eustis or Fort Story, Virginia. 

The transportation company, with which I spent four months of active duty for training 

that summer and autumn, had a first sergeant who had been a captain in World War II and 

I remember one Korean War veteran. That was my first Army. I decided to become an 

officer; I applied to and was accepted by West Point. I entered before the U.S. commitment 

to Vietnam was particularly serious. When Captain Roger Donlon received his Medal of 

Honor, I was in Germany on summer training. Germany was glorious that August.

I graduated from the Military Academy with the class of 1966. As an active duty officer 

I was a member of the Post Vietnam Army, the pre-Gulf War Army it became, and the post 

Gulf War army that followed. Since then, I have been a camp follower, gradually losing 

touch with the Army in any meaningful way except for continuing, if distant admiration 

and gratitude. This paper concerns itself with leaders of post war armies, looking for new 

identities.

In the spring of the year, ever since 1947, distinguished gentlemen, leaders of the U.S. 

and U.K. armies, transit the Atlantic to speak at their ally’s institutions of professional 

education in honor of the long ties between our two nations and of Kermit Roosevelt, T.R.’s 

son. The younger Roosevelt served in both armies, in the first and second world wars. The 

speeches vary in quality and focus. My suspicion is the Americans benefit most from the 

exchange and it has always struck me as an irony that, so far as I have been able to discover, 

while there is a repository, albeit incomplete, of British speeches here at CGSC, there is no 

central collection of the American Roosevelt lectures. The Army War College lists a folder 

of twelve.

The speakers are, as I say, a distinguished lot. The first was Albert Wedemeyer. He 

was followed by, among others, Maxwell Taylor, Lawton Collins, Al Gruenther, Anthony 

McAuliffe, James Gavin, Andrew Goodpaster, Ted Conway, Richard Stillwell, Bill DePuy, 

Bruce Palmer, Bernard Rogers, Edward Myer, John Vessey, and Glenn Otis. These are just 

some names taken, more or less at random, reading down the list. I looked for General 

DePuy’s Kermit Roosevelt Speech unsuccessfully when I compiled the collection of his 
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papers issued by CSI upon the occasion of his death. Henry Gole does not refer to it, so 

I assume he had no more success locating it. I have had copies of General Starry’s and 

General Richardson’s speeches for some years. I found General Davidson’s on line at MHI 

at Carlisle, and, with the help of Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, I managed to obtain 

copies of General Fred Franks’.

This spring General Martin Dempsey was the U.S. Kermit Roosevelt speaker.2

 Dempsey 

applauded his hosts for addressing the erosion of strategic thinking, which he took as a 

shared phenomenon, and offered the observation that the U.S. and U.K. militaries both find 

themselves challenged by “a lack of intellectual and institutional clarity about the enduring 

nature of war, distinctive in important ways,” he observed, “from the changing character 

of warfare.” An “important subplot” he went on, “is the erosion in leader development in 

general.”3

Dempsey went on to offer that there would be no shortage of work for military forces. 

Armed conflict will continue; natural disasters and economic turmoil as well. “We will,” he 

said, “be surprised by the pace of change in technology, how it proliferates, who will use 

it, and for what purposes.”4

 Rather than claim that technology will solve all our problems, 

like the futurists of the nineties and the early Bush administration, Dempsey offered the 

conclusion that technology “has leveled the pitch between us and our potential enemies, 

creating a far more competitive security environment.5

 It makes surprise more likely and 

hence puts a greater premium on leaders who are resilient and adaptive.”6

Dempsey’s concern then involved accounting for, and avoiding, what he calls “the 

failure of imagination.” “The military profession in particular,” he said, “demands 

imagination: the ability to discern the weak signals of impending change from a vast array 

of events and data.”7

 His primary focus, then, was on avoiding what he sees as failures 

of the past in the overvaluing of the benefits of technology and, in particular, neglecting 

to account for the creativity of the other, the opposing human enemy who, as Clausewitz 

reminds us, is a constant companion in warfare.

Elaborating on his theme of a failure in imagination, Dempsey condemned in florid 

terms the unfulfilled promises of the Revolution in Military Affairs, characterizing its 

champions as “apostles of knowledge dominance and worshipers at the altar of stand-off 

precision strike.”8

 He chose for scorn, particularly, an idea associated with former Chief of 

Staff, General Ric Shinseki, the notion of the ‘quality of firsts’.9

Our imagination failed, Dempsey said, because we did not account for the imagination 

of the enemy. “They adapted their strengths to our weaknesses. They dispersed among the 

population and in difficult terrain. They decentralized and leveraged commercial technology 

to empower their networks. They syndicated with criminal, religious and political groups 

to suit their common interests.”10 One is reminded, in this jeremiad (understandable from 

the former commander of the 1st Armored Division in the early dark days in Baghdad) of 

an old, vaguely remembered cartoon of a muddy Marine surrounded by the debris of the 

war in Korea, asking plaintively, “Where the hell are the push-buttons?” 

It struck me that it might be useful to go back and look at other Kermit Roosevelt 

Speeches to see what they might contain of interest to the incumbent TRADOC Commander. 
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Now a disclaimer is called for. Aside from the differences in personality of the respective 

speakers, the conditions governing their appearance were dramatically different. Generals 

Davidson, Starry and Richardson possessed the important advantage denied Generals 

Franks and Dempsey of a clear threat against which to build and plan, and well known 

ground on which to fight, if it ever came to that. Of course, the army they envisioned never 

did meet the enemy it was designed to fight. Instead, that Army, and its joint and allied 

partners, overran the Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait in 1990-’91, justifying in four days 

the long investment in post-Vietnam recovery. That single fact in no way discounts their 

efforts or concerns.

General Davidson spoke to the British National Defense College on or near the very 

day the South Vietnam collapsed.11 His speech, focused on the role of U.S. forces in Europe, 

seems to have been aimed at American ears as much as the British allies. It recounted the 

history and fluctuations of the U.S. commitment to Europe since 1945. Davidson observed 

that U.S. forces had drawn down from the 1961 Berlin Wall high of 278,975, to around 

190,000. During the same period, while the U.S. was distracted in Southeast Asia, the 

Soviet forces had increased 30%, added 2,000 additional tanks, improved their air force 

and turned their navy into a global, blue water fleet.12 Davidson observed as well the lessons 

of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, in which, he said the Israelis had lost three divisions worth 

of tanks in 18 days.13

Davidson’s argument to his British audience was that the danger of Soviet aggression 

was real and that the U.S. and its allies had to confront the question, whether “the West, 

by the quality and number of men and weapons in its conventional forces, reflect the will

and intent to defend its society.”14 He warned his British audience of post-Vietnam U.S. 

Congressional opposition to maintaining current U.S. deployments and quoted Secretary of 

Defense James Schlesinger arguing for their necessity. He concluded, saying:

Certainly, we would have chosen a more propitious time to be challenged—a time 

when problems at home and the problems of our allies would not distract us from our 

duties. But history is a cruel and impartial judge...it will not reward us for the challenge, 

but only for the response.15

By the time Donn Starry delivered his Roosevelt lectures, the Reagan military buildup was underway and the Army was bringing the new generation of fighting equipment 

on line. Recruiting standards were raised and the Army instituted administrative discharge 

provisions that facilitated removing much of the human dead wood accumulated in the 

previous ten years. Although General Starry was Commander in Chief of U.S. Readiness 

Command in 1982, he used the occasion of his appearances at The Royal Military College of 

Sciences, Shrivenham, the National Defence College, Latimer, and the Army Staff College, 

then at Camberly, to introduce the British Army to the concepts of Air Land Battle, which 

he had brought into army doctrine while commander of Training and Doctrine Command. 

Starry, who had been one of the prime movers of the Army’s recovery after Vietnam, 

had begun his part of the work reviving the Army in conditions of severe post war stress.16

Carter budgets were stringent. The active Army was over-structured at 16 divisions and 

unable to meet its recruiting and retention goals as it shifted from a conscript force to 
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volunteer manning. General William DePuy’s 1976 tactical doctrine was dogmatic and illreceived but it got the Army into the field and onto the ranges. Gradually discipline and a 

sense of purpose were restored.17

Much of General Starry’s presentation of the NATO Airland Battlefield seems dated 

today, in absence of a first class armored enemy across the way. Two of his Roosevelt 

speeches, though, retain interest in respect to their timeless considerations of the 

requirements of war. 

The first is the speech on leadership presented to the Cadets at the Royal Military 

Academy, Sandhurst.18 Starry offered five observations. First he addressed the human 

content of battle leadership: 

“Leadership,” he said, “is the ability to harness the courage of human beings into 

concerted action in a most dangerous and complex undertaking.” Second, he continued, 

“Leaders must learn to identify complex situations in advance, to find logical answers, and 

to prescribe regular drills that their units can use to cope with those complex situations...

Thirdly, to win, leaders must think...leaders must be trained to think[:] think ahead, think 

correctly, logically, quickly, precisely, with creativeness and imagination about the complex 

situations they can expect to encounter.” Fourthly, because leaders cannot be everywhere, 

they must ensure their subordinates know what to do until the leader can arrive to direct 

them. And fifth, and finally, he observed that, “in battle, the only thing that can be expected 

is the unexpected...we must train our officers and men for it...”19

In light of General Dempsey’s interest in the nature of the profession, it is also worth 

recounting what Starry had to say about the importance of leaders modeling certain 

values. The first was professional competence, made up of “a superior sense of disciplined 

professional responsibility...[and] willingness to sacrifice.” It includes, he said, “developing 

the ability to infuse the young men and women you lead with those values.”20 Secondly,” 

Starry went on, “the professional military reflects a commitment...to the unit of which 

you are part, and to the men and women you lead...the commitment is to something larger 

than yourself—there is no room for careerism.” Thirdly, he added, “the military profession 

must hold in high merit the virtue of candor—the willingness and ability to discern and tell 

the objective truth.” And finally, he said, “there is courage...courage is not the absence of 

fear...Courage is the willingness to admit and the ability to control fear.” 

Starry allowed that while he commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in 

Vietnam he interviewed every incoming officer. Among the questions he asked, one was 

whether or not the new leader was afraid. He got, he said, some strange answers to the 

question.21 He closed by reminding the British cadets of the essence of their calling: “Never 

forget,” he said, “you are the leaders—the few who must provide the inspiration to do 

well what has to be done in those brief, highly incandescent moments of history when 

everything comes together, all at once, demanding a solution.”22

To the Royal College of Defense Studies, Starry gave a speech on “Strategic 

Imperatives—Towards the Year 2000.”23 Still resonant in our day, he offered that the 

most critical need was for “a fully coordinated policy framework in which all elements of 

national power...are combined as integral parts of a coherent strategy.” He led a tour de 
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horizon of the challenges of the day and offered five guidelines for a “rational framework 

for military action in pursuit of national goals:”

1. First, if military forces are to be employed, it is imperative that it be decided early 

on what is to be done.

2. Secondly, whatever may be the course of action on which we embark, it must be 

decided whether or not sufficient forces are or can be made available to accomplish 

the mission.

3. Thirdly, can available deployment means move the forces to the right place in time 

to accomplish the mission?

4. Fourthly, can the forces deployed be sustained after they’re employed?

5. Finally, having satisfied one commitment with whatever forces, deployment 

means, [and] sustainment resources may be required, there may be a need to respond 

to other commitments as well. Can that be done?24

To these he added a follow-on observation, that “no public official in a democratic 

society today can afford to ignore taking into account the political, economic, social and 

military environment in which his actions are viewed and his programs put into effect.”25

Two years later, General Richardson, whose central role in the recovery of the post war 

Army was both substantial and remains to be documented, confined himself to discussing 

the importance, purpose and limited focus of professional education; a topic that those of 

us privileged to attend his recent induction to the CGSC Hall of Fame understand clearly 

still excites his interest, his passions, and his critical judgments.26

In 1992, General Fred Franks, was making something of a victory tour with his principal 

ally when he delivered his lectures. A year before he had commanded the U.S. Army VII 

Corps in Southern Iraq and Kuwait. One of the divisions under his tactical control was the 

British 1st Armoured Division, commanded by then Major General Rupert Smith. Franks 

awarded some British soldiers their campaign ribbons and joked with the veterans of that 

war that he had come looking for missing U.S. Army cots, for which, he said, British 

officers had developed quite a fondness.

Like General Starry, Franks varied his remarks according to his audiences, though 

all his talks were about the balance between the intellectual and emotional content of 

soldiering. Like General Richardson, he published the heart of his lectures in Military 

Review, first in an essay titled “Matters of the Mind and the Heart,”27 which he tied to 

a Staff College lecture given a month after the Kermit Roosevelt journey, and later in a 

valedictory article published in 1993, “Battle Command: A Commander’s Perspective.”28

In contrast to General Starry, for whom Franks had served as executive officer, the 

commander of VII Corps in Dessert Storm found himself confronted with the post Cold 

War build-down without the appearance of a single dominant foe on which to orient. In 

fact, Franks’ VII Corps had been deactivated immediately at the end of the Gulf War. Both 

the British and U.S. Armies were in the process of undergoing deep reductions in force, 

about 25%, according to Franks. 
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As the Army built down, Training and Doctrine Command drew in and Franks and the 

new Army Chief of Staff, Gordon Sullivan, focused both on maintaining the balance of 

the existing force—“No time outs!”, General Sullivan said—and developing the concepts 

that would enable the Army to realize the promise of the communication and precision 

fires technologies, the potential of which had been revealed in the recent Gulf War. To 

that end Sullivan sent the Gulf War divisions back to the National Training Center and 

created an experimental organization called the Louisiana Maneuvers, after the World War 

II mobilization exercises. 

Sullivan gave Fred Franks and TRADOC the task of mapping the future. Absent a 

definable threat, combat developers began talking about capability-based rather than threatbased force structures. It was an approach which, progressively divorced from the human 

dimension offered by history, perhaps, contributed to overlooking the importance of the 

adaptive abilities of potential foes.

The theme of Franks’ lectures, like Dempsey’s, was preparing leaders and the institution 

to confront change while retaining a combat edge.29 There was concern that the Army would 

lose focus on its preparation for combat while it dealt with the rapid changes bearing down 

on it. General Sullivan referred over and over again to the example of Lieutenant Colonel 

Brad Smith’s task force in Korea. Franks repeated the story in his lectures. “No more 

Task Force Smiths!” was the battle cry for continued emphasis on the primary mission, 

what General Dempsey said recently was the one task in which the Army must never fail, 

employing lethal force in the service of the nation.30

Franks warned against being bogged down in short-term change and missing the 

future. He believed, he said, “you can’t roll up your sleeves and wring your hands at the 

same time.” It was necessary to look ahead. “What a shame it would be if about ten years 

from now,” he said, “we look back on a period of relative stability for our military and say 

what we forgot to do was look ahead.”31

In his Roosevelt speeches, Franks proposed concentrating on two themes, the 

interaction between doctrine and technology, and the evolution of the nature of conflict. 

From his experience in the Gulf War, Franks had concluded that AirLand Battle had risen 

to a new level, one where simultaneous attack throughout the depths of the enemy forces 

had become a reality. 

Franks pointed to history for warning examples. He observed the long failure to adapt 

to the conditions of tactical lethality created by rifled musketry and he balanced this view 

with the difficulty contemporary observers must have had looking at early prototypes 

of armored vehicles and seeing the possibility of massive, coordinated or synchronized 

armored maneuver. Franks’ answer, driven in part by the need to pay for retaining combat 

forces by reducing the size of the institutional side of the Army, was creation of focused 

Battle Labs, not to theorize but to experiment, to tinker, he said, to use simulations and 

exercises to see where emerging technology might take us.

Franks quoted Martin van Creveld’s Transformation of War (Free Press, 1991), which 

asserted that war was abolishing itself. Franks surveyed the recent spate of deployments and 

doubted it. He quoted as well Sir John Hackett who said, “The function of the profession 
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of arms is the ordered application of force in the resolution of social problems.”32 Franks 

asked “What social problems may we asked to resolve? What’s next?...I don’t think,” he 

said, “we ought to lose sight of the fact that our nations will call on us again. Where and 

when I don’t know.” And, he challenged his audiences to help think through that question.33

He spoke in the end about the unchanging “Matters of the Heart”—The soul and spirit 

of the military. He talked generally about what he called the T-words: Training, Teamwork 

and Trust. Speaking to British Soldiers, he drew on British examples of courage in battle 

and command, and he concluded reading a short note of thanks from the mother of one of 

his VII Corps Soldiers. “I believe,” she wrote, “the excellent training my son received, and 

the teamwork involved throughout DESERT STORM, kept my son alive. My son has been 

telling me that you all are the best, and seeing is believing.”34

So what is to make of all this? 

In a recent You Tube reflection on the Army Profession, General Dempsey argues 

the Army has a need to reflect on the nature of the Profession of Arms and to have “a 

discourse...a discussion within our ranks...about what it is that makes us a profession, 

and then encourage the self-examination to help us understand whether we are living up 

to it.”35 Part of such a discourse is looking back to where the Army has come from, how 

its members have met previous challenges, and led transitions, to redefine themselves as a 

relevant profession of arms. 

All of the Kermit Roosevelt speakers I have addressed here were confronted by the 

need to recenter the force and redefine its identity in light of new developments, strategic 

and technological. General Davidson stood at the end of a failed war when he gave his 

Roosevelt speech. He didn’t know how the future would turn out, but he pointed to the 

direction the Atlantic alliance would have to go to meet the increasingly obvious Soviet 

challenge, and he appears to have been alerting the British allies not only to the common 

threat but to the need to mobilize his own nation’s Congress to the common necessities. 

When General Davidson spoke, General Starry was, or was about to become, 

the Commandant of the Armor Center, where he would contribute to the conceptual 

revitalization of the broken Army, even as budgets and force limits made it seem doubtful 

that the necessary forces could be created to realize the vision. By the time Starry was 

TRADOC commander, for reasons largely beyond his influence and certainly beyond his 

control, the potential to realize and improve on that early vision had come into being. When 

resources again became available, the Army had identified its requirements and desired 

formations and was prepared to synchronize the integration of ideas and resources, with 

a force growing increasingly professional in its self-identification and behavior. General 

Richardson’s role in all of these developments, as ADCSOPS, as CAC Commander, 

DCSOPS and TRADOC commander, was significant and is neglected here only because 

his own reflections are recent enough at the Staff College not to warrant repetition. 

General Franks’ question, about the imperative of looking ahead ten years and using 

the time wisely, defines the task that confronted them all. General Davidson’s observation 

that it is the quality of the response not the convenience of the challenge, which will be 

judged, remains true. As both Dempsey and Franks warned, the signals of change are weak 
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and misleading. General Franks pointed out to me, recently, “What I was trying to do 

was structure the Army so we could ask the right questions...then let the generation who 

would have to execute the answers go find those answers.”36 Something must be left to 

the generation that actually confronts the emergent problem on the ground. Imagination is 

applied most critically in real-time.

General Dempsey’s clear criticism is that after the first Gulf War, the Army did not look 

ahead well enough, institutionally. It did not develop in its leadership the conceptual agility 

to respond to unanticipated changes, to reframe understanding rapidly, when the system no 

longer responded as expected. Imagination failed. Faith in technology, confidence, perhaps, 

in the old successful conventional combat identity, led to complacency and, when tested, 

the imaginative and conceptual tools of Army leaders did not reflect the imaginative agility 

to read the fluid situation and make the necessary transitions in timely fashion.

If General Dempsey is correct about the failure of imagination, and there are certainly 

those who will dispute the specific content and locus of failure, then the remedy must 

be found in recreation of the educational system which was so much a part of Starry’s, 

Richardson’s, and Franks’ legacy to the Army. For imagination in uncertainty comes 

from searching curiosity, openness to new ideas, rigorous, critical, collaborative learning, 

and a fundamental understanding of the reciprocal nature of conflict. In that respect, it 

is interesting to observe a perceptive forecast by a 1988 graduate of the Command and 

General Staff College. This particular major offered that:

If the professional officer goes to war today, he will probably fight for a nation with an 

obvious aversion to war. He will probably fight in a less-than-total-war environment 

for very limited and vaguely-defined political objectives. He will probably fight an 

adversary who will meet him on the field of battle with the fanaticism of a religious 

crusade. Such circumstances will surely test his concept of Duty.37

The major was one Martin E. Dempsey...now the TRADOC Commander.
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Notes

1. Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 

1784-1898 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), vii.

2. Martin E. Dempsey, Kermit Roosevelt Lecture; “A Campaign of Learning: Avoiding the 

Failure of Imagination,” The RUSI Journal 155: 3, (June/July 2010) 6-9.

3. Dempsey, 6.

4. Dempsey.

5. See candidate Bush’s 1999 Citadel speech: http://www.citadel.edu/pao/addresses/pres_

bush.html, (accessed 30 August 2010).

6. Dempsey, “A Campaign of Learning: Avoiding the Failure of Imagination,” 6.

7. Dempsey, 5-6.

8. Dempsey, 7.

9. “At the tactical level, Objective Force Units will see first, understand first, act first and 

finish decisively as the means to tactical success.” United States Army White Paper, Concepts 

for the Objective Force, [n.d.], page 6. On line at http://www.army.mil/features/WhitePaper/

ObjectiveForceWhitePaper.pdf, (accessed 30 August 2010). See the 2003 critique of the Army 

White Paper by then Lieutenant Colonel H. R. McMaster, CRACK IN THE FOUNDATION: 

Defense Transformation and the Underlying Assumption of Dominant Knowledge in Future 

War. U.S. Army War College, Center for Strategic Leadership, November 2003, Volume S03-

03. On line at http://www.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/army-usawc/mcmaster_foundation.pdf, 

(accessed 30 August 2010).

10. Dempsey, “A Campaign of Learning: Avoiding the Failure of Imagination,” 7-8.

11. On 30 April 1975. Davidson’s series of appearances were from 27 April to 7 May.

12. General Michael Davidson, Remarks for the Kermit Roosevelt Lectures, England, 27 

April to 7 May 1975. 355.

13. Davidson, 358.

14. Davidson, 356.

15. Davidson, 363.

16. See General Donn A. Starry, “The Profession of Arms in America,” in Encyclopedia 

of the American Military; Studies of the History, Traditions, Policies, Institutions, and Roles 

of the Armed Forces in War and Peace, John E. Jessup and Louise B. Ketz, eds, Vol. 1 (New 

York: Charles ‘Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 467-503. Roger Spiller, “In the Shadow of the Dragon: 

Doctrine and the U.S. Army after Vietnam”, Chapter 9 of In Roger J. Spiller, In the School of 

War (Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 220-257. (Essay 

first appeared in the RUSI Journal.) Richard M. Swain, “Filling the Void: The Operational Art 

and the U.S. Army,” Chapter 8 of The Operational Art: Developments in Theories of War, B. J. 

C. McKercher and Michael A. Hennessy, eds (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1996) 147-172.

17. Department of the Army, Center for Military History, Information Paper, SUBJECT: 

Breaking the Army, 1965-1980,” written by Dr. [William A.] Donnelly/202-685-2251, dated 29 

August 2007.

18. Titled “The Leadership Challenge” and delivered on 7 May 1982. Transcript in 

possession of author.

19. “The Leadership Challenge,” 26.

20. “The Leadership Challenge,” 28.

21. “The Leadership Challenge,” 28-29.

22. “The Leadership Challenge,” 29
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23. Delivered on 11 May 1982. Transcript in possession of author.

24. Delivered, 35-36.

25. Delivered, 36.

26. The author has a copy of General Richardson’s speech presented at the Royal Military 

College of Science, Shrivenham, 22 May 1984. The paper was published as General William 

R. Richardson, “Kermit Roosevelt Lecture: Officer Training and Education”, Military Review 

(October 1984), 22-34.

27. General Frederick M. Franks, “Matters of the Mind and the Heart,” Military Review 

(March 1993), 2-10.

28. General Frederick M. Franks, Jr., “Battle Command: A Commander’s Perspective” 

(Military Review, May-June 1996), 4-25.

29. General Franks’ lectures were gathered in a pamphlet, 1992 Kermit Roosevelt Lecture 

Series. A copy was provided the author by the TRADOC History Office through the good 

officers of Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, formerly General Franks’ executive officer.

30. Dempsey, “The Army Profession”, June 2010, YouTube.com.

31. General Frederick M. Franks, Jr., Kermit Roosevelt Lecture Series, “Soldiering: A 

Matter of the Mind and the Heart”, Joint Services Defence College [UK], 14 May 1992, 3.

32. Sir John Winthrop Hackett, The Profession of Arms (Department of the Army, Officers 

Call, CMH Pub 70-18, Facsimile Reprint of 1962 Lees Knowles Lectures given at Trinity 

College Cambridge, by Lt.-General Sir John Winthrop Hackett, 1986, 1988, 1990), 3. There 

are other printings of these speeches. The LondonTimes published them as a pamphlet in 1983. 

General Hackett made some interesting comments on how the U.S. came to reprint his essay in 

the old Encounter (January 1986), 75-76.

33. General Frederick M. Franks, Jr., Kermit Roosevelt Lecture Series. “Soldiering: A 

Matter of the Mind and the Heart,:” Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, 13 May 

1992, 18-19.

34. Franks, 25. The quotation was the closing of all the presentations.

35. Dempsey, “The Army Profession”, June 2010, YouTube.com.

36. E-mail from General (Ret) Frederick M. Franks to the author, Monday September 13, 

2010.

37. Martin E. Dempsey, Duty: Understanding the Most Sublime Military Virtue. A thesis 

presented to the Faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in partial 

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree, MASTER OF MILITARY ART AND SCIENCES. 

Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1988.
165

Day 2, Panel 5: Rebirth of the US Army, 1976-2001 

Presentation by James Carafano, Ph.D.

(Transcript of Presentation)

Moderated by MAJ(P) Clay Mountcastle

MAJ(P) Mountcastle:

I will proceed with Dr. Carafano’s talk, and then we’ll go into the Q&A session on the 

completion of his talk. 

Dr. James Carafano is also a career Army officer in field artillery, so we have our 

fair share of field artillerymen here today. And is the assistant director of the Heritage 

Foundation’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, and 

is Senior Research Fellow for Defense and Homeland Security Issues. He also earned 

his stripes in the classroom at USMA, teaching at West Point, and is currently a visiting 

professor at the National Defense University in Georgetown University. He’s the author 

of numerous books, the latest of which is Private Sector, Public Wars: Contractors in 

Combat—Iraq, Afghanistan, and Future Conflicts. Dr. Carafano. 

Dr. Carafano:

So, like, I am so excited to be here. First of all, I feel right at home. I’m very used to the 

fact that when people hear I’m going to talk, they run out of the building. But, even more 

importantly, this gives me an opportunity, because I mostly deal with kind of contemporary 

things. But to really be an ambassador and advocate for a way of looking at military history, 

which I think is absolutely essential and critical and vital to our discipline. And not just 

to our discipline, but I really believe in serving our profession. And the argument is, is 

that the kind of military history that we read, need to be writing today, is really at the 

center of the starburst of economic and political and business and the history of popular 

culture and science and military. That the fruitful and important history to understand our 

profession and understand leadership in our profession has to be written by integrating all 

those perspectives. 

Now, that’s not to make an argument for new military history, which I’m not. I was 

a fan of the Annales School, giving voice to the voiceless, I think that’s OK. But quite 

honestly, the way that kind of social history has developed in the military history discipline 

has been pretty disappointing. I mean, mostly, it’s really come about articulating political 

and stakeholder and social agendas in history hasn’t really informed, I don’t think, military 

history all too terribly well, and it’s been more of a mirror for how people see the world 

than really kind of informative. I think, you know, the histories that John Dower’s written 

kind of actually taken to a dead end, as military historians. 

But, I would argue that you cannot write really good 20th century military history 

without this interdisciplinary perspective, because I think there’s a really important cycle 

that we see there, which is, and particularly important when you look at leadership and 
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command issues. And it’s this, is that that we have this cycle of developing ideas and 

concepts, intellectual and business constructs in the private sector, and then when we 

mobilize for war and we adapt to meet all the new changes of a new kind of war, and we 

suck people in to do that, and we suck ideas in to do that, we transform the military. And 

those ideas come into the military and they are themselves transformed, and then when we 

send veterans back out into the private sector, we flush that back out and we change the rest 

of society as well. And this cycle goes on and on, whether you want to talk about the impact 

of things like scientific management, and Taylor’s writing had that eventually came in and 

shaped the military for World War I, or how our ideas about middle management shaped 

how we fought World War II. But I think this cycle is important and I think it’s profound. 

Sometimes it has very positive effects, both on the civil society side and the military side, 

sometimes it comes through rather awkwardly. But I think it’s really critically important, 

and I think it nowhere has greater and more important and more vital implications than 

understanding the narrative of the US Army in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, and what 

happened to our profession, and why. 

There’s this great myth that somehow the problem of the US Military in the 1970s was 

a problem of the profession. That somehow it was the ethics or the culture or the values 

or the brains of military service, which really accounted for the failures in Vietnam and 

the failures of performance in Vietnam. You know, I think this narrative is unbelievably 

unsupportable, even on the most superficial level. And you can just look back, now 

historically, at some of the kind of shining things that we put out to prove that. One of 

my favorite ones was “Zero Defects.” We all remember Zero Defects, right? This was 

the management techniques, drive all the mistakes out of the thing. Zero Defects was a 

very innocuous civilian military—excuse me, civilian management practice. We imported 

it, much like we always import these things into, just like we imported Taylor and other 

management business concepts into the military. Of course, like many things, the Army 

inartfully integrated it, because you can’t necessarily port business leadership concepts just 

directly into the military and do it smartly. So we had things, like, for example, everybody 

had to sign a Zero Defects card. To swear that they would make sure that there were no 

defects. Now, this was then later resurrected as this was the root of all evil, because we 

had body counts, and bad leadership, and everything, because we had this risk-averse 

leadership and all this and everything. That’s never been studied, never been—and on the 

face, it’s kind of insupportable. We did Six Sigma in the 1990s, right? Six Sigma’s just the 

modern version of Zero Defects. I don’t remember anybody running around the military 

saying that Six Sigma destroyed the culture of the US Military. 

There was an enormous debate about leadership versus management. Whether 

you needed leaders or managers. Again, this was a very innocuous kind of—well, not 

innocuous. This was a really inane debate that was kind of stupid. If you actually look at 

modern business leadership writing, they really say, well, leadership and management, 

you know, it’s not one or the other. You have to have both skills. But again, nobody went 

back and historically looked at this to say, was there really something to this debate. And 

you could also look at the Military Reform Movement, which I think has been woefully 

understudied. The Military Reform was opinion without analysis. You had all these great 

military arguments for military reform based on a bunch of opinions. I mean, there was 
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nothing analytical or substantive behind those things. So, and this all famously culminated, 

and we’re in the right place, right? With, of course, the famous leadership study down at 

Leavenworth, where they surveyed the students and they said, oh, our leaders are corrupt 

and valueless and broken and all the rest of this stuff and everything. And everybody looked 

and said oh god, it must be true. Nobody said, well, it’s just a bunch of majors griping. This 

is really—and where is the real analytical study of this, study that puts it in its context, to 

see this is really telling us something about the culture and profession of the military, or is 

it just a bunch of guys spouting off. 

So, I mean, I think this narrative is so incredibly unsupportable and inane. I offer just 

three observations that anybody ought to be able to make in 15 seconds to say that this 

historical narrative is just stupid and unsupportable. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the 

US Military profession in the 1960s or 1970s, and maybe resurrecting the profession was 

not the root of the resurrection improvement in the 1980s. 

The first one is like, who did the resurrecting? Who were these guys? And many of them 

had been mentioned today. If you look at the cadre of leaders who set the foundation for the 

rebuilding in the 1980s, and some of them led the rebuilding in the 1980s, who are these 

guys? Well, a lot of them were World War II veterans. They’re the Greatest Generation. So 

how could they have gone from being the Greatest Generation to, like, boobs? And so, you 

could have just go on with the names, and we talked about some of them. DePuy. Abrams. 

And then there were names we didn’t mention, like Dutch Kerwin. Now, Dutch Kerwin 

started fighting in North Africa at 26, 27 years old. He organized the artillery fires to the 

breakout at Anzio. Fought his way, all the way into France. Was Chief of Staff for Abrams 

and Westmoreland both, and then Vice Chief of Staff. I mean, these guys are all over the 

military in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They were the ones doing the rebuilding. So they couldn’t 

have gone from being the Greatest Generation to not the Greatest Generation. Obviously, 

somewhere, when the 1960s broke out, they didn’t check their culture and their values 

and professionalism at the door. And then go back and get them out of the closet after the 

Vietnam War was over. 

I think the second problem is if you look at who actually did the rebuilding of the 

military in the 1980s, last time I checked, they were all veterans of Vietnam. Right? So, you 

go down the list of the Reimers and the Sullivans and the Vuonos and the Cavazos and the 

Ulmers and the Franks, so, they didn’t get some kind of magic pill in 1980 that turned them 

from weak-kneed risk-averse leaderless, cultureless, valueless guys, and all of a sudden 

they got their “mojo” back. So that’s unsupportable. 

And I think the third thing is, and this is where I really fault us as a profession. With 

very few exceptions, people like Bob Sorley, who had the audacity to write that there 

actually may have been people during Vietnam who weren’t idiots, like Abrams and 

Harold K. Johnson, but mostly, nobody went looking in the record for signs of a vibrant 

US Army professionalism in the 1960s. Or signs of culture or value. And I think the truth 

is if we had mined there, we’d find a lot very easily. When I was at West Point, one of the 

projects I worked on was there was a really interesting project that was run by the History 

Department in the 1960s called the Adventure Board. This was run by Tom Griess. And 

Tom said, you know, a lot of our graduates are doing great things out there. The cadets 
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don’t know anything about that. This is before Facebook. So, this was the Facebook of 

the 1960s. Something probably you guys have never heard of, it’s called “mail.” So Tom 

had a letter writing campaign where they wrote to graduates and former professors and 

other people in Vietnam, they said write us back on your experiences so we can share them 

with the cadets. And they posted these letters, and they did illustrations on it. Some of you 

remember Bob Carson Barsky, who was the cartographer forever at West Point, died a few 

years ago. He did up displays and all this. It was very popular while around. Then, when 

the war winded down, they just kind of grabbed all this stuff up and they threw it in a closet 

and they forgot about it, and when I heard about it, I actually went looking for it. They told 

me it had been thrown away, and I went—I was walking down the hall one day, and I don’t 

know if any of you guys remember Colonel Dillard, I forget his first name. Scott Dillard, 

right. Who said that? You’ve been in Scott’s office then, right? OK, so you know where 

this story is going. Scott Dillard was the world’s biggest rat pack. His office looked like 

the last scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And so I go to Colonel Dillard, I said, “Oh my 

god, I just talked to the janitor guy, he said they threw all these things away.” He says, “I 

think they’re in my office.” So I think I saw them sitting out at the trash bin, I thought that 

might be interesting, I might want to look at that somebody. And so we go into his office, 

and buried in the back of his office is these boxes of these letters. And so we drug them out, 

and we cataloged them, and we put them in the library. But the point is if you read those 

letters from young junior officers and lieutenants and captains and some majors, you could 

have changed the date and the name, and they could have been somebody writing from the 

Meuse-Argonne, or some guy writing from Anzio, or Bougainville, and, they just read like 

every other. They were honorable letters, there were people who were proud of what they 

were doing, people that, and granted, they were writing back to cadets, right? But still, you 

could tell that a lot of these letters were just genuinely honest. And I don’t think that’s a 

hard thing to find. I think if we went back and we looked at professionalism in the 1960s, 

we would find a military whose values and cultures were every bit as resilient and strong 

as they were in the ‘40s and in the ‘50s and in the ‘80s. 

Now, it doesn’t mean I think that Army leadership was in this great condition, because 

I do think there was a significant, and great, and enduring flaw in Army leadership, and it 

is this. And that is the intellectual capacity of military leaders to adjust to divergent ways 

of war. I think there is a weakness in the military leadership in the US Army, and I think 

it hinges on professional education, how we do professional education. I think if you look 

at the post-Cold War period, there were three big changes. One was the advent of new 

technology and computers and the information, all that, and quite honestly, the Army didn’t 

do too bad there. We kind of got that one. I think we have to credit Sullivan and Reimer and 

Shinseki with not missing that. I mean, the other two were expeditionary warfare, which 

we totally missed. I remember back when we started doing the post-Cold War stuff and we 

were doing our experiments, and somebody said, “Well, what are we going to do about the 

deployment phase?” And General Hartzog said, “Aw, we don’t have time to worry about 

that.” Right? And so we jumped into fighting the war. And of course, the expeditionary 

piece was huge. And we spent almost no time on that, ‘til we ran into things like Kosovo, 

and other theaters where the Army found trouble getting in deployment, and of course, the 
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third piece was addressing irregular warfare despite the vast amount of experience we had 

among our junior leaders in Vietnam, the Army was totally unprepared for that as well. 

So, why is that? Why did we do relatively well in the professional development front, 

but on this intellectual front, this capacity to adjust the military thinking to different ways 

of war, why did we fare, I think, far less well? Despite the fact that we did such a great job 

of rebuilding the military in the 1980s, and I would cite three things. 

The first was the promotion system. Again, this was something, again, another thing 

we borrowed from the business sector, the idea that good, smart people, you don’t want 

to lose them, so you want to get them up in the ranks, you want to give them leadership, 

you want to get them up faster. So the Army developed a system of early below the zone 

promotions. So one of the problems of below the zone promotions is we literally started 

deciding when people were captains, whether they’re going to be generals or not. Because 

we were putting people on a fast track when we were captains, and the way the system 

worked is, quite honestly, unless the guy committed some major crime or something, he 

just stayed on the fast track, because nobody would take him off, until he became a general. 

And as you get into the more senior level of promotion, you basically have, when you get 

into the boards, who are people promoting in boards? Well, they’re promoting people that 

they think are going to be the best leaders. And we all know who the best leaders are going 

to be, right? That’s very easy. It’s the people that look like me, think like me, sound like 

me, talk like me. So the tendencies to promote people who fit the paradigm, and as long 

as the paradigm was very narrow, doing kind of things closer, mirror the Fulda Gap, the 

Army was great. But when the paradigm really broadened, and you need leaders looking 

at very, very divergent cases, then you found, I think, as a whole, with exceptions, the 

intellectual community of the Army, the leadership was limited. Limited, in part, because 

of the promotion system that created like that looks a lot like that. 

I think the second problem that hurt the Army a great deal was the way we downsized 

at the end of the Cold War. And there were two problems there. One was that commands 

disappeared overnight. And so you had several year groups who went from having, like, 

a hundred opportunities to command, to maybe, like, ten. And of course, in the Army 

promotion system, if you didn’t command, you didn’t get promoted. You didn’t get to 

senior service school. So I think there was a whole further narrowing the intellectual variety 

is, boy, when you’re narrowing it down, you can only get a few guys. The like of the like 

are really the ones that get through. 

And then, of course, we had this early out option. We said everybody can take early 

out. And who are the kinds of people who took early out? This is, again, a practice we 

borrowed from business. As a matter of fact, Lockheed Martin had just done one of these 

things, and Lockheed Martin had just rediscovered what the Army rediscovered, is the 

people that take the early out, they’re not necessarily the ones you want to leave. A lot 

of them are maybe some of your most talented and creative people who are frustrated in 

the system, and rather than stick it out, they just take the money and run. So I think the 

combination between the rapid depression of commands and creating opportunities for 

some of the best and brightest, and even some of the best and quirkiest, to kind of walk out 

the door, people took advantage of that. 
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Then the third place I would really place fault is our senior military, professional military 

education. Which really, in my mind, ossified in the wake of World War II. Where we’re 

sending leaders to learn how to be strategic thinkers about a week before they retire. So 

we’re sending people who are in their mid and late ‘40s to really their capstone intellectual 

experience. First of all, I don’t know about you, but I think by the time a brain gets to about 

45 years old, it’s untrainable. So, I think intellectually, you’re not really very adaptive. 

They’re very little time for you to practice that skill. There’s very little opportunity for you 

to practice that skill, and I think in a sense, that really put the Army thinking on hold, the 

fact that we really weren’t cultivating very strategic thinking at very, very junior levels. 

You know, I would contrast the model that we had in the ‘70s and the ‘80s, which, 

and maybe we can debate this. But to me, one of the most fruitful and productive errors of 

leadership and intellectual development in the US Military was the interwar years between 

World War I and World War II. And my argument is the bad news is, nobody got promoted. 

The good news was nobody got promoted. And so, in an environment like that, where 

you didn’t get promoted, but you also didn’t get kicked out either. In a sense, you could 

do whatever the heck you wanted to. And we had a lot of military leaders who made a lot 

of interesting choices, and they could, because they weren’t going to pay a price for that. 

So you had people like Eisenhower went and worked in the Philippines. You had Stilwell, 

who’s going, running off, and Maxwell Taylor going to language school in Japan. So you 

didn’t have this kind of ossification or this very narrowness of thinking and experience. 

You actually had, for the US Army, one of the more wide and varied levels of experience. 

Then you jump into World War II, and then what happens is we get into World War II, 

and we find ourselves doing all kinds of things in all kinds of places in the world that we 

never thought about doing. So we’re doing amphibious operations in the Pacific. We’re 

storming the Siegfried Line. And it’s almost like that scene from Mission: Impossible, at 

the beginning of the old TV series, where he pulls out the portfolio and he says, “Where can 

I find the right guy for the right job?” And miraculously, in World War II, there was a pretty 

big list. You could find a Stilwell. You could find a Patton. You could find a logistician. 

You could find guys who are gurus. You could find guys with quirky experiences and 

backgrounds that would fit the needs of a unique situation that you hadn’t anticipated in a 

way, I would argue, that you don’t find when you walk into the aftermath of the invasion of 

Iraq or in Afghanistan. The bench, you could find some of those guys, but the bench is just 

not as deep, because you didn’t let them develop and mature and grow and gain that variety 

of opportunity of experience as junior officers. So you couldn’t deal with the unanticipated. 

So why do I raise this? Well, I think there’s a debate here. Whether we’re going to 

continue in the long war, or whether we’re going to go into the next interwar period, in the 

generation ahead. And I think there’s good news and bad news there, and I’ll just close on 

this. 

So, the good news is, we now have Army leadership from the highest levels from the 

very most junior levels who have enormous operational experience, right? These guys have 

way more combat time than maybe any other army in the history of the Army. And it’s all 

kinds of things in lots of different environments. That’s a great body to build on. 
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So, what’s the bad news? Well, the bad news is operational experience untempered by 

intellect isn’t necessarily the most helpful thing in the world. There’s a great story, which 

is after World War II, they sent everybody to Leavenworth. Big help, right? After you 

fought the war, we send you to school to learn how to fight war. But they went anyway, 

right? Because they didn’t have anything else to do. We had the school curriculum and we 

had the school solution. So we do a tactical problem, and the instructor would present the 

school solution, whereupon all the World War II combat vets would stand up and just groan 

and, “Oh my god, that is so stupid.” “Oh my god, we would never do that.” “Oh my god, 

that is so stupid. Oh my god.” And then the Pacific guys would stand up and they go, “Oh, 

you’re right, that is so stupid. But you European guys, you don’t know what the hell you’re 

talking about. This is the way you really do it.” And the point is, they were very smart and 

intuitive, but from their own operational perspective. So having operational experience is 

great, but unless you can grow that operational experience and learn how to adopt that to 

a variety of experience, is not very useful. And you need education to do that. So, I think 

having a generation of combat leaders is actually almost dangerous, because they’re going 

to think is the answer is what they did in the whatever valley, and they have to learn that 

that’s just one kind of war and one kind of experience, and they have to learn how to take 

that personal experience and use that to develop the intuitive judgment and insight to adapt 

that to other kinds of warfare and other experiences. So that’s problem number one. 

Problem number two is this advantage is temporal. They don’t stay around forever. And 

so, the space between one combat generation and the next, you don’t know if that’s World 

War II and Korea, or Vietnam and Desert Storm. So that advantage of combat experience 

is a temporal, ephemeral thing that goes away over time. 

The third thing is downsizing. I don’t think another downsizing is out of the question. 

Nobody can predict the future. But if you talk to Army leadership or you talk to everybody 

in DoD, the mantra is no money, no this, no that. It’s only a question of time ‘til they 

start thinning out the ranks. And the question’s how do they downsize. Do we do it again, 

where we let the best and the brightest walk away. There’s some very interesting research 

on that about whether the best and brightest and staying, and how they’re staying, and if 

they really are the best and the brightest. But I think that creates an enormous challenge 

for the military. A lot of this is what do you do after they save Berlin? If you’ve been a 2d 

lieutenant, and you’ve commanded on a forward operations base, right, and you are the 

warrior king, and then the war’s over, and now you’re a 2d lieutenant, and you’re getting 

yelled at by the captain because all the Humvees or whatever they have now, MRAPs aren’t 

lined up, right, you’re thinking, “This sucks. I’m going to go do something else.” And so, 

a lot of times you have trouble keeping a combat generation engaged in their profession, 

because it’s just boring. 

And then the final thing is, I think, the professional military education system. I think 

we are broken, in the sense that we are not keeping up with the rest of the planet. Almost 

every other major profession has their capstone formal professional educational experience 

when they’re in their early 20s or early 30s. Only the military waits until you’re dead, 

before they actually send you to senior service school. And as much as I love our war 

colleges, I think they are too narrow to give us the range of leaders and thinkers that we’re 
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going to need in the future, and I do think we need a diversity of professional military 

education experience, and I think we need it much earlier in people’s careers. And I think 

without that, we risk losing all the creativity and innovation and imagination that we’ve 

gained in the last years trying to adjust to this long war. 

Well thank you, and I appreciate it. Over to you. 
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Day 2, Panel 5: Rebirth of the US Army, 1976-2001

Questions and Answers

(Transcript of Presentation)

Richard Swain, Ph.D.

James Carafano, Ph.D.

Moderated by MAJ(P) Clay Mountcastle

MAJ(P) Mountcastle: 

OK. And one of the other reasons I was excited to sign up to be a moderator is that 

I knew at least I could pose my question and not run out of time, because I get to take 

moderator's privilege and throw it out there first. But, and this question is something I've 

been thinking about for a bit of time, and it's directed to both members of the panel. Jim, 

it might fit in a little bit more with what you presented with us now, but certainly, offered 

to both of you. Clearly over the past eight years or so, we've heard building criticism of 

the post-Vietnam Army, and particularly the leadership in the post-Vietnam Army, in that it 

was not keen to pay attention to the lessons of Vietnam. It was too quick to put the lessons 

of Vietnam behind it and blaze ahead and not look back. However, when those opinions 

are expressed, I don't see a lot of what-ifs added to that, as to how, had the Army leadership 

chosen to do that, how that might have affected the rebuilding the process that everybody 

was so happy with when it finally seemed to work and get the Army to where it was by 

1990, and if we're going to look at victory in the Persian Gulf as kind of this capstone to 

the rebuilding phase, some might argue that, but would we have had the same rebuilding 

process if the Army leadership had chosen to dwell on those lessons of Vietnam more 

like the critics would like to have seen, or would we not have had the same Army that we 

arrived in the Persian Gulf with in 1990, had we chosen to do that? 

Dr. Carafano:

Yeah, I would say the Army didn't have a choice. First of all, the attitude, not just of the 

White House, but of the senior members in Congress and the nation as a whole is "Never 

again, we're not going to do this anymore." So if the Army went into Congress and said I 

want to spend all this money on sustaining irregular warfare as a mission, everybody would 

have said, "OK, you're not going to get any money." And the second point was the funding 

in the post-military was bare bones. It didn't leave a lot—you had to make hard choices, 

and the Army's hard choice was the enemy that was still in front, and that was the Fulda 

Gap. So I'm not really sure the Army had many choices, but I think we potentially could 

be in a situation, again, where the Army is faced with exactly the same choice. And the 

decision this time may be, "OK, great, we're going to do irregular warfare. We just don't do 

the conventional warfare anymore." That's the debate we have now. And either way, they're 

both bad choices, right? Because the enemy's going to do whatever we don't. So if we do 
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irregular warfare, then they'll just beat us conventionally, or vice versa. I don't know how 

you could be a great power and not do windows, and play baseball and softball and soccer. 

Dr. Swain:

I agree with the basic premise, which to me, the error, first of all, I don't think you had 

another choice, for the same reasons. I think the error is that the Army wants to be a one-trick 

pony, and I don't think that's an option. It's not a true statement that the Army completely 

abandoned irregular warfare to the extent that the Special Operations people claim that as 

their jurisdiction and their particular field of expertise. That clearly was inadequate when 

we ended up in Iraq. I always tell everybody, we wouldn't have had the insurgency problem 

in Iraq if Dave Perkins couldn't have gotten to Baghdad with a conventional attack, and 

we've tended to forget that in the intervening nine years. But I think the thing I agree with 

most is you can't—there's the business about we don't do windows, and you ain't going to 

get it in the world we live in. We're going to have to be more versatile. Or you're going to 

have to be more versatile, I won’t. (laughter) 

Dr. Carafano:

Just one quick follow up. I think we should kill the other great myth, which was the 

answer, which is a great soldier could do anything. So when you talked about irregular 

warfare, the answer you got was, "Well, we have great soldiers. If they can fight the Battle 

of the Fulda Gap, they can adapt to anything." And what's proven is that's not true. Great 

soldiers can do anything. It may take you three or four years and several thousand casualties, 

and you pay a pretty high strategic price for that. But this notion is, if you build a good 

disciplined well-organized educated force, that they're going to adjust to radically different 

kinds of warfare effortlessly, that's just not—I don't think there's any evidence for that. 

Dr. Schifferle:

I generally agree with the perspective that you both have. But there is a question that 

we've kind of glossed over both yesterday and today, which is educate what? And the 

discussion of good soldiers do everything well, or a multi-purpose force, general purpose 

force versus a constabulary force and an MCO force, but in the officer education realm, are 

there not common issues that are common to command and control leadership, logistics, 

sustainment, those kinds of things that probably would fill up all available time and all 

OES, where the environment in which you're doing those things was only, if you will, the 

background of the instruction? 

Dr. Swain:

I think that—I'm not sure exactly how to take that on, except to say that first of all, 

education doesn't just take place in the schoolhouse. The notion, I happened, my own 

pet theory right now is I think about General Dempsey's question, is if you watch his 

tape, he says a very interesting thing. And that is that emulation is what makes someone a 

professional. That doesn't happen in the schoolhouse. My own view is that you're training 

for the mass of the Army if you teach sound tactical principles, you can do it in multiple 

scenarios that'll get what you need, the privates know how to do. The difficulty is having, 

really, in my mind, the field-grade officers with a sufficient range of possibilities that they 
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175

can shift from one to another as the circumstances require. And I just, I think, my own 

opinion is, you can do a judicious curriculum in this college that'll give you that range of 

skills. I don't see it running out. 

Now, just to be critical and controversial, if you want to dispose of a curriculum to 

teach a technique for a year, you're going to get the results of people skilled in a technique 

and don't have any idea why that technique is there. 

Dr. Carafano:

I guess I'd like to confine my comments to talking about the strategic leaders, and not 

the people that generally who you talk to, is the ones we have to be generous to. So, I think 

there are three essential leadership skills, and coincidentally, I think, actually, military 

history and history in general is an extremely valuable tool for all three. And one of the 

reasons why I've really been disappointed at the semi-demise of military history in general. 

The first one is the one we've always talked about, traditionally, which is critical thinking 

skills. How do you think critically about a problem, which I think SAMS does a great job 

of that. The second one is the why do you think what you think skill, which is why do 

you believe what you believe? Why do you hold these assumptions? Why do you address 

problems this way? I think that's an equally valuable and important skill, to understand how 

to question your own assumption, we do some of this now with red teaming for example. 

So why do you think what you think. And the third one, which I do think we are arguably, 

maybe a little neglectful of as a society, is, who are you? In other words, do you understand 

who you are, as an American? Your cultural values, your social values. What makes an 

American uniquely an American? And why is that important to you, and why should you 

care about that? So I would say those are the three core essential intellectual skills that I 

would like the system to impart to our senior leaders. 

MAJ(P) Mountcastle:

Of course. A follow up. 

Dr. Schifferle:

The interwar period had two distinct differences, at least two distinct differences, in 

addition to the ones that you mentioned, to the contemporary educational environment. 

The first one was that—and nobody got promoted until everybody got promoted is true. 

The corollary of that is that the only efficiency reports that really mattered were the school 

efficiency reports. That students assessed by instructors who themselves were assessed 

as students, brought to the Army the ability to assess individual skills. Not so much unit 

performance, but individual skills. So I'd like to toss that out here and say, should we 

move in that direction? And I think I would add a fourth to your list of three, which is 

self-confidence. The ability to know that you can do certain tasks under pressure and get a 

go, gives the officer a sense of confidence once they graduate, and that may go a long way 

towards explaining how we were able to cope with global war in World War II. 

Dr. Carafano:

Yeah, just on your point about evaluation, I think that's right. You can have all these 

great and weird, quirky skillsets, but if nobody knows you had them, they don't do you 
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much good. One of the values of the interwar Army was that it was so small, is everybody 

knew everybody and knew their strengths and weaknesses, and apparently for [Lloyd] 

Fredendall, apparently everybody thought he was a great guy. And of course, now it's a 

bigger military, and you've got the Reserve and the National Guard piece. So, I wouldn't 

say the interwar system, right, would work terribly well as a model now. But the dynamic 

of, again, I mean, the problem is, is you got to have this place for these quirky, weird, 

strange thinkers, right? Who don't fit the mold and look like everybody else, until one day 

you discover, oh my god, I need that guy. Or girl. And so you have to have a way to keep 

them in, and flourish them, and develop them as leaders, and not lose them, because you 

might need them someday. 

Audience Member 1:

I'd like to follow up on, and solicit from both of you, comments on, particularly your 

observation that we educate folks too late, that you go to the Army War College and then 

you die. (laughter) And so, the timing isn't right. It seems to be that that's a very critical 

aspect of the Army educational process, or of any educational process, is trying to get the 

timing right so that the person has a sufficient frame of reference to understand what it is 

they're dealing with, and the problems that you're training them towards have sufficient 

currency that things will still be fresh in their mind when they get to them. And yesterday, 

we were talking about 19th century educational paradigms, and essentially, you got your 

education up front. And then everything else you learned on the job. And by the time you 

got to the end of it, you're woefully undereducated, because you hadn't kept pace. You 

mentioned, with some admiration, how doctors and lawyers do it, but doctors and lawyers, 

at least all the ones I know or are related to have a different problem. They get out of step. 

They get out of currency. They lose the warm afterglow of having been recently educated, 

and they have to go to great lengths and great pains to kind of catch up. And a doctor who's 

been out of medical school for 40 years is almost hopeless, unless he's been re-educated 

in a period of time. So, two part question is, how do you get the timing right, because 

our whole evolution has been towards this process of having sufficient penny packets of 

education that you spread them out in time in such a matter that they're useful when they're 

needed, and also a corollary question is, in particular with respect to your observation of 

going to the War College and then dying, how does SAMS fit into that paradigm, because 

SAMS, of course, trains you to do some pretty ethereal high level stuff at a very early point 

in your career. 

Dr. Carafano:

So I think that you characterized the Army education model perfectly when you said 

basically it's just-in-time education. We give somebody the education they need for the 

assignment directly before the assignment. So first, I would say is like ten years operational 

experience—and I agree with you, is the best educational paradigm is the one where you 

have both a combination of operational real-world experience combined with that academic 

experience. That's why a lot of times, I used to, before a recession, suggest to my kids when 

they graduate, go get some life experience before you go back to graduate school, so you 

know what the heck, why you're doing this, right? So I would say ten years of operational 

experience would be more than enough for anybody to have a good foundation that they 
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should be able to assimilate a graduate level education and see what really has meaning 

for them. If it's a good graduate level education, as part of their professionalism, it should 

instill in them the notion of a lifetime of learning. The notion that they need to be constant 

learners over their profession, and that they're going to have to seek out opportunities to do 

that. And I think that would take care of itself. 

Dr. Swain:

I don't believe you die after the War College. I'm not a beneficiary of the Army War 

College, I came to SAMS as a War College fellow, and I was telling somebody the other 

day the great benefit of the fellowship took place for me when we went to PACOM. We did 

a global trip. And what happened at PACOM was having grown up in the notion of AirLand 

Battle is the paradigm of how wars are fought. I'll never forget sitting in the PACAF 

Auditorium while the Commander of the Pacific Air Forces talked about how air power 

would be employed in an oceanic theater. And it was a completely different paradigm. And 

it all made sense. But I never thought about putting tanker lines up as the critical thing that 

an Air Force general would worry about. So I think that, in my particular case, I found it a 

real perspective change. I remember, I think we can make way too much of the notion of 

turning out a “Jedi” from the Army War College, and I'm reminded of the young German 

officer who was counseled by being told that the emperor had one strategist, and he wasn't 

it. Most of the people I have seen being strategists were being military bureaucrats moving 

paper, and the skill they had to have was moving paper. It seems to me that the trick is 

identifying the paper movers who understand what the paper's all about, and moving them 

forward. And I'm not sure that happens in the War College. I like it when Huba Wass de 

Czege designed SAMS, I think there was a real elegance to the notion that it was a three 

year course. The first year was to lay the foundation in CGSC. The second year was what 

you learned in SAMS, and the third year was a year of actually going out and practicing 

what you had done theoretically, and Huba's notion was always that it took all of those 

experiences to produce a, quote, "SAMS officer." And so, my own view is that's about 

the right model, and where the War College graduate becomes a real strategist is when he 

gets into a job that requires strategic thinking, and he either succeeds in applying what he's 

learned, or he learned how to play golf at Carlisle. So, I'm not nearly as worried about it. 

I'll throw in one other thought. I had a discussion with Mike Steele once, who's really a 

smart guy, and knows a lot of stuff I don't know. And I was wringing my hands about—my 

generation came out of Vietnam, and it was expected that you got a graduate degree. I 

mean, you just had to do that. You know, throw me in that briar patch. But I mean, it was 

really an expectation until 1987. And all of a sudden, the Army went to muddy boots. And 

my whole explanation of this was oh, the Army rejected intellectualism. And Mike Steele 

said no they didn't, they ran out of Majors. There's a correlation between the fore structure 

and the availability of opportunities to educate. When Donn Starry founded CAS3, and 

truncated the career course, it wasn't because he thought it was a better idea. It was the only 

idea the personnel guys could sustain. 

So, we have got to learn how to manage a TTS, what is it, TTHS, is that what, yeah. 

We got to learn how to manage that account as part of the Army, or we're never going to 

get the structure right. Yeah. I mean, you know, we're liable to look at what's going on now 
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with people that don't come to, you know, we got the structure, but we're not moving the 

people through it. 

Dr. Carafano:

Yeah, Pete and I saw that when we taught at West Point. West Point's a very interesting 

case, and you can track the history of the Academy of when it's considered a career killer 

for officers to teach there, and when it's considered a gold star, and it has nothing to do 

with the job, it just has to do with the amount of available officers. So when Pete and I got 

recruited to go teach, being at West Point was a really plum assignment. By the time we 

left, it was a career killer. And in Pete's case, it's true. 

Dr. Schifferle:

I was thinking about this. I think we're about to tell the Army, or to have the Army tell its 

officers, who wants to get out? If the inevitable occurs, and we draw down to eight or six or 

some number less than ten. A reminder that in 1920 or so, we asked the Army officers who 

were going to be elminated, who wants to stay? And we had promotion panels, selection 

panels, and tests, and exam. A very rigorous system to make sure that, of the 20,000 or so 

you're going to kick out, that we're going to be keep the best 5. 

Dr. Swain:

Well, remember the '90s. The absurdity of the '90s --

Dr. Schifferle:

Oh, I do. 

Dr. Swain:

For me, the first thing we did was bribe people to get out, and then complain because 

they did. 

Dr. Carafano:

Pete, I know somebody else had a point, but I just wanted to follow up. Wasn't it a 

conscious decision to overstaff the officer corps? 

Dr. Schifferle:

Yes. There was about a 3 to 1 ratio compared to what it was before 1917 and what it 

was after 1920. We had a conscious decision, and it was primarily because of the National 

Defense Act of 1920, required 50-plus percent of the officers to serve in educational 

institutions as instructors or students. So if you were going to have a field force of nine 

active divisions, you needed those nine active divisions worth of officers. But we needed 

another two times officers to serve as TTHS account for students, instructors, and then the 

inevitable staff hogs that are laying around. It was a conscious decision to do exactly that. 

Audience Member 2:

Dr. Swain mentioned the problem that General Dempsey identified was the failure of 

imagination. So I want to ask Dr. Swain, how do we develop and educate imagination, and 

Dr. Carafano, how do we tap and employ imaginative officers? 
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179

Dr. Swain:

Well, I, of course, convinced that history is the only way to produce imaginative 

officers, simply by the virtue of the variety that good history gives you of context and 

contingency. You train for it by, you know, there's a wonderful story of Lawton Collins, in 

his autobiography, talks about, when he was training in the division staff, he would take 

them out with one mission, he kept changing the circumstances on them to require them to 

adapt to it until that became the norm. I mean, that's about all I can offer on that. 

Dr. Carafano:

That's a great question. I mean, I think the first question is the discussion Pete and I 

were talking about, what are the critic, obviously, I think that if you have critical thinking 

skills and the ability to know why you know what you know, understand how do you 

do critical analysis, and you understand foundationally who you are, that provides the 

intellectual component foundation of officers who can deal who can manage generally. 

But your second question's really interesting. Of course, it's easy now, because we have 

an operational environment, it's very easy to have, for us people to be imaginative, right? 

Because they just get plenty of opportunity to practice that. What happens when you walk 

into an interwar period, right, how do you be imaginative then? That's the really interesting 

question, because nobody's just interested in counting plates in the mess hall. So one way 

you can let them practice that is through the diversity of their educational experience. And 

the other way you practice that is you let people go do interesting things. Maybe necessarily 

outside the line unit. Which, again, poses a big problem, because if you've downsized, 

you've got very little resources, you know, that has to be a very conscious decision, like 

they made in the 1920s to say okay, we understand, we're not going to have enough money 

to do anything. What are we really going to do? You know what? We're going to invest 

in intellectual capital. We're going to save the people first. We're going to keep the brains, 

and sacrifice everything else. So you need a leadership that's going make that decision that, 

not that I'm in favor of downsizing, I fully believe we ought to fully fund the military, and 

we shouldn't be facing this thing. But if the Army is faced with that, that would only be 

retained through a conscious decision that you could say, okay, I'm going to let this guy 

for a year with industry. But if you take your officer corps back to the bare bones you need 

to keep the operational force afloat, that ain't going to happen. So you're going to lose that 

ability to do imaginative, creative types of challenges for people. 

Rick Astore: 

I’m from the Center of Military History. To follow up on that a little bit. Perhaps a 

fourth one of your critical elements that we need to teach more on is the question, who are 

they¬? As in, not just who are we, but who are the other people in the world that we need to 

know more about. And I would think that that experience would only come from advanced 

degrees and outside experience. Again, with the size of the officer corps remaining steady, 

you have to get that experience somehow, and if you're not actively deployed there, 

you're going to have to go through a very elaborate educational system to learn about 

other cultures, and I think the Army still gives lip service to "other cultural training." You 

know, six weeks of language training. Is not the same as learning deeply about a variety of 

cultures around the world. So, I think that may be a fourth critical element. 
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Dr. Carafano:

Yeah, I think you have to be careful on the "who are they" problem, right? Because it's 

the world. So the notion of are you going to make somebody converse into every culture, 

everywhere in the world? That's a bit unrealistic. And so are you going to pick your shots, 

and maybe you'll get your shots exactly wrong, so now we make everybody learn Arabic, 

and so if we wind up fighting in Venezuela, will be kind of, so, and I'm also very kind of, 

I'm really skeptical of the Lawrence of Arabia model, that every officer needs to be the 

Lawrence of Arabia kind of guy, right? So, I think you develop creative officers, and they 

learn how to adapt to an environment. So I think it would be very good for people to have 

a cultural experience, like, okay I lived for two years in Japan. Not necessarily that you 

live for two years in Japan, two years in Morocco, two years everything else. And the other 

thing is we have to be, we have to recognize that human brains are human brains. Not 

everybody wants to be a math major, not everybody wants to live in Japan. And if you want 

to maintain a breadth and diversity in your workforce, you've got to allow some kind of 

flexibility and career development, and people love to play to their strengths, right? And so, 

in a sense, some people are going to want to be rocket scientists. And some people are going 

to want to be Lawrence of Arabia. And you have to decide if you want to create a human 

capital program that allows for that kind of diversity, and allows people the opportunity to 

kind of develop intellectually where they feel really strong. And it's a bet, right? It may turn 

out you don't need a guy who really knows about Japan. But then again, it may turn out that 

you really do. So, I, as much as, I think, ironically, as much as we talk about human capital, 

and as important as it is and everything, I think on this intellectual thing is really kind of a 

blind spot for the Army. If you think about what's going on now, we're investing an awful 

lot in human capital in terms of thinking about problems of sustained combat, wounded 

warriors, and all that kind of stuff. But the kind of things we're talking about, as much as 

I'd love to hear General Dempsey talking about that, and other initiatives and stuff, I think 

as a whole, the Army, I don't see people really thinking about the intellectual capital piece 

in a way that's going to get the Army 30 or 40 years down the road. And the Army in the 

interwar years, they made one good decision. But they just got enough of it right that they 

had a very good cadre of senior, wound up with a very good cadre of senior leaders that 

saved the nation during World War II. So, if you get just a little bit of this right. 

Audience Member 4:

This is kind of a long question. But, I hear this "rebirth" of the Army and all this stuff, 

and I'm wondering if we aren't looking at this era, '70s, '80s, through rose-colored glasses. 

If you look at the Army doctrine, the '76's is active defense, and then we have AirLand 

Battle in the '82, '86 FM 100-5. And it's kind of returned to the comfort zone. It's the hididdle-diddle armor, armor heavy philosophy. And yet, look at what's happening in the 

world. We have Grenada. We have Panama. We have Somalia. All this is light infantry stuff 

that needs to be deployed very rapidly, and our major doctrinal publication doesn't cover 

it. All the officers and a lot of the units are going to National Training Center, practicing 

AirLand Battle, and we don't have AirLand Battle until '91 in the First Gulf War, and if 

I may bring up just one thing about that, you have General Scales, in his film, Certain 
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181

Victory, talking about all of the Army's problems are solved now, and then a few months 

later, what do you have? You have Somalia. So...

Dr. Swain:

I'm not going to be responsible for General Scales. 

Audience Member 4:

But if you look at it overall through the '70s and the '80s, the education and training 

we're giving our leaders doesn't match what's going on in the world. 

Dr. Swain:

But what was going on to me, the fallacy in that argument is the notion that what 

was going on in the world constituted the main problem. And it didn't constitute the main 

problem. There was no existential problem in Grenada. The Grenada was something we 

could do because we were big and powerful and full of hubris. But I don't see where it 

would have been, I don't see where the alternative would have been useful, to focus Army 

doctrine on dealing with Grenada. You know, you could send the Mississippi National 

Guard down there with broomsticks if you had to. 

Audience Member 4:

Okay, I'm not saying "focus." But we had doctrine that was terribly focused on the 

operational level war in Europe, and yet, if you look at the 1968 that we rejected, it talks 

about an Army that's deployed around the world. It talks about allies, NATO, counterinsurgency warfare. It covers what we call "the full spectrum of war." And we don't get to 

anybody talking about the full spectrum of war until kinda sorta the FM 100 of 1993. 

Dr. Swain:

And that seems to me to be the argument relevant to today, and I'll give you an example. 

General Dempsey, right now, one of his principal things as TRADOC Commander to sell 

is this new idea of mission command. Or mission orders, or whatever the right euphemism 

is. Interestingly enough, in 2003, FM 6-0 adopted mission command as the Army standard 

for command. Now, that's only useful if you know FM 6-0 is there. I agree with you, I like 

the '68 manual. But how many people in '76 knew about the '68 manual? It wasn't rejected, 

nobody knew it was there. 

Audience Member 4:

But we went back to it in 2001. We looked at FM 3-0. It's very similar. 

Dr. Swain:

And I was here when all those guys were doing that, and that was a deliberate—but it 

doesn't change what I just said. Nobody rejected the '68 manual, nobody knew it was there. 

Dr. Carafano: 

So I would agree with you in a sense that—and that was my argument, is the sense 

that what you had was a military that was capable of being "mo' better," right? In a narrow 

range, right. Now, I think there was a couple of reasons why things like Grenada and 

Panama and stuff didn't resonate. One was, even with the rebuilding and the money that 
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we threw into the Army in the 1980s, there wasn't really, because you have to remember, 

Russia was still there, right? So that was still job one, right? And there was not the capacity, 

even with all the money that went in there, because you're coming from so far behind, to 

be able to look at those things. If you remember back, the light divisions are justified not 

because they're going to do stuff like Somalia and Grenada. They only got funded because 

they came up with a mission that worked in NATO. Now, it was bogus, and stupid, right? 

But that was the only way it got them funded. So, and as a matter of fact, if you looked at 

the total Army, and we talked about the total Army, but other than the roundout brigades, 

the total Army in the 1980s was still pretty not well funded and trained. Just because the 

money wasn't there for that. And that was a big part of that. And that's why if we're going, 

you know, the rocks and the shoals and everything are there. If we go into a period of 

downsizing here, the decision that the senior Army leaders make, and these are the kind 

of decisions that nobody's going to prevent them from making. Nobody's going to tell the 

Army how to spend its 12 bucks that it has left, right? They're going to make one of three 

decisions. They're going to say, OK, we're going to be a full-spectrum force, and if you try 

to be a full-spectrum force with no budget, you're going to be nothing. You can be all of one 

thing, and you may wind up fighting something else, or you can try, I mean, you know, so 

the strategy that the Army picks is going to be really, really critical. 

Audience Member 4:

I agree with that totally. But, why do we deny the intellectual vision of saying, OK, 

we don't have the resources right now to engage in, quote, "full spectrum operations," 

especially conventional warfare. But why do we take it out of FM 3-0? 

Dr. Carafano:

I completely agree with you. And that was, I think, again, was the strength of the Army 

and the Navy of the '20s, and '30s, and '40s, where they were conceptualizing and fighting 

forces that didn't exist. Except on paper. Because they thought, you know, someday we 

might have to do this. Which is—you know, in one sense, intellectual capital is expensive, 

but you know, it's a lot cheaper than buying a stealth fighter, right? So if you can keep 

people who can conceptualize how to fight a kind of warfare. You can't. You can build a 

plane, well, I don’t know if we can build planes anymore. I mean, you can contract for lots 

of things, but you can't contract for this. And to me is giving up your intellectual capital, 

that's the last, I mean, that's the thing that should be behind the back door at the Alamo. 

And this is what's always been frustrating me about the way the Army is treated in military 

history. I mean, to me, this is the secret sauce. This is an intellectual weapon of incredible 

importance that can teach these tremendously critical skills, and at the end of the day, if 

you can't afford anything else, at least you could have smart people. And yet, that's one of 

the first things we throw under the bus. 

MAJ(P) Mountcastle: 

All right, we're going to have to wrap it up there for this panel. That was a great setup 

for the next following panel here. Take us into 2001 and beyond. I want to thank again our 

presenters here today, Dr. Swain and Dr. Carafano.
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Day 2, Panel 6: Educating Leaders for a New Era, 2002 to Present

Mission Command: An Old Idea for the 21st Century by 

COL (R) Gregory Fontenot

(Submitted Paper)

My purpose in this paper is raise two questions with respect to mission command. Is 

this central idea of the operating concept new and second are the conditions such that the 

Army can assure that mission command can become a key artifact of Army Culture. My 

view or bias is that the Army is correct in its conviction that mission command is essential 

to the way the Army intends to operate, but that the idea should nonetheless be examined 

critically in order to understand how to implement mission command as a key operational 

characteristic of the force. Moreover I will argue that the conditions that obtain today 

and the culture of the Army today will make realizing Mission Command as a means of 

operation difficult.

General Martin E. Dempsey, Commanding General US Army Training and Doctrine 

Command, established his vision clearly for how the Army should organize and operate 

in his recent Kermit Roosevelt Lecture at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). In 

a pithy presentation Dempsey argued convincingly that, in the 1990s the Army, and for 

that matter the Defense Department became mistakenly infatuated with the potential of 

technology to confer a long term advantage to US forces. Fundamentally, the judgment 

reached about the efficacy in the so called revolution in military affairs proved mistaken. 

According to Dempsey, the reaction of our opponents coupled with the continued ambiguity 

associated with combat operations led him to draw conclusions that he articulated at RUSI 

as six lessons.1

The need for exercising mission command which he characterized as “implying 

decentralization of capability and authority” is one of these six vital lessons that will 

drive how the Army should organize and operate. Further mission command, according to 

Dempsey, “implies that collaboration and trust are as important as command and control. 

It is about understanding the context of operations, and it recognizes that what comes 

from the lowest tactical echelon is as important as what comes from the highest strategic 

echelon. Today leaders at every echelon are co-creators of this context.”2

 But, Dempsey 

goes further much further when he defines mission command as including “sharing and 

mitigating risk.” Dempsey is absolutely right for Mission Command to become a fact of 

life in the Army trust and collaboration is required. Together these hallmarks of mission 

command demand sharing the risks of the decision that any leader takes at any echelon.3

The Army Capstone Concept and the Army Operating Concept go further still. 

Operational Adaptability is central to the Army Capstone Concept. Within the capstone 

concept mission command is a Core Operational Action. The Army Operating Concept is 

the primary document for implementing the essence of the Army Capstone Concept. Here 

too mission command is central to enabling what the Army now describes as full spectrum 

operations. In this document, mission command is defined as: 
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Mission command is the exercise of authority and direction by the commander and 

the commander’s staff to integrate the warfighting functions using the operations process 

and mission orders to accomplish successful full-spectrum operations. Mission command 

enables agile and adaptive leaders and organizations to execute disciplined initiative within 

commander’s intent as part of unified action in a complex and ambiguous environment. 

Mission command is critical to Army forces’ ability to develop the situation through action 

and seize, retain, and exploit the initiative.4

Both the capstone concept and the operating concept are certain in the conviction that 

OIF/OEF, the Second Lebanon War and generally things that have happened since 2003 

are as the capstone manual asserts “Harbingers of Future Conflict.”5

 The concept, asserts, 

breathlessly that OIF demonstrates that the US Army must face “a broad range of enemy 

organizations that possess a wide array of capabilities (emphasis in the original).” Yet 

nothing in the capstone concepts examples are new. The Germans faced both conventional 

and unconventional forces in Russia just as the Israelis did in the second Lebanon War. 

Hamas conducted what could be described as web or archipelago defense which arguably 

the Germans invented as an asymmetric response to overwhelming Russian superiority 

in numbers. In my view, the Army Capstone Concept suffers from a metaphorical short 

term memory problem. The “harbingers” the authors chose suggest no deep reading of our 

history or even of reports of experiments that the Army itself conducted.

Whether the concept’s authors are right in identifying the “harbingers” of future 

war in the period 2016-2028 or not is central to evaluating whether Mission Command 

can be implemented. An examination of how the Army has thought about command is a 

useful place from which to determine whether Mission Command is a new idea or an old 

idea dusted off for reuse is pertinent. From this we may conclude something about the 

efficacy of the idea as perceived in the past and the conditions in which the Army imagined 

decentralized operations and unit command initiative as most useful. For this purpose a 

cursory review of the Army’s conceptual thinking about the nature of warfare as represented 

in the fundamental document of Army operations—Field Manual 100-5 Operations, later 

3-0. We could start with Von Steuben but instead will only go back as far as FM 100-5 Field 

Service Regulations: Operations published on May 22, 1941. That document is far more 

prescriptive than descriptive given the development of a mass Army ultimately placing 12 

million men in the field operating in multiple theaters simultaneously. Despite the “recent” 

discovery of complexity in the new Army operating concept World War II could be said 

to have been both grand in scale and complex as it involved everything from amphibious 

assault to military government in active combat theaters. 

The Army asserted on page 18 of the 1941 manual that soldiers should be trained in 

such a way as to “integrate individuals in a group...without destroying the initiative of the 

individual.”6

 Commanders, this same manual asserted, must communicate their decisions to 

subordinates, “by clear and concise orders, which gives them freedom of action appropriate 

to their professional knowledge, to the situation, to their dependability and to the teamplay 

(sic) desired.7

 This very directive manual further “directs” for the provision of initiative 

especially in operations where the commander cannot directly influence the action because 

of separation of units or because the commander has chosen to weight the main effort, in 
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Fontenot

part, by his presence.8 This sounds, without resorting to anachronism, more than a little 

like mission command on occasion when decentralized operations are imperative or just 

the best course of action. Fundamentally, the 1941 manual assumed that there would be 

times when decentralized operations would be demanded by the either the conditions in the 

field or because of difficulty in communication. So in 1941 the Army believed that Mission 

Command or something like it might be required because of physical separation or tactical 

conditions. World War II soldiers were expected to act on their initiative when required. 

What about that most Cold War of Cold War manuals—FM 100-5 Operations published 

in 1 July 1976. Even this very narrow manual, roundly criticized at the time and since, 

accounts for a full spectrum of operations noting that “The US Army may find itself at 

war in any of a variety of places and situations, fighting opponents which could vary from 

the highly mechanized forces of the Warsaw Pact to light, irregular units in a remote part 

of the less developed world.”9

 In the next paragraph the manual admits that the Army and 

thus 100-5 is structured and oriented on the Warsaw Pact as the “most demanding mission 

the US Army could be assigned.”10 This manual is absolutely focused on the Fulda Gap 

but lists among the How to Fight manuals doctrine on everything from desert warfare 

to counter guerilla warfare. The Active Defense as this doctrinal statement was called 

absolutely required and depended on commander’s initiative stipulating the need to assume 

risks and asserting that Colonels maneuvered while Captains fought battles because the 

Army in Europe had to fight outnumbered and win.11 Mission command then had a place 

here as well.

While the Active Defense focused fundamentally on the tactical level the next two 

manuals articulated an operational focus. Ultimately, the concepts found in the 82 and 

86 editions built from common framework the euphemism for which is AirLand Battle. 

The 1986 manual began with articulating a spectrum of warfare ranging from nuclear 

warfare to “terrorist activities (that) resist conventional military solutions. Between these 

extremes lies a wide range of possible conflicts which may escalate toward nuclear warfare 

and which will almost always involve counterterrorist activities.”12 The 1986 manual 

was bereft of “mission command” as a term but described command and control in terms 

easily understood as “mission command.” The AirLand Battle required flexibility and/

or variation introduced by subordinates. The manual waxed eloquently on how to create 

the conditions in units to facilitate exercising, leadership from any critical point on the 

battlefield. The section on command and control defined it as a system that would produce 

plans or orders that left, “the greatest possible freedom to subordinate leaders.”13 Thus even 

during the Cold War the idea of decentralization of decisions and even operations were not 

an anathema to the Army.

US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) published the last “legacy” 

manual and in fact the last FM 100-5 in 1993. This edition of the manual attempted 

to restore balance in Army thinking about the conflict articulating a “range of military 

operations,” operations other than war, conflict in which hostilities might occur and war, 

“the use of force in combat operations against an armed enemy.”14 Although there were 

other important ideas introduced in this manual it reflects a frustration with the Army’s 

growing reliance on technology that General Fred Franks, commanding general of 
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TRADOC, resolved to down play command and control as a system which by then had 

so much else hung on it that what had been C2 was by 1993 C4ISR.15 Franks reacted to 

what later became known as information based warfare with the same skepticism that 

Dempsey has about the Revolution in Military Affairs some 18 years later. In short he 

would have no C to the nth power acronyms so he invented the term Battle Command. 

Franks considered leaving control out of the manual altogether. In the end, he defined 

Battle Command so that it could not be conflated as even first among equals in a command 

and control system. Chief among those things he believed pertained to commanders were 

the need to think and act as “simultaneous activities” along with visualizing the battlefield 

and providing clear direction in battle.16 Flexibility and operating within a superior’s intent 

were central to Franks’ ideas on Battle Command as he articulated them in the 93 manual. 

Although decentralized operations or command never appears in the manual it was a matter 

of intense discussion because Franks thought he saw signs of requirements for very small 

formations to operate remotely and without direct supervision—specifically company and 

perhaps even smaller units.17

So what does all of this mean? First mission command is clearly not a new idea nor is 

the idea that Army units should be adaptable or able to conduct decentralized operations. 

So what? The so what is that the Army needs to confront some basic facts about the nature 

of the control function of command and the way in which technology has fundamentally 

altered the way the Army operates both in terms of the degree of centralization and 

specificity and level of supervision that ensued from these changes. As late as the invasion 

of Iraq officers routinely followed their own judgment generally assuming if things turned 

out well they would be supported. 

George Armstrong Custer perhaps epitomized the Civil War Army’s near shibboleth 

of personal initiative required by poor communications but also encouraged as a matter 

of culture. One of the officers present at General Terry’s final council of war during the 

Campaign of the summer of 1876 that led to Custer’s defeat described the session in the 

following way, “It is understood that if Custer arrives first he is at liberty to attack at 

once if he deems prudent.”18 But the culture of initiative did not stop at regimental level. 

Lieutenants routinely exercised their initiative often in operations they led across enormous 

distances out of touch with their commanders for weeks on an end. Both the culture of 

command and the facts of the control system in the 19th century Army required “mission 

command” and decentralization. For the most part it worked, at the Little Big Horn it did 

not. Decentralization and mission command were practically the only way the late 19th

century US Army could operate.

But what of the so called legacy Army whose last hurrah was the invasion of Iraq?The 

control system, by then euphemistically called network centric warfare, included Future 

Battle Command Brigade and Below, FBCB2, which enabled someone with access to a 

monitor watch the events of that war as they unfolded from a seat on the third floor of the 

Combined Arms Research Library. Despite this transparency, on 7 April 2003 Colonel 

David Perkins, commanding 2nd Brigade 3rd Infantry Division, exceeded his orders and 

instead of conducting a limited objective “Thunder Run” turned right instead of left and 

seized much of downtown Baghdad. When asked when he knew that Perkins and 3rd ID had 
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committed to this effort, Lieutenant General William S. Wallace, commanding V Corps, 

responded that, “I first knew they were going all the way was when I watched the blue 

icons turn and head downtown.”19

These two examples, while anecdotal, suggest how both culture and the tools of control 

can interact. In 1876 Terry had neither the means nor the intent to control Custer. Both he 

and Custer understood that Custer-when given his head-would do what he liked. Moreover 

Terry only knew where he expected Custer and not necessarily where the 7th Cavalry 

actually was during most of the campaign. For these and other reasons the Battle of the 

Little Big Horn has remained a matter of debate to this very day. Alternatively vilified or 

praised each of the major protagonists roles have continued to proved grist for discussion. 

Should Terry have give Custer specific orders, should Reno and Benteen, once joined have 

marched north to Custer’s aid and would it have made a difference if they had? In 2003, 

Wallace enjoyed a tremendous advantage over Terry. He knew exactly where Perkins was 

and had the means to intervene. Wallace chose not to do so which implies a level of trust 

and confidence he did not glean from the control mechanisms that he had.

What Wallace might have done had Perkins lost a great many soldiers or had been 

defeated is a matter for speculation but it is hard to believe that he would not have been 

criticized for not intervening. In short, Wallace, by actively deciding not to intervene, 

chose to share or at least underwrite the risks that Perkins took. That is an act of courage 

increasingly difficult to take in this age of instant communication that makes it possible 

for tactical unit actions to be litigated in the media practically from the moment medical 

evacuation helicopters lift off with wounded. 

The means to affect positive control as a consequence of instantaneous communication 

will act as a powerful drag on initiative when coupled with the nearly simultaneous capacity 

to criticize decisions without understanding context. Swearing by decentralized operations 

and mission command will be far easier to execute in power point briefings than in the 

field.

At the outset the Army needs to accept the risk that enabling initiative entails along 

with the benefit. In 1962, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer offered the following assessment 

which applies still;

Initiative is the agent which translates imagination into action. It must be used 

intelligently lest it becomes irresponsibility or even insubordination, but it must be used 

courageously when the situation warrants. Military history provides innumerable examples 

of commanders, who, confronted with unforeseen circumstances, have adhered slavishly to 

instructions and, at best, have lost an opportunity; at worst they have brought on defeat.20

Lemnitzer did not confront the difficulty of operating with a dramatically improved 

control system. 

The capacity to do as Wallace did in 2003 could become more not less difficult. There 

is no reason to believe that our capacity to see blue, at least and to improve communications 

coupled with the tendency to investigate everything will decline in the future. If these 

conditions persist how will officers generate the capacity either to afford subordinates the 

opportunity to exercise mission command or to return to my thesis the time and space to 
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reflect on their operational experience. Learning organizations, as the Army aspires to be, 

are able learn during execution. Bu learning lessons may take second place to responding 

to a cacophony of requests for information from higher headquarters, the media, families 

and who knows who else.

Engendering the philosophy of Mission Command within the Army will require the 

Army to educate not only soldiers but policy makers on the idea. Transparency afforded 

by mass communications and digital recorders in the hands of soldiers and journalist 

will assure that we litigate every tactical decision for which there is a bill to pay. The 

appearance of precision in control as exemplified by things like Command Post of the 

Future and the means to know where units are coupled with both sides developing audio 

and visual records of the fighting will make platoon leaders decisions grist for the 24 hours 

news cycle. The United States Army lost a great many soldiers killed during a rehearsal 

for the Normandy Invasion but that disaster did not become widely known in the public 

until after the war. We remain embroiled now in several controversies involving small unit 

engagements such as Wanat. To what extent these kinds of disputes will effect decision 

makers is not yet understood, but it hardly supports the concept of driving decisions down 

to the lowest level.

Managing the expectations of policy makers will not be as hard as managing the 

expectations of the American public. How do we account for tactical misjudgment in an 

era where family members are convinced incompetence or even criminal negligence is the 

only reasonable explanation for a child’s “unnecessary” death in combat? This is an Army 

problem if the Army really means to share the risks of decisions and yet enable lowest unit 

possible to make tactical decisions. There will be and there as has been enormous pressure 

to mitigate risk. A sure fire way to do that is through centralized decision making—but that 

system will limit initiative and render decentralized operations very difficult.

Dempsey has rightly identified the central difficulty in making mission command 

a fact rather than aspiration in the Army—sharing risk. Dempsey will need to lead the 

campaign to consider the implications of what he proposed the Army needs to do versus 

what may be required of it. We who serve the Army should wonder aloud whether we really 

mean to embrace mission command or whether the risks will exceed our capacity. Mission 

command requires time for commanders/leaders to estimate their situation, understand 

what has transpired and be afforded the cover of their superiors in order to do either or 

both of these things. This old idea continues to have value perhaps even more now than 

previously but it is a difficult one to indulge in the conditions that obtain now. We will 

know what the Army means to do by watching what our senior leaders do and juxtapose 

against what they say.
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Notes

1. General Martin E. Dempsey, Kermit Roosevelt Lecture as printed in Royal United 

Service Institute, “Journal” June-July 2010, Vol. 155, No. 3, 6-9.

2. General Martin E. Dempsey. 8-9.

3. General Martin E. Dempsey. 9.

4. TRADOC Pam 525-3-1, The United States Army Operating Concept: 2016-2018, 

19 August 2010, p12. See also TRADOC Pam 525-3-0, The Army’s Future Force Capstone 

Concept (Executive Version) Operational Adaptability: Operating under Conditions of 

Uncertainty and Complexity in an Era of Persistent Conflict, 2016-2028, 7 December 2009.

5. Capstone Concept section 2-3 p13.

6. War Department, FM 100-5 Operations, May 22, 1941, 18.

7. War Department, 29.

8. War Department, 112

9. Department of the Army, FM 100-5 Operations, 29 April 1977 p.1-2.

10. Department of the Army.

11. Department of the Army, see especially chapters 3, 5 and 12.

12. Department of the Army FM 100-5 Operations, May 1986, 1.

13. Department of the Armys, 21.

14. Department of the Army, FM 100-5 Operations, 14 June 1993, 2-1.

15. C4ISR is command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and 

reconnaissance.

16. Department of the Army, FM 100-5, Operations, 14 June, 1993. P. 2-27. Personal 

knowledge as General Franks. Chief of the Training and Doctrine Command, Command 

Planning Group.

17. Personal conversations with General Franks.

18. Nathan Philbrick, The Last Stand; Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 

New York: Viking, 2010, 99

19. Gregory Fontenot, E. J. Degen and David Tohn, On Point the United States Army in 

Operation Iraqi Freedom, Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Studies Institute, 2004, 349.

20. Printed on the 1962 CGSC graduation program.

191

Day 2, Panel 6: Educating Leaders for a New Era, 2002 to Present

A New “Melody Report” Educating Officers for the 21st Century by 

Kevin Benson, Ph.D.

(Transcript of Presentation)

Dr. Benson:

I found out about doing this, working on something with Don Wright, and at the end of 

the little talk, Don said, “Oh, Kevin, thanks so much for stepping up to give a presentation 

at the CSI symposium.” And I said, “What CSI symposium?” I’m here because Greg’s 

wingman dropped out, and I’m proud to be here. And I’m also proud to, number one, 

follow Greg, and number two, be the only guy standing in between you and a cold drink, 

because I’m the last speaker, so let me get at it. 

I assert that it is time to reflect on the focus of our education, and what full spectrum 

operations means for our general staff officers. Last week, I had the privilege of spending 

time with the first core staff leading a symposium, where they very proudly told me that 

they were going to be the first major operational headquarters to refocus on full spectrum 

operations. And when I suggested that, you know, I think our doctrine kind of declines 

full spectrum operations as inclusive of that which you are not going to focus on anymore, 

COIN and stability operations, everyone kind of looked at me like, what are you talking 

about? And I left convinced that at first core, full spectrum operations, at least there as a 

euphemism for the high intensity clash of titans. I’m also happy to be here, as Pete knows, 

this gives me a chance to polish one of my pet rocks. And these are my major points. I 

discovered the Malloy Report when I was doing my dissertation research. In 1933, Col. 

George Marshall writes about (inaudible) into the college, all the way to, I think it’s time 

for a new report, and I’ll show you why. This is what Marshall wrote, in essence. I found 

this in our wonderful Combined Arms Research Library. Does this sound familiar? Does it 

look familiar? Here are his criticisms. 

There are three charts. I would point out that number one really looks like my campaign. 

Sandstorms, traffic at (inaudible), units getting lost, a core forward (inaudible), and oddly 

enough, all of us in that little plans group of mine knew things like this were going to happen, 

but we were so clouded by the uncertainties (inaudible). Second set here, in The Logic of 

Failure, Dietrich Dorner wrote that the best managers in these experiments were the ones 

who asked the most questions. So, how do we square this with mission orders and mission 

command? Where is the balance between enough questions for situational awareness, and 

micromanagement? How do we tell the difference? You know as Greg suggested, litigation 

begins with the arrival of dust off, how does this affect operating within the commander’s 

intent, and mission command? How do we rate orders that encouraged risk taking, and 

linking tactical success to attaining operational and strategic objectives. You know, there 

was that anti-Powerpoint rant by the US Army Reserve colonel. He went out right about it. 

The confusion between the battle update brief, the commander’s update brief, as we called 

it, the Third Army daily battlefield update assessment. And yet, none of us really knew 
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how to do assessments, believe me, I watched those. How many of our officers leave staff 

college understanding how to do that? But the most important one, and this is huge, was 

that number 13. And keep that in mind when you get to the—when I show you the Malloy 

Report. When I went to staff college, every unit in our garrison was at 100%, with a 100% 

OR rate. Yet historically, we know that’s not accurate. My godson got back a month ago 

from being a platoon leader in a rifle platoon in Afghanistan. Uncle Kevin, you know, on 

paper, I have 35 soldiers. From day one until day last, he never had 35 ever, but we were 

game at 100%, with a 100% OR rate. Probably shouldn’t do that. You know, for my own 

personal satisfaction, during the opening stages of this campaign that’s now over, kind of 

sort of, I did a little back of the envelope calculation. And personally, at least to myself, to 

my satisfaction proved the efficacy of the 0.01% disease nonbattle injury rate. It actually 

proved out, based on casualty reports that we had. And I venture to say, it is still true. So 

again, what does that do for our war game? How do we teach war gaming here now? We 

don’t know the answer to that. 

And [Meyer] to Malloy now. This is what I found very interesting, almost 50 years 

later, General Meyer (inaudible) my research, I did not find out who brought this to Meyer’s 

attention. Yet, I’ve seen all of the papers, he did direct General Malloy, Assistant (inaudible) 

of the Army at the time, to come out here, use Marshall’s critiques as his basis for assessing 

what the college was doing. And you can see what he reported. So this also came in handy 

to General Sorley, then colonel, as he was writing his report to establish the School of 

Enhanced Military Studies, because he cited Malloy’s report as support for the need for 

second year of study, given the complexity, there’s that complexity word, that was growing. 

Here’s one of his findings. The college could also do, I would offer, with some (inaudible) 

from folks not here on the statement of their mission, and the scope, and its purpose. 

What constitutes full spectrum operations in the 21st century? We can devise that mission 

statement here, but it really does need to be validated somewhere else. What courage and 

DA level is required to ensure our best tacticians and logisticians come to the staff college 

to teach those tactics? Tactics, we all know this, includes core operations. (inaudible) But 

how many of our students here understand that tactics goes beyond battalion, especially, 

and you’ll see this later, when it appears that everybody campaigns? You know, while we 

are no longer, you can see up here, this is one of my favorite ones. (inaudible) You know, 

while we’re no longer in the business of learning how to kill Russians, we are certainly still 

in the business of learning how to kill the enemy for the republic. And given that need, how 

does our curriculum address the hunting and skills to balance offense, defense, stability 

operations, or civil support operations in the continental United States? And of course, with 

this last one, like Jim pointed out, we also have to ask so what? This is just a major griping 

in the (inaudible) to fill out a form, but there’s something to that. Because in addition to all 

of this, how do we establish conditions for honest feedback, and a mechanism to act upon 

it? So, (inaudible). [laughter] No, that’s all right. 

In 2009, I worked for Greg [Fontenot], by the way, I had the privilege of going to 

lead another seminar at the 3d Infantry Division, preparing for yet another deployment 

in Iraq. In 2009, I asked the question that is just an open question, what constitutes the 

center of gravity in Iraq right now? And without hesitation, the major popped up and said, 
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“Sir, it’s the people!” And I said, “Well, we’ve had a successful reinforcement.” All of the 

developments, don’t you think it’s time to reassess the center of gravity? I mean, this is 

going to help you develop your major operations plan for the division. “Sir, it’s the people.” 

Well, why? “Well sir, that’s what Infantry 24 says.” OK. Thank you very much, and we sort 

of moved on because I was running into a brick wall. But as some of us in this room know, 

read anything, do brigades campaign? Not according to our doctrine, but I guarantee you 

there are officers who will assert that oh yeah, I wrote my brigade campaign plan. Really? 

Who guarantees that that campaign plan is (inaudible). There’s that 20th century term 

(inaudible) something else. How do we educate people to understand it? 

Which is why I return to, I think it’s time for another Malloy Report. Why is that? 

These are our conditions. We know that these things are happening, I’ll pick up on some of 

the things that have been said here. We are going to enter another recentering again. This 

week, for those of you who live around here, the Kansas City Star headlined the story about 

the increasing levels of indiscipline in the United States Army. I read that, I read the story, I 

couldn’t find the report, but it sounded like, and I could’ve closed my eyes and substituted 

some words, and that was when I was a lieutenant. So how are we going to, you know, how 

are we going to address this? Recentering is going to require, among other things, I offer, a 

rigorous reassessment of the education that prepares our officers to be general staff officers, 

because we must link tactical success. My Lieutenant Godson told me, hey, we never lost a 

firefight, never. Which reminded me of the little story that Harry Summers included in the 

top part of his book, the North Vietnamese colonel and him, and you know what that was. 

We defeated you all the time in battle. Yes, that’s true, and it’s also irrelevant. Our general 

staff officers have to take this wonderful range of tactical experience, I would offer, small 

unit tactical experience, and based on their education and experience, be able to step back 

from one company to 100. From one battalion to up to four. If, in fact, this is....

Note: this transcript was produced from a poor quality recording and corrupted 

file. Unfortunately due to technical difficulties, the final eight minutes of Dr. Benson’s 

presentation were lost.

195

Day 2, Panel 6: Educating Leaders for a New Era, 2002 to the Present

Questions and Answers

(Transcript of Presentation)

COL (R) Greg Fontenot

Kevin Benson, Ph.D.

Moderator: Mr. John McGrath

Note: unfortunately due to technical difficulties, the entire question and answer session 

was lost.

197

Day 3, Panel 7: Sister Services Perspectives

Historical and Cultural Foundations of Navy Officer Development by 

Gene R. Andersen, Ph.D.

(Submitted Paper)

I must begin by thanking Ken Gott and CSI for inviting me to participate in this 

conference. It is an honor to share this stage with such an eminent lineup of experts. This 

is my first visit to Fort Leavenworth, and I am grateful to have had this brief window 

into the perspective of the Army. I must emphasize that my opinions are my own, and 

not necessarily those of the Naval War College or the Navy. Lastly, I am not a historian, 

except in the most amateur sense. My field is leadership and leader development, and my 

responsibilities at the Naval War College include the electives program in leadership and 

ethics, as well as a student research project in leadership at the operational level of war. 

Yesterday, General (Retired) Gordon Sullivan, former Chief of Staff of the Army, 

powerfully evoked some key touchstones of the Army’s institutional culture and ethos, and 

he pointed to the Army’s history as a key source of those touchstones. Edgar Schein, in his 

book Organizational Culture and Leadership (3d edition, 2004), calls these touchstones 

artifacts of an institution’s culture. Schein argues that these identifiable structures, stories 

and rituals are the most obvious indicators of an organization’s culture, while its espoused 

beliefs and values form a deeper stratum of the culture and both of those levels point to the 

underlying assumptions that are the true foundations of the organization’s sense of itself 

and view of its environment.1

This perspective has been my approach to understanding why the four Department of 

Defense services have such fundamentally different officer development processes and 

methodologies, and why none of the services could successfully adopt one of the other 

services’ system. The Navy in many ways has the most unusual of these systems, since 

the Navy has no leadership doctrine or leader development doctrine, has no single officer 

short of the CNO who is in charge of officer development and has no officer development 

requirements that cannot be waived. I think the answers to why this is so are embedded in 

the Navy’s institutional culture, which is largely the product of the Navy’s history. Navy 

Officer Leader Development is a product of the Navy’s history and culture, and driven 

by the Navy’s underlying assumptions about what the Navy is and the world the Navy 

inhabits.

The Army, Air Force and Marine Corps

As context, consider the following thumbnail sketches of the Army, Air Force and 

Marine Corps approaches to leader development as seen in this light. These are necessarily 

brief and built upon generalizations about very large, diverse and complex organizations, 

but I think they may be helpful in understanding why each service develops officers the 

way it does.

The Army’s underlying assumption is that it is a very large organization comprised of 

a multitude of small units that need to work effectively together in predictable ways as a 
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combined arms team despite routinely being geographically dispersed. Some values that 

go with this are professionalism, consistency and organizational alignment. The artifacts 

that observers see are doctrine which is generally prescriptive (with FM 6-22 as the core 

for leader development), detailed organizational structure (TRADOC, Army Leader 

Development Office), a credentials-based view of education, and required classroom 

courses at nearly every paygrade (demonstrating a high commit to career-long formal 

leader development).

The Air Force views itself as a highly technological organization that is deeply dependent 

on individual thinking (hardly surprising for an organization whose key image is the fighter 

pilot). A key value is therefore individual effectiveness, and the artifacts we see are a leader 

development process driven by behavioral scientists (leadership is taught at the Air Force 

Academy by psychologists, not line officers) and based on enduring competencies (the 

Air Force has the most complex and detailed set of leader competencies), concept-driven 

professional military education (aerospace power), and a deep commitment to ongoing 

education (Air University).

The Marine Corps views itself as a low-resource organization that needs to push 

decisions to the lowest possible level (“The Strategic Corporal”), with junior personnel 

taking unsupervised action. This requires a deep inculcation in Marine values and a Marine 

mindset (“Every Marine a rifleman”), which is largely achieved by an immersion in Marine 

Corps heritage (most Marines know such stories as Presley O’Bannon and the march to 

Derna, John Basilone at Guadalcanal, Chesty Puller at the Chosin reservoir, and John 

Ripley at the Dong Ha bridge). The artifacts we therefore see are a development process 

driven by storytelling in the field (which more than 20% of the curriculum at The Basic 

School), doctrine that is generally descriptive rather than prescriptive (and driven more by 

philosophy than process), historically-themed professional military education, and crucible 

experiences. 

Hopefully this brief look at the other services will help you to better see why I have 

chosen to focus where I have in looking at the Navy’s officer development process in light 

of its culture and history.

Command at Sea

The Navy’s perspective on officer development is founded in its focus on command 

at sea. In his Guidance for 2009, CNO Admiral Gary Roughead referred to the Navy’s 

“culture of command that has been the foundation of our Navy’s successes for more 

than two centuries” as a key to executing the sea services’ Cooperative Strategy for 21st

Century Seapower (2007).2

 Navy Regulations says “The commanding officer and his or 

her subordinates shall exercise leadership through personal example, moral responsibility 

and judicious attention to the welfare of persons under their control or supervision. Such 

leadership shall be exercised in order to achieve a positive, dominant influence on the 

performance of persons in the Department of the Navy.”3

 I quote that because, in the 153 

pages of the Navy Regulations, that is the only real discussion of leadership in the Navy. 

The Navy does not have an official definition of leadership, a top level instruction on 

leadership or leader development, any written doctrine on leadership, an officer charged 

with all officer development, a truly integrated system of professional schools, or much 
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Andersen

regard for its own heritage and history. To understand why the Navy has succeeded despite 

all this, let’s take a quick look back to the beginnings of the Navy.

The roots of the US Navy are deeply embedded in the operation of frigates. Prior to the 

Civil War the Navy built few ships of the line, and none of those ever saw combat. Instead, 

from the earliest days of the American Revolution, the Navy built and operated frigates, 

most famously the “six frigates” of Ian Toll’s history of the early 19th century Navy.4

These ships, including the 44-gun Constitution, United States and President and the 36-

gun Constellation, Chesapeake and Congress, were designed for independent operations 

at sea.5

 Intended to be fast enough to outrun any ship of superior force and both stout 

enough and heavily armed enough to defeat any ship that could sail with them, these ships 

engaged in individual missions from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean and from the US coast 

to the English Channel and into the Mediterranean. This created a leadership culture where 

captains received individual orders, sailed over the horizon in pursuit of those objectives, 

and returned when they believed they were finished. Squadrons were seldom assembled, 

and when they were, they were marked by continual infighting among the ship captains 

over strategy, tactics and seniority.6

The Navy’s culture of command is therefore based on independence of action, 

command by negation, forehandedness and initiative.7

 Navy captains maintained immense 

authority over their crews and their operations, and were expected to respond effectively to 

changing circumstances without any guidance from senior officers.8

 This culture permeates 

every watchstanding function of the Navy as well, requiring junior officers standing deck 

watches, operating aircraft or operating small boats to act in the same spirit.9

Command is therefore the ultimate career objective in the Navy, and it is always 

viewed as the ultimate test of an officer’s worth and potential. Navy line officers who 

are not selected for command have little chance of selection to flag rank and are typically 

assigned to less significant jobs. As a result, command has also become the ultimate filter 

in an officer’s career. Success in command will usually carry an officer to the next grade; 

failure in command nearly always is career-ending. This is why the Navy fires so many 

commanding officers, by the way. Any failure of character, tactical competence, technical 

skill or leadership while in command is disqualifying for the next job and will usually lead 

to a relief for cause. Navy Times reported on Monday on the Navy’s 15th relief for cause 

of 2010;10 a 2009 Navy Times investigation documented an average of more than one relief 

for cause a month going back to 1999.11 Though press coverage of firings often implies that 

the Navy’s officer development system is somehow broken, the fact is that such reliefs for 

cause are part of the system, not a breakdown of the system.12

Technical Competence

In contrast to the armies of the eighteenth century, the navies of the eighteenth century 

were highly technological organizations with extensive developmental requirements for 

both officers and enlisted Sailors. The three-masted square-rigged sailing ship was the 

greatest technological achievement of the era prior to the steam engine, and it required 

a large, well-trained and highly specialized crew to operate it. Officers were expected to 

master all the tasks of basic seamanship (which included mastery of the entire system of 

spars, lines and sails that provided propulsion and maneuverability), naval gunnery (which 
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required mastery of the ballistic trajectory of cannon balls launched from a platform moving 

in three dimensions), open water navigation (which required mastery of astronomy, the use 

of the sextant and spherical trigonometry) and more minor tasks like the operation of small 

boats, the use of the system of signal flags and shipboard damage repair. By World War 

I, this list included steam engineering, and shortly thereafter the operation of shipboard 

aircraft. By the Cold War, nuclear propulsion had joined the list, along with complex 

combat systems and air, surface and subsurface sensor systems.

This resulted in an officer development process that focused on technical and tactical 

competence, and in an enlisted force that became progressively more specialized. It also 

resulted in an officer development process that has always been largely conducted at sea 

(though this is much less the case in naval aviation). This system was largely dependent on 

passing expertise from more senior officers to more junior officers via a rigorous system 

of on-the-job training. 

It is perhaps noteworthy that the Army had a drill manual from Baron von Steuben 

onward, and that text was updated by a series of luminaries in Army history across the 

nineteenth century.13 A comparative Navy publication would perhaps be a manual on 

seamanship; the Navy had none until Stephen Luce wrote one in 1862 (more than 80 years 

after von Steuben), and his text remained the standard with only minor updates through the 

end of the nineteenth century. Luce also was a leading force in the establishment of the US 

Naval Institute in 1873, created the Navy’s first shore training establishment for enlisted 

personnel (the forerunner of today’s Navy Boot Camp) in 1882—a century after the Navy’s 

founding—and founded the Naval War College in 1884.14

The Navy did not possess any ashore training location for officers until the establishment 

of the Naval Academy in 1845, more than four decades after the establishment of the 

Military Academy at West Point. Senior Navy leaders opposed the establishment of the 

Naval Academy, the Naval War College and the Naval Postgraduate School. The cultural 

result of all this is a Navy leader development process that is founded in the belief that going 

to sea is always the best and most effective way to develop as an officer as a professional 

and as a leader. 

Doctrine and the Lack Thereof 

The cultural belief that leaders are made at sea and commanding officers are best 

qualified to determine what development individual officers require and how that should 

be accomplished is key to answering the question of why the Navy has no doctrine for 

leadership or leader development, or even a service-wide definition of leadership. This 

perspective carries ashore in the Navy operation of its principal schoolhouses, most of 

which receive little guidance from higher authority on what they should teach or how they 

should teach it. The Navy has no parallel organization to the Army’s Training and Doctrine 

Command (TRADOC).15 Instead, school commanding officers in the Navy have wide 

latitude to adjust curriculum and standards based on their own professional experience. 

Navy doctrine is therefore largely limited to operating manuals for systems and platforms. 

The Navy published a series of capstone doctrine publications in 1994; they are brief, have 

never been substantively updated and are widely ignored (even in the Naval War College’s 

curriculum).16
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As a more specific example, consider the Army’s publication on command philosophies, 

which is more than 100 pages long.17 The Navy has no parallel instruction, nor does it 

perceive that it is in any way lacking because it does not. Students in the Prospective 

Commanding Officer course at the Navy’s Command Leadership School (CLS) are required 

to write a command philosophy. Students are provided with several command philosophy 

documents that the CLS staff considers to be good, but they are not given any specific 

guidance for creating a command philosophy, nor is their final product inspected against 

any standard other than the judgment of the instructors that it is a credible document. 

Conclusion

The Navy views itself as a highly technological organization that depends on leaders to 

make decisions, solve problems and take action. This requires maximizing the operational 

experience of leaders through sea assignments and on-the-job training, and the enforcement 

of cultural norms derived from command at sea, including forehandedness, initiative, 

adaptability and focus on mission accomplishment. All of this results in a focus on service 

at sea, a general conviction that education should be technical and a personnel system 

that rewards sustained superior performance rather than specific credentials.18 It is perhaps 

worth noting that the current Chief of Naval Operations is not a graduate of the Naval 

War College and does not hold a master’s degree. He has, however, held six operational 

commands, most of them at sea.19 There are two current Navy four-stars (ADM James 

Stavridis, EUCOM, and ADM Patrick Walsh, COMPACFLT) with earned Ph.D.’s, but both 

achieved that despite the Navy’s officer development system, not because of it, and both 

made their careers at sea.20 This is because the Navy views time in the classroom as time 

away from the fundamental requirement to go to sea and learn by firsthand experience. As 

a result, the Navy still tends to think of education as a cost, rather than as an investment in 

the future of the officer and the service.

The Navy views its people as a highly flexible resource, and assumes that Sailors 

can master most any job. The Navy’s N1 used a PowerPoint slide in recent years that 

summarized the training and development issues associated with sending Sailors to 

Provincial Reconstruction Teams with a bullet point that said we have good Sailors and 

they will figure it out.21 And they have, though perhaps at some significant cost to the 

mission.

Today’s Navy officer development system provides career-long development 

opportunities both in and out of the classroom, but its emphasis is on experience tours 

(preferably at sea or in the Pentagon), informal mentorship and self-development. 

Classroom training is available at key career steps (Division Officer, Department Head, 

Executive Officer, Commanding Officer, Major Command), but only the command courses 

are not easily waiverable. Education opportunities are tied to specific milestones (JPME I, 

JPME II, Master’s degree) but officers are strongly encouraged to attain such credentials 

by distance learning wherever possible.22, Primary PME is available only online via the 

Navy’s web portal; completion is required for entry into the Naval War College.23 Individual 

officer development is broadly overseen by community managers at the Navy Personnel 

Command, but is specifically the responsibility of each individual officer. Course directors 

have broad authority over curricular changes and Instructors have significant freedom 
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in executing the curricula. This system maximizes flexibility, limits classroom time, and 

places a premium on individual initiative.

The Navy’s principal challenge in this area today is the breakdown of the environment 

that made this system such a success during the Cold War. The war on terror has taken 

Navy people out of their community career paths and sent them to unusual jobs, reducing 

the consistency of the experience base in the Navy’s officer corps. Budget limitations 

have reduced steaming days and flight hours, limiting the exposure of junior officers to 

key evolutions and challenges. And the skyrocketing costs of shipbuilding and aircraft 

production have seriously reduced the size of the operating force. The future will require 

the Navy to replace some time on the bridge and in the cockpit with time in the classroom, 

just as happened in the 1930’s. It remains to be seen how we will accomplish that. 
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Notes

1. “Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd ed.” Edgar Schein, 2004.

2. NO Guidance for 2009, November 2008, page 1.

3. Navy Regulations, 1990, Chapter 8, article 0802.

4. “Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy” Ian W. Toll, W.W. 

Norton & Company, 2008. 

5. Authorized in 1794, the six ships were built in six shipyards in six states under the 

oversight of famed naval architect Joshua Humphreys.

6. See, for example, “Captains Contentious: The Dysfunctional Sons of the Brine” Louis 

Arthur Norton, University of South Carolina Press, 2009.

7. As opposed to command by direction. Command by negation implies broad delegation 

of tactical choices to subordinate commanders based on a clear statement of the commander’s 

intentions and objectives. The commander then acts as necessary to negate or disapprove 

actions with which he/she does not concur.

8. Including very broad non-judicial punishment authority when at sea.

9. Hence Navy pilots sign for their aircraft and approve their own flight plans from their 

initial qualification.

10. “Navy Sacks Three Leaders in One Day” William McMichael and Gidget Fuentes, 

Navy Times, 19 September 2010.

11. “Why So Many Skippers Get Fired” Andrew Tilghman, Navy Times, 14 September 

2009.

12. “CO Firings Have Roots in Flawed Screening Process” Navy Times, 14 September 

2009.

13. The instructions of von Steuben were originally written in 1778-79.

14. “Sailors and Scholars: The Centennial History of the US Naval War College” John 

Hattendorf, Mitchell Simpson and John Wadleigh, Naval War College Press, 1984, pages 5-21.

15. The Naval Education and Training Command (NETC) in Pensacola, Florida, has no 

role in creating doctrine, no policy role beyond administration of its subordinate schools, and 

little authority over the Naval Academy, Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School 

(which are all considered to be Echelon II commands responsible directly to the OPNAV staff). 

16. Navy Doctrine Publications 1-6.

17. AR 600-20 of 18 April 2008 is 138 pages long.

18. The Naval Academy has enforced a minimum percentage of each class choosing 

engineering, science and math majors formost graduating classes since the adoption of the 

majors program there in 1973.

19. Official biography, ADM Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations.

20. “Another Crossroads? Professional Military Education Two Decades After the 

Goldwater-Nichols Act and the Skelton Panel” House Armed Services Subcommittee on 

Oversight & Investigations, April 2010.

21. The Navy’s N1 is responsible for manpower, personnel, training and education of the 

total force.

22. The Navy does not consider Intermediate Level Education or Senior Service College to 

be career milestones or development requirements.

23. The Navy Primary Professional Military Education course consists of approximately 75 

hours of online content in over 100 course modules available on the Navy Knowledge Online 

(NKO) portal. It has been available since May 2006.

205

Day 3, Panel 7: Sister Services Perspectives

“It was More Than Just Doctrine!” Reflections on the Preparation of the US 

Marine Corps and Its Officers for World War II by Donald F. Bittner, Ph.D.

(Submitted Paper).

But in 1921, [future General Jerry] Thomas faced important decisions that 

would shape the rest of his career. Once a part of the Marine that had been – the 

Marine Corps of World War I and the Caribbean interventions – Thomas was now 

an officer in the Marine Corps that was, not the Marine Corps envisioned in War 

Plan ORANGE.1

Alan R. Millett

Prologue: Now or Then?

Concerns about war, budget issues, the nation’s role in the world, a service’s place in 

the defense establishment, changing technology, uncertainty about the future, a complex 

and challenging international situation, service force structure, and institutional survival. Is 

this the post Vietnam War era and the role of the Marine Corps in the late 20th century?2

 The 

early years of the second decade of the 21st century and a post Iraqi-Afghanistan world?3

 Or, 

does this also describe the Interwar years of the 1930s and the challenges associated with 

that era? In the years between World Wars I and II, wherefore the Corps and its evolution?

The Corps and Preparing for War—Pre-1941-I

In the immediate post World War I years, none of what occurred during World War 

II with respect to the Marine Corps and its amphibious warfare capability—and how 

this would evolve—was evident. In fact, a career officer of the Corps in the early 1930’s 

contemplating the future of his service could have postulated three options: A traditional 

role associated with ships detachments and barracks duty ashore, a colonial constabulary 

mission linked to the “Small Wars,” and, for the few visionaries, a projected mission of 

amphibious assault. 

Of these, for a Corps with an average strength of 16,093 for the fiscal year of 1932, 

only the first two of these stated roles were addressed in the annual report of the Major 

General Commandant of the Marine Corps.4

 In his 1932 report to the Secretary of the 

Navy, Major General Ben H. Fuller noted that Marine detachments were on 36 vessels of 

the Navy (including the frigate USS Constitution, but excluding the aviation units on the 

carriers Lexington and Saratoga), and in barracks at various naval stations and bases in 

the United States. Marine units were also serving ashore in both barracks duty and “Small 

Wars” roles in China (Peking and Shanghai); Haiti; Nicaragua; Guantanamo, Cuba; the 

Canal Zone; Guam; Hawaii; and The Philippines. The closest to landing operations was 

a comment that a provisional battalion of Marines with supporting artillery had embarked 

on the battleships Arkansas and Wyoming for “intensive training aboard those vessels 

in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific waters.” Fuller also reported that a regimental 
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headquarters, a battalion, and battery of artillery had participated in “joint Army-Navy 

exercises in Hawaiian waters”—with the goal of training “the services involved in the 

coordination and cooperation necessary in joint maneuvers.”5

Since 1945, the answer to the then issue of the immediate future of the Marine Corps 

is clear. So much so that in 2009 and 2010, senior Marine officers still speak of the 

development of amphibious warfare [assault] doctrine at the Marine Corps Schools at the 

Marine Barracks, Quantico, Virginia, during the Interwar years—as if that was all to the 

issue of developing that capability that emerged before and during World War II. Indeed, 

during the 1933-34 Academic Year, the Marine Corps Schools suspended classes under the 

orders of the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps and devoted their attention to 

developing a draft landing operations doctrine. This built on the additional duty committee 

endeavors led by Major Charles Barrett which had commenced in 1931.6

 From this came 

the “Tentative Manual for Landing Operations,” which through refinement via further 

work resulted in U.S. Navy official doctrine Landing Operations Doctrine, United States 

Navy, Fleet Training Publication 167 in 1938.7

 However, there was indeed more to it than 

doctrine.

Missions and roles had to be established, and this gradually occurred.8

 In 1900, the 

General Board of the Navy assigned an advanced base mission to the U.S. Marine Corps; 

in 1922, the Major General Commandant of the Marine Corps, John A. Lejeune, then 

defined the functions of the Marine Corps to include ships detachments, guards at naval 

bases, garrisons in foreign areas, expeditionary operations, and forces for the fleet for shore 

operations in support of the fleet; and, in 1927, the Joint Board of the Army and Navy 

assigned to the Marine Corps the role of maintaining forces in support of the fleet for 

the seizure of advanced bases and limited supporting land operations as essential for a 

naval campaign. Amidst this, in 1921 Lieutenant Colonel Pete Ellis drafted Advanced Base 

Operations in Micronesia, 1921—a projected plan for the Marine Corps role in the U. S. 

Navy’s War Plan Orange.9

This, however, did not make a capability. Force structure was needed to conduct 

such operations, and this gradually evolved. In 1900 the Advanced Base Force was 

formed, which by 1913 had become the Base Defense Force. In 1923, the Marine Corps 

Expeditionary Force was established (one each, based respectively at Quantico on the east 

coast and San Diego on the west coast). However, in 1933 a further significant changed 

occurred: The formal creation of the Fleet Marine Force, under the operational command 

of the Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet, for planning and operational purposes.10 From this 

would evolve the Marine Corps amphibious warfare operational capability of World War II 

embodied in an eventual two amphibious corps with associated troops, six divisions, five 

aircraft wings, and 20 defense battalions—but all of that was in the distant future.

Linked to these events would, of course, be training. Due to various commitments, 

e.g. World War I and after that conflict the “small wars”, work in landing operations before 

the mid-1930s was very intermediate. Still, the Corps did what it could. Hence, limited 

exercises were conducted before the First World War and others in the 1920s. From the 

mid-1930s, more extensive and focused fleet exercises were held. Overall, regardless of 

where they were held in the western Pacific, Hawaii, and the Caribbean, plus some training 
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at Quantico; these drills revealed deficiencies in Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures 

which were associated with the evolving landing operations capability—as well as the 

collaboration of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps team.11 Future General H. M. Smith, 

who participated in the Hawaii exercises, developed candid conclusions about the then 

capability of the Corps to conduct such an operation. As his biographer wrote, “Under 

the conditions then obtaining, he thought the amphibious assault impossible. The Marines 

would have been wiped out. Vast improvements were necessary.”12 This would occur, and 

as part of this process a significant shift in concept ensued: From seizing a temporary 

naval base in a benign environment and then defending it, to landing from the sea against 

a defended area where a needed base, naval or air, was needed. 

A need for specialized equipment as well as training for the evolving mission also 

became very apparent. This involved more than small units weapons and communications 

equipment; that would come over time, as would developing aspects of Tactics, Techniques, 

and Procedures associated with control of naval gun fire, close air support, planning the 

loading of vessels, embarkations and debarkation from shipping, and communications for 

command and control. Other aspects were more fundamental. If the amphibious assault is 

viewed as a maritime version of World War I trench warfare, challenges indeed loomed. 

The defender would be operating from prepared positions awaiting the landing force. 

For the latter, it would be “going over the top” from a maritime “trench”—and the basic 

challenge of surviving the “no man’s land”, i.e., the ship-to-shore movement, between its 

maritime trench line and landing on a defended beach, i.e., a break-in via penetrating the 

surf zone, crossing the beach, and then penetrating inland. 

How was this to be done? Certainly not by the age of sail and small wars type of shipping 

and landing craft previously available, as shown at Gallipoli—at least not against an enemy 

as capable and prepared as the Japanese (and later Germans) would be. Gradually, the 

answers evolved: Attack amphibious transports and cargo ships to carry the landing force 

into the objective area.13 How, then, to move it from the ships (i.e., the maritime trench line) 

to the shore, i.e., beach? From civilian industry, eventually, came the answer: The eventual 

classic Landing Craft Vehicle/Personnel developed by Andrew Jackson Higgins in New 

Orleans, and the Tracked Landing Vehicle, from Donald Roebling in Florida.14

The Corps and Preparing for War—Pre-1941—II

Roles and mission, doctrine, structure, training, and equipment were all important, but 

who would lead a changed organization? This entailed the right men in the right place, and 

officers who were prepared to command such operations. This meant men of capability 

who could be identified, educated, properly assigned, and selected for promotion. Beyond 

initial recruitment, this meant a needed promotion reform in the United State Marine 

Corps—and this did not occur until 1934 under a new commandant, Major General John 

Henry Russell.15

Prior to his assuming office, promotion in the Corps was based on vacancy and seniority. 

When vacancies occurred, the officer at the top of the seniority list received promotion to 

the new vacancy. With Russell, he pushed for reform, a system based on merit by board 

selection.16
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In advocating this change, Russell had to educate both houses of Congress on the why 

and implications of such a change. He stressed that the officer Corps situation was the 

“most serious problem confronting the Marine Corps since I joined in 1894.” He informed 

appropriate committees of each chamber that he had overage colonels (52 to 62 of age) and 

Lieutenant Colonels (49 to 57), while 70% of his captains were over 40 and 37% of his First 

Lieutenants were over 35. Hence, the Corps could not go to war with such a situation.17

In addition to his staff providing more specifics, the New York Times supported such 

reform by reporting that if the situation would not change, an officer would service 140 

years before being eligible for Brigadier General, and a Captain would serve 55 years in 

that grade.18 Amongst young officers, the Naval Academy jib of the early 1930s seemed to 

be true when Midshipmen opting for the Navy joked with their soon to be Marine officer 

brethren, “I’ll see you in 20 years when we’re both Captains.”19 The issue was both physical 

and professional fitness. Once reform of the promotion system had been implemented, the 

Commandant succinctly compared and contrasted the old and new systems. In his final 

report to the Secretary of the Navy, General Russell in 1936 wrote, “Another serious defect 

of the seniority system was that an able, zealous, active and efficient officer could not be 

promoted over the head of another who lacked such qualifications. Mediocre officers were 

promoted as rapidly as the most efficient and there was not incentive to excel.”20 Serving 

officers of the time, especially capable and ambitious ones, certainly were aware of and 

talked about the situation—but stayed in because they were young, enjoyed what they were 

doing, and found duty in the Corps rewarding.21

Of course, statistics could be misleading—but officers remained in grades under the 

old system for long periods of time. Robert Devereux, the Marine commander at Wake 

Island, served five and a half years as a 2nd Lieutenant, and ten and a half as a 1st Lieutenant. 

Future General Jerry Thomas served 15 years as a 2nd and 1st Lieutenant. World War I hero 

and Marine Corps novelist (and artist) John Thomason served 14 years as a Captain, and 

General Oliver P. Smith, the eventual commander of the 1st Marine Division at the Chosin 

Reservoir, 17 years as a Captain. For field grade officers, a similar situation existed: Future 

General H. M. Smith was a Major for 13 years, and General Roy Geiger, an amphibious 

Corps commander in World War II and short time commander of 10th Army at Okinawa, 

13 and a half years.22

Russell succeeded where his predecessors, including John A. Lejeune, had failed. 

Congress passed the reform and it was signed into law. Immediately, promotion boards 

were formed and selection based on merit was implemented. Selected officers advanced 

years before they would have under the old system—and their names are those of senior 

commanders of World War II. For example, H. M. Smith, 13 years a Major, was promoted 

to Colonel after only three years in grade as a Lieutenant Colonel. Smith was only one 

such officer so promoted because of ability and potential for future service. Besides H. M. 

Smith, the colonel’s board in 1934 selected future generals Clayton Vogel and Charles F. 

Price, while that for Lieutenant Colonel advanced Julian C. Smith, Joseph Fegan, A. A. 

Vandergrift, Roy Geiger, Charles Barrett, Harry Schmidt, William Rupertus, and Pedro 

del Valle. This process continued in 1935, as Fegan, Vandergrift, Geiger, and Barrett were 

selected for Colonel, and a second board selected Julian C. Smith and John Marston. 
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Meanwhile, in 1935, Majors Clifton B. Cates, Lemuel Shepherd, Graves B. Erskine, 

Maurine Holmes, and Leo Hermle were selected for Lieutenant Colonel.23

The results of the company officers’ boards were equally dramatic. In 1934, only 92 of 

259 Captains were selected for Major, and only 89 of 198 1st Lieutenants were picked for 

captain.24 The effect on the officers corps of the Marine Corps can easily imagined, in both 

its positive and negative consequences and reaction.25

As O. P. Smith tactfully commented, “Well, yes, it was in 1934 that the selection board 

process was on, and that really cleaned things out, boy! It was terrific.” Marine Colonel and 

historian Robert Heinl tactfully stated that proficient officers “found themselves promoted 

with bewildering speed after years of stagnation.”26

Other officers of the time were more candid and scathing of the former system and those 

who had benefited from it: As Brigadier General John Letcher penned in his memoirs, the 

selection boards effected the “incompetent officers of the Marine corps like scythes cutting 

through ripe grain...there was wailing and gnashing of teeth and bitter words especially 

from the wives of offices who were not selected.” General Merrill Twining was even more 

blunt, reflectively writing that the 1934 initial boards “rid us of a heavy concentration of 

alcoholics, functional illiterates, and incompetent slobs. It was ruthless and intended to 

be.”27

Linked to this was professional military education for its officer corps. Before 1891, 

America’s “Soldiers of the Sea” had no formal education system for its leaders. In 1891, 

what eventually became known as The Basic School was founded for newly commissioned 

2nd Lieutenants. Not until 1920 did the Corps establish its own professional educational 

system for its career officers.28 That year, a three tiered system, originally known as the 

Marine Corps Schools, was established at the Marine Barracks, Quantico: The Basic 

School (later moved to the Marine Barracks, Philadelphia, and after World War II returned 

to Quantico) for 2nd Lieutenants, and one year courses respectively for captains and field 

grade officers.29

Initially patterned after and using course materials from the U.S. Army system, in the 

1930s the PME curriculum changed to that of a maritime service orientation. 30

The action officer for this was Colonel Ellis B. Miller, Chief of Staff of the schools.31

Miller had written in August 1932, “The prolonged use of this Army material, now taken 

from all of the Army schools, has so saturated the entire Marine Corps Schools system that 

its foundation is still resting on Army principles, Army organization, and Army thought.” 

Change had to come, for as Miller emphasized, the curricula of the schools “must involve 

Marine organizations, Marine equipment, Marine problems, Marine operations, with 

a Naval, not Army, background.” As he succinctly noted, “The Marine Corps is not the 

Army; the Army is not the Marine Corps.”32 In 1933, Ellis articulated the key points:

 The Navy is a war machine already constructed and capable of immediate action. The 

Marine Corps is part of that machine, must produce, on call, a well-trained force, familiar 

with naval methods, and organized and equipped for conducting shore operations essential 

to the success of the naval mission. 
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The implications were clear: In a future war, the fleet needed bases from which to 

operate and their defense and/or seizure existed via the U.S. Marine Corps: “The solution 

of this problem was accompanied by including as a part of the fleet, a force sufficiently 

strong and possessed of the necessary material to seize, establish, develop, maintain, and 

defend a temporary base from which the fleet might operate against the enemy....”33

Change indeed ensued. For example, in the curriculum for the 42 week field officers 

course (then named Senior Course) for the 1939-40 Academic Year, course work focused 

on subjects related to the Marine Corps or aspects of offensive and defensive landing 

operations, from military history, legal principles, logistics, military intelligence, aviation, 

chemical warfare, engineering, infantry weapons, communications, tactics and training, 

to overseas operations, map problems, and map maneuvers (all but one involving landing 

operations or ground operations ashore).34

Of interest, in the 42 week course, only one problem of 57 hours was devoted to Small 

Wars (near the end of the academic year)—with more hours were devoted to equitation 

(17) than given to basic instruction in Small Wars (16, three of which were on “Pack and 

Other Animal Transportation in Small Wars” with two of those a “Demonstration of Pack 

Saddles and Pack Loads”).35

Included in the curriculum were the Advanced Base Problems sent from the Naval War 

College to the Marine Corps Schools from 1931 to 1941. A “school solution” was developed 

by the students and faculty, and then presented at the Naval War College at Newport, the 

Department of the Navy in Washington, and at the Marine Barracks, Quantico. All but two 

of these involved locations associated with War Plan Orange (i.e., Saipan, Guam, Tinian, 

Truk, and the Philippines, and from the mid-1930s to 1941 involved an amphibious assault 

and not simply defense of an advanced naval base seized in a benign environment and 

then awaiting the enemy’s reaction.36 However, the effect of this professional education 

should not be overly emphasized nor debunked. Between 1920 and 1941, for example, in 

the course for field grade officers, only 330 officers graduated from it and, of these, only 

186 remained on active duty during the Second World War—but they formed the nucleus 

of the amphibious corps, divisions, aircraft wings, defense battalions, and corps troops 

of World War II. 37 During the war, 11 generals commanded Marine Corps divisions, and 

nine graduated from its Interwar staff college; of the 14 assistant division commanders, 

11 graduated from it. Thus, 20 of 25 generals who commanded divisions or were assistant 

division commanders graduated from the Corps’ senior professional military education 

institution; of the other five, three served at the Marine Corps Schools as instructors on the 

staff. At the amphibious corps level, the Marine Corps formed two Marine Amphibious 

Corps, III MAC (with the former I MAC becoming III MAC) and V MAC. Six Marine 

generals commanded these, and four graduated from the Quantico field officers course, and 

the other two served on the faculty of the Marine Corps Schools. 

At the regimental level, the figures are similar.38 During World War II, the Corps raised 

33 regiments (20 infantry, six artillery, four engineer, two raider, and one parachute).39

For these, 117 regular officers commanded regiments and would have been of the grade 

to have attended one or more of the Corps’ and/or sister service professional military 

education schools before the United States entry into World War II.40 Of these, in addition 
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Bittner

to The Basic School, 70 were graduates of one or more of the Corps’ professional military 

education schools, 14 of a Corps PME school and a U. S. Army company grade and/or 

field grade officers’ school, 18 of schooling only in the U.S. Army system, and three of a 

combination Marine Corps/U.S. Army and French War College PME courses. Only 11 did 

not attend a Marine Corps or sister service PME course after The Basic School and two, 

the aforementioned mustang and another officer, had no TBS designation after their names 

in the official registers.41

That Was Then—But What about Now?

The international environment, society, and services are not frozen in time. Change 

occurs. Conditions are very different today than in the Interwar year, but several issues 

connect then and now. The first is identification of officers of ability and merit for 

advancement and positions of increased and greater responsibilities. Despite whatever 

faults it may have, the system of board selection, i.e., superior professional peer review, 

continues to function and is indeed preferred to one based only on seniority and vacancy! 

A human element there may be, but is there a better method of selecting future leaders? 

The other linkage is professional military education (PME). The U. S. Marine Corps has 

indeed institutionalized this aspect of the development of its officer corps. This includes a 

clearly stated and understood professional training and professional military education for 

Captains via its career level school, the Expeditionary Warfare School, and for all Majors 

at its intermediate level school, the Command and Staff College. Both of these courses are 

offered through a Non-Resident Distant Education programs offered by the Marine Corps’ 

Training and Education Command’s College of Distant Education and Training. Eligible 

officers are encouraged to enroll and become professional military education complete 

for their appropriate rank. A fortunate few are also board selected to attend the one year 

resident courses of the Expeditionary Warfare School or Command and Staff College (or 

sister service or foreign equivalents), whether or not they have graduated from the nonresident courses.42 

In addition, the Corps has institutionalized a professional reading program, and 

emphasized cross-cultural communication programs and foreign language skills.43 A similar 

PME program is now extending to its enlisted ranks, with required education and training 

for all the Noncommissioned Officer and Staff Noncommissioned ranks.44 Stated simply, in 

professional military education a shift has occurred from a selective program for a fortunate 

few to one of “no Marine left behind.” This is further recognition of the complexity of 

modern warfare emphasized by former Commandant Charles Krulak’s articulated concept 

of the “strategic corporal” —a concept known to all contemporary Marines.45

The second decade of the 21st century is not the Interwar years of the 20th. Thus, in 

June 2010 an official U. S. Marine Corps publications stressed the following point: “Often 

thought of exclusively as an amphibious assault force, the period 1942-1945 was the only 

time in our history that the Marine Corps was organized, trained, and equipped for that 

one mission and did only one mission: Amphibious assault.”46 Despite this, for many 

Marines in the immediate decades after the Second World War, the assault was what the 

Corps was organized and trained for (with the sustained commitment ashore in Vietnam an 
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exception). But what of its previous history of “small wars?” This was taught to recruits 

and officer candidates entering the Corps as a means of emphasizing initiative, courage, 

and leadership—but related to the past. In the 21st century, such is not now the case—as 

the two traditions of the U. S, Marine Corps of “small wars” and amphibious warfare 

have blended into one entity doctrinally called Expeditionary Operations.47 This means 

that for contemporary Marines, more is demanded of them in the profession of arms and 

along the spectrum of conflict—and only the best can be selected as leaders of increased 

responsibility and for these only the most professional and educated can succeed in such 

a complex reality, be they in ranks from Corporal to Sergeant Major, or 2nd Lieutenant 

through General. 

In 1920, as the Corps was establishing its professional education system, the words 

of the 13th Commandant of the Marine Corps, Major General John A. Lejeune, are still 

relevant:

 It is our aim for all of our officers to have as good opportunities to obtain a military 

education as the officers of the Navy and the Army. Education is absolutely essential: An 

educated officer makes for educated men and an ignorant officer makes for ignorant men.

 Today, Lejeune’s articulated concept is even more applicable to all Marines—and 

soldiers, sailors, and airmen. This is a point Lejeune would have recognized, for as he later 

continued with this theme when speaking to the Committee on Naval Affairs of the House 

of Representatives: “You know there used to be an old theory that the soldier ought to be 

ignorant and illiterate and like dumb, driven cattle. I think our experience in this war [i.e., 

The Great War] shows the more intelligence, the more education, and the more initiative a 

man has the better soldier he is.”48
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Bittner

Notes

1. Allan R. Millett, In Many Strife: General Gerald C. Thomas and the U.S. Marine Corps, 

1917-1956 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993), 87. 

2. A sensation within the Corps in the mid-1970s was the Brookings study: Martin Binkin 

and Jeffrey Record, Where Does the Marine Corps Go from Here? (Washington, DC: Brookings 

Institution, 1976). This is still discussed by officers of that era, e.g., Dr. J, William Gordon, 

Colonel, USMCR (Ret.) and Dr. Donald F. Bittner, LtColonel, USMCR (Ret.), professional 

exchange at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Quantico, Virginia, 14 September 

2010. 

3. Even as the Corps is still committed to operations in Afghanistan (but now out of Iraq), 

the service is turning its attention to post-Afghanistan issues, to include mission, role, force 

structure, and end strength. A study group will do so at the Marine Corps Combat Development 

Command, Quantico Virginia, during the autumn 2010: Commandant of the Marine Corps to 

Executive Steering Group for Force Structure Review Group, 1520 C 06 dated 16 August 2010, 

Subj: “USMC Force Structure Review Group (FSRG) 2010 Charter”; the enclosure addresses 

roles, missions, and Corps competencies, including those mandated by law (Title 10 § 5063). 

For initial discussions of this, see Gina Cavallaro, “Corps at a Crossroad: Force Structure Group 

Tasked with Plotting the Way Forward,” The Marine Corps Times, 30 August 2010, 16; Bob 

Lamonthe, “Keep the Capabilities, Trim the Excess: CMC Defines Force Review Guidelines,” 

The Marine Corps Times, 6 September 2010, 16; and appropriate material pertaining to the 

Corps, Walter Pincus, “Eyeing the Pentagon: Gates Considers Three Changes,” The Washington 

Post, 17 August 2010, A13. For a contemporary discussion of the Corps and its amphibious 

mission, definition of a Marine, and concern about a second land army, see Dakota L. Wood, 

“Caught on a Lee Shore, The American Interest – Online – September 2010, at http://www.

the-american-interest.com/index.cfm. See also, Gidget Fuentes, “Relevance of MEUs Debated 

after Years of Fighting on Land,” Marine Corps Times, 4 October 2010, 34. Comments by 

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on the role of the Marine Corps, especially its amphibious 

one, made at the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on 7 May 

2010, and at the Marine Corps Memorial, San Francisco, California, on 12 August 2010, have 

especially stimulated concern, responses, and national attention. Transcripts of these remarks 

are available at http://www.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=4623, and 

http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1498, respectively. 

4. The authorized strength of the Corps in 1932: 1,030 officers, 154 warrant officers, and 

17,500 enlisted.

5. .Annual Report of the Major General Commandant of the United States Marine Corps

(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1932). Several years later in assessing the 

capability of an assembled landing force similar to that on the aforementioned battleships, 

the then Major Pedro del Valle wrote that “the sad condition of our landing force was made 

shockingly obvious.” He later concluded that “thank God we never had to make this crazy 

landing.” Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle, USMC, Semper Fidelis: An Autobiography

(Hawthorne, CA: Christian Book Club of America), 67 and 71.

6. In addition to Major Barrett, the committee consisted of Marine officers Major Pedro del 

Valle and Major Lyle Miller, and Navy Lieutenant Walter Ansel.

7. Landing Operations Doctrine, United States Navy, Feet Training Publication 167

(Washington, DC, 1938). Copies of the evolving doctrinal publication, with various committee 

proceedings, are in the Archives Branch of the Gray Research Center. Appropriate changes 
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were issued in 1941, 1942, and 1943. Significantly, the cover letter of change 1 dated 2 May 

1941 included the following verbiage: “FTP-167 is intended as a guide for forces of the Navy 

and Marine Corps conducting a landing against opposition. It considers, primarily, the tactics 

and technique of the landing operation and the necessary supporting measures therefore. Purely 

naval or military operations are dealt with only to the extent to which these operations are 

influenced by the special nature of amphibious warfare.” The U.S. Army adopted the doctrine 

as FM 31-4, Landing Operations on Hostile Shores, in 1942.

8. Late 19th century issues and endeavors are studied in Jack Shulimson, The Marine Corps’ 

Search for a Mission, 1880-1898 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993). 

9. Ellis’ plan has been published. See U.S. Marine Corps, FMFRP 12-46, U. S. Marine 

Corps, 712H Operations Plan, Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia, 1921 (Washington, 

DC, 1992). Ellis envisioned not just defense of advanced naval bases, but also their seizure; 

the subject of advanced bases had been studied from the first decade of the 20th century by 

Marine Officers at the Naval War College, to include John Henry Russell, Robert Dunlap, Dion 

Williams, and Ellis himself; such materials are retained in the archives of the library of the 

Naval War College. For a biography of Ellis, commentary on the plan, and his demise while 

on a not well concealed intelligence mission in the Pacific, see Dirk A. Ballendorf and Merrill 

L. Bartlett, Pete Ellis: An Amphibious Warfare Prophet, 1880-1923 (Annapolis, MD: Naval 

Institute Press, 1997.)

10. Department of the Navy, General Order No. 241, 7 December 1941. For the complete 

text, see Marine Corps Historical Division, http://www.tecom.usmc.mil/HD/Docs_Speeches/

Thefleetmarineforce.htm.

11. These are summarized in Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: A History of the Marine 

Corps (New York: Macmillan, 1980; 2nd ed., 1991), Chapters 10 and 12.

12. Norman Cooper, A Fighting General: The Biography of General Holland M. ‘Howlin’ 

Mad’ Smith (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps Association, 1987), 51. 

13. By 1944, the Haskell class Amphibious Attack Transports (APAs) and Amphibious 

Attack Cargo ships (AKAs), plus Amphibious Command Ships (AGCs) configured on the same 

hulls, had evolved - plus other amphibious craft such as the LST (Landing Ship Tanks) and 

Landing Ship Docks (LSDs). Many of these vessels remained in service into the Vietnam war 

era. Such ships carried the landing force to the theatre and then within it, i.e., movement and 

maneuver. APAs and AKAs could carry approximately 20 or more landing craft. For the basic 

characteristics of these types ships, see Jane’s Fighting Ships, 1946-47 (New York, NY: The 

Macmillan Company, 1947), 388-392.

14. Landing Craft Vehicle Personnels were used both in the European and Pacific theatre of 

operations. The classic photo: that of U.S. troops approached Omaha Beach at Normandy. The 

“D-Day Museum,” or more accurately National World War II Museum, is located on the site of 

Higgins boat manufacturing company. For characteristics of these small craft, see Commander 

Amphibious Training Command, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Landing Craft and Their Employment

(1965). For a detail history of this landing craft, see Jerry E. Strahan, Andrew Jackson Higgins 

and the Boats That Won World War II (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 

1994).

The descendants of the LVTs (Tracked Landing Vehicle) have been called the AMTRACs 

(Amphibian Tractors), AAVs (Assault Amphibian Vehicles), and EFV (Expeditionary Fighting 

Vehicles); the last named remain in controversial development entering the second decade of 

the 21st century. For details on the basic procurement of the LVT and other landing craft, see 

Colonel Kenneth J. Clifford, USMCR, Progress and Purpose: A Developmental History of 
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Bittner

the U. S. Marine Corps, 1900-1970 (Washington, DC: Marine Corps History and Museums 

Division, 1973), 48-60.

15. In addition to the law, the Interwar problem was compounded by the Russell and 

Neville Boards after World War I which determined who would be retained in the post-war 

officer corps, their rank, and their lineal list number. i.e., seniority. For a succinct discussion of 

this, see Millett, In Many a Strife, 74, 75, and 83. 

16. This meant selection for promotion predicated on potential for future service based on 

past performance, as opposed to a reward for past service. 

17. For a succinct discussion of this, see Donald F. Bittner, “John Henry Russell,” 

Commandants of the Marine Corps, Allan R. Millet and Jack Shulimson, eds. (Annapolis, 

MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004), 245-248. For Russell’s testimony, see United States Senate, 

“Selection, Promotion, and Retirement of Commissioned Officers of the Marine Corps. Hearing 

before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Naval Affairs. S. 3058, 20 April 1934.” 

18. “General’s Rank in Marines Requires 140 Years’ Duty,” New York Times, 15 January 

1934.

19. Colonel Robert D. Heinl, USMC, Soldiers of the Sea: The United States Marine Corps, 

1775-1962 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1962), 316. A variation of this quotation is 

in Norman Cooper’s biography of H. M. Smith, A Fighting General, 50. At that time, almost all 

Marine officers entered the service via the U. S. Naval Academy.

20. Major General Commandant of the Marine Corps to the Secretary of the Navy Final 

Report, 2 September 1936 (Typed copy). Copies of the annual reports of the Commandants of 

the Marine Corps are in the Archives Branch, Gray Research Center, Marine Corps University, 

Quantico, Virginia. 

21. Memoirs and individual oral histories candidly addressed the situation. See the critical 

commentary in Brigadier General John Letcher, USMC, One Marine’s Story (Verona, VA: 

McClure Press, 1970), 57, 104-108, and 113-114. Letcher eventually commanded 1st Field 

Artillery Group (V Marine Amphibious Corps) on Iwo Jima. 

22. Roger Willock, Lone Star Marine: A Biography of the Late John W. Thomason, 

Jr., USMC (Princeton, NJ: Privately Published, 1961), 3 and 15; Brigadier General Robert 

Devereux interview with author, 17 November 1982; General Jerry Thomas letter to author, 

23 December 1982; Roger Willock, Unaccustomed to Fear: A Biography of General Roy S. 

Geiger, USMC (Princeton, NJ: Haskins Press, 1968), 168; Norman Cooper, “The Military 

Career of General Holland M. Smith, USMC” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Alabama, 

1974), 101 and 104; and General O. P Smith, “Oral History” (Washington: Historical Division, 

1973), 12-13. General O. P. Smith also recalled future Marine Corps Generals Jerry Thomas 

and Mervin Silverthorne served many years in the grade 1st Lieutenant, i.e., nearly 13.

23. Reports of Proceedings of Senior Selection Boards to the Secretary of the Navy, 25 

June 1934, and 7 January and 2 December 1935. U. S. National Archives, RG 127, Box 133, 

File 1965-75-35-10. These reports simply list the names of the officers selected. The results 

were also published in the Marine Corps Gazette. 

24. Reports of Proceedings of Junior Selection Boards to the Secretary of the Navy, 25 June 

1934. U. S. National Archives, RG 127, Box 133, File 1965-75-35-10. As with the senior officer 

boards, the results appeared in the Marine Corps Gazette.

25. The opponents to the reform sought their revenge in 1936 in opposing Russell’s 

permanent promotion to Major General. This emotional, negative, and highly personal 

opposition received considerable publicity at the time, e.g., see appropriate coverage in the 

New York Times, proceedings in the Senate in the Congressional Record, and in a memoir by 
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Russell’s daughter: Brooke Astor, Footprints: An Autobiography (New York, NY: Doubleday 

& Company, Inc., 1980), 85-89, and 187-193. 

26. Smith, “Oral History,” 13; and Heinl, Soldiers of the Sea, 298. 

27. Letcher, One Marine’s Story, p. 108; General Merrill Twining letter to Author, 28 

December 1982. 

28. For a succinct overview of the system, see Donald F. Bittner, “Marine Corps Professional 

Military Education” and “Quantico, Virginia,” William E. Simons, ed., Professional Military 

Education in the United States: A Historical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 

2000), 190-192 and 257-259, respectively. In that volume, see also “The Basic School” (76-

78), “L’Ecole Superieure de Guerre” (134-135), “Amphibious Warfare School” (42-45), and 

“Marine Corps Command and Staff College,” (186-189). 

29. Announced unofficially to the Corps via “The Quantico Schools,” The Marine Corps 

Gazette, Vol. V, No. 3, September 1920, 316-317. Of interest, officers were informed that 

“Unless under very exceptional circumstances, student officers will not be detached until they 

have completed their courses. The old curse of ‘This is in additional to your other duties,’ will 

not be applied to the students, for they will be assigned no duty but their school work.” (317) 

For an over history of the Command and Staff College, see Donald F. Bittner, Curriculum 

Evolution. Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 1920-1988 (Washingtn, DC: Marine 

Corps History and Museums Division, 1988).

30. For commentary on this by O. P. Smith, a former faculty member at the Schools, see 

Clifton La Bree, The Gentle Warrior: General Olive P. Smith, USMC (Kent, OH: Kent State 

Press, 2001), 6.

31. An officer now generally unknown in the Corps of the 21st century, insight into this 

dynamic and hard driving officer can be found in Lieutenant General Victor Krulak, USMC, 

First to Fight: An Inside View of the U. S. Marine Corps (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 

1984), 81. 

32. Colonel Ellis Miller letter to Brigadier General J. C. Breckinridge, 15 August 1932. 

HAF 274. Archives Branch, Gray Research Center, Marine Corps University, Quantico, 

Virginia. Miller also listed 14 specific tasks which needed to be done, the foremost resting on 

development of a “Marine Corps doctrine.” 

33. Colonel Ellis B. Miller, USMC, The Marine Corps in Support of the Fleet (Quantico, VA: 

Marine Corps Schools, 1933), 12-13. The bibliography lists 77 references, including military 

and naval memoirs of World War I, official and unofficial histories of Gallipoli and German 

Baltic operations, theorists such as Mahan and Corbett, Marine Corps officers’ publications, 

and lectures on and after operations reports from exercises in Panama (1923), Culebra (1924), 

and Hawaii (1925). 

34. These included Gallipoli, Zeebrugge, Baltic Islands, Alhucemas, and early American 

landings, plus the Civil War battles of Bull Run and Chancellorsville.

35. Master Schedule, Senior Course, Marine Corps Schools, Marine Barracks, Quantico, 

1939-1940.” This includes a day by day, hour by hour, week by week listing of each class and 

subject thereof. Summary “Recapitulation” of the courses are on pages 21 to 35. This was the 

last complete course before World War II, as the 1940-41 Academic Year was suspended in 

April 1941.

36. For a summary and analysis of the Advanced Base Problems, see Donald F. Bittner, 

“Taking the Right Fork in the Road: The Transition of the U. S. Marine Corps from an 

‘Expeditionary’ to an Amphibious Corps,” Battles Near and Far: A Century of Overseas 

Deployment, Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey, eds. (Canberra, Australia: Army History Unit, 

2004), 128.
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Bittner

37. Figures compiled from the Marine Corps monthly muster rolls, 1920 to 1941, for the 

Marine Barracks, Quantico, Virginia; within that command, officers were listed under Marine 

Corps Schools. The original muster rolls are in the National Archives, Washington D.C., with 

microfilm copies in the Gray Research Center, Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia. 

The Corps also sent a limited number of officers to U.S. Army PME schools, and to one foreign 

institution: L’Ecole Superieure de Guerre, in Paris, France. Of the latter, 11 completed the twoyear course and one finished its first year. Donald F. Bittner, “Foreign Military Officer Training 

in Reverse: U.S. Marine Corps Officers in the French Professional Military Education System 

in the Interwar Years”, The Journal of Military History, Vol. 57, No. 3, July 1993, 481-510. 

Compiled from the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States 

Navy and Marine Corps, July 1, 1941 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 

1941). Educational qualifications of officers of the Marine Corps on active duty were listed in it. 

38. Only regimental commanders are assessed; a similar one could be made of the defense 

battalions, 20 of which were raised and whose commanding officers were usually of the grade 

of colonel or lieutenant colonel—some of whom also commanded regiments; the list of defense 

battalion commanding officers is in Charles L. Updegraph, Jr., Special Marine Corps Units of 

World War II (Washington, DC: Historical Division, U.S. Marine Corps, 1972), 88-92. A similar 

analysis could also be made of Marine Aircraft Wing and Marine Air Group Commanders. 

39. Marine Corps regiments in the war: 1st to 9th: Infantry; 10th to 15th: Artillery; 16th to 19th: 

Engineer; and 21st to 29th: Infantry. 

40. Professional schooling beyond the entry level The Basic School for 2nd Lieutenants; 

included the field grade officer one-year Marine Corps and one or two year Fort Leavenworth 

courses, and the Corps’ company grade one year course and the U.S. Army career and branch 

schools of the infantry, cavalry, field artillery, and coast defense artillery. Due to the recent 

development of a Marine Corps professional education program, that service did not then have 

a war college; however, 15 regimental commanders were U. S. Army or U. S. Navy war college 

graduates, while six had completed signal and five motor transport courses at U.S. Army 

schools, two had engineer courses, and three courses in law. Also, one was a naval aviator and 

another a certified translator in Spanish. 

41. All figures compiled from the names of corps, division, assistant division, and 

regimental commanders listed in regimental histories (1st, 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 

11th, 12th, 14th and 25th Marines), Special Marine Corps Units of World War II, and the official 

History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, vols. I to V, 1958, 1963, 1966, 

1971, and 1968 respectively, all published by Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, 

U.S. Marine Corps; Gordon L. Rottman, U.S. Marine Corps World War II Order of Battle

(Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 2002); and the six World War II division histories published 

after that conflict, and then cross correlated with names and educational qualifications noted 

in the Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers of the United States Navy and Marine 

Corps for the war years, primarily that for 1941. Age became a factor as the Corps expanded 

– and younger officers commanded regiments as the conflict progressed, hence before the war 

commenced most of these did not have the opportunity to attend the Corps’ senior professional 

military education school (or a sister service equivalent). 

42. The Corps’ officer development program is outlined in Commanding General, 

Education Command, Marine Corps Officers Professional Military Education Continuum, 

March 2010. The Commanding General, Education Command, is also the President, Marine 

Corps University, Quantico, Virginia. www.mcu.usmc.mil 

43. In many ways, this is a return to skills many Marine officers possessed in the Interwar 

era. Exemplifying this was Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, a regimental commander in 
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World War II, who was fluent in Chinese and after his retirement from the Corps received his 

D.Phil. from Oxford University – and translated Sun Tzu into English and this work is still in 

print. Samuel B. Griffith, USMC, Sun Tzu: The Art of War (New York, NY: Oxford University 

Press, 1963). However, for a balanced perspective on both the positives and negatives 

associated with such real and superficial capabilities in the pre-World War II era, see Richard L. 

Millett, “Conclusions: Lessons Lost and Lessons Forgotten,” Searching for Stability: The U.S. 

Development of Constabulary Forces in Latin American and the Philippines. Occasional Paper 

30 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2010), 123-131. 

44. For the specifics of the Marine Corps professional military education program, see 

Marine Corps Order 1553.4B, MCCDC C 40 OP dated 25 January 2008, “Subj: Professional 

Military Education (PME).” For a further discussion of these programs, see Colonel Terence 

K. Kerrigan, USMC (Ret.), “College of Distance Education,” and Lieutenant Colonel Dennis 

Haskin, USAF (Ret.), and Major Sean Griffin, USMC (Ret.), “Distance Education and Blended 

Learning Seminars,” Marine Corps Gazette, Vol. 91, No. 10, October 2010, 36-35 and 46-53, 

respectively. 

45. General Krulak repeatedly addressed the concept of the “strategic corporal” between 

1995 and 1999 while Commandant of the Marine Corps. For example, General Charles C. 

Krulak, “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War,” Marines: Official 

Magazine of the Marine Corps, Vol. 28, No. 1, January 1999, 26-32. 

46. Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration, Marine Corps 

Operating Concepts: Assuring Littoral Access...Proven Crisis Response, 3rd ed., June 2010, 

p. 2. Whether conceptually or actually true or not, the key in this statement is the institutional 

self-identification of its role and mission during and since World War II.

47. Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 3, MCDP 3, Expeditionary Operations

(Washington, DC, 1998), 32. The linkage of expeditionary operations to their naval character, 

especially amphibious, is on pages 45-46. 

48. Major General John A. Lejeune, USMC, Testimony, 26 February 1920, Hearings before 

the Committee on Naval Affairs of the House of Representatives on Estimates Submitted by the 

Secretary of the Navy, 1920, Vol. II (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), 

1828 and 1830. For contemporary recommendations reference the importance of education and 

changes pertaining to it, see Stephen J. Hadley and William J. Perry, Co-Chairmen, The QDR in 

Perspective: Meeting America’s National Security Needs in the 21st Century: The Final Report 

of the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, Final Corrected Advance Copy (2010), 

xv to xvii. www.usip.org. 
219

Day 2, Panel 3: Changing Leadership for a Changing World Role, 1906-1939

Questions and Answers

(Transcript of Presentation)

Dr. Gene Andersen, Ph.D.

Dr. Donald Bittner, Ph.D.

Moderated by Mr. Kelvin Crow

Mr. Crow:

Thank you, Dr. Bittner. I’d like to exercise the moderator’s prerogative by asking the 

first question. We have a few moments for questions and I’d like to address that to Professor 

Anderson. Forgive me. I had a brother who was a Naval Officer, but can you expand a little 

bit on command by negation? I just didn’t get a good grip on that.

Dr. Andersen:

Command by negation is the concept in the Navy that I’ve given you direction. Go forth 

and do your job. I will tell you if something you are choosing to do is not what you should 

do. I mean, that’s what it boils down to. It’s a little bit more complicated than that but it’s 

essentially the idea that I’ve given you broad instructions and if I observe that you’re doing 

something that I don’t want you to do, I will tell you not to do it, but otherwise, go do your 

job. That’s once again simplistic like everything else I’ve said, but trying to take the big 

ideas and boil them down, that’s basically how that works out.

Mr. Crow:

So I’m going to let you run until you screw up and then I’ll talk to you.

Dr. Andersen:

Then I’ll tell you don’t do that and if you keep doing it then I’ll get somebody else. 

Then I’ll fire you. Questions gentlemen? General Brown?

BG Brown:

I was one of those army officers you spoke of that had the culture shock of going to 

the Naval War College as a relatively senior Colonel and I was struck while there, not 

only by the difference between my background as an Army officer and what I felt I was 

encountering with the naval officers, but also the rather dramatic differences between the 

Navy and the Marines which in my mind were even greater than the difference between the 

Navy and the Army. And within the Navy the rather dramatic difference between, in my 

view, submariners, aviation-oriented folks, and the ones who were frigates and destroyers 

and surface warriors. I’m wondering if the both of you could kind of comment on the 

extent to which those separate cultures affect the paradigm you’ve described, and in the 

case of the Marines, the extent to which the recent 50 year run of not doing any amphibious 
Panel 7

220

landings may or may not have watered down the effort to distinguish the Marines from the 

Army that you described as being so potent in this interwar period. You know, hanging 

onto the amphibious warfare as being the thing that made the Marines unique. It’s kind of 

a two-part question but hopefully related.

Dr. Andersen:

To lead off with the culture piece, I’ve sort of misguided you in the sense that I talked 

about a Navy culture. And there’s an argument to me made—and in my longer version of 

this talk, I make it, that the Navy doesn’t really have a culture, per se. That the Navy is a 

collection of communities and each of those communities has a culture, and so the culture 

that I spoke of is really the Navy’s surface culture: the culture of the frigate destroyer, 

cruiser world of the Navy’s surface operations. And it is not really the culture so much 

necessarily of the aviation community, of the submarine community, or the rest of the 

Navy. The Navy is, to a much greater degree than any of the other services, a collection 

of subordinate communities. Just as an example, career management in the Navy. The 

community managers that own career management for each community, own officers all 

the way up until the point that they’re selected for Admiral. So Navy captains are detailed 

by people who are community managers for the benefit of the community. All the way up 

to the captain level, their development is driven by, “What does the community perceive 

is good for the community?” Not for the Navy at large. There’s no central management of 

the Navy, of Post-Command Commanders, of Captains, of any officers short of an admiral. 

So the Navy is really very deeply stove piped into sub-communities. And even in aviation, 

I’m a helicopter guy, I was a helicopter pilot, I was very different, viewed myself as being 

very different from tactical air guys who flew off the carrier or the maritime patrol guys 

who went home every day. Two very different cultures, very different communities, and we 

perceived ourselves to be very different, so just within the Navy there is some incredible 

differences.

Audience Member 1:

As an outsider who served with the Navy as well as the Marine Corps, I agree with 

what you say. I’ve been at the college for 36 years now and I’ve had offers from all these 

various communities and we kind of joke about the guys in the blue suits with the gold 

rings but I have an engineer, I’ve had a chaplain, I’ve got a submariner, I’ve got a helicopter 

pilot in the last two years, and you talk with them about surface line issues, they’re not 

familiar with that at all. You talk to them about going to our second year course, they talk 

about different areas for a promotion, career development, things of this nature. As I said, 

how the Navy functions like this, in many ways, is a mystery. And I’ve been associated 

with the naval service since 1962. This issue of the Marine Corps not being a second 

land Army, it surfaced again, if you recall, during Vietnam when one of the commandants 

changed the designation from a MEU, MEB, and MEF. Marine Expeditionary Unit, 

Marine Expeditionary Brigade, Marine Expeditionary Force, to MAU, MAB, MAF with 

“Amphibious” replacing the “Expeditionary.” There’s always that concern about are we 

going to evolve into a second land Army, and as Colonel Miller said in the ‘30s and basically 

as General Connelly has been saying during his “commandantcy,” we can’t survive and 

we shouldn’t be a second land Army. So, what you see, and especially on his concern 
Questions and Answers

221

about the Marine Corps and getting from the Navy, amphibs and getting the expeditionary 

fighting vehicle online as well as the Osprey to maintain that expeditionary, I’m calling it 

expeditionary now, amphibious is a subset of expeditionary capability. Otherwise we’re 

very vulnerable because Congress, the public, the Secretary of Defense is going to say we 

can’t afford two land Armies. So that’s why General Connelly keeps coming back to that. 

We’ve done some analysis of our students and right now we figure one or two years from 

now. I’m quoting our Dean of Academics now because I had gone in a couple days ago. 

We were talking in seminar and my navy officer had not seen and did not even know of the 

Humphrey Bogart film, The Caine Mutiny. So it was one of these generational discussions 

that spun off and our dean said in a couple years all of our Marines, their total professional 

experiences is going to be COIN operations, sure, insurgency, functioning as a second land 

Army. And then I said, well, you know, remember, about five years ago we were worried 

how we were going to blend our officers who had been to Afghanistan and Iraq with those 

who had not been. Well, that was not a problem, but it’s something we see being worked 

out, and so for those of us who’ve been around, we saw the same thing after Vietnam in the 

Brookings study, Where Does the Marine Corps Go From Here? And they recommended 

that we assume the mission of the 18th Airborne Corps Strategic Reserve. What it ended 

up being was a Norway commitment. I guess we still have equipment stored up there. But 

that’s a big concern within the Marine Corps.

Dr. Andersen:

Just a point about history. The Navy doesn’t tend to view its history as all that significant. 

I walked down to the bookstore here yesterday and you’ve got James Hornfischer’s Last 

Stand of the Tin Can Sailors for sale down there, which is a great book about sort of 

the Navy’s equivalent to the story of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain at Little Round Top. 

Ernest Evans at Johnston at Leyte Gulf is a parallel story but it has very little resonance in 

the Navy and very few naval officers have read the book.

Audience Member 2:

If I can make a comment—

Mr. Crow:

Gentlemen, I’m sorry, it’s a fascinating discussion. I know we have other folks who’d 

like to ask questions but I’m afraid we’ve run out of time for this panel. I’d like to ask you 

to join me in giving a warm round of applause of thanks to our panelists.

223

Day 3: Featured Speaker

US Army Leader Development: Past, Present, and Future by 

Brigadire General Sean B. MacFarland

(Transcript of Presentation)

Moderated by Kendall D. Gott

Mr. Gott: 

Welcome to the final section of the 8th annual Military History Symposium, sponsored 

by the Combat Studies Institute. While I have the opportunity, I want to thank you all for 

coming. And I’d like to thank the staff that has supported this event in its entirety. Kurt 

King is up there somewhere with the audio/visual crew. We have Elizabeth Brown and Jodi 

Becker, who have been out at the registration booth and Kevin Reed, who has been doing 

a lion’s share of manhandling of the books and other heavy toting and lifting, and all the 

staff members of Combat Studies Institute served as moderators. 

One of the regrets I have during these events is I do not get enough time to say hello 

and to chat with each and every one of you. And I regret that. But I’d just like to say how 

much it means to all of us that you’ve traveled from afar, whether it be from the CAC 

headquarters or all the way from the East or West Coasts and beyond. And it was really nice 

to have sister services here this year, as well as our friends and allies from foreign nations. 

OK, again, our final panel is our own Brigadier General Sean MacFarland, who 

currently serves as the deputy commandant of the Command and General Staff College 

here at Fort Leavenworth. Sir? 

BG MacFarland:

Thanks. Good job. I’ll try to keep my remarks as brief as my bio. First of all, I’d just 

like to echo thanks to everybody for attending this conference. And I hope that you’ve 

found it to be worthwhile. 

I feel a little under-qualified to be standing in front of you today. I’m not an historian 

of any note. I’m an engineering major. But I’ll do what I can to talk about how history has 

influenced leader development. And leader development is, as you heard, my portfolio, my 

brief. So I’ll talk a little bit about that. 

First of all, I think it’s important to at least acknowledge that this entire discussion is 

not moot, that leaders are made and not born. If leaders were only born, then this would 

just be a topic of eugenics and nothing more. So I happen to believe that, as the US Army 

believes, that we can make leaders. 

Having said that, the Army’s approach to leader development through the years has had 

its ups and downs, with a record of mixed success. And my job is, of course, to improve 

on that track record. And although leadership has always helped to provide the margin 

between battlefield success and failure, those margins are growing slimmer all the time, 

thanks to technology proliferation. It’s leveling the battlefield between ourselves and our 
224

Guest Speaker

potential adversaries. And that makes it all the more important to ensure that we have 

leadership that is superior to that of our enemies. 

General Winfield Scott, who led American troops in the War of 1812 and then in the 

Mexican-American War actually, some 35 years later, he declared it as his fixed opinion 

that West Point-trained officers had transformed the Army and provided the principle 

difference between victory and defeat in that conflict. Now that fixed opinion was shared 

by enough of our leadership that West Point remained the primary source of professional 

education within our Army for over a hundred years thereafter. Unfortunately, despite its 

many and necessary contributions to America’s defense, the military academy by itself was 

far from sufficient to meet the needs of our growing nation.

hter of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, both Union and Confederate, 

under the command of West Pointers on both sides of the Civil War made it clear that 

something was missing in our leader development model. Indeed, our professional soldiers 

demonstrated little or no more skill in leading large formations than the rank amateurs. 

Whatever primitive talent management system that we were using back in those days, 

especially at the outset of the war, was severely flawed. 

Furthermore, our senior commanders were largely self-taught above the tactical level 

in the operational art. And it was said that many carried a copy of [Antoine-Henri] Jomini’s 

book in their saddlebags about his treatment of the Napoleonic Wars. Unfortunately, the 

technology of the Napoleonic Wars was in the past, and the technology of the Civil War 

made those tactics really inappropriate for the day. And lots of American soldiers paid a 

heavy price for their commanders’ ignorance.

After a long series of unsuccessful commanders, the Union of course finally found, 

through a very costly process of trial by fire and error, their leader in Ulysses S. Grant. 

And to borrow from the old parable, we’ve made him, we took the stone that the builders 

rejected and made him our cornerstone. Something was upside-down in how we were 

picking our leaders back then. 

Well, at the end of the Civil War, the Army moved back to the frontier, and began 

fighting a series of small campaigns against Indian tribes, just as it had before the war. 

And intellectualism, I think, dived to a new low within the Army during those days, along 

with low pay hardships and slow promotions. All these factors combined to make an Army 

career unattractive for the best and the brightest of that generation.

So not surprisingly, the Army turned in an embarrassing performance during the 

Spanish-American War. And in response, Secretary of War [Elihu] Root began to reform 

the Army’s professional military education system. Unfortunately, the First World War 

interrupted those reforms shortly after they began. And their impact was minimal by the 

time we sent our doughboys over there. Indeed, actual combat was the main schoolhouse 

for our leaders during the First World War, just as it was during the Civil War. 

We tacitly accepted the European view, best articulated by Field Marshal Ferdinand 

Foch, that it takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general. Although we were among 

the victors, American military innovation during the campaigns of 1918 was virtually 

nonexistent, and our losses were once again severe. We still had a long way to go obviously 
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in leader development. Despite our victory, though, the experiences of the First World War 

in the trenches was traumatic enough that the Army, along with the other services, began to 

focus on education, just as Secretary Root had tried to do before the war. 

And as a result, military innovation actually flourished between the world wars, 

despite the impact of a great depression. And it was during the inter-war period that Fort 

Leavenworth really came into its own as the mid-grade professional education institution 

that we like to call the intellectual center of the Army. 

I’ll defer to Pete Schifferle on the history of the Command General Staff College 

during the inter-war years and during those wars. Suffice it to say, the investment we made 

during America’s lean years paid great dividends in the forms of the brilliant campaigns 

that our Leavenworth graduates waged during the Second World War, in both the European 

and Pacific theaters. 

However, as we saw with the Civil War victory, can be a double-edged sword. And 

complacency set in after the Second World War. And we narrowly escaped disaster in 

Korea. Fortunately, the Korean War was similar enough to the recently concluded Second 

World War, and we had enough residual talent and experience still in our ranks that we 

were able to avoid catastrophe. 

Unfortunately, that was not the case in Vietnam, where sadly our inability to adapt 

quickly enough to the circumstances of that conflict exhausted the Americans’ national will 

before we were able to defeat the enemy. And ultimately, that led to the defeat of our South 

Vietnamese allies. 

Perhaps like no other conflict though, Vietnam spurred the American Army to take 

a hard look at itself and change. Like the inter-war period 50 years earlier, these were 

lean years for the military. Nevertheless, that era was marked by numerous doctrinal and 

technical innovations. And General Sullivan touched on that during his talk on the first day.

But among them was our recognition of the importance of the operational art. To 

develop successful campaigns, the Army opened the school here at Fort Leavenworth, 

SAMS, School of Advanced Military Studies. And in short order, its graduates were called 

upon to write plans for operations in Panama and Iraq, which led to our overwhelming 

victories in both operations, Just Cause and Desert Storm. And some of those planners’ 

names would be familiar to you guys, like Huntoon and Rodriguez. I mean, these were 

the bright, young iron majors out there who took the lessons they learned here and applied 

them in the field. To some, it seemed like the operational art was a powerful, mysterious 

force. And its practitioners inevitably earned the nickname “Jedi Knights”.

But SAMS is just one of the many reasons that we enjoyed so much success, and 

in such disparate and far-flung operations. Another was the professionalism of our noncommissioned officers. After Vietnam, we addressed one of the most glaring deficiencies 

of that war, and that was the disintegration of our NCO corps. One of the reforms was the 

institution of the NCOES beginning in 1971. And we’ve all heard that no plan survives 

contact with the enemy. The reason our soldiers were able to implement our plans so well 

and to adapt and overcome innumerable challenges caused by fog and friction of warfare 
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was our professional NCO corps. Not only do we fight well at the operational level, but we 

completely out-classed the battle-hardened Iraqi army at the tactical level as well.

As General Freddie Franks said when asked about the American Army’s technological 

advantage over the Iraqi army, he said, “You could have put our soldiers in their tanks and 

our soldiers in theirs, and the outcomes would have been the same.” Our well-trained and 

educated NCOs were the reason that he could make that boast. 

After our victories in Panama, Iraq, and the end of the Cold War, we again fell victim 

to our own success. Despite entering the 21st century with quick initial victories over the 

Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, we failed to adapt to 

the growing insurgencies in both countries. We ignored the lessons of the Israeli defense 

force in southern Lebanon, did not prepare for a new type of irregular or hybrid warfare.

After almost losing the fruits of our 2003 victory over Iraq’s armed forces to insurgency 

and civil war as it spread across Mesopotamia, we finally adjusted our tactics and forged 

a campaign that salvaged the military situation. But it was a near-run thing. It took far too 

long for us to adopt proper COIN TTPs [counterinsurgency tactics, techniques, procedures] 

in Iraq. 

One of the reasons we were able to hold on despite a failing strategy and then turn the 

situation around was that our soldiers continued to be led by highly competent, professional 

junior officers and non‐commissioned officers whom they respected. And they gave us 

senior officers the breathing space that we needed, but probably didn’t deserve, to properly 

understand the fight we were in. 

We hope to do the same in Afghanistan. But it’s too soon to say whether we can or will 

succeed there. One thing we do know is that if we had had the same NCO corps that we had 

in Vietnam, it is likely that we would have been ejected from both Iraq and Afghanistan by 

now. And the Army would be at or past its breaking point, as it was in the ‘70s. 

It used to be common to tell a unit that despite repeated ass-kickings at the hands 

of the OPFOR [opposing forces] at the combat training centers, that they’re a learning 

organization. That wasn’t much of a morale boost for rotation units, but it captured the 

intent of the Army’s leader development philosophy. Failure was OK, as long as you 

learned from it.

Well, failure might be okay at a CTC [combat training center], but it’s not okay on the 

battlefield. The American people expect us to do more than just learn from our nation’s 

wars. They expect us to win them. And, by the way, they not only want us to just win, but 

they want us to do it fast, cheap, and clean. And their patience for our discovery learning 

process is very limited. 

So how do we do that? Well clearly, we need to be more agile and adaptive. And we 

need to understand complex problems better and design our solutions accordingly. We have 

to understand our environment and think critically to succeed, both today and in the future. 

And that’s the challenge for me and the team here at LD&E.

The Army leader development strategy that will take us through 2015 includes all four 

cohorts; officers, warrant officers, non‐commissioned officers, and civilians. As the Army 
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moves to fully implement the rotational readiness model we are trying to balance the three 

elements of learning; experience, training, and education, against the demands of persistent 

conflict. We started out with eight imperatives for the Army leader development strategy. 

The one on the bottom, the ninth, we just recently added. We really think it’s important that 

as we enter our tenth year of constant conflict, with no end in sight, that we focus on the 

profession. Because the Army is beginning to show some of the strains of the burden that 

we’re bearing.

As General [George] Casey said, we didn’t become a hollow force immediately after 

Vietnam. That comment was made actually nine years after we got out of Vietnam. But 

after nine years of combat, we have not reached the point where we want to say that we’re 

a hollow force. What we say is we’re an army out of balance. And one area where that 

imbalance has been felt most is in our professional military education system. It’s been 

a challenge just to get officers of all ranks and types into our schools, and then back out 

into the field where they’re needed. That challenge has become even more acute when we 

transformed into a brigade-centric modular army, because that put an even greater demand 

on the Army for our mid-grade officers, especially majors. 

And more than that, it’s been a challenge just to ensure that our PME [professional 

military education] schools provide the right type of education and training to our officers 

and NCOs so that when they return to the fight, they have the tools that they need to 

succeed. 

So what then must we teach our leaders? And how should we teach them to achieve 

maximum effect? Well, you can see some of the hows up above there. And what we’d like 

to say is that we don’t teach people what to think, but we teach them how to think, which 

brings us to the subject of critical thinking.

Army leaders have to possess both intellectual courage and humility. They have 

to know how to apply these with a disciplined approach to both identify and solve the 

problems that we confront. And obviously this is hardly a new concept, but it also tends to 

be under-appreciated as a military virtue. Tennyson’s poem about the charge of the light 

brigade immortalized a military mindset that I think is popular among many, which is, 

ours is not to question why, ours but to do and die. Too often, we remember this verse and 

not the lines that condemn the folly of that unquestioning obedience of the leaders of that 

charge. 

So we’re trying to each our officers to challenge assumptions, recognize biases, and to 

find the core questions to be answered. That’s the key of critical thinking. History is replete 

with examples of commanders who fought their plan rather than the enemy, generally to 

their own detriment. We can only speculate how many opportunities were lost or risks 

unappreciated by American commanders because they didn’t think critically. A recent 

example from our own history was our failure to recognize that growing insurgency in Iraq. 

We convinced ourselves that the enemy was defeated and we were only facing the ragtag 

remnants of a beaten army. And we persisted in that belief until we lost the initiative to 

the enemy. And then we had to fight hard to regain it four years after we first invaded Iraq. 
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Ours was to question why, not simply do and die. But we failed. We failed as leaders to 

do that effectively. It’s not enough to tell an officer that he has to think critically or to give 

him some sort of framework to think by. We have to give him the opportunity to try and 

fail, and try again before we ask him to do this on the battlefield where the stakes are too 

high to accept failure. And our digital leader development center at the college develops 

scenarios and puts officers in critical decision making positions throughout the course. Our 

classroom instruction has shifted away from lectures, rote memorization, and approved 

solutions, the old green sheets, to a more open discussion that’s really facilitated by an 

instructor, the format called the guide on the side, instead of the sage on the stage, also 

more properly known as learner-centric instruction.

One of the mental frameworks we’re trying to each is that of design. This concept has 

generated a lot of discussion and some think it’s a new idea. It’s also generated a lot of 

resistance out there. But this is not a new idea. Design, the ability to understand a situation, 

frame the problem, and develop a solution is not new. 

What’s new about that? It’s happened as long as commanders have led forces against 

an enemy, before Alexander the Great was even born. In the past, design occurred almost 

exclusively between a commander’s ears. But today, he needs help. And staff officers 

trained in design can help him do that. Design assumes a greater importance when we’re 

faced with complex situations. 

Complexity is the dominant characteristic of 21st century warfare. And to those who 

would argue that we’ve always faced complex situations, I’d say that’s true, but the degree 

of complexity is increasing. Throughout all of recorded history, we really only fought up 

until the past 150 years or so in just two demands, the land and the sea. About a hundred 

years ago, we added the air domain. About 50 years back, we added space. And about 15 

years or so ago, we added cyberspace. 

So if the British were to invade Boston today, Paul Revere would need a few more 

lanterns in the North Church steeple, you know, five if by cyberspace, something like that. 

But as an army, the domain of war that interests us the most is of course and always will 

be the land domain. Recently, we’ve drawn upon or been drawn into counterinsurgencies 

in alien lands, where we’ve come to appreciate the human terrain is at least as important as 

the physical terrain that we’re fighting on. And our dismissal of Arab tribes in Iraq created 

conditions for our near defeat. And it was only our hard-won understanding of those tribes 

that later provided the key to our success. 

Cultural and foreign language studies are assuming a greater importance in our military 

schools. And it’s not as though the US has no experience with tribes. You have to wonder 

if our Indian wars would have lasted as long or ended so cruelly for Native Americans, 

not to mention for the 7th Cavalry, had we systematically undertaken to understand the 

tribes along our frontier. It’s ironic that we discovered human terrain so far from home. As 

Dorothy of Kansas would say, it was in our backyard all along. 

Wars is a contest of wills. Our leaders need to be able to impose their will on the enemy 

before the American people lose their will to continue the struggle. The challenge is growing 

ever more present and we have largely unsympathetic and ill-informed media maintaining 
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an unblinking eye and non-stop commentary on everything that we’re doing. The enemy 

knows this and exploits this. Imagine if, in the Second World War, the Nazis were able to 

beam videos directly into our living rooms of Hansel and Gretel sitting among the ruins 

of their home with their dead parents lying next to them. What would that have done to 

the strategic bombing campaign in the Second World War? How would it have affected it? 

Would Eisenhower have survived the criticism of the Torch landings, the fratricide, you 

know, during the Sicily landings to go on to command the Normandy invasion? Would he 

have lasted past D+1 at Normandy, given all the casualties we encountered on the beach 

on the sixth of June? 

Media training for our leaders at Fort Leavenworth can help. But it really can only 

mitigate the effects of this media phenomenon. Unless our political masters are willing 

and able to create a national consensus and a sense of shared sacrifice in support of our 

conflicts, and they don’t seem inclined to do that, the key will be for our military leaders 

to be able to achieve swift and decisive victory, or to reduce the cost of any protracted 

struggle while achieving measurable progress. That’s our challenge and our dilemma. 

And here at the Lewis & Clark Center, that’s what we’re trying to achieve. Only critical 

thinkers will be able to make those competing and often contradictory goals achievable. 

And I thank you for all of your contributions to that effort. And thanks for attending this 

particular conference. 

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Day 3: Featured Speaker

Questions & Answers

(Transcript of Presentation)

Brigadire General Sean B. MacFarland

Moderated by Kendall D. Gott

Mr. Gott: 

We’ll open this up for discussion at this time. If you have a question for the General, 

please raise your hand and activate your microphone when called upon. 

Audience Member One: 

Following up on your comments on the media, yesterday, we kicked around the battle 

of Wanat and the aftermath of the investigation, and concern for whether or not that would 

intrinsically have an impeding effect on the initiative and confidence of our junior officers, 

and whether or not we would end up with, on the battlefield, a kind of a zero defects 

mentality and a failsafe mentality as an impairment to our performance. What do you think 

of that risk? And what do you think we can do to mitigate it?

BG MacFarland: 

Yes, sir. Well, that’s a huge risk, first of all. That’s what I think about the risk. What 

can we do to mitigate it? One of the things that we need to do is shift from a mindset of 

investigation to find fault to a study to learn lessons and improve. So the automatic 15-6 

investigations that are triggered any time we had an engagement in Iraq where, you know, 

an escalation force occurred, for instance, against a civilian vehicle, even if nobody was 

killed, you had to do a 15-6 investigation. We opened fire against a civilian vehicle, 15-6 

investigation.

Well, soldiers are inevitably going to conclude that we’re playing gotcha. And no matter 

how many times you try to tell them that you’re not, they’re going to see right through you. 

If we can get away from that and just say, “Listen, we’ll study interesting types of events 

on the battlefield and see what lessons we can glean from that, and then use that to prevent 

these types of things in the future without necessarily finding fault,” then I think you might 

start to get a little less risk aversion.

Right now, the CAC blog site has a question on it that anybody can log in and answer. 

Do you think we’re creating risk-averse leaders at the junior level where the rubber meets 

the road? And last time I checked it, granted at that point, it was pretty early, I think it was 

the first day, I think only 20 or 30 people responded, but the answer was overwhelmingly 

yes, we do think we’re creating risk aversion.

And I will tell you that at the operational level, it was one of my greatest frustrations 

to have a risk-averse higher headquarters not wanting to experiment and adapt. And that’s 

why it’s so important for us also to explain the concept of design and critical thinking, that 
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Featured Speaker

you can have a very risk-averse strategy that will take you straight down the path to defeat. 

And that risk is inherent in success. And through critical thinking, we can identify those 

opportunities to exploit. 

So we’re trying to combat that. But ultimately, we are where we are in terms of the 

media. And, you know, we can only, I think, affect that on the margins. They’re always 

going to be hyper-critical of us from their uninformed perspective. And we just need to 

understand that that’s the environment we’re in. So we better be on top of our game.

So the Wanat study in particular I think brings us a great tool that we can bring into the 

schoolhouse here, because it’s relatively recent. It resonates with our officers and NCOs. 

And there are tactical and operational questions there. There are ethical questions that 

we can talk about. It’s not in the report itself, but the report can be a springboard for us 

to sit around and say, OK, you got a company commander who gets a silver star, and 

then a 15-6 investigation comes along and slaps a general officer letter of reprimand on 

him in his permanent file. Later, somebody else comes along and says, “No, we’re not 

going to do that.” All right, so risk aversion versus accountability, you know, where’s the 

balance? Again, we don’t tell them what to think. We teach them how to think. And we 

bring these questions up so that our officers are attuned to that. And then when they become 

senior officers, they at least understand there is a cause and effect relationship between 

accountability and risk aversion, so. Long way of not answering your question probably, 

sir. 

Dr. Hamilton: 

We spent the last two or so days talking about different educational experiences in the 

military from the institutional side to the education of practical experience as when the 

Navy goes to sea. And that’s where you learn. You were arguably successful as a BCT, 

brigade combat team commander in making the shift from, say, kinetic operations, force 

protection and trying to shift the responsibility for protection to the Iraqis from that to the 

surge, which provided the conditions for the Iraqis to stand up better. What would you say 

in your educational experience really set you up to do that? Was it institutional? Was it 

practical experience? Was it both?

BG MacFarland: 

It was really none of the above. It was more of the broadening experiences that I had 

the opportunity to have outside of what you would normally get in the course of a career. 

First of all, I’m not your average, well, I don’t think there is such a thing as an average 

one-star. But I didn’t get here the way, on the same timeline most people get here by. I’m 

strictly due course. Never been a below the zone guy. 

I was picked up on my second look for battalion command, was not a first look battalion 

commander. When I got picked up for brigade command, they decided to inactivate the 

brigade I was going to. First, they decided, we’re not going to change command in theater. 

And then they inactivated the brigade. So I became an “unslighted principal”. “What are 

we going to do with MacFarland? Well, let’s make him the fifth corps G3. He’s got a year 

to kill,” and even though that’s supposed to be a former BCT commander job.
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Questions and Answers

So I had some, you know, and I had the opportunity to be an aide de camp for some 

guys like General Shinseki and General Meigs. And I worked for Tommy Franks. And, you 

know, for better, for worse, all these different experiences all kind of helped me think it a 

little bit above the brigade level. I was able to see things from a corps or theater perspective, 

even if my bosses couldn’t. I was used to thinking at that level, because I had all that extra 

time that the Army gave me by not promoting me early for anything.

So I’d say the broadening experiences were what helped me out a lot. The other thing 

is, I had no place to go but up. First of all, I had nothing to lose. I didn’t really think I was 

in the hunt to become a general officer, because I’d been so delayed along the way and all 

that stuff, letters of reprimand, you know, as a young officer and all that. 

But the other thing is, I had, you know, a problem set that was just so bad that I knew 

that continuing to do what we’d done in the past wouldn’t work. That had been tried and 

it failed. So I had to try something. So I tried everything. I just threw anything I could up 

against the wall. And whatever stuck, we went with that. We reinforced success. And, you 

know, we stumbled upon this sheik who was kind of a minor figure, but he seemed like a 

guy that we could work with. And we just kind of once we got, you know, our foot in the 

door, we, you know, put the whole stack in there behind that, the lead guy’s foot.

So that’s kind of how we, you know, found our way out of that situation. I mean, I was 

trying everything, you know? You read about the tribal engagement thing because that 

worked. You don’t read about some of the other harebrained schemes that I tried, because 

they didn’t work and we abandoned them, you know? I’m not a brilliant guy, you know? I 

just was desperate. Okay.

Anybody else? Okay. Well, thanks for coming and I’ll turn it back over to CSI. And 

hope you all get back to where you’re from safely. Stay out of the (inaudible) at Fort Bliss. 

You know, people, I just came from Fort Bliss, and people always say, “Oh, I don’t want to 

go to Fort Bliss. I’ve read about all the violence.” And I said, “Hey look, all the violence is 

in Juarez.” So El Paso’s actually, like, the second safest city in America, with the exception 

of the AFEES facilities on Fort Bliss which are probably one of the most violent places in 

America, so. Thank you. 

Mr. Gott: 

 Thank you again, sir. This concludes the formal program. I’d like to reintroduce Dr. 

William Glenn Robertson, director of the Combat Studies Institute for final remarks.

Dr. Robertson: 

When we try to put together a symposium every year, we have two touchstones. The 

first is a top of current relevance, something that a very practical profession can find useful. 

The second is a topic that has historical depth, something that we can look at over time. Our 

first keynote speaker two days ago, Brigadier General Brown, laid out pretty much exactly 

what we were trying to do in this symposium. Because as you may recall, he said the issues 

of leadership and how to cultivate leaders have a timeless quality about them. And that was 

absolutely true. 
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Featured Speaker

He also said that over time, there are variables within that problem set that do make 

different periods unique. So there are timeless issues from the early national period of 

the American military establishment, but there are variables that make some of them less 

relevant to us today, almost 200 years later. 

Over the course of these three days, we’ve explored some of those different time 

periods and some of those different variables. And there have been significant changes in 

national culture, in national capability, including the technological dimension, and in terms 

of the nature of the threat facing our country. So we’ve essentially looked at 200 years of 

Army history in terms of leader development at particular times and places in both peace 

and war. 

For me, variables by their very nature change things over time. But at bottom, when 

you strip away all the extraneous things and the jargon, it comes down to this simple 

question: what it takes to motivate people successfully, in its rawest form, what it takes to 

get people to advance at the peril of their lives in the face of killing fire to do the business 

the nation has need of them to do. 

Last March, I was privileged to be part of a staff ride for TRADOC senior leaders that 

looked at the Civil War campaign from Cold Harbor to the crossing of the James River in 

1864. At one of our stands, we stood at the line of departure of a Pennsylvania regiment at 

Cold Harbor, looking across the field about 250 yards deep towards a line of entrenchments. 

And as I painted the picture for these senior leaders, it came down to this. What was the 

task that had been assigned the lieutenant colonel who was in command of that regiment?

There had been some planning, not nearly enough, at the highest levels, and at the 

intermediate levels. And that’s leadership of a sort. But for this lieutenant colonel, it came 

down to what we have to do to move our regiment across 250 yards of open ground in the 

face of a determined enemy entrenched to the eyeballs. And they didn’t falter. They didn’t 

hesitate. They went forward. 

Now, as you well know, they didn’t succeed. But they gave it everything they had. The 

leadership was adequate to the task, though the result was not what the attackers would 

wish. That was 1864. The variables have changed. General MacFarland has just laid out 

where we are as we go forward into the next generation.

But I submit to you that the timeless part of leadership will carry forward into the next 

generation just as it has since the 19th century, and indeed before that, in the history of the 

US Army. We’ve tried to talk about a current, relevant issue and place it in historical context. 

We’ve had some really great speakers, some really great questions from the audience. We 

appreciate your coming. We look forward to having another symposium next year with a 

topic of current relevance, looking at through the historical lens.

So thank you all for coming. We look forward to seeing you next year. 
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Day 3, Panel 8: Foreign Perspectives

Making Australian Military Leaders: A Historical Reflection Based on the Changing 

Face of Wars and the Australians That are Selected to Fight Them 

by Lieutenant Colonel Craig Burn

(Transcript of Presentation)

Dr. Wright: 

You can see the full biographies in the program, but in the order that they will speak: 

Lieutenant Colonel Craig Burn has served in the Australian Army’s liaison to the Combined 

Arms Center since 2008. He is an Armor Officer who has taught at Fort Knox. Colonel 

Burn’s experience in deploying includes Rwanda and East Timor. Colonel Jean-Claude 

Brejot was commissioned in 1986 after graduating from Saint-Cyr. Since that date, he has 

held multiple positions and deployed on a number of contingency operations, including 

those in the Balkans, and a period serving as an advisor in Tunisia. And Colonel Graham 

Norton, who was commissioned in 1985 and began a long careers as a signals officer. 

During this career, he deployed to the Balkans and to Afghanistan. I should say all of these 

gentleman serve as the liaisons from their countries military to the Combined Arms Center 

here at Fort Leasvenworth. Let’s start with Colonel Craig Burns. Sir, the floor is yours.

Lt Col Burn: 

Thank you, Don. Well, in the interest of time, we are going to try and hold ourselves 

pretty rigidly to our allocated window. I’m going to read largely my notes so I can get 

through it in time and make sure that we have the opportunity to grill the Brit at the end. 

Thanks for the opportunity to speak as a member of this panel. Cultivating Army leaders 

from a historical perspective is no doubt a huge topic and I relish this opportunity to share 

but a few of my ideas. I’m not a historian, so my remarks will of course be based upon 

my experiences of over three decades in the Australian Army and through the reflections 

of what it means to lead Australian men and women. Please consider that my remarks are 

unable to be nested in the context of any Australian war of independence or civil war, as we 

have experienced neither. While I’ll dig a little into the Australian experience of war, I will 

more importantly reflect upon military leadership through the prism of national character.

The leadership style for the Australian Army, as for any army, must be back cast against 

the character of a nation’s people and the psyche associated with its sense of national 

security. In sharing my thoughts on the cultivation of leaders within the Australian Army, 

I’ll skim only the wave tops of my ideas. Some may be controversial, and while I will 

naturally take a dig at my British colleague on one or two points, I’ll avoid the well-beaten 

path of commenting on Australian operations under British command at Gallipoli. I will 

avoid it, but first dig. 

Leadership is inherently a human activity, so if anything defines a leader it must 

be one sense of human nature and its associated behaviors. Leadership is a contextual 

phenomenon. That particular time, place, or situation that a group or leader finds itself in 
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Panel 8

is a key determinant of who and how someone will lead. It’s a social dynamic that builds 

its foundation in a mix of human emotion and through life’s influence. We’ll have defined 

each of the individuals in the group well before the precepts of an institutional army has 

touched them. The ability to counter an innate response or to strengthen one’s resolve for 

many will not come from within one’s self. It will emerge in the face of leadership and may 

well be assisted in its manifestation through some form of conditioning. I’m not talking 

about a mob or herd mentality, but with the words or acts of one person to spur the actions 

of another. Consider the nature of enterprise-based armies focused on miserable efficiency, 

equity, and [costed] outcomes. I would observe that they are less about cultivating leaders 

and more about developing followers. In the military context, that person responsible 

for assuming the leadership role will normally be appointed based upon their measured 

performance and experience, and then empowered through a commensurate rank. Herein 

lies the potential that the appointed authority is not necessarily the best leader. What they 

will be is the one held accountable. This is when the innate leadership foundation becomes 

essential. Can I have the next slide, please?

We’ve heard a lot of discussion through the symposium linked to generals who have 

most likely had far too many books written about them when you consider the heroics of 

many that have died under their command, and for who little, by way of writings, have 

been put together to reflect their leadership achievements, other than within the statistics 

to illustrate a point about their commander. Followers have and will always outnumber 

leaders. Far too few books have focused on the leadership talents of those followers. The 

counterpoint that I see is that of senior leadership or managers shaping organizational 

loyalty and culture, and drill dynamics of discipline and obedience, to achieve common 

purpose versus an ability to influence and channel those innate human dynamics to achieve 

the common purpose or the task need. It stands to reason that through inherent traits that 

enable leaders that emerge from doctrinal manuals, rather they’re built through experience 

or reflection in the context of interacting with and learning about people. Yet modern 

armies based its measure of performance around institutional requirements. They shaped 

followers rather than cultivating the most effective leaders amongst their members. This is 

ingrained through annual assessment, that is such a determinant of career progression that 

they generate their own gravitational pull on assessment-driven behaviors. Seldom, if ever, 

are the leaders assessed by the led. In my observations, the most successful leaders are 

those that invest their efforts in developing emotional intelligence. That is, being a person 

enabled by self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation, or demonstrating empathy and 

an ability to nurture relationships through sincerity. This is, in my opinion, the absolute 

foundation of leadership. Those qualities can only be set very early in life, whether they are 

born out of adversity or a comprehensive and largely privileged upbringing. I acknowledge 

that these qualities alone will not make a leader successful in a military context, but I 

contend that if they are not evident in youth, they cannot be later trained by an ally or learnt 

by an adult. Precepts might be indoctrinated, but the foundation cannot be constructed after 

the individual has been assembled.

It is the human qualities that the Australian Army sets out to identify in any leadership 

candidate, as they form the foundation that can be built upon by the institution. But without, 

sure, we can still build leaders, but without the essential underpinning that warrant them 
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being trusted with the lives of soldiers. These are the traits that distinguish the difference 

between leaders of people and leaders of organizations. Leaders of organizations are, by and 

large, managers. While being a manager does not preclude emotional intelligence, success 

in management pursuits can be based largely on academic intelligence, organizational 

savvy, and cunning. It is in this context that I will focus the remainder of my remarks on 

those aspects of leading Australian soldiers.

Where does the Australian Army draw its leaders from? In cultivating leaders, the 

Army sets its baseline differently from many other armies. Our post-World War II army is 

looking for that almost innate emotional intelligence in selecting young men and women 

to fulfill leadership roles in the Australian Army. Almost at no point in this process are we 

looking for tertiary qualifications or academic pursuits. From commissioning, we look for 

high school graduates that display the hallmarks of emotional intelligence, tamed with 

integrity, and where they have been exposed to values which are common with those of 

the Army and human ethics. Most often I have found in people who have been active in 

team sports and positions of responsibility, such as school prefecture and captaincy, school 

cadets, and there are many other extracurricular pursuits. Academic achievement plays a 

role as far as literacy and (inaudible), and beyond that achieves little in terms of advanced 

standing. As a result, the officer corps of the Australian Army are largely cut from the same 

mold of cloth. Candidates cannot recover from a life of misadventure by commissioning 

in the army, because those inherent traits that have facilitated poor choices in their youth 

are discriminators when sizing up the ability for an army to develop a person as opposed 

to reconstructing them. 

But what of the folks they lead? Therein lies a much greater range of backgrounds 

against which those leaders can be challenged, and amongst from which junior leaders will 

naturally emerge. The Australian character was born out of adversity. Having been denied 

the use of North America as a penal colony, the British Empire, it was only a matter of 

time, went looking for options as to where it could place its ne’er-do-wells, and of course 

out of that circumstance Australia was colonized. But don’t be mistaken; many others had 

set foot on Australian soil before James Cook staked his Union Jack into Sydney Cove and 

declared it British territory. His arrival had been preceded by the Spanish, the Portuguese, 

the Dutch, and the French. Of course, up until that point, nobody had been crazy enough 

to try and colonize the driest continent on the earth, containing the most poisonous, biting 

creatures that are known across the world. Notwithstanding, when you throw the deprived 

into circumstances of adversity and challenge them to build hope out of very little, you’ll 

naturally see only the best of human spirit prevail. Can I have the next slide? 

On the backdrop of splendid isolation, add a cricket ball, a rugby ball, a swimsuit, 

a homebrew kit, and you’ve got the makings of a great place to live and for a nation to 

emerge and prosper. Add to that the free settlers that have been prepared to endure months 

of hell as they sailed in rotting hulks across the equator, around the Cape of Good Hope, 

across the Indian Ocean, and then risked thousands of miles of coastal shoals to come 

ashore on the east coast of Australia, and you have a pretty tough breeding stock from 

which to raise a colonial army. It was their experiences that set so much of the character 

of today’s Australian Army, and we work hard to reflect, 140 years on, that ethos. Those 
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colonies then sent expeditionary forces back to the Sudan, to South Africa, and of course 

after federation in 1901, we built a national army that would forge its sense of true identity 

on the shores of Gallipoli.

Who were those men and what characterized how they would attribute themselves so 

well in the face of probable death and hopeless defeat? Well, they were certainly not your 

most politically-correct bunch of young men. They were born out of adversity and they 

were growing up as young men through a sense of deprivation, owning only what was 

achieved through work and effort, and placing no value on privilege. Where the value of 

trust embodied all that truly counted in a person’s character. An environment where needs 

of the group were placed before the individual, and yet confident that the group would 

never ignore the individual. The Australian motto in World War II was “Fight, work, or 

perish.” If I can digress just for the brief example of perhaps some of what we see in 

terms of the Australian character, an anecdote was written in the instructions for American 

servicemen stationed in Australia in 1942. That’s a small, doctrinal, cultural awareness 

pamphlet that was produced at that time. Illustrates the flippant sense of humor that can 

often file Australians in the diplomatic states. It cites a situation in a Sydney bar where an 

American soldier turned to an Australian sitting next to him and said, “Well, Aussie, you 

can go home now. We’ve come over to save you.” And of course the Aussie’s response 

was, “Well, have you? And I thought you were just a refugee from Pearl Harbor.” Of 

course there was no disrespect intended, but that was just how Australians flippantly throw 

something aside, and of course then get themselves in a world of strife. There was probably 

a brawl that ensued. 

In any case, privilege through appointment is clearly rejected, and unless those 

privileges were earned. The sense of humor is irreverent. Identity comes from being a 

team player but certainly not an all-star. The [inaudible] syndrome, which remains central 

today in the Australian societal value system, was the mentality that ensured no one person 

got ahead of the pack without brining the team with them. Inherited traditions of officer 

selection, based on the rules of aristocracy and life’s opportunities, would then give way 

to selection of officers from the ranks that were proven in terms of leadership and greater 

abilities.

But unlike the societal forces of today, it was never about finding the weakest link 

and voting them off the island. It was about reinforcing the weakest link, if and when it 

was revealed. The combination of hard work, commitment to the team, a self-deprecating 

attitude, and implicit trust was undoubtedly the foundation of mateship, a trait amosngst 

Australian soldiers today that define who we are and how we operate. Our values are 

few yet all-encompassing: courage, initiative, and team work. There’s no doubt that the 

Australian Army struggles with all the compelling mechanisms that modern business 

practices bring to things like ensuring branding and reputation, and linking that to roots and 

successes in foregone generations. All those romantic notions. It’s equally challenged by 

the dynamics of the modern labor market. However, the success that we have enjoyed over 

the past 60 years is really from our approach to officer candidate selection and enshrining 

the philosophy that effective leaders can be developed but cannot be trained. Selection of 

the seed stock is critical to success, because junior leaders without that innate foundation 

and emotional intelligence will be mercilessly ignored. Thank you. 
239

Day 3, Panel 8: Foreign Perspectives

Finding the Balance Between Timeless Fundamentals and Temporal Adjustments 

by Colonel Jean-Claude Brejot

To answer the question, I will not develop a long description of the French Army 

Leadership evolution for several reasons:

I am not a historian and I am so much respectful of your erudition 

(scholarship) therefore I will not make the mistake of walking into your 

yard. I only have 20 minutes, which is also a good excuse to avoid an 

incriminating situation. My accent could betray the meaning of my 

supposedly deep demonstration, and most importantly, it is Thursday, the 

last day of the seminar and before lunch. 

Second, I will not use a lot of Power Point slides, not because I want to 

follow this new trend which consists of condemning the over use of slides 

but simply because...I am not able to draw a complex slide. For all these 

reasons, I will simply focus on some aspects of the question in order to 

illustrate what I’m considering as the main concern for an officer thinking 

about how to educate leaders which is:

Finding balance between timeless fundamentals and temporal adjustments. 

To find this balance, I need to go far back into the History of my country 

because the way we are educating our leaders is obviously linked to our 

style of Command which is itself deeply influenced by our culture . 

From the Feudal Army to the Royal Army

During the Middle Age, France had a simple political structure: the feudal system with 

the aristocracy which has the monopoly of legitimate violence and a king with a strong 

moral authority but little power. The French Army at the origin is an aristocratic Army and 

its values are those of the knighthood, which means honor, courage and momentum. This 

is the matrix of the French military culture, its style of command and then the influence on 

leadership.

This system worked quite well until what we named the Hundred Years War (1337-

1453) when we faced another system. In England, the King is strong and the aristocracy 

weak. We then faced an army of conscripts with Infantry (France will not have an Infantry 

system before the Revolution in 1789). Our Knighthood system was broken in Crecy 

(1346) and Agincourt (1415) battles against the English infantry. This break would allow 

the King of France to take control of his own Army.

Between the end of the Hundred Years War, the end of the Italian War (Marignan 

1515) and the victories against the King of England, a new French style is built with the 

association of the momentum of Cavalry, the strength of Artillery and the first use of 

Infantry. A new culture is appearing with the technical arms. The geometry spirit will soon 

be in competition with the momentum spirit. 
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With Louis the XIV, the aristocracy is still in charge of the Army but under the control of 

the King. Geometry and mathematics are now used during sieges and Cavalry and Infantry 

are given to the aristocracy. This warfare is becoming complex and would need officers 

educated to deal with this complexity. But the Aristocracy is opposed to this education. A 

leader in this time is a noble no matter is his ability to fight. 

The New System

The conjunction of a period of creative thinking (tactical thoughts by de Guibert and 

others about the Division as the organization we know today, the first tactical command 

posts, etc.), technical innovations (the Artillery with the Gribeauval system) and the French 

Revolution which opened the ranks of officers to every citizens is at the origin of the new 

system. 

Napoleon will rationalize the momentum created by the Revolution (I will not develop 

the impulse the Emperor provided by creating a modern Army with the success we all 

know). I will just mention that he pushed the art of war and battle very high. Leaders at 

this time needed to associate the momentum of the old knighthood and the geometry by 

knowledge. This period will last till 1815 and the end of the French Empire.

The Return of Rigidity

With the Restoration, which is the coming back of monarchy and the Second Empire, 

officers are recruited from the Middle Class which is imitating what aristocracy did 

in the Army before the Revolution. Strongly separated from NCOs and soldiers, these 

officers are themselves constituting 2 parts: the officers with momentum in Infantry and 

Cavalry and the officers of geometry in Artillery and Engineers. Each category has his own 

academy (Saint-Cyr and Polytechnique). Because of this situation, the style of warfare and 

the subsequent command is swaying between the crazy bravery similar to Solférino and 

Magenta (1859) with the Infantry in the role of the ancient Cavalry and the unadventurous 

rigidity causing the defeat in 1870 against the Prussians. In 1914, the excessiveness attack 

doctrine will return.

This was a result of a lack of diversity in the recruitment of the military elite during 

this time. In 1914, there were 90 officers attending the equivalent of our CGSC, Command 

and General Staff School. Among them, 80 were from the Infantry. These leaders were all 

thinking in the same way: excessiveness attack.

Between August and September 1914, the French Army is coming through the disaster 

at the border to the miracle of the first battle of Marne. General Joffre will replace 40% 

of the generals during these months. The crisis highlighted the weakness of the system 

but innovations and critical thinking restarted during WWI. Sometimes crisis will reveal 

weaknesses. General Petain found again a good balance between our opposite traditions by 

combining arms in a sophisticated way.

After WWI, because of the trauma and the complexity of the combined arms created 

by Petain, rationality and geometry is coming back again in the Army, like in the XVIII 

century. In 1940, the victory of the German army is the perfect illustration of a good balance 

between science and audacity.
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Brejot

In the Modern Era

In the crisis of 1940, a new Army is borne like during the first Empire and in 1918. 

Recruited from all our society and selected by merit, this new generation will fight until 

1962 which is the end of the Algerian war. During WWII, Armored Division and Airborne 

units will cultivate the tradition of audacity.

The Cold War can be seen like the coming back to “science” with the nuclear deterrence 

and the sterilization of tactical innovations until, for the French army, the 80s and the 

operations abroad.

To conclude this visit of the French History, I would say that the French Military 

style is a permanent arbitration between the heart which stimulates the courageous action 

(assault, the Last Stand Defense, the sacrifice) and the reason which supports the logical 

combination of arms and effects. When both cultural roots are working together, it is the 

time of success. But, being able to identify unbalanced organization inside his proper 

organization means the need to educate and prepare leaders to exercise critical-thinking. 

Having said that, taking into account seriously the impact of history and culture on 

leader’s education, I would like to conclude by two riddles. Let’s just have a look on these 

2 quotes.

The basics in leader’s education exist as we can see with these two examples. And it 

can be dangerous to forget them because of the appearance of some promising technology. 

“Man is the prime instrument of combat” colonel Ardant du Pick had written in his Etudes, 

before dying leading his regiment in 1870. But, the evolution of the world around the 

leader must be taken into account. We all know the influence of new technology in the 

conduct of war. But, war is primarily a human activity. 

Traditions are fundamental in the History of an Army and feed the core values of the 

leaders. They are undoubtedly critical in educating leaders. But they also can be a brake to 

change and innovation. 

Finally, I decided to gather in the same slide all these famous French leaders because 

they have something to share: they all are at the fringes of normal French Army society. 

Thanks to their character, their charisma, they were able to think out of the box and influence 

deeply my country. It’s what is at stake in leadership development, I think. We don’t want 

to create a “Brave New World” but leaders able to decide in the dark. So leadership is 

according to my modest experience a balance between timeless values and adjustments to 

the world in which we are leaving. And culture is the only way to understand and find this 

balance because as General de Gaulle said in Saint-Cyr when teaching History: “The true 

school of leadership is general knowledge.”

 

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Day 3, Panel 8: Foreign Perspectives

A British Perspective by Colonel Graham Norton

(Transcript of Presentation)

One of the great advantages of going last, of course, is that I can put up my picture of 

a British square at Waterloo. It has absolutely no relevance to what I want to say, but I’m 

going to put it up. It is, as you might consider, a very British trait. You’ve only witnessed 

the very Australian trait, which is to get their retaliation in first. And it is quite true to 

say that the British did look at a place to put all our ne’er-do-wells and we put them in 

Australia. One fundamental error, we realized, was you could get out there. 

I have to say I was honored yesterday to listen to General Sullivan. Indeed one of 

the great things about serving here at Leavenworth is the regular chance to listen to the 

great and the good as they come through. I noted that General Sullivan said that he’d been 

thinking about what he might say yesterday for some time, and I have been doing the same. 

I’ve been contemplating what I might say here for a number of weeks. You therefore might 

want to consider why I was still putting these notes together at 11:30 last night. I would 

offer two explanations to you. The first is that it could be my intent to sort of draw on some 

of the thoughts from other presentations, use them to help compare and contrast, thinking 

in both in the past and the present, on leadership from our two nations. Thus I could only 

be putting it together last night. The less generous of you might wish to take the view that 

have been taken by a number of my writing offices in the past. It’s that I get by on sort of 

an adroit combination of laziness, panic, and bluff and not a set of qualities that either of 

our armies would necessarily put in the top 10, I suggest. I hope you accept the former as 

an explanation rather than the latter. 

That said, I’m going to take a bit of a leap here, because both of my colleagues have 

said they’re not historians, and neither am I, but I’m going to try. I recall the history of UK 

observers in the United States. It’s not necessarily a good one. Many of you may recognize 

Arthur Fremantle, who was an observer with Longstreet’s corps at Gettysburg. It’s perhaps, 

all in all, remarkable that after witnessing Pickett’s Charge and everything that went on 

that day, he returned home to England to write a book, and his underpinning premise was 

the certainty of Confederate victory. So with that somewhat poor record in mind, I thought 

I might invite you to accept a few thoughts by way of comparison between the UK and 

the United States with regard to leadership. Actually, I would suggest this is something of 

a three-way comparison: my personal experience, the thinking in the UK today, and my 

observations and experience in my time here with the US Army. As such, this is about 

perspectives. You may well disagree with some of my comments. They may be wrong. 

But it is the perspective and prism through which I’ve been looking at things. You’ll notice 

in some areas we’re challenged in the same way. In others, we differ or have differing 

solutions. Next slide, please.

I’m going to use this slide as a sort of pan rail to cover some of the similarities of issues 

that the UK is dealing with. Therefore I offer six points for potential discussion. The first 
Panel 8

244

bullet on leadership doctrine, historical study. Despite its history, the UK doesn’t actually 

have huge volumes of doctrine on leadership. Lots of books, lots of pamphlets, lots of 

historical memoirs, but nothing that we could necessarily equate to your field manual. 

I’d argue that we haven’t done particularly badly without it. But in contrast in my career, 

we’ve suffered particularly in the recent past, I would suggest, through a poor attitude 

towards historical study. My generation in particular, based primarily, I might as well start 

with my career in Germany against a known, we thought, threat, have shamefully, in some 

cases, failed to study. We heard on Monday that Frederick the Great’s recognition that 

energetic and stupid were particularly good qualities for an infantry officer, it doesn’t mean 

they’re compulsory. And I have to say, I have served alongside officers whose deliberate 

not understanding, particularly of technical information, was almost a badge of honor. As 

an officer in Germany, if you’re found to be reading doctrine in the officer’s mess, you 

would be leaving through a window. Now, that is not the case today. I often look with 

considerable admiration at our young armies and the young officers in our armies, their 

professional dedication. But I have to say, I would judge the US Army as probably slightly 

ahead of my own on this. But I also submit to you, there is a limit. You can actually overdo 

the doctrine, and the on-the-job training that we heard about this morning has equal value.

My next point is intuition or training, and I make this point with a degree of trepidation, 

particularly with this audience. I know what I’m about to describe is black and white. 

The answer is probably a shade of gray. But I do so to provoke debate. Bottom line, the 

question, can you train someone to be a good leader or does there have to be some innate, 

intuitive, natural ability? I ask this question in light of the fact that even today there is still 

no requirement to have a bachelor’s degree to be an officer in the British Army. Most do, 

but it’s not required. One could argue, I believe, that the US Army approaches that you 

can train somebody to be a leader as long as they have sufficient intelligence. The UK 

view is that although we have minimum educational standards, some leaders are born and 

not made. Inevitably, the answer is going to be somewhere in the middle. But I make this 

point only to emphasize that I have, on occasion, paused to wonder whether the US Army, 

particularly in its officers corps, and its focus on educational qualifications has not denied 

itself some very, very effective potential junior leaders. 

My next point really runs on from that, and that’s what I like to term leadership to, 

from, or in, or by, the ranks. We have, in the United Kingdom, something called the late 

entry officer, the LE officer. This is an officer who has served some 22 years in the ranks 

and risen to a Regimental Sergeant Major’s appointment. And at that 22-year point, he’s 

probably about 40 years old. We commission him. We commission him as a captain, as a 

major. And he is commissioned to do specific jobs. He’s not going to command battalions, 

but he is going to sit in the staff of battalions and do specific jobs for which he has spent 

his entire career. I draw this example only by the fact that I have witnessed and watched 

young, and I’ll use the example of an S4 in a battalion in a very complex environment, 

trying to deal with a lot of problems which his commanding officers ask him to do, and 

he’s going to be senior lieutenant or a captain. He’s going to be mid-20s, maybe 30. In my 

army, you’re going to have a 44-year-old major who’s been serving the army for 22 years 

doing that sort of job. The “so what?” here, of course, is exactly the same as the first one. 
Norton

245

We have this separate route, unique but separate, to allow us to pick up that talent later in 

life and bring them through. 

Next, three areas of current work in the UK. The first is that of values-based leadership. I 

was very interested the day before yesterday, when General Brown mentioned underpinning 

values of leadership. And a card, I think, said, well, that’s mine, which I’ve carried around 

for about 20 years. Given to me, and this is given to every British soldier as he goes into 

his basic training. I just got a copy. However, our work at the moment is driven by the 

requirement. And the difficult balance we have, and I think it is something that occurs 

through time, through history, on a regular basis, of representing a nation but at the same 

time being seen as a beacon, being seen as something different. We’re doing a lot of work 

now in our values-based leadership to attract people and what we call the gatekeepers, the 

parents of the young 16 and 17-year-old who might want to join the army, to show that we 

are retaining a traditional value, but at the same time balancing that with a modern society. 

We’re also still facing huge challenges on operations versus in-barracks leadership. 

I noted the recent report, which was the health prevention report, as it happened, and 

the chapter it had in it on the US Army about decline and loss and failure of in-barracks 

leadership. We’ve got a generation of young officers who have spent many, many, many 

hours, days, and years taking the fight to the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan, but haven’t 

sat and managed the day-to-day problems you get with soldiers in barracks, and we are 

concerned that we need to revitalize that and re-understand that as tempo draws down. 

Finally, this question of the balance between learning and experience. I have to say, I’ve 

enjoyed the last few days. I haven’t been here for all of it. I’ve been somewhat disappointed 

in the lack of (inaudible). Just in this last half an hour. I used Jim as an example here. And 

don’t think me anti-educational. I think the whole thing is about getting the balance. And 

as ever as a Brit, I’m going to finish right now with a quote from Churchill, because it 

wouldn’t be right if I didn’t. Churchill, when talking about public speaking, he said, “Say 

what you have to say, and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending, 

sit down.” So I shall sit down. Thank you.

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Panel 8: Foreign Perspectives

Questions and Answers

(Transcript of Presentation)

Lieutenant Colonel Craig Burn

Colonel Jean-Claude Brejot

Colonel Graham Norton 

Moderated by Dr. Donald Wright

Dr. Wright: 

Well, shall we let the Yanks play in this? I’ll go ahead and turn the floor over to Jim. 

Jim: 

I was particularly interested in your comment about recognizing the echelon of 

operations versus in-barracks leadership. A couple of years ago I was visiting the US Army 

NCO Academy in Europe, and one of the things, actually, they were complaining about 

was that soldiers were getting promoted to NCO so fast. There were combat veterans they 

were cutting back and they knew everything about everything except how to take care 

of their soldiers in a noncombat environment. Yesterday I mentioned the fact that one of 

the challenges is as you go from an army at war to an army not at war, people miss the 

adrenaline, the freedom, the independence, and they have trouble adjusting. I’m interested, 

from all your perspectives, how do you see your armies coping with that challenge?

Col Norton: 

 I think it’s a common issue that all our armies are going to come across. We (inaudible) 

a particular challenge. At the same time, relatively large garrisons in Germany are drawing 

down very much in the UK as well. We’re moving from what could be regarded as a 

seven-day-a-week mentality, both in Germany and operations, to what is more of a fiveday-a-week when you’re back in your home station. The challenge as I see it as that this is 

where history could help. I think there’s a book called Crisis in Command, which is very 

much a commentary on the post-Vietnam problems the US Army had. People are reading 

that to think through, what are we going to do when the pressure is off a little bit? How do 

we deal? I don’t come forward with any great answers, other than the fact that I think it’s 

encouraging that both our armies are acknowledging it now. Perhaps we have a chance to 

deal with it when it comes to be. I remember Wednesday afternoons in every (inaudible) 

ever written. It was always a sports afternoon. That’s what you used to do. If you worked 

hard, you got to go home early on a Friday. I speak to young officers and young soldiers 

now who have been here six or seven years and they don’t recognize that. Therefore it’s 
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re-inculcating that balance and that in-barracks bit, which is not—let’s be frank—it’s not 

sexy to count up that you’ve still got all your kit. It’s not sexy to count up you’ve still got 

all your soldiers. That’s the problem. How do you deal with Corporal so-and-so comes and 

knocks on your door on Monday morning after beating up his wife. These are the sort of 

challenges I think we need to see and have to deal with. We’ve got to look back on how 

we’ve dealt with that in the past. The biggest way we can do it is to aim off of it in the first 

place and understand where it’s coming from.

Col Brejet: 

I would like to insist on the notion of time. The French Army is involved in operation, 

as I mentioned before, since the ‘80s, in several theaters of operation between Africa and 

Lebanon and so on. When I was commanding my regiment a few years ago, four years ago, 

I was fighting against time, because this repetition of operation, I mean, more than to be 

able to deal with leadership when in barracks or when in operation. It’s really a matter of 

time, because, to take the example of the French Army in the ‘80s, we had a professional 

part of the army and an unlisted one. The professional part was always deployed in Africa, 

mainly, and was fighting with the same problem of time. Today we are running after time, 

after time, after time, to prepare to face multitasking and for the French Army, at least, 

reduction of the number of soldiers we have in the French Army. We need to be able to save 

time and to work with priorities, because more than to deal with specific. I think leadership 

is the same. When a young NCO or a young officer is welleducated, he will be able to lead 

soldiers in garrison or in combat, depending on the experience, the environment, and so 

on. We all know that. But the key point for me with this experience to command a regiment 

is to put priorities and to save time and not to give to these young NCOs and officers too 

many things to do without any priority. And dealing with soldiers in garrison, if it’s decided 

as a priority by the commanding Colonel, General, and so on, we must save time to give 

them time to lead soldiers. And time is crucial, as Napoleon said before, a long time ago. 

Lt Col Burn:

 For a brief Australian opinion, we come from a slightly different place. The army has 

grown up not as part of an empire or part of a nation that wants to be an empire. We’ve not 

been offensive. We’re about working for living, not living for working. My view is that if a 

leader is only any good in operations and he’s not able to lead his soldiers in garrison, then 

he’s inadequate and he should be like the Navy. Walk down the plank. If the true challenge 

and the difficulties leading soldiers in garrison, and you have got them spun up so much 

for their posture in operations and you can’t wean them off that and give them motivation 

and aspiration and something to aim for in garrison, then find yourself someone who can. 

Because you don’t have a balanced leader. In fact, you don’t have a leader. And I think, in 

my experience in command, I’m an armor officer, so I’ve lived through the world of alphamale community peers and I’ve seen the way men typically take it so badly when they get 

a support score on command and not an operational score on command. The bottom line 

is command is command. It’s about people. So it’s got to transcend both environments. 

Therein lies the challenge. Frankly, from what I’ve seen, it’s those people that work in 

ego-based warrior domains who are faced with greater challenges and often as leaders can 

transcend a number of environments and are, in fact, as pure leaders, stronger and better. 
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Questions & Answers

They have weaknesses and there are jobs they can’t do. But if it’s leadership you need 

to get soldiers for garrison living, and for Australia, post-Vietnam peace broke out, we 

didn’t do anything until Somalia. We went through that phase where the best were in the 

schoolhouse, teaching and training. Because no one wanted to stand around the garrison 

painting rocks. Therein lies the challenge. I just think it’s nice to make these things a 

problem that they shouldn’t be. In fact, bringing soldiers out of theater and dealing with 

discipline. I’m reading the article that was referred to in the Kansas City Star during the 

week. The drugs, the bizarre things that are going on in the barrack blocks. Let me tell 

you, we have our own scandals and atrocities in Australia. Those things generally reflect 

a command climate. So you’ve got to find the commander and find out why he doesn’t 

change the climate and where are his leadership skills.

Dr. Wright:

Other questions? Ben.

Ben: 

I was intrigued by the comment about a leader should be a leader, both in operations 

and in garrison. However, if you take somebody that’s been leading in combat operations 

and then you return them without any additional training or orientation to a garrison 

headquarters or support headquarters where it’s strictly a peacetime operation, there’s a 

bit of a culture shock there. I’m just throwing this out. Don’t you think that there should 

be some sort of reorientation for leaders that have been, say, in the combat zone for a year 

or something like that? And when they come back and you give them a new assignment, 

say, “Hey, we really want to orient you with the new problems that are coming up with the 

barracks and some of the new soldiers,” rather than just throw them overboard because 

of this inability to adjust immediately to a different environment. Don’t you think there 

should be some kind of transition?

Lt Col Burn:

I do agree. Personal experience. I flew out of Rwanda. The streets were littered with 

bodies. The massacre of the mid-’90s. Seven months in command in that environment. 

I flew direct from Africa, touched down in Townsville, with a plane ticket to my home 

location. Lost command of my company on the air field. I was given a taxi voucher. When 

I got off the plane in Melbourne I went looking for a taxi that was prepared to take me 

the hour and a half drive to the garrison. Couldn’t find one. So I’ve got all my battle rattle 

there. And all of the sudden you’re left swinging. But I’d spent 20 years preparing myself 

to command operations at that point. It’s also, as a professional, upon my shoulders to 

be preparing myself for transitions. It didn’t make it easy and it certainly was something 

that I agree with you. There was no decompression time and there was no acceptance in 

the new environment I then went on to serve in back in Australia of where I’d been and 

where I’d come from. You were expected to conform to that garrison life. Tough challenge. 

A lot learned out of it. I don’t know. Systemically, it’s a hard thing to solve. I think the 

mettle of the leader is about also working hard within yourself to be able to solve that 

problem. I think the analogies we saw this morning of naval command, whereby one 

minute you’re a ship at war, the next minute you’re running a cocktail party on the poop 
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Panel 8

deck in some diplomatic activity. I mean, the transition and the contrast, and in some ways 

the ambiguities of what you’re doing in your command job and the complex operations the 

guys are engaged in today in Afghanistan and have been in Iraq, still in Iraq. One minute, 

the three blocks. They’ve got to transition. Call it adaptation. It’s the new buzz phrase. But 

that’s just a transition of frame of mind, expectation, and what depths of your profession 

and your education and your experience you can draw upon. I don’t think there’s a systemic 

solution to any of that. I think it’s very much an individual thing when you’re the leader 

and the commander. 

Col Brejet:

I have two comments regarding your question. First of all, I totally agree with you. The 

transition must be prepared precisely when the combat zone or the environment is very 

hard for leaders and soldiers. For instance, when our units are coming back from a garrison 

to France after they’re (inaudible), they are spending almost 10 days in an island in the 

Mediterranean Sea in Cyprus, in order, precisely, to prepare the transition before going 

back to the garrison. But that’s the first part of my question. I think the key point, we have 

to find it in the chain of command. When I say chain of command, in the French Army, 

the key part of our leadership organization is this chain of command between the Chief of 

Staff of the Army and all his colonels commanding regiments. Inside the regiments, the 

link between the colonel commanding and the captain in charge. This is the main chain 

of command. All around, this chain of command exists, of course, but they can’t interfere 

in this chain of command. And why I’m mentioning that—it’s because when the chain 

of command is strong inside a regiment, inside a company, we are ready to operate this 

transition better than if the chain of command is not functioning very well. The more the 

chain of command is deep and strong, the better the transition to a war zone to a garrison. 

We are coming back to leadership. To be ready to exert this command, as Craig mentioned 

just before, it’s life work to prepare leaders as a young lieutenant or captain. For me, yes, 

we have to try to help this transition. But even with this organization, we never replace a 

good chain of command with commanding directed to our soldiers, NCOs, officers, all this 

chain of command which is part of the efficiency.

Col Norton: 

 I would just make the point that I think you’re looking at a generation here that, 

broadly, operational deployments was the exception. Inbarracks was probably (inaudible). 

Anybody who’s joined any of our armies in the last nine years, it will be the other way 

around. I think the important thing, as I said earlier, is a recognition that there are potential 

issues for people to resolve is the encouraging thing. Your army has done it, my army has 

done it. I tend to agree with Craig. A good leader is a good leader. It doesn’t make any 

great deal of difference. But the important thing was that it has been recognized so that 

something can be done about it. But we are sometimes just going to be you’ve got people 

out there who haven’t done inbarracks routine. The norm for that is not the norm for us.

Dr. Wright: 

We have time for several more questions. Yeah, Wayne.

Dr. Hsieh:
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Questions & Answers

There are various moments in American military history, the American military 

has attempted to learn from all their military. I think recently, if you look at American 

counterinsurgency doctrine, there’s been a lot of talk about David Galula or David Kilcullen 

or Lawrence of Arabia. And I wanted to get your perspective of how well Americans 

have learned from your respective military traditions, especially because there’s always a 

potential for misinterpretation. I’m an academic. When I was in graduate school, everyone 

was obsessed with Michel Foucault. This French thinker would come and would sort of 

laugh at the Americans and say, “Well, in France this is so passé.” I’m just sort of curious 

what your perspective is when we as Americans try to adapt your ideas. Do we get it? Or 

do we sort of half get it or do we miss a lot of the context?

Col Norton: 

I’ll use a very contemporary example. This is something that my Chief of the Army 

has said in this building. You are very good, and have been over the last few years. Very, 

very good at spotting and bringing forward. Certainly on the doctrinal side. I will give you 

COIN as an example. The UK fell into the trap and the Americans, US, played to that. The 

Brits had been doing counterinsurgency for years and years and years. They know what 

they’re doing. They did Malaya, so they know what they’re doing. We got ourselves in a 

position where we were believing our own publicity. What you were able to do was take 

it and overtake it. FM 3-24 was undoubtedly ahead of what we had. In that respect, very, 

very good indeed, in terms of identifying and pulling the good. The difficulties, of course, 

is what you judged, it’s all circumstance-based and it’s all nationally-based. So sometimes 

you need a panel like this to suggest that the emperor’s got no clothes in certain areas, 

because we all get into our own national group thinking. But I have been particularly 

impressed at the ability to identify and move quickly to do things. FM 3-24 is as good an 

example I can possibly think of, of picking up some good stuff that we had got, learning 

from what we did, and overtaking it.

Col Brejet: 

I totally agree with Graham. You are much better than the French Army to learn 

the lessons of the past. I can tell you that without any problem. I have a great example 

with David Galula, for instance. Because we didn’t know this author before you, it was 

mentioned by George Petraeus and FM 3-24 and so on. We rediscovered our own history, 

thanks to what you did here. I think you are very good teaching and studying history, much 

better than my own country is doing, to be honest. Maybe because the fame of France is 

sometimes to be arrogant, so maybe we don’t need to study history, and it’s a mistake. And 

to be honest, in my career I learned history by myself. We are in this generation where 

maybe in your country, the same, Graham, we didn’t have formal or academic courses in 

history in my career. I did that by myself, because we are all considering without learning 

history, we are a bad leader. But I think you are doing very well regarding that. 

Lt Col Burn:

Learning from history for Australia is a difficult thing. We don’t have much of a 

history. Pretty new country. I’ve worked in the ABCI program now extensively for the last 

five years. We were constantly working on interoperability issues between five armies. The 
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Panel 8

thing that fascinates me is that we all, unashamedly, within the ABCI community, plagiarize 

each other’s doctrine. It’s amazing in concepts and a whole range of other things. So on 

one hand you’re trying to work interoperability at a procedural level. But also doctrine 

is just a whole bunch of jigsaw pieces and we reassemble them, depending on what the 

political spin is of the day. I’m often fascinated, though, when we hand things to the US, 

that ultimately when it’s put through the US machine, there can be no attribution to any 

other nation other than itself. Whereas in Australia it’s a badge of honor to say, “We’ve 

studied the US approach and we believe there’s something in this and we will adopt this,” 

and sometimes word-for-word, procedure-for-procedure. Other times, we clearly have to 

put a few more ays and mates and things in it. So I don’t understand it. Plus I’ll also note 

that, and it’s occasional observation, but I think if we watch FM 3-24 going through, it’s 

flips and throws, again. I don’t understand why doctrine, which is supposed to be more 

of an enduring writing, needs to be held on to like a rattle shift. Whenever we want to 

induce a cultural change, and I’m speaking also of my own army, whenever we want to 

generate an immediate cultural change, somehow to get it through the government circles 

and the metrics that tilt politicians that generals are doing their job, that somehow we 

have to throw another copy of a doctrinal manual somewhere on a congressman’s table in 

order to legitimize the fact that we’re taking some action to change something. When in 

actual fact, that 80% solution that sits in your doctrine, and in your educational, if it’s to 

make sure that people can contextualize that with what today’s need is, is perhaps a more 

efficient approach. But the political nature of Western modern armies is change takes us 

in a different path. I’m not sure how the navy does it. I think my navy is pretty much the 

same. But in the army, and for the sake of two lines in one paragraph, in one chapter, and 

four paragraphs in another, we’ll turn the pressures again and take it through a very intense 

staff process. In terms of how we share those ideas, I think within many of the armies, we 

share them more often than any of us even realize. But in terms of attribution, we’ll quote a 

British general and then call him the Australian governor general rather than telling people 

he was a British general. We’ll steal ideas and thoughts and then try, so we’re all doing the 

same. But we certainly do, I think, swap ideas. Guys like Dave Kilcullen come to the top. 

We had a similar fellow doing similar work with the US State Department during Vietnam 

and in Burma before that, and through Vietnam. And those people crop up. People with 

great ideas that resonate in the time. It’s not about sharing ideas. They are in some ways 

savants in their own little world and are of value to people. 

Dr. Wright: 

We have time for one more question.

Audience Member 1:

In a couple of our exchanges earlier, we’ve kind of belabored the issue of when officers 

should go back to school, and whether or not it was training that was sufficiently in advance 

of their utilization or whether it was training just in time. In our own experience, or in 

my experience, went to the basic course just coming in, went to the advance course just 

making captain, went to Leavenworth just a little bit after making major, and then the war 

college after making colonel. So you had this spread of schools, each of which seemed to 
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Questions & Answers

be comfortably in advance of utilizing the skill that you had, or at least I thought it would. 

Within your armies, when do your guys go to school and why?

Col Brejet: 

In the French Army, we have about the same system. Lieutenants in the academy, 

captains to prepare for a company command. We have just a difference. It’s when we, as 

major or young lieutenant colonel, we are coming to the equivalent of CGSC. In France, 

we have a two-year education. The first year is for each army, and mainly for the army, 

because navy and air force aren’t doing that. So we have one year CGSC just dedicated 

to the army for tactical and first approach of strategy. And we have a second year, which 

is totally joined with all of our services. So the only difference compared with the system 

developed in the army. And we also have an equivalent of war college, but with some few 

colonels attending this course. So basically except this joint college in Paris, the main 

difference with the army system. Why are we developing that? I think in the same way 

you are doing it. It’s to prepare for next command time, depending on the potential of 

each officer to follow this course in order to command and command in command. Am I 

answering your question, sir?

Audience Member 1:

Yeah, thank you.

Lt Col Burn:

 We, likewise, have a very refined system and a continuum of educative development. 

I highlighted that we select our candidates in spite of education. We look for leadership 

traits and we take them from their (inaudible). Some of those officer candidates, having 

been selected, are then immediately thrown into university study before they commission. 

Others are thrown into military training, commissioned, and then it’s up to them, really, 

through their career to back cast and regain their tertiary studies if they wish. But we have 

two continuums. We have an allbranch, or what we call allcorps continuum, and we have 

a branch-specific continuum. They run in parallel as you pass through gates in time and 

rank, are fairly comprehensive, and continuously under review. But your touch points are 

basic levels of training. When we do our commissioning training, everyone graduates as an 

infantry platoon commander. List special weapons top qualifications, but that is the level 

male/female, infantry platoon commander basic. Then when you leave that commissioning 

school and you go off to do your branch qualification, the infantry guys just do special 

weapons, but there’s not a great deal more for them to do. From that point forward, again 

there’s a captain-level course which prepares you for sub-unit command or company-grade 

command, which for us is done as a major. So by the time you command that company, 

you’ve got a few more years of experience under your belt and you command as a major. 

Again, similar parallels through staff college, preparing you for unit command. War college 

is a final level. So very much the same. What we don’t do that I think the US system does so 

well, is really put the badge of respect and recognition on tertiary education and facilitate 

people to get back in and study. We tend to throw that then back to the individual and 

say, “Yeah, you can do it and we’ll help fund you in your own time.” But there’s no real 

opportunity to get out of your cut and thrust of “up or out” in the career-based system and 
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Panel 8

take two years out to study. If you do that, you’re left behind. When you come back in, your 

peer group is so far ahead of you in terms of the perceived experience and progression. In 

that aspect, we are very weak in terms of postgraduate studies.

Col Norton: 

Our model, again, is virtually the same. Focused on the levels of command. Everything 

passed out of Sanders, passed out at the same standard. You do some special arms stuff. 

Your next major benchmark is your (inaudible) equipment. UK’s ICSC corps comes here for 

two weeks and does a joint course with Ireland. Thereafter, it’s training for unit command, 

and then potentially brigade command as well. I would reemphasize what Craig has said. 

Despite my comments earlier on about the level of education you need to get in, we don’t 

necessarily put as much value on self-betterment and education in the civilian environment 

to the same extent as the United States Army does. I will point just one thing. There is an 

officer on the current CGSC course who’s about to write a monogram on exactly this issue 

of comparison of junior officer to mid-officer training across the two armies, which might 

be of interest if and when he finishes it.

Lt Col Burn: 

Your last part there about civilian education. When we do our staff college, if you do, 

like here, the extra couple of units, you can be accredited a master’s-level qualification. 

That sits there and that’s valuable to those who elect to do the extra bit of work. That was 

my first master’s. My second I did on my own time at night school, like a lot of people 

do, and did my master’s in international law, quite separately. The army will recognize it 

in terms of putting it on your dossier, but in terms of them thinking about that, in terms of 

your employment or how that may be an asset to them, it’s completely lost on them. They 

couldn’t care less.

Dr. Wright: 

We are out of time. Join me in thanking our panelists for this. 
255

Appendix A Conference Program

Day 1

Tuesday, 21 September 2010

0730-0800 Registration

0800-0815 Administrative and Opening Remarks

Keynote Address

0815-0945 Keynote Presentation

 BG(R) John S. Brown: 

 Cultivating Army Leadership: An Historical 

 Overview

0945-1000 Break

Panel 1

1000-1130 Antebellum Officer Education, 1800-1865

 Looking Beyond West Point: Life in the Old Army 

 as Education for War. Dr. Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh

 The Development of Successful Non-professional 

Officers in the Army of the Tennessee, 1861-

1863. Dr. Steven E. Woodworth

 Moderator: Dr. Donald P. Wright

1130-1300 Lunch
256

Appendix A

Panel 2

1300-1430 Emergence of a Modern Officer Corps, 1866-1905

 The 1891 Infantry Tactics. Dr. Perry D. Jamieson

 

 Dr. Todd Brereton

 Moderator: Dr. Curtis King

1430-1445 Break

Panel 3

1445-1615 Changing Leadership for a Changing World Role, 

 1906-1939

 The Leavenworth Schools, Professional Military

Education, and Reform in the Old Army, 1900 to 1917. 

 Dr. Tim Nenniger

 So Rigorously Trained and Educated: Leader

Development in the US Army, 1919 to 1939. 

 Dr. Peter Schifferle

 Moderator: Dr. Rick Herrera

1615-1630 Administrative Announcements
257

Conference Program

Day 2

Wednesday, 22 September 2010

0730-0830 Registration

0830-0845 Administrative Announcements

0845-1000 Featured Speaker 

 GEN(R) Gordon Sullivan: History Strengthens

1000-1015 Break

Panel 4

1015-1145 Conventional and Unconventional Challenges of

 the Cold War, 1945-1975

 Soldiering as an Affair of the Heart. Dr. Lewis 

 Sorley

 Leadership: DePuy, Slim, and You. Dr. Henry Gole

 Moderator: Mr. Robert Ramsey

1145-1300 Lunch

Panel 5

1300-1430 Rebirth of the US Army, 1976-2001

 Thoughts in Spring on Professional Identity.

 Dr. Richard Swain

 Dr. James Carafano

 Moderator: MAJ(P) Clay Mountcastle

1430-1445 Break 
258

Appendix A

Panel 6

1445- 1545 Educating Leaders for a New Era, 2002 to Present

 Mission Command: An Old Idea for the 21st

 Century. COL(R) Greg Fontenot

A New “Meloy Report” Educating Officers for the

21st Century. Dr. Kevin Benson

 Moderator: Mr. John McGrath

1545-1600 Administrative Announcements
259

Conference Program

Day 3

Thursday, 23 September 2010

0730-0830 Registration

0830-0845 Administrative Announcements

Panel 7

0845-1000 Sister Services Perspectives

 Dr. Gene Andersen

 There Was More to It than Doctrine? Reflections on

the Preparations in the 1930s of the Marine Corps

 for Future War. Dr. Donald Bittner

 Moderator: Mr. Kelvin Crow

1000-1015 Break

Panel 8

1015-1130 Foreign Perspectives

Making Australian Military Leaders; A Historical

Reflection Based on the Changing Face of Wars

 and the Australians That are Selected to Fight Them.

 Lt.Col Craig Burn

 Finding the Balance Between Timeless

 Fundamentals and

 Temporal Adjustments. Col Jean-Claude Brejot

 A British Perspective. Col Graham Norton

 Moderator: Dr. Donald Wright

1130-1300 Lunch

Featured Speaker

1300-1430 BG Sean B. MacFarland: US Army Leader 

 Development: Past, Present and Future

1430-1500 Closing Discussion and Remarks

261

Appendix B Biographies

Dr. Gene R. Andersen is a retired naval aviator and a Section Head, Department of 

Leadership, Ethics & Law, US Naval Academy, 1997-2000 and the Primary Professional 

Military Education Program Project Leader, Center for Naval Leadership, 2003-2005. His 

publications include Formal Mentoring in the US Military: Research Evidence, Lingering 

Questions and Recommendations, Naval War College Review; How to Make Mentoring 

Work, US Naval Institute Proceedings, April 2009; Leadership and Human Behavior, 

Pearson Custom Publishing, 1999.

Dr. Kevin Benson served in the U.S. Army for 30 years. His final assignment 

in the Army was serving as the Director, School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort 

Leavenworth Kansas, from 2003-2007. He was the C/J 5 (Director of Plans) for Third US 

Army and the Combined Forces Land Component Command at the beginning of Operation 

Iraqi Freedom, from July 2002 to July 2003. He is now employed by McNeil Technologies 

and teaches at the U.S. Army University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort 

Leavenworth, Kansas.

Kevin is a 1977 graduate of the United States Military Academy. His military education 

includes; the U.S. Army Armor Officer Basic Course, US Marine Corps Amphibious 

Warfare School, US Army Command and General Staff College, and the School of 

Advanced Military Studies. He also attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Security Studies Program as a War College Fellow in 2001. He earned a Ph.D. in American 

history from the University of Kansas.

Dr. Donald F. Bittner from St. Louis/Columbia, Missouri, is a Professor of Military 

History with the Marine Corps Command and Staff College. He has served Marine Corps 

University in and out of uniform since 1975 and has 20 years of Federal Service.

Colonel Jean-Claude Brejot Jean-Claude Bréjot was the chief of the Army 

Intelligence Doctrine office in the Army Doctrine Center located in Paris (CDEF) Prior his 

assignement to CAC. CDEF is in the French Army the equivalent of CAC for Doctrine, 

Lessons Learned and Simulation.

His prior deployments and assignements include command of 402nd Air Defense 

Artillery Regiment, Châlons en Champagne, France, chief of plans for 1st Division (Etatmajor de force numéro 1), Besançon, France, chief of plans for European Union Operation 

Concordia, Skopje, Macedonia, Military Assistant for the Commanding General of 

Multinational Division South-East, Stabilization Force (SFOR) in Mostar, Bosnia, Military 

Advisor for the Commanding General of the Tunisian Staff College in Tunis, Tunisia, 

Operations Officer of 9th Marines Division (9ème Division d’Infanterie de Marine), 

Nantes, France, Planning Officer of Brigade Janus, Implementation Force (IFOR), Mostar, 

Bosnia, Military Assistant for the Commanding General of Brigade Janus, Implementation 

Force (IFOR), Mostar, Bosnia, deputy commander and troop commander in 58th Air 

Defense Artillery Regiment in Douai, France, Platoon leader in 54th Air Defense Artillery 

Regiment in Hyères, France.
262

Appendix B

His awards include the French Legion of Honour, the National Defense medal (Silver), 

the French Balkans medal, the NATO Bosnia medal, the EU Macedonia medal, the Tunisian 

Legion of Merit.

Colonel Jean-Claude Bréjot graduated from Saint-Cyr and was commissioned as an 

Artillery officer in 1986. He is also graduated from the Army Advanced Staff College and 

the Joint Staff College.

Dr. Todd Brereton received his PhD from Texas A&M University, specializing in 

army reform, education, and professionalization during the Gilded Age. He is presently 

professor of history at Iowa Wesleyan College, where he also serves as chair of his academic 

division. Brereton has been teaching at the college/university level since 1991, and has 

taught a wide variety of courses, including advanced courses in U.S. military history. He 

participated in USMA’s military history seminar and has delivered numerous papers at 

academic conferences, including the Society for Military History. In addition to his work 

at Texas A&M, Brereton has taught at the University of Louisville, Georgetown College, 

and Eastern Kentucky University. He came to Iowa Wesleyan College in 2002. His present 

research regards the construction of nuclear weapons at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant.

Brigadier General (R) John S. Brown gave more than 34 years of service to the 

United States Army, and now teaches as an adjunct professor and serves as a historical 

consultant. His most recent duty assignment (1998-2005) was as Chief of Military History 

for the United States Army. 

Previously General Brown served as Chief of Programs and Requirements for the 

Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE); Executive Officer to the Army 

DCSOPS; Commander of the 2d Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division in Texas and Kuwait; G3 

Operations for III Corps; G3 of the 24th Infantry Division; and Commander of the 2-66 

Armor Battalion in Germany, DESERT SHIELD, and DESERT STORM. General Brown 

has commanded armor units at every level from platoon through brigade, and has served 

on staffs at every level from battalion through theater.

General Brown has published, edited and lectured at home and overseas. Notable 

publications include Draftee Division, a case study of divisional mobilization during 

WWII, and the forthcoming Kevlar Legions: A History of Army Transformation 1989-

2005. He authors the monthly column “Historically Speaking” in Army magazine, and has 

written numerous articles and chapters.

General Brown is physically handicapped. He has been married to the former Mary 

Beth Hoisington for 39 years. They have two children, a daughter who is a corporate lawyer 

and a son who is an army officer, and four grandchildren.

Education: B.S.-United States Military Academy, M.A.-Indiana University, M.M.A.S.-

United States Army Command and General Staff College, M.A.-United States Naval War 

College, PhD-Indiana University

Lieutenant Colonel Craig Burn commenced his appointment as the Australian 

Army’s LNO to CAC in January 2008. He is an armour officer and hales from the city of 
263

BiographiesB

Brisbane on Australia’s east coast. He came to Fort Leavenworth from the Land Warfare 

Development Centre in Puckapunyal where he was the capability concept and requirements 

developer for two battlespace operating systems; ISR and IO. He has held an array of 

regimental, instructional and staff appointments and has previously served on exchange as 

a small group instructor at the US Armor School, Fort Knox.

LTCOL Burn is a graduate of the Australian Army Command and Staff College (Fort 

Queenscliff) and holds a Master of Defence Studies from the University of Canberra and a 

Master of Public and International Law at the Melbourne University.

His operational service include tours in the UN assistance mission in Rwanda, and in 

the International Force in East Timor.

Dr. James Carafano is one of the nation’s leading experts in defense and homeland 

security, and directs the Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sara Allison Center for Foreign 

Policy. He is an accomplished historian and teacher as well as a prolific writer and researcher 

on a fundamental constitutional duty of the federal government: to provide for the common 

defense. His research focuses on developing the national security required to secure the 

long-term interests of the United States - protecting the public, providing for economic 

growth and preserving civil liberties. Dr. Carafano’s op-ed columns and commentary are 

published widely, including the Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, New York Post, Philadelphia 

Inquirer, USA Today and Washington Times in addition to the Washington Examiner. He 

is a member of the National Academy’s Board on Army Science and Technology and the 

Department of the Army Historical Advisory Committee. He is a senior fellow at George 

Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute.

Colonel (R) Greg Fontenot: Colonel Gregory Fontenot, USA Retired is the director of 

the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Ks. Colonel 

Fontenot was one of the authors of On Point: The US Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

Colonel Fontenot served 28 years in the Army as an Armor officer commanding units in 

Europe and the United States. Colonel Fontenot led a tank task force in Desert Storm and 

an armor brigade in Bosnia. Other important assignments included faculty at USMA, chief 

of Command Planning Group TRADOC, Director of SAMS, and Commander BCTP.

 frequent contributor to Army Magazine and Military Review Colonel Fontenot has 

delivered papers at the Marshall Awards Seminar, the American Literary Translation 

Association, Rand Corporation’s Conference on Stability Operation, the Military Sensing 

Symposium, The USMA Symposium on Contemporary History and Cantigny Foundation.

Colonel (R) Henry G. Gole (Ph.D.) served four tours in Europe and three in Asia. 

He was an enlisted infantryman in the Korean War and a Special Forces officer in two 

combat tours in Vietnam. His doctorate is from Temple University. He has taught at several 

institutions of higher learning and continues to teach his elective course, Men In Battle, at 

the US Army War College. In addition to numerous articles and book reviews, his published 

work includes General William E. DePuy, Preparing the Army for Modern War (2008), 

Soldiering: Observations from Korea, Vietnam, and Safe Places (2005), and The Road to 

Rainbow: Army Planning for Global War, 1934-1940 (2003).
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Appendix B

Dr. Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh immigrated to the United States as an infant from Taiwan 

and grew up in Alhambra, CA. He received an excellent public high school education 

at Alhambra High School, and went on to Yale University, where he received a B.A. in 

History (2000). He attended the University of Virginia for his graduate work, where he 

received a PhD in History (2004) and worked under the direction of Gary W. Gallagher 

and Edward L. Ayers.

Hsieh spent the 2004/5 academic year as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow 

at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, where he also taught half time in Yale’s Directed 

Studies curriculum--a freshman Great Books program of which Hsieh is himself a proud 

alumnus. In August 2005 he joined the U.S. Naval Academy History Department, where 

he remains an assistant professor. For the 2011 calendar year, he will hold a position as 

a Henry Chauncey Jr. ‘57 Fellow in the Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program at the 

International Security Studies program of Yale University.

Between July 2008 and June 2009, Hsieh was on interagency detail with the U.S. 

State Department in Iraq, where he served as the Tuz Satellite Lead for the Salah ad Din 

Provincial Reconstruction Team. He received a Commander’s Award for Civilian Service 

from 3 BSTB (Department of the Army), and a Meritorious Honor Award from the U.S. 

Department of State (Embassy Baghdad).

Hsieh has a diverse number of interests in military history, although he remains a 

nineteenth-century Americanist by trade and training.

Dr. Perry D. Jamieson received his PhD from Wayne State University and taught 

American military history at the University of Texas at El Paso in 1979 and 1980. Dr. 

Jamieson then began a long career in the United States Air Force History and Museums 

Program. He was serving as the Air Force’s senior historian when he retired in March 2009.

Dr. Jamieson is the coauthor of Attack and Die (1982) and the author of Crossing the 

Deadly Ground: United States Army Tactics, 1865—1899 (1994); Death in September: 

The Antietam Campaign (1995); and Winfield Scott Hancock: Gettysburg Hero (2003). His 

Air Force publications include books on the 1991 Gulf War and the 1996 Khobar Towers 

bombing. He is currently working on a volume on the final operations of the Civil War, 

which will be the last entry in the University of Nebraska Press series, “Great Campaigns 

of the Civil War.”

Dr. Jamieson and his wife Stephanie live on the main street of Sharpsburg, Maryland 

and on most weekday mornings he hikes the Antietam battlefield. Every March for more 

than the last twenty years, he and Stephanie have spent about a week in Lakeland, Florida, 

the spring training home of the Detroit Tigers. Dr. Jamieson is a life-long fan of that team, 

the Red Wings, Pistons, and—he reluctantly admits—the Lions.

Brigadier General Sean B. MacFarland currently serves as the Deputy Commandant 

of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 

He graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in 1981 and was 

commissioned as an Armor officer. His command tours include service as the Commander of 

Joint Task Force – North; Commander of 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division 
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BiographiesB

- the Ready First - in Tal Afar, West Ninewah province, and Ramadi, Iraq; Commander 

of 2nd Battalion, 63d Armor Regiment at Camp Able Sentry in Macedonia; Operations 

Officer and Executive Officer of the 3d Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, in Schweinfurt, 

Germany and later Bosnia as part of the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR); and as 

Troop Commander in 3rd Squadron, 12th Cavalry Regiment, in Buedingen, Germany.

His other duties and assignments also include the Joint Staff; Combined/Joint Task 

Force 7 in Iraq, Aide de Camp, Deputy Regimental Operations Officer for the 3rd Armored 

Cavalry Regiment during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm; and Cavalry Platoon 

Leader and Troop Executive Officer in the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Bliss, 

Texas.

He has served overseas in Germany, Iraq (Desert Shield/Desert 

Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom), Kuwait, and Bosnia (IFOR and SFOR). His 

educational degrees are a bachelor of science from the United States Military Academy, 

masters of science degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Aerospace 

Engineering) and the National Defense University (National Resource Strategy), and a 

Master of Military Arts and Sciences degree from the US Army Command and General 

Staff College (Advanced Military Studies).

Dr. Tim Nenniger: Timothy. K. Nenniger is currently Chief of the Archives II Textual 

Records Reference Staff at the National Archives. He has been with the National Archives 

since 1970, where he has had extensive experience working with military and naval 

records, in professional as well as supervisory positions. From 1994 to 1997 he was an 

analyst on the World War II Working Group of the Joint US-Russia Commission on POWs/

MIAs and was the principal author of the working group’s report, “The Experience of 

American POWs Liberated by the Soviet Army, 1944-45.” From 1997 to 2005 he was 

vice-president then president of the Society for Military History. During 1987-88 he was 

the John F. Morrison Professor of Military History at the US Army Command and General 

Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. A graduate of Lake Forest College, he received 

his MA and PhD degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where his 

specialization was the American military and has published a number of works in that field. 

Colonel Graham Norton was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Loughbrough 

University before commissioning in to the Royal Corps of Signals in August 1985. With 

the exception of two tours at the School of Signals in Blandford as a student and an 

Instructor, his early regimental Service was in Germany, firstly as a troop commander in a 

20th Armoured Brigade HQ and Signal Squadron and also as Adjutant with 4th Armoured 

Division HQ & Sig Regt.

At staff he served as an SO3 Assessments in the Yugoslav Crisis Call within the Defence 

Intelligence Staff, and briefly as SO2 Comms Ops at HQ LAND prior to attending the first 

Joint Advanced Command and Staff Course. Following Staff College he was appointed 

SO2 ISTAR in the operational requirements branch in MOD, before once again returning 

to Germany after being selected to command 4th Armoured Brigade HQ & Sig Squadron; a 

tour that included an operational deployment to Bosnia. Selected for promotion to Lt Col is 

2001, following a 6 month detachment as SO1 Communications within HQCENTCOM’s 

OEF headquarters, he returned once more to Germany to command 7th Signal Regiment.
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Appendix B

A 14 month appointment as SO1 Policy in Personnel Services 2, responsible for the 

development of army discipline policy followed command. On selection for promotion to 

Colonel, he and his family again returned to Germany, when he was appointed ACOS G6 in 

the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. This three year tour included an operational deployment 

to Afghanistan as the Commander of the UK’s Joint Force CIS HQ.

Colonel Norton took up his current appointment in August 2009. He is married to 

Amanda, and they have 2 sons, both of whom attend Boarding School in England; Ben 

(17) and Edward (12). His interests include reading and photography, and he is a lifelong, 

if somewhat sad supporter of Leeds United Football Club. 

Dr. Peter Schifferle is a graduate of the U.S. Army Armor Officer Basic and Advanced 

Courses, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College and the School of Advanced 

Military Studies. He holds Masters Degrees from the University of North Carolina, Chapel 

Hill in German History, and the School of Advanced Military Studies in Theater Operations. 

He was awarded a Doctorate in American History from the University of Kansas in 2002. 

His book, America’s School for War: Fort Leavenworth, Officer Education, and Victory in 

World War II, was published by the University Press of Kansas in April 2010. 

Upon graduation from Reserve Officers Training Corps at Canisius College, Buffalo, 

New York, Peter J. Schifferle was commissioned into the Armor Branch in 1976. Dr. 

Schifferle served in a variety of command and staff positions in both Tank and Armored 

Cavalry units throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East and the Republic of 

Korea, including an assignment as the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment S4 during Operations 

Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Prior to his last assignment as Exercise Director, School 

of Advanced Military Studies, U. S. Army Command and General Staff College, he served 

as Chief of Plans, V Corps in Heidelberg, Federal Republic of Germany. That assignment 

included supervision of staff planning for Task Force Eagle as both IFOR and SFOR in 

Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 through 1997. After retirement in 2000, he was appointed the 

Director, Advanced Operational Art Studies Fellowship at the School of Advanced Military 

Studies. 

Dr. Schifferle has been married for over thirty years to the former Sandra Leigh Gould. 

They have one daughter, Rachel, 20.

Dr. Lewis Sorley, a former soldier and then civilian official of the Central Intelligence 

Agency, is a third-generation graduate of the United States Military Academy who also 

holds a doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University. He has served on the faculties at West 

Point and the Army War College. His Army assignments also included leadership of tank 

and armored cavalry units in Germany, Vietnam, and the United States and staff positions 

in the offices of the Secretary of Defense and the Army Chief of Staff.

He is the author of a book on foreign policy entitled Arms Transfers under Nixon

and two biographies, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times

and Honorable Warrior: General Harold K. Johnson and the Ethics of Command. The 

Johnson biography received the Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Book Award. 

An excerpt of the Abrams biography won the Peterson Prize as the year’s best scholarly 

article on military history. He has also been awarded the General Andrew Goodpaster Prize 

for military scholarship by the American Veterans Center.

His book A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s 

Last Years in Vietnam was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His edited work Vietnam 

Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972 received the Army Historical Foundation’s 
267

BiographiesB

Trefry Prize for providing a unique perspective on the art of command. A second edited 

work, The Vietnam War: An Assessment by South Vietnam’s Generals, is currently in press. 

Dr. Sorley has also written Honor Bright: History and Origins of the West Point Honor 

Code and System, a book commissioned by the United States Military Academy’s Simon 

Center for the Professional Military Ethic. At the Army’s request he compiled and edited a 

two-volume work entitled Press On! Selected Works of General Donn A. Starry, published 

by the Combat Studies Institute Press at Fort Leavenworth.

Dr. Sorley served for a decade as Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Army 

Historical Foundation and is Executive Director Emeritus of the Association of Military 

Colleges and Schools of the United States. During the Spring 2009 semester he served as 

Gottwald Visiting Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Virginia Military Institute. Also in 

2009 he was named a Distinguished Eagle Scout by the Boy Scouts of America.

General (R) Gordon Sullivan is the President and Chief Operating Officer of the 

Association of the United States Army, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. Since 

assuming the presidency in 1998, General Sullivan has overseen the transformation of the 

Association into a dynamic 100,000+ individual and 500+ sustaining member organization 

that represents Soldiers, families, and the defense industry. 

His responsibilities as President and Chief Operating Officer encompass both 

daily business operating and strategy planning for the largest Army-oriented non-profit 

association. The Association promotes and advocates programs for Soldiers and their 

families, creates opportunities for Army-Industry and professional dialog; advocates 

public awareness of Army and national security issues through its educational mission and 

maintains an outreach program to national leadership on critical issues pertinent to Army 

readiness. 

Born in Boston, Massachusetts on 25 September 1937 and raised in Quincy. He was 

commissioned a second lieutenant of Armor and awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 

history from Norwich University in 1959. He holds a Master of Arts degree in political 

science from the University of New Hampshire. His professional military education 

includes the U.S. Army Armor School Basic and Advanced Courses, the Command and 

General Staff College, and the Army War College. 

General Sullivan retired from the Army on 31 July 1995 after more than 36 years of 

active service. He culminated his service in uniform as the 32nd Chief of Staff—the senior 

general officer in the Army—and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

He is the co-author, with Michael V. Harper, of Hope Is Not a Method (Random House, 

1996), which chronicles the enormous challenges encountered in transforming the postCold War Army through the lens of proven leadership principles and a commitment to 

shared values. He is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Norwich University and 

the Marshall Legacy Institute; and was formerly a director on the boards of NewellRubbermaid, Shell Corporation, Institute of Defense Analyses and General Dynamics. 

General Sullivan is married to the former Gay Loftus of Quincy, Massachusetts; they 

currently reside in Alexandria, VA. He has three children and three grandchildren. He is an 

avid reader, amateur historian, and active sailor and sport fishing enthusiast.
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Appendix B

Dr. Richard Swain is a retired officer of field artillery, a former director of the Combat 

Studies Institute (88-90; 92-94), a faculty member at the School of Advanced Military 

Studies. (94-99), and from 2002-2007 served as Professor of Officership in the William 

E. Simon Center for Professional Military Education at West Point. While at West Point 

he initiated and participated in an effort uniting faculty of the service academies to write a 

new edition of The Armed Forces Officer for instruction of cadets and midshipmen. (The 

book is currently in print by NDU Press/Potomac Books.) Rick is currently employed by 

the Leavenworth Office of Booz Allen Hamilton where he has been engaged as part of a 

team teaching operational design to various military clients. (Booz Allen Hamilton is in 

no way responsible for the paper presented here.) In 1991, Rick deployed to Saudi Arabia 

as the Third Army Historian. He wrote a monograph titled, “Lucky War”: Third Army 

in Desert Storm. The book was published by CSI under the Leavenworth Press imprint, 

by the good offices of Dr. Roger Spiller. From 1999 to 2001 Rick was employed as a 

contract historian by General Montgomery Meigs to write an account of senior leadership 

in Bosnia. A version of that paper was published by SSI titled: Neither War Nor Not War. 

Rick currently resides with his wife Nancy in Lawton Oklahoma.

Dr. Steven E. Woodworth received his B.A. in history from Southern Illinois University 

in 1982 and his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1987. He is a two-time winner of the Fletcher 

Pratt Award of the New York Civil War Round Table for his books Jefferson Davis and His 

Generals (1990) and Davis and Lee at War (1995). Among his other works are Six Armies 

in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns (1998), While God Is 

Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (2001), Nothing but Victory: The 

Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865 (2006), and Manifest Destinies: Westward Expansion 

and the Coming of the Civil War (2010). He coauthored (with Kenneth J. Winkle) The 

Oxford Atlas of the Civil War (2004), which won the annual book prize of the Society for 

Military History. Woodworth has also received the Grady McWhiney Award of the Dallas 

Civil War Round Table for lifetime contribution to the study of Civil War history.


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