(Which means that nobody that teaches at the Captains' Career Course will be interested)

Add this page to your RSS reader. It's run by the acolytes of the famous fighter pilot, John Boyd's. Yeah, John Boyd of "Observe-Orient-Decide-Act" fame.

If you've never heard of the "OODA Loop" or are curious as to what dogfighting in an F-86 can teach you about media relations, business, strategy, or life, take a look at this article, entitled "The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot".

But for now, some quotes from this essay I'm writing.

I always ask for peer reviewers, and have even offered money for them, but no one takes me up on this. Ahem, hey lurkers (you know who you are), what if I offered a password and login to pr0n sites in exchange for peer reviewing, huh? (I expect eleventy billion replies to that).

Anyway, quotes:

...The British military leadership during the First World War was notoriously incompetent. So much so that the bravery of British officers was generally a tactic to compensate for a lack of ability —what we in the 21st Century might call “Leeroy Jenkins-ism”. Sir Archibald Murray was a prime example of this, except for the fact that he didn’t even have courage to compensate for a lack of ability...

...Additionally, officer evaluations have moved away from a qualitative “top-third, middle-third, bottom-third” system, to a system entirely dependent upon the writing skills of the commander, and his ability to unlock the supposed “magic words” of superlative evaluations. And even then, one questions the value of an evaluation when promotions are almost automatic. As a result, I seem to care more about what a hot chick I’ve never met writes on my Facebook wall than what my battalion commander writes in my official evaluation.

So while I only do 10 minutes of work on a 12-hour shift (yes, I will write more about this later), I decided to catch up on reading Barbara Tuchman's  The Guns of August, a book which discusses the German, French, British and Russian armies and politics before the First World War up through the Battle of the Marne in September 1914. 

Single-handedly, this book repudiates the entire Captains' Career Course.  Words cannot describe how utterly useless and void of knowledge that course is.

• Barbara Tuchman describes the planning that went on in the German General Staff in great detail.  For over ten years prior to the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, the German General Staff workout out, in meticulous detail, the various inner workings of the Schlieffen Plan.  True to the stereotype of German mechanical efficiency, the Schlieffen Plan was a methodical, mechanical, logical approach to fighting war, calculated to the very last minute detail.  In many ways, it was like the "scientific" approach to war the Army advocates in their Military Decision Making Process, where staff officers calculate force ratios, roll 3d20 die, whatever.  The German Army thought the plan was a testament to the great Karl von Clausewitz.  In reality, it wasn't.  Clausewitz talked about the "fog of war" and "friction" in combat, which the German Army completely ignored.  Additionally, the Germans (and to a lesser extent, the other countries) failed to recognize the political situation.  The Germans felt that massive brutality and terror (in Belgium) would stifle resistance.  In reality, it caused the Belgians to resist more and brought the whole world crashing down on them.   
• The French had a funny little philosophy at the time, which the US Army has now sought to emulate.  (Yes, you read that correctly).  While the US Army believes that "defensive operations only serve as a means to transition to the offensive", the French believed that victory could only be accomplished during the offensive, due to their superior elan, or fighting spirit, thoroughly scorning the defensive.  In theory, it would lead to a bold charge to victory.  In practice, it looked more like Leeroy Jenkins.
• The thought of treating war as a science was actually quite amusing in that nothing has changed in the last 100 years, apparently.  Most armies strive to teach war as a science for the main reason that it's easier to teach.  For starters, the typical military mind is by nature a left-brained mind, defaulting to planning checklists and standard tactics.  Similarly, it's far easier to teach war as a science, as it puts everyone on a level playing field.  It's difficult to grade and analyze art, but it's relatively simple to ask for fill-in-the-blank tests that can be easily graded.  It's a dangerous trend, since battles take place in the minds of human beings, who are thoroughly unpredictable.  That the military thinks of war as a purely mathematical application of the proper amount of firepower leads to disastrous results when failing to take into account political realities.
• Additionally, the fact that we spent our time in the career course planning battles and analyzing terrain by incessantly tracing maps with acetate and markers as if we were still in the 1950s makes me think that nothing has really changed in the digital age.  Although, with our instructors being more focused on how pretty our traced acetate maps looked, maybe there was a little "art" of war here, I don't know.

With that said, the big lesson here is to always be flexible and ready to adapt to the unexpected.  I mean, the unexpected happens to me all the time.  Sometimes, I find myself scrambling to keep people from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  Confused?  You won't be after the next post.  (Which you might have actually read before this.  Whatever).

(I think I need to organize this into something less rambling. Let me know what you think)

I started to contemplate this as I start going though my advanced course. After reading some of the books on US Doctrine, combined with the number of practical exercises that we are undergoing in the process of learning the Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP), I realized that the officer corps badly needs a cultural revolution.

To the defense of the officer corps, and really the military in general, I need to note that the US military is, for better or worse, a reflection of American society as a whole. Many people on "the outside" are under the mistaken impression that people in the military are somehow vastly different than they are, an impression generally derived from media images in movies and news reports. The strange truth of the matter is that we, as Americans, really aren't reading as we used to. Whether it's the emphasis on television, the declining state of American educational institutions, or simply that we don't have the time to read like we used to. The latter of these reasons is even more prevalent in modern military life. With the Optempo that we are experiencing these days, few people have as much time to devour an entire book, particularly if they have a family to take care of.

That's actually kind of sad, as the Chief of Staff of the Army puts out books every year for soldiers at all rank levels to read. It's a shame, really, as officer professional development these days seems to be focusing on the trees, not the forest. For example, we might teach an officer how to fill out a form to relay information to higher headquarters, but we don't teach him what information he's relating or why he should convey that information. Filling out a specific form is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Certainly, did the great generals Napoleon, Alexander, etc demand that their situational reports be filed in black ink with their insignia in the top right hand corner (oh, and no justified text, we don't like that).

I've been reading Greene's 33 Strategies of War recently, and I'll soon be moving on to the Marcus Aurelius book or the TE Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") book when I finish that. There's a wealth of knowledge we can obtain from these sources. The problem is that we don't know how to read history. As a military. As Americans.

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