By then-Lt. Col. Mitchell M. Zais, USA, USMA ’69
March 1990 Armed Forces Journal International
(Now retired Army Brig. General Mick Zais, PhD, is the Vice Chairman of Board of Directors of STARRS and he is also on the Board of Directors of the MacArthur Society of West Point Graduates. Gen. Zais served as the Deputy and Acting US Secretary of Education during the first Trump administration. Previously, he was elected South Carolina’s 17th State Superintendent of Education. He has served as Commissioner of Higher Education in South Carolina for eight years, and for 10 years as president of Newberry College in that state. Zais retired as an infantry brigadier general after 31 years in the US Army, including service in Vietnam, Korea, Panama, and Kuwait. He is a paratrooper and Ranger. Biography)
Gen. Zais: “This article was published 36 years ago. Failures of leadership in our military have convinced me that, more than ever, the curricula at our service academies need a warfighting focus rather than an engineering focus. This article explains why. Certain military occupational specialties will require engineering expertise, but these are the exception rather than the rule.”
“No mastery of command can substitute for an intelligent comprehension of the economic goals, the political impulses, the spiritual aspirations, that move tens of millions of people.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, quoted in the 1988-1989 West Point Catalogue
The curriculum at the United States Military Academy remains an anachronism, despite recent revisions. While mandating academic work in tangential fields. West Point has failed to require an adequate study of war. It is not the school of the warrior. To achieve its potential, the Academy must significantly alter its antiquated curriculum.
In its early days. West Point was America’s only engineering school. Its graduates built the canals, bridges, and railroads opening the West. As historian John Keegan notes in The Mask of Command, when General U. S. Grant was a cadet,
“West Point taught little tactics and no more drill than was necessary for the Corps of Cadets to maneuver itself on the parade ground. The emphasis of the syllabus was on mathematics, engineering, and science.’’
Things haven’t changed much in the last 150 years—the emphasis is still the same It is time, however, to ask if the needs of the modern Army have not changed.
The West Point curriculum is seriously flawed. It provides a good general education, focusing on technical subjects, but at the expense of an outstanding military education.
As defense critic William Lind and former Senator Gary Hart point out in America Can Win: The Case for Military Reform, a military education must give the student a thorough grounding in the art of war— the soldier’s culture:
“He must come to understand the guiding concepts of his profession, why they are held to be true, and how they evolved. He must be able to put whatever military situation he faces into a larger context built of military history, military theory, and an under- standing of how people behave in combat.”
West Pointers should be able to “think logically and creatively about war and in war.”
Because of their curriculum, most recent graduates can explain Laplace’s methods for transforming differential equations, yet are unaware of Ardant du Picq’s works describing the psychological domain of combat.
They can recite Hubble’s Theory explaining the number of gas molecules in a given volume, but are unable to describe Trinquier’s theories explaining how to fight insurgents.
Cadets study Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in nuclear physics, yet give short shrift to Clausewitz’s principles about the uncertainty of combat, the friction of battle, and the fog of war.
In short, while their understanding of the physical world is extensive, most Academy graduates fail to understand the mechanics of battle and the psychology of combat.
Defenders of the current system argue that the curriculum is “balanced,” that it provides an appropriate mix of math, science, and engineering with humanities and social sciences because the credit hours required for each are almost equal.
The term “balance” suggests that technical and humanities courses are of comparable importance for the professional soldier. They are not. Knowledge of society, human nature, and history, with an emphasis on their military aspects, is vastly more critical than technical skills for career military officers.
The Core Curriculum
The course of study at West Point has two major components—the core curriculum and electives. The electives program corresponds to a major in a civilian university. The core is a group of courses every cadet must take, regardless of major.
One expects the core courses to teach the institutional values, skills, and knowledge required of a career Army officer They don’t. Major areas required to provide a thorough grounding in the art of war—a soldier’s culture—are omitted.
The first two years at West Point are devoted largely to the core curriculum. During this time every cadet must take 15 semester hours of mathematics, seven of physics, six of chemistry, and three of computer science.
Near the end of the second year, each cadet picks his or her major—either in humanities and social sciences, or in math, science, and engineering Cadets choosing the technical fields take predominantly quantitative courses in their final two years. Cadets selecting humanities and social sciences, however, are required to take an additional five engineering courses, totaling 18 more semester hours.
Of the 12 required semester hours of history, only six are in military history— about the same as the seven semester hours required for physics.
The unspoken message? It is more important to understand the forces holding atoms together in a nuclear reaction than the forces that caused the French Army to fall apart in 1940 before the attacking Germans.
Likewise, most cadets take only six semester hours of a foreign language, the same as the requirement for chemistry.
Finally, while cadets take 15 semester hours of mathematics, they receive only three in psychology and three in leadership. The implicit priority? Manipulating numbers is more important than leading people and directing organizations.
A revised curriculum, which grew out of a 1988 study at West Point, was introduced last summer. According to a study group member, its focus on engineering is based on the premise that cadets need to be “able to deal with the technical problems of the Army.” The study concluded that the best way to achieve this goal is to teach the “engineering thought process” and to carry the curriculum all the way through to the “design stage” of engineering
Most military officers, however, must no more be able to design weapons than race car drivers must be able to design engines. They need only understand, in a broad way, the principles behind the workings of their equipment.
In fact, the temperament that makes an outstanding automotive engineer may be antithetical to that of a successful racer, just as very different personalities may be required of risk-taking combat commanders and weapon systems engineers.
The Commentators
Admiral William Crowe, while he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, observed,
“Battles are still fought by people, and their state of mind will influence the outcome more than weapons.”
General Carl Vuono, Chief of Staff of the Army, has said,
‘The purpose of the Army education system [is] to ensure that we have . . . leaders who are capable of inspiring our soldiers in peace and war . . . who know how to fight, and train organizations to fight, and understand [how] … to carry out the Army’s role in joint and combined operations.”
In short, they wart officers who are masters of the arts of war and leading people, not expert engineers.
The propensity to focus on hardware at the expense of the less quantifiable aspects of warfare has been noted by Edward Luttwak, author of The Pentagon and the Art of War and the more recent Strategy:
“One aspect of the American style is the refusal to accept the primacy of the human dimension in military power. . . . If you pay attention to the basics of war, which are training, cohesion, and all the human dimensions, and have really reliable low-tech combat capabilities, then you win no matter what happens. . . . If you go into combat with the high tech and you haven’t the low tech. . . then it doesn’t matter how fancy your stuff is. You’re going to end up with embarrassments, defeats, and inadequacies.”
As defense analyst Jeffrey Record has noted,
“‘Even profound technological superiority is no guarantee of success in combat . . . history is littered with battles and wars—Little Big Horn, the Chinese civil war, Vietnam—in which the loser enjoyed vast technological advantage.”
Former Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr., commented on the limitations of a technical education and how training shapes thinking.
“The ability to articulate strategy.” he said, “requires considerably more intellectual depth than mere hard sciences and engineering can impart. . . . The Navy of the ‘70s was thinking engineering, not strategy.”
The phenomenon was observed by a British submarine officer in conversations with military writer Tom Clancy. According to the Brit, when he met with an American skipper, “All the ‘Yank’ wanted to talk about was his sub’s reactor plant, instead of tactics.”’
A curriculum stressing the hard sciences over the military sciences inadequately prepares its students for the Army’s most important task, to defeat the nation’s enemies in battle.
Addressing cadets, former infantry officer and Vietnam veteran Fred Downs noted West Point’s propensity to downplay the central role of combat:
“An officer’s first job is to keep his men under control. That is complicated because men in combat are on the ragged edge. … An officer must also understand how to deal with human nature under stress. He must be aware of each soldier’s motivation, philosophy, personal habits and beliefs, peer group pressures, and societal background. And he must balance these factors in an environment of sleepless nights, fatigue, hunger, thirst, bad weather, stress, anger, anxiety, killing, and dying.”
To believe that the study of technical subjects can help an officer meet these challenges is to fail to understand the nature of war and the psyche of the combat soldier.
The Evidence
Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, held strongly that a technically trained undergraduate makes a better naval officer. During a 1976 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, he averred:
“I think teaching management as a major subject for an undergraduate is ridiculous, and I can see no way that it contributes to the ability of a junior officer to do his job.”
This belief, the “Rickover Hypothesis,” was put to the test at the US Naval Academy.
Predictors of performance were examined for more than 1,500 Annapolis graduates from the classes of 1976-1980 who entered the most technical branches of the Navy—nuclear submarines and the conventional surface fleet. The more managerially oriented branches such as supply corps were specifically excluded.
After five years in the fleet, the highest performing group was that of officers who as midshipmen majored in management or economics. They significantly outperformed engineering majors, math majors, and science majors, even though as midshipmen they had, by far, the lowest grades
A recent State University of New York study examined the leadership styles of 186 Naval Academy graduates serving in the surface fleet. This study found that humanities and social science majors were rated as more charismatic, considerate, intellectually stimulating, inspirational, and more likely to reward excellent subordinate performance than engineering and physical science majors.
A significant long-term investigation of the effects of the undergraduate major was conducted by AT&T. The leadership, management performance, and career advancement of 766 first-level general managers were examined over a 30-year period.
One’s college major was found to be the most important factor in accounting for differences in performance. It was more influential than grades, extracurricular activities, or prestige of the college.
The study concluded that humanities and social science majors were clearly superior in all measures of overall performance and progress. In contrast, engineers and math and science majors lacked many important leadership and managerial skills. Business majors fell between these two groups.
The AT&T study concluded that humanities and social science majors performed best because of their superior interpersonal skills (sociability; social presence and objectivity; dominance; self-acceptance; ability to adapt; and self concepts that support relating to others in a self-assured, outgoing, and flexible way), higher intellectual ability (independence and flexibility of thought, decisionmaking skills, creativity, and range of interests), greater verbal skills (oral and written communication), and higher ambition.
Engineers were more controlled, orderly, rule-oriented, and reserved with others–characteristics that do not easily translate into smooth leadership style, strong personal impact, or behavior flexibility.
Finally, the humanities and social science majors had a higher tolerance for ambiguity and a lower index of authoritarianism.
These final two traits are critical for military officers, particularly at higher organizational levels. Authoritarianism is important because it is a measure of breadth of perspective.
Low scorers— most frequently the humanities and social science majors—have a relatively wide psychological universe; are aware of a range of customs, values, and approaches to life; and expect and are tolerant of differences in people.
In contrast, high scorers—more likely the math, science, and engineering majors—move in narrow circles, seeing events only in a context of a limited frame of reference. They do not recognize the existence of a range of values and approaches and are intolerant of new ones found.
Tolerance for ambiguity, more typical of humanities majors, is vital because the vast majority of problems an officer must solve are fraught with vagueness. Clausewitz said that war is the province of uncertainty.
These studies clearly refute the Rickover Hypothesis and testify to the irrationality of the Naval Academy’s disdain for the “soft sciences.” They also suggest detailed scientific knowledge is not necessary to ably administer technical programs.
Another inquiry showed that engineers who enter the public arena are handicapped by their personality and training. The researcher points out that engineering is an outlet for students interested in things rather than people, facts rather than feelings, and logic rather than emotion, because it emphasizes analysis, suppression of emotion, and an impatience with ambiguity.
The above studies suggest that people who choose to study engineering (numbers and things) may be fundamentally different from those who study humanities and social sciences (people and society). If so, the Military Academy—with its emphasis on math aptitude—may well be recruiting the wrong people and educating them the wrong way.
A large body of research suggests college students trained in the hard sciences are poorer leaders than those trained in the soft disciplines because hard sciences teach “critical thinking” skills only about technical problems and may actually impair thinking about interpersonal and organizational issues.
They also show extensive training in engineering may inappropriately shape the thinking style of leaders. This occurs because the linear, sequential, analytical, and logical approach to solving engineering problems differs greatly from the holistic, creative, intuitive, and integrative thinking which is required in humanities and social sciences. Significant combat and leadership tasks involve this second type of thought process, not the former.
Consider General George S. Patton, Jr. After a year at the Virginia Military Institute, it took him five more years to graduate from West Point—because he was weak in math. But he was not stupid. Far from it. As a mid-grade officer he studied military history extensively, learned French so he could read Napoleon’s exploits in the original language, wrote poetry for national women’s magazines, and published articles on the psychological aspects of battle.
Most significantly, when the vast majority of America’s senior officers viewed tanks as mere platforms to support infantry—by countering machine-gun fire and knocking down barbed wire—Patton was writing articles for The Cavalry Journal explaining the role of the tank on future battlefields. He was an intuitive, creative thinker, not a logical, analytical thinker.
Army Studies
In 1978 the Army Research Institute studied the day-to-day problems of junior officers. This project involved more than 1,300 officers, noncommissioned officers (NCOs), and enlistees. The final report, Analysis of Junior Officer Training Needs, identified the most troubling aspects of an officer’s first assignment. The study concluded that ‘‘there is a need for realistic training in the soft skills like counseling and relating to others.” What Army junior officers wanted most was training in handling relationships with enlisted personnel, NCOs, and superior officers.
The Officer Professional Development System was the subject of a recent Army-wide study involving more than 14,000 company and field-grade officers and 332 generals. This comprehensive inquiry, headed by Lt. Gen. Charles W. Bagnal, recommended a shift from a technically oriented educational philosophy to a broad military education.
The study determined the most important skills at various ranks. Company arid field-grade officers listed “leadership and human relations skills” as their single most important job skill. Generals said oral and written communications were most important. These are not the focus of the Academy’s core curriculum.
The Bagnal Study also identified areas of knowledge common to all branches and military specialties. These were psychology, organizational behavior, humanities, interpersonal relations, history, management principles, and leadership. Not surprisingly, the scientific method and the engineering design thought process were absent from the list.
Military Courses
All the elements are in place to make West Point the School of the Soldier it should be. For the core curriculum to reflect the essence of the warrior ethos, all that is required is a shift in attitude and emphasis. Refocusing the curriculum is easily within reach—once the decision to make appropriate revisions is made.
The foremost deficiency in the Academy’s core curriculum is the absence of a course on military thought. One should expect all West Pointers to know something about military theory. They don’t— not even the basics. They haven’t the foggiest notions why some insurgencies succeed while others fail, or how Western approaches to war (as exemplified by Clausewitz) differ from Asian frameworks (typified by Sun Tzu or Mao Zedong).
The core curriculum should be revised to include a two-semester course on military theory. While this alone will not transform military technicians into military thinkers, it will at least introduce cadets to the fundamentals of their profession.
Likewise, the present two-semester course in military history is inadequate. As many defense analysts have pointed out, military history is the data base of the soldier’s profession, the repository of all we have learned about what works in combat. Thus, four semesters of military history should be required, the amount of time currently allotted to mathematics.
The present one-semester course in leadership and organizational behavior is inadequate. What are cadets being prepared to do other than to lead soldiers and units? This course, along with military history and military theory, is the essence of an Academy education. Cadets must grow to understand what Napoleon meant when he said, “In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” The leadership course should be expanded to two semesters.
A course in sociology, with an emphasis on military groups, is needed. Officers must understand the fundamentals of group behavior and societal dynamics. Since Academy graduates must lead men and women from all walks of life, whose experiences and values are often radically different from their own, they should understand these differences in perspective and motivation.
Finally, the charter and the course requirements of the foreign languages department should be expanded. Every cadet ought to take two years of a foreign language. The course of instruction should include substantial material on the culture, economy, geography, and government of the countries where that language is spoken. When talking to foreign officers, it is important to know not only their language, but also their frame of reference.
To make room for these military-related courses, the core curriculum in engineering and hard sciences should be reduced (see table). A cadet can learn all he needs to know about chemistry in one semester. While one semester of probability and statistics is warranted, three semesters of calculus and differential equations is excessive. Similarly, the five-course sequence in engineering can be eliminated as a requirement. Cadets could elect these courses, but they would not be part of the mandatory core curriculum.
Engineering approaches to management and problem solving reached their zenith during Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Pentagon era. The problems these methods were brought to bear on, however, were not amenable to exclusively analytical solution. As Stanley Kamow points out in Vietnam—A History:
“The missing element in the “quantitative measurement’’ that guided McNamara and other US policymakers was the qualitative dimension that could not be easily recorded. There was no way to calibrate the motivation of Viet Cong guerrillas. Nor could computers be programmed to describe the hopes and fears of Vietnamese peasants.”
McNamara was shaped by his training. A friend and advisor described his problem: “The war is difficult for him. Vietnam is a combination of people and ideas and these are the two areas in which he is weak.” It’s time for the Academy curriculum to focus on people and the ideas of war instead of McNamara-like engineering approaches to problem solving.
Clausewitz distinguishes between two wartime activities, sword making and swordsmanship. The former is the preparation for war, the latter is the conduct of war.
A curriculum emphasizing technical subjects helps prepare cadets for careers in weapon system design, testing, and acquisition; for conducting computer studies and war-gaming models; for doing cost benefit analyses and budget proposals, in short—sword making.
A curriculum stressing military history and theory, human and organizational psychology, sociology, and comparative cultures best prepares graduates to win the nation’s wars, in other words—swordsmanship.
Inadequacies in sword making may lead to peacetime inefficiencies; deficiencies in swordsmanship will result in battlefield defeat.
West Point has served our nation well: its potential is far greater. It is well to bear in mind the words of General Maxwell D. Taylor. As Superintendent of the Military Academy he wrote:
“There is no academic department at West Point which is not excelled in size or scope by some other civilian school. Other colleges offer more advanced scientific and liberal arts courses to special students. . . . West Point succeeds or fails in the future to the degree in which it continues to produce broad men of character, capable of leading other men to victory in combat.”
Producing such men and women is a goal aided by a curriculum emphasizing not math, science, and engineering but history, military theory, and the humanities. Our soldiers deserve nothing less.■
Lt. Col. Zais, a 1969 West Point graduate, taught on the Academy’s faculty in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership. He served as an infantry officer with the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 1st Infantry, and 2nd Infancy Divisions in the US, Korea, and Vietnam. He is a graduate of the Advanced Military Studies Program at Ft. Leavenworth, KS, and holds a PhD from the University of Washington. Most recently he commanded the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry, in Korea before assuming his present position as a National War College Fellow at Ft. McNair in Washington, DC.
Original article in Armed Forces Journal International (pdf)
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