It is my pleasure to introduce Jason Clarke, Desert Fox speaker.
He is an officer of the U.S. Army but is currently serving as an exchange officer of the British Army.
Chief of the General Staff. Jason Clarke is not only a practitioner, he's also very much involved in academia.
He has taught at West Point. He has a doctorate in history from Duke University.
And later this year, Harvard University Press will publish his book, and I'm sure he will write more on that after the talks as well.
It's called Preparing for War. For generations of the U.S. Army and the Peace Walk and Change from April 15 through 1974.
Pleasure to have you here. As I speak of faith and I'm grateful.
Thank you so much. So thank you all for coming.
It's a delight to see anybody in the room, particularly having so many distinguished faces who I, Stephen, respect greatly.
Thank you for having me. And also to Rob Johnson, who made the initial offer.
You know what I mean? What a pleasure to be here at Oxford with CCW.
In my role as an academic in the United States, of course, you know,
very conscious of everything that was coming out as far as the scholarship out of here.
But it wasn't until I came to the UK in the role of the practitioner that I started to see, I think,
a difference and one that speaks well to the UK about how much there is the the interplay of, you know, academic inquiry and policy decision.
I don't want to overstate it, but certainly people take that in Whitehall and take notice of what goes on in places like this.
And and it's that spirit that I'm here today as both a drawing upon my historical research as an academic,
but also looking to it's, you know, taking the insights to how that might be applied to to today's problems.
I do have to have and have been get permission for the shameless plug the the publishers evil publishers have since changed the subtitle.
It is now the emergence of the US Army 1852 1917.
It's a little bit more than I would would like, but it should come out hopefully around December timeframe.
The exact publication date will be decided here pretty frequently.
And also I have to have the disclaimer that the views are my own do not the views of the US Department of Defence,
or certainly not the British military and the Ministry of Defence either.
So with that, let's launch straight into it.
At first blush, you might wonder why the US army of the 19th century is even really worth paying to pay attention to in today's climate.
You know, in 1898 it was 27,000 strong.
And so with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that we have currently about, you know,
whether here in the UK, whether 82,000 is enough in the US, whether 450,000 is enough.
It seems like such a bygone time that there might not be anything that we can necessarily learn from that.
And also there is you know,
it is that the military professionalism of the 19th century is easily parodied as being this proudly anti-intellectual bit.
And so there might seem very little as far as even method that we could learn from from that group.
And I would but I would remind everybody that while there is some merit in the the criticisms of that time,
both here, where there's also a certain amount of amateurish,
amateurish ness in the 19th century, the you know, the way that they were able to conquer an empire and the UK and then also a continent for the US.
And so there was something that they were doing right and they were doing
pretty good at it until they weren't and conditions changed and at that point,
you know, in the early 19th century actually, and surprisingly enough in both places about the same time,
1898, 1900, you know, the limitations of that old professionalism were pretty viciously revealed.
So which brings me to my question that I'd like you to keep in mind for today.
So professionalism was good. Conditions changed. No longer.
It was it no longer was quite sufficient.
So our Iraq and Afghanistan leading indicators that our present military professionalism has also come up against the buffers,
and we need some sort of new concept. If so.
And I think the. We should at least entertain the possibility, whether you agree or not.
Then perhaps the process by which the 20th century notion of professionalism supplanted that of the 19th
century might have some lessons for us as we go to a post 20th century form of military professionalism.
First, I should kind of outline what I view as the differences between the 19th and 20th century.
So superficially, the differences in warfare are obvious in 1815.
You have the armies arrayed and linear patterns, linear formations bristling with flintlock muskets and smooth bore cannon of the Napoleonic era,
led by officers adorned with, you know, large hats and gold braid and whatnot.
By 1917, armies look really different. Soldiers were one.
They're armed with magazines, with rifles, still artillery, machine guns, tanks, aeroplanes.
But also, you know, officers and soldiers alike wear these olive drab uniforms that,
while infinitely more practical than all of the bread and whatnot,
also suggest there's a loss of individual individuality within this undifferentiated mass for everybody.
The machine, the big green machine. But that's superficial.
The less obvious, equally stark change was the mode of command went from informal direction that was grounded in the
person personality of the commander to a system of formal control using impersonal staff procedures.
And so if we envision this on the one side, you have, you know,
the general on horseback on the Hill with aides coming in and going frantically with with messages.
Now, in 1917, you still might have the commander touring the front lines and giving direction.
But really, most of where the command and control is back in the rear when you have a, you know, this large staff turning out large,
complex orders based off of procedures that they had learned at staff colleges previously in peace.
So that change is the methodological equivalent of the sartorial change, from gold braid to olive drab.
Undeniably more functional, but an element of personality was sacrificed in the transition and individuals
lost economy as they were subsumed within this larger organisational mass.
But with that more restrictive professionalism came a huge increase in military effectiveness.
The US Army is a great example. 1898 General William Pecos Bill very colourful name.
Their chapter struggled to command and control just three divisions within Cuba,
and those were primarily made up of and a few batteries and those were primarily made up of regulars.
And so there was no no question that this was, you know, citizen soldiers who weren't ready for war.
It was a very well-drilled, well-organised, well equipped force, and he struggled with it.
We fast forward just 20 years later and you look at the ADF and in there and I will be the first to say there are many problems with the ADF,
but the ability of the ADF to take a group that was overwhelmingly made up
of draftees and other recent civilians and move them around the battlefield.
When you compare it to the struggle with just three divisions in Cuba, I mean, it's it's incredible shift.
And so the development that underpinned that change was not technological,
although certainly there was enabling, you know, technologies that went into that as well.
But it was conceptual. And so the old professional professionalism was built upon the belief that military competence was a product of character,
common sense and natural aptitude. These innate qualities might be refined through experience or study, certainly,
but they were largely beyond the ability of the institution to manufacture.
There was consequently little effort to train officers anything but technical skills like engineering and gunnery.
And so the result was it was a guild like conception of professionalism that granted all members some degree of
deference and left those at the middle or higher ranks largely unfettered in how they practised their trade.
The new professionalism, by contrast,
was built upon the premise that the military profession was a body of expert knowledge that could be codified, imparted and regulated.
Umpired field training, professional education, tactical doctrine.
Implicit to all of these activities that we just take for granted with the modern military
is that the army can and indeed must shape the manner in which officers think and act.
In hindsight, I mean, the benefits of all these things were so clear that we might think that it was the product of design,
but the actual process was incremental, organic and resisted by many officers.
Officers of 1815 were steeped in a romantic view of warfare and a overwrought sense of individualism.
And they would have found the notion that the institution could manufacture generals or commanders would be misguided and offensive,
like blacksmiths and telephone switch operators.
You know, the officers of the 19th century did not want to give up cherished, cherished ways of organising themselves and thinking about themselves.
But at some point, we get to this point where the late officers of the Industrial Age and the
progressive era in America and being perhaps more accustomed to mechanical metaphor,
they were more inclined to think of themselves as components within a larger apparatus.
So let me kind of put a finer point on that by giving it some some substance and personality.
So it's the difference between Winfield Scott, you know, the hero of 1812 and Mexican war, and George C Marshall, who,
while we primarily think of him as his role to duty as chief of staff, was one of the star staff officers who made this big ADF machine go.
And actually that was the beginning of his his rise. Well, I suppose again a little bit earlier,
but still made his name and their useful contrast because both were exceptionally capable people and both were committed to the profession.
So it wasn't that there was a lack of seriousness or weren't they stupid back then?
These are both highly credible people, but the organisations they're a part of are so vastly different in what they can achieve.
So get to the question of how do we get to Denmark? So the question today is how do we how do you go from Scott to Marshall?
So much of the explanation for the difference between Scott and Marshall really has nothing to do with the military at all.
To draw one more bit of contrast, in 1815, the United States was a.
Agrarian candle lit, horse drawn and centred upon the eastern eastern eastern seaboard excuse me.
In 1918 there was industrial electric powered, engine driven and spanned a continent and controlled bits elsewhere as well.
And so in that way I'll tease this out a little bit later on,
been that difference is where we start seeing the screen Marshall and Scott because they're both products of those two bits of America.
So something to think about. Uh, what, how would we use, what adjectives would be used for America today?
And are they so different than those adjectives of 1917 that is going to create an entirely new kind of officer.
So. And just as the larger world continues to disprove the end of history thesis, military history is not done either and continues to march on.
And so at the risk of seeming to curry favour with my hosts,
I think that one of the most sensible subject statements on the subject comes from Rob Johnson,
who in 2014 wrote The character of war and the future will change as frequently as it has in the past.
But there will be many striking continuities.
So for a host of reasons, military's are quite good at continuity, and sometimes they can actually be pretty good a change, too.
But the degree to which they are successful in rationalising those two elements,
continuity and change is often determined by what is precipitating that change.
And so let's just do a brief look at the current literature.
So we have to contend with Samuel Huntington and the soldier in the state.
First, if you're talking about military change.
So he's actually interesting because he's basically drawing upon the same source material that I am the army of the 19th century.
And his argument was that military professionalism flourished because it was unhindered by the corrosive effects of civilian liberalism.
Now, since then, 1957 is when sort of state came out of basically all of his historical arguments have been,
you know, the props have been knocked out one by one about all of his characterisations, about the 19th century army.
But, I mean, he is still he's very influential in his overall argument.
But I would note that my own work actually finds the exact opposite.
So it's not simply that he's a little bit wrong about saying that the Army was more geographically isolated than it was.
But I argue that as professionalism, at least in the way that he defined it, of institutions like staff colleges and the general staff,
that actually the change happened later and it was because these ideas were percolating in from society rather
than they were driven by some sort of military functional imperative to fast forward with ideas to more standard,
which we don't get to propose in the 1984, who argue that military change is driven by outsiders.
And so the politicians within the title of this talk that militaries are so resistant to change,
you have to have some sort of outside influence comes in, perhaps aided by some mavericks internal to the military.
And they impose change based off of a neorealist sort of impetus of some strategic threat arises a couple of years later.
Stephen Peter Rose challenged that. He noted that it's really hard for an outsider to make the military change against its will.
So he spoke about generals and usually some sort of general has both a vision and then also has the organisational bureaucratic war
fighting skills in order to create a certain critical mass of younger officers with good career paths that can then take forward this,
this vision instituted across the organisation.
And he said, Yeah, okay, maybe this all could be in response to some new strategic threat that arises,
but it also might simply be driven by, you know, internal competition for resources or even for prestige amongst different arms.
Substance subsequent scholarship has modified these contending views, some at summarising some of this work very nicely.
Theo Farrell and Terry Tarif note that cultural, political and technological factors also modify the course of change.
And importantly, they also note that an external shock might be what drives change.
And so, in summary,
the current scholarship and military adaptation offers three broad causes for change external direction that overcomes military conservatism,
internal direction likely emanating from some visionary, general or admiral,
or an institutional reaction to an external shock such as defeat or new technology.
And so I refer to these by the somewhat simplified shorthand of politicians, generals and events.
And these explanations do very well when we're trying to explain some discrete instance of change.
You know, why was this field manual revised in such a way?
Or why did we reorganise the military in relation to this new technology that was coming in, all of those sorts of things?
So it's not that there's no merit in those. Such bounded events are usually a combination of those three factors,
but sometimes the overall magnitude of the change is greater than the sum of such small increments.
And I think the case of Arthur Wagner. Neatly illustrates this point.
So Wagner was commissioned in 1875 at a West Point in 1890.
He was one of our innovators in military education.
And so he essentially kind of created the foundation for later State College out of a
school that was really just meant to teach lieutenants to be able to mount a proper guard.
He also was hailed as the master of manoeuvres in the early 20th century.
And so he was one who really, as we were trying to take European style grand manoeuvres,
introduce large scale, realistic field training, and very importantly with the didactic element.
And so at the end of it, an umpire was going to say, General, you did this right or you did that wrong.
And so that learning element, as opposed to what they had before, which was just everybody going out and having a good time firing off blanks.
And also, he was the foremost tactical theoretician of the age.
And his books were were kind of man toward reading.
So in 1904, he becomes essentially the head of training and education and doctrine within the general staff.
And so everybody expected that Wagner coming into this new position,
general staff had just been created the year before, would make his ideas, would put him into regulations.
And then this was his chance to make his his ideas law.
But he insisted that this would be improper because for him, when his ideas were in a textbook,
they weren't binding and somebody could disagree with them.
Now, he thought his ideas were right, but he wanted the regional commander, the colonel,
to be able to do what he wanted to do unbidden by this overweening hand of the central doctrine and indoctrination or linked towards.
But it still is striking that the individual most responsible for creating the tools of indoctrination schools you know, theory, field manoeuvres.
He shrink from the logical implication, logical ends of his own work and say, no, no, no, you got to yell out, keep their autonomy alive.
So for him, these tools were just means of crafting a better version of the old profession, not create created entirely new one.
Just a few years later that had been turned on its head.
The he was since died and in 1910 the president of the Army War College explicitly rejected the individualism of the 19th century.
The main object of the school, he said, was, quote, to develop a safe school,
of safe leadership for officers and not to encourage unusual and extraordinary methods.
Uniformity of thought, uniformity of procedure in solving problems of war are of the utmost importance.
And we can safely leave the development of genius to chance. Unquote.
So in other words, the army would make individuals into the kinds of army kinds of officers and commanders that it wanted.
Then the American experience would have one solidified this view, because for the first time in U.S. military history,
the War Department was given control over the training and commissioning of all of the citizen soldiers coming in.
And so they were given the keys and they felt like they had stamped and they didn't think they'd done a great job.
There's things they want to do differently in hindsight, but they had created this mass produced army.
So the officer corps started thinking of itself in terms of making people into the kinds of commanders they wanted.
And so in the 1923 lecture at the Army War College, then Colonel George C Marshall told the assembled members of the general staff that they had,
quote, the power and the duty to indoctrinate the army.
So he fully embraced the this new idea that the institution could make a
commander a thought that would have offended his predecessors not long before.
So, you know, this is not politicians or generals or events.
There's something a little bit deeper that is going on there that is creating this difference in outlook.
And it really what had happened was generational changes had accumulated with each different viewpoint on what it is to prepare for war,
which is how I define a generation.
Essentially what defines a professional generation as it is how it conceives of war, and therefore what it concludes, how it should prepare for it.
And as they have different notions of that, that creates a slightly different aperture for what the institution can do.
But simply observing that generation's think differently doesn't really help us that much, and it really isn't all that profound.
But one thing we should zero in on is, is if you look at Prussia at the same time as Winfield Scott,
so the the change that is exemplar is embodied as Marshall had kind of in a way had come about in Prussia at the same time as Scott.
So there wasn't any technological barrier to it. And typically,
most American military historians would say that what happened was that it was
civilian ideological hostility to a standing army that kept everybody back.
And certainly there was going to be large reorganisations.
And also they weren't going to be able to undertake anything that was resource intensive in time of peace because they really had no money.
But there's still a whole lot. And if you look at, you know, the example of Wagner,
that was a deliberate choice not to go down the road of standardisation, of military professionalism.
So there was a lot that though simply Dr. Ford didn't want to do until for some reason they certainly wanted to in the early 20th century.
So what explains that sort of give some think some structure to our thinking about generational change?
I propose that we we think of this that professional generations are the products of three different categories of influence.
The first of these categories is made up of all the institutional mechanisms that deliberately shape the profession.
West Point Military Schools. Most are obvious examples, but it also includes policies that govern the selection of officers, systems of promotion,
methods of organising and giving preference to certain functional specialities over the others,
the way that the institution can consciously craft itself into a certain way.
The second category is are all those elements of military service that shape
perceptions that are outside of the ability of the institution to control.
So this a company that encompasses everything from informal norms within subunits,
like with that regimental system to the simple lived experience, you know what officers actually see in peace and war.
These indirect influences that can.
Are almost always more important in determining the character of the profession than the formal inputs, simply by sheer weight of numbers.
Four years at West Point, early in the career versus for decades in a certain regiment or, you know, the regulations say one thing.
But yet, you know, you look at the Civil War and four years of warfare taught you this other thing, whatever the drill regulations say.
And so all of those lived experiences,
although you also could just be simple the effect of having incredibly slow promotion throughout most 19th century.
Usually it took about 30 years of service before you start getting to be a major.
And so those things have impacts. The third category is essentially everything else.
And so everything that is not strictly military.
So it's the values, concepts and outlooks inherited from civilian society which also outweighs the formal inputs.
As with like West Point as example, people have been socialised for a good 18 to 22 years before they even arrive at the gates of West Point.
And then society continues to act upon them even after they're commissioned,
which is why, you know, officer quarters are recognisably members of their own society.
They have attitudes about things. But it's not just well, if that's the civilian attitude.
And I feel military attitudes, civilian attitudes of class can influence the way that officers and enlisted interact.
Racial attitudes can certainly have a huge impact on operational decisions when operating in foreign countries.
And then also a notion, a nation's sense of where it is in the world can also influence questions of strategy.
So when we have all three of these factors combined, there's this they create the social and military milieu you that forms a generation.
And I'm not saying that generations are monolithic. In fact, and this is something that I've taken very much from from Brian Lin's work.
You know, disagreement has been the norm. And so you can almost define a generation as much by the points of disagreement as its points of consensus.
And so, as an example, for those of you who might know, you know, John Nagl, you know,
the famous coined minister, John Gentille, the famous, I guess anti coined minister.
Historians in the future will look back at that as being defining.
You can't take that argument between those two,
whatever side you come down on and transplanted into the 1930s isolationist America just it doesn't make sense.
And so what you choose to fight about really kind of defines a generation.
But so the context doesn't dictate a single set of views, but it does provide a common pool of ideas,
values and experience that bound the diversity that you can have.
So as historian Daniel T Rogers notes, because most individuals are users rather than shapers of ideas,
our thoughts and actions are defined by the constellation of life, accessible ways of looking at society.
Each generation of army officers was similarly defined by its own particular constellation of ideas
that provided the raw material from which its members assembled their own method of preparing for war.
When the compass in you changed, so did the outlook of the officers, and a new generation was born.
And so that helps explain how we got from Scott to Marshall.
But as puzzlement and look at some of the conceptual implications for this trinity.
So I think there are three critical, critical lessons that we should draw from this. And to do this,
I'll draw from the wonderful Christopher Bartlett I cite as he goes into explaining
the positive trinity and he has you know the of the magnetic are know going in
between you know three different other magnetic poles and it kind of just swings around
crazily as the different forces of those three magnetic influences play upon it.
So using that image, the first implication is that efforts to change the profession will always yield unexpected results.
So let's imagine we have the magnetic arm. We've taken it back to that institutional apex that I draw on.
And so there's going to be a firm hand that's going to say, we're going to reform the military and it sends that arm along a path.
Now, even though it's a straight and true force acting upon it, as soon as it goes out, it's going to start deviating into our efforts.
That reform are always going to change because on one side you're going to
have military experiences are going to work against the institutional force.
That's because of maybe just old habits of mind and the way that the that the officer
corps thinks of that it has to do things or inter-service rivalry or whatever it is.
But also culture, cultural notions of fairness, of propriety, of prestige.
All of those will also act upon it. So that initial course of reform is going to sway around a little bit.
And so we should expect that formal efforts to alter the profession will deviate from the intended course.
There's a corollary, and that takes us to the the second application.
This is my favourite. Institutional efforts to remain the same are also destined to fail for the exact same reasons.
So let's use the thought experiment.
So let's imagine the Chief of Staff of the US Army in 2040 he or she is currently serving.
Well, let's imagine that General Mark Milley, the current chief of staff, had been able to say,
I want to produce somebody just like me to be the chief of staff in 2040.
And so we had frozen all of our institutional inputs in place.
There is no change to our our commissioning sources, no changes to our staff, college, our war colleges.
All the training systems have been the same, accounting for a difference of personality, of course.
Would we have the same output in 2040? Of course not. You know, Milley was commissioned in only check my notes.
Early 1980s, Cold War Army served in a motorised division in the 1980s to play the deployed to Haiti as a brigade operations officer in 1994,
commanded brigades in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq,
and then returned to Afghanistan as both a brigadier general and then again as lieutenant general.
So the unknown future chief of staff is obviously hypothetical, but they're real.
We just don't know who it is. Was commissioned roughly around 2005.
So that person has likely had multiple deployments as a company grade officer to either Iraq or Afghanistan or both.
But even while they served in the same campaigns as General Milley,
he was a brigade commander with over two decades of commissioned service service that he's filtering his inputs from.
That was probably their first operational deployment, maybe as platoon leader in Iraq during the surge.
Quite a different view.
And then maybe in Afghanistan as a company commander and the future chief of staff is probably just promoted or soon to be to promote
to major still has many formative experiences to come in the years ahead then also being a millennial as opposed to a baby boomer,
you know, there's all sorts of very different inputs and [INAUDIBLE] be a very different person even if we wanted to freeze the institution in place.
The third implication is that while the institution can either command nor resist change, it can aid it by direct,
redirecting the forces of experience and culture into what it views as positive outcomes that in fact, you know, increase military effectiveness.
And I think a good example of this. Although as somebody who's written pretty persuasively about the subject,
the root reforms of the early 20th century, so 1899 to 1903, they didn't create George C Marshall.
I think he probably would have had the same sort of systems orientated thinking no matter what,
because that was just pervasive in Progressive Era America.
But he was certainly much, much better for it, for having gone to Leavenworth and served there for four years and gone through all these big,
large training camp camps that allowed him the opportunity to be a staff officer directing thousands,
which were the U.S. Army at the time, was a big number, and it helped hone his experiences.
And so this combination of the institutional aspect and the cultural aspect working so
powerfully in combination was what helped make things work out as well as they did.
I'll leave you to, to judge how good the ADF did.
And this is this isn't surprising because Root was the epitome of the progressive era corporate New York lawyer,
good friends with Theodore Roosevelt, one of the leading members in the professionalisation of the legal profession.
He was a member of the New York Bar. I mean, he he had the zeitgeist.
And so what he was doing was taking the institution the way that society was taking it anyway.
So with those three insights in mind, what are the exact implications for today?
So I think first we should talk about what the current generations are.
And as we do so, to remain tentatively, at least within my area of military expertise,
such as it is, I'll talk about only the British, the US Army that I feel that British culture,
army, organisation and recent military experiences are similar enough that much of what is to follow would also apply to Her Majesty's forces.
But there are some very interesting potential differences the impact of the regimental system, the legacy of Northern.
Ireland and the different demographics from which the officer corps are drawn from just to be some of the most obvious ones.
And maybe that's that's what we can discuss in questions. I also should say I'm going to confine this to the officer corps in the 19th century.
Certainly, the military profession was synonymous with the officer corps. Today you can make an argument against it.
Officially, the US Army includes the enlisted and army civilians as members of the army profession.
Perhaps they are professionals, but their systems of socialisation are so different that you can't speak in any
meaningful way of them as being part of the same boat as the officer corps.
So I will will move my discussion to that. So three generations today.
The first is, well, I'll call it the super power generation OC commissioned in the mid 1980s to earlier.
So right now these are senior brigadiers and then two stars and higher.
They came into the army that was configured postured for the Cold War.
Their operational experiences were Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, the Balkans, and also their baby boomers.
The long war generation is the second, and this encompasses a very large span, all the way from brigadier to captain.
The upper boundary is drawn. And so those commissioned in the late 1980s.
Which difference differentiates those who experienced Iraq and Afghanistan at the company or battalion level,
or as more junior staff officers in the higher staffs from the super power generation,
which would have commanded nothing lower than the brigade level and provided the staff,
directors or division chiefs of the large operational and strategic theatre headquarters.
So that's the long war generation was more at the whip end of events in Iraq and Afghanistan
and also entered those conflicts with little or no previous experience of combat experience.
Now I've set the lower boundary somewhere around the early part of this decade,
so the youngest members of this group are still very much in their formative period of their careers in the history of Iraq,
and Afghanistan is still being written. So the boundary I reserve the right to shift it at some later time.
And this might be just because Iraq and Afghanistan continue to drag up,
but also could be could shift earlier if, say, next year, there's some seismic event that,
as we look at it, you know, is so much more influential within their cohort because now there's only,
you know, the numbers in Afghanistan and in Iraq are much smaller.
And so there could be something that's just around the corner that will have
a huge influence upon this group when you look back at it retrospectively.
And so I don't have any hard and fast rules as far as the generation is going.
It's really about the experiences and there's still some game to be played.
And then culturally, you know, Gen Xers and maybe some millennials, depending upon how you draw those boundaries.
So that brings us to the most intriguing element, I think, which is what I'll call the nascent generation.
And so I present lieutenants, cadets, but many are still out there, still in school.
And so what influences will shape the professional worldview of this group?
They'll be our colonels and generals in the 2013 and 2014 because really that is, you know.
S.G. Yes. That's that's who he's trying to form right now, that that far out group in terms of institutions,
despite a chorus of outside voices calling for radical change to officer education personnel systems,
there are no indications that the military is going to change anytime soon.
So we have a socialisation system with a school system that was put in place
after World War Two that goes from a commissioning source at West Point or,
you know, a civilian university, ROTC up through war colleges and a couple of general officers courses.
But those are actually fairly light touches. And so every few years, there's a sense that we have to we have to kind of regrouping,
instil some knowledge into these officers so they can proceed to the next level.
Evaluation forms, I mean, have changed quite dramatically in the actual form,
but the actual substance of how officers are evaluated has changed very little.
And very just just recently the US Army rejected the notion of 360 degree evaluations as being too disruptive,
and then also the system obsessions, sessions, promotions and career development, which is based upon the pre-World War two upper out system,
interestingly introduced by Marshall, has weathered a determined assault by Undersecretary of Defence for Personnel and Readiness,
Brad Carson, who initially at least had the support of SecDef Ash Carter.
But despite that. Seemingly overwhelming high level support for the initially much touted force of the future initiative.
The service chiefs were reportedly successful in fending off most of the proposals,
which has been considered a disappointing result for the reformers. And in light of such a defeat.
I'll be interesting to see when somebody's going to try to pick that country up again.
Might be quite a while before they wants to make huge changes to the personnel system.
So in some institutions are probably going to remain fairly much like they are now, pending some out of the blue reformer.
But then we still have the military experiences and the culture inputs.
So let's explore the matter of experience first. Now, obviously, this is still history to be written, but as a thought experiment,
let's suppose that there will be no all consuming war in the next two decades.
Instead, there'll be many.
I'm not saying there'll be peace, but many different, smaller operational uses of the army, disaster relief at home, building partner capacity,
some more challenging and dangerous train and advise efforts that look a whole lot like combat to people on the ground.
And then some things that also are undoubtedly combat, but only in small scale crises.
And so they don't impact the whole institution. Now, for historians, you know, in the few, in the future,
they might pass over these because they only a fraction impact a small fraction of the military.
But for the people who are involved in those kinds of events, that is a very significant event and influences the way they think.
But so some members of the nascent generation would have multiple of those experiences, some maybe one or two, some might have nothing at all.
I would just be peacetime training and garrison routine. And so you'd have this generation with a lot of very disparate, diverse experiences.
And so, uh, and then also there's functional differences as well.
Infantryman, Aviator, Logistician, also all have different views of the world.
So I think that they'd be far less cohesive in terms of their experience in the long war generation,
which and I don't want to say that there was a, you know, unified experience of Iraq and Afghanistan.
I mean, just in Mosul, if you were there 23 versus 26 versus 2010, those are very different sorts of experiences.
Much less Baghdad, much less Kandahar. But still, the long war generation is a little bit more bounded than the hypothetical nascent generation.
Now, the other aspect of that is what what might effect culture might have on the nascent generation.
So all the officers who will be commissioned in this decade in the next are already alive.
So we at least know some of the cultural inputs that they, you know, will have influence, but still they have long lives ahead of them.
And so there's there's much to be said, as much that it hasn't been seen yet either.
But let's imagine two different paths. One, a little bit more kind of cultural continuity, one of change.
Now, I submit that since the upheaval of the 1960s, cultural continuity has kind of been has been the the norm.
So the baby boomers flow into the Gen-Xers, flowing to the Millennials, or generation wise, whatever you want to call them.
And so if this continues, then the military result might be something very much like the post-Civil War generation, which had something very similar.
They also went through West Point that looked a lot like everything that had existed since 1820s, and so they had the same professional socialisation.
They also served in the shadow of this great conflict, in their case, the Civil War, but lacked a unifying experience of their own time.
And so going back to Arthur Wagner, the innovator who I mentioned, that was his experience.
And culturally there was a lot of continuity with the 19th century America as well.
Certainly it wasn't static, but, you know,
there was a bit that with the individual was was very strong and and can be seen as a link in between the different generations.
So if that's the case for the nascent generation, they'll be different than the long war generation, the superpower generations.
But for the most part,
they will probably be content with the same understanding of their professionalism and the way that they react with the institution.
What happens if cultural change predominates?
And I think this notion is plausible.
So if we look at the extraordinary political turmoil within and among the political parties in both the U.S. and the UK,
the dislocation of economic sectors and the potentially unsustainable.
Distribution of wealth,
the dissatisfaction with social structures manifested in such quite different forms as Black Lives Matter and nativist militias.
All of this occurring within a technological environment that allows us to organise politically,
economically and socially in different ways than we were able to do before.
I can't possibly hope to unpick all of that, but I only just raised those points to observe that when political,
economic and social organisations are all undergoing a simultaneous and significant change,
it seems like that will have a significant impact on culture. That will, in turn inevitably manifest itself in the military.
And so that kind of shift would be what we saw in moving from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era right around the turn of the century.
And that was the same change that resulted in the difference between Scott and Marshall.
So what do we what do we make all of this for the super power generation?
You know, they're there past the point of standardised career progressions and everything like that.
And but to their credit, they realise that they're different and that the junior officers and soldiers of today benefit.
Invariably they're going to be some misunderstandings in how they approach it, even though they're trying to do so in good faith.
I remember a couple of years ago in the Pentagon I was working on a project were
led by super power generation general officers who were talking about say,
how do we transition from Afghanistan to a more generalised, you know, threat?
Now, these are all people who have been brigade commanders or battalion commanders in the 1990s.
And so they talked about using Ree as a prefix. They wanted to restore, you know, the lost art of garrison leadership.
They wanted to regain fundamentals. And with little success,
the younger officers kept on trying to warn them off this because the post-9-11 generation had this horrible image in their mind of the Army,
the 1990s, as an endless round of small minded,
pointless tasks, you know, painting rocks and whatnot,
that just and so that the differences in perspective led to a lot of miscommunication and a lot of pushback within the Air Force.
And the lesson to be drawn from this is that it's always a fraught situation when one party is referring
to what they experienced and what was real for them versus what another party is really an abstraction.
And then so you have to wonder what's going to be the difference in the way that the long
war generation sees the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan versus the nascent generation,
which draws their understanding of it from a combination of youthful impressions, history, books, war stories, and perhaps The Hurt Locker.
So The Long War Generation, my research has suggested that wartime generations generally are not very good at adaptation.
They tend to adapt very poorly. And it's not simply that generals want to refight the last war as they've been accused of doing.
Instead, it's because that is that experience is the shared.
It's it's the war is the lingua franca for professional discourse.
Everybody can go back to it. And so even though we might have our own ideas about what we should have done differently,
that same set of shared experiences is the medium through which all discussion about what the profession should be follows.
So there's a shared understanding difficulty. But also, I mean, there's, you know, war is visceral and so it's also within individuals.
And the example I used from the scholarship is all of these young officers who were at Fort Leavenworth in the early part of the century,
most of them had seen combat in the Philippines where the Filipinos were.
It's embarrassing to say this defensively. Who's written the book on the the war?
But, you know, the Filipinos preferred to have trenches.
They would fire off a few volleys. As soon as the Americans start counterattacking, they would go right away because the weapons were very good.
They were very well led. And also they didn't need to be kind of achieve their purpose.
And so American officers learned that infringements are not effective, firepower is not effective.
Now, if you had asked any of them explicitly, can you take that those lessons and apply them over to German Grenadiers?
They said, of course not. They call it savage warfare.
You can't take savage warfare, but as they are at Fort Leavenworth in the staff college and they're studying German textbooks,
talking about, you know, basically a Franco-German war.
Those deeply held beliefs were manifested in the way that they they saw the effectiveness of infantry and firepower.
Now, of course, the doctrine of the offensive was very prevalent in Europe as well.
So it's not just the Philippines,
but what was uniquely American was the hubris from 1914 to 1917 that caused no revision of doctrine in the entire period.
Verdun and Somme made no impression.
So when the first doughboys went over the top in May 1918,
the Infantry Tactical Manual still said that weapon, that machine guns, were weapons of emergency only.
And that rifle. Fire was more important than artillery.
So could the long war generation similarly be prisoners rather than beneficiaries of our experience.
We will see, but I think we need to maintain some humility in how we go about this so that the nation for a generation.
Finally wrapping up here, if they do not experience an all consuming conflict, I certainly hope they don't.
Then maybe they're like the post-Civil War generation,
in which case we should probably try to use systems of training and education to give them a holistic view.
So rather than sniping and saying, Well, that's not the real army over there, you know, I'm an infantryman, you know.
You know, focussed on like fights and there is a tanker focussed on heavy warfare.
That's not the real fight. We need to create a more of a sense of we rather than parochial and provincial us in them.
Also very wide ranging education and wide ranging training rather than having
everybody go through the exact same scenario at the National Training Centre.
It probably doesn't help expand our horizons.
But then the other thing will be what happens if they are just so far different that they really are a different sort of culture,
much like Marshall was from from Wagner. They're going to be huge.
Just simple, you know, inter-generational tensions that arise from that.
But for more substantive things, a recent Army War College study noted the tendency of general officers to use intuition,
which is exactly the wrong way of going about this. In the US Army,
we very recently had a massive problem where a well-meaning sergeant major who was put in
charge of reforming the uniform in appearance regulations said You can't have tattoos,
it's on military, which if you actually look back at history in tattooed warrior societies,
probably it's the other way around that, you know, the attitude is military.
But this had very real consequences because we wrote off a massive part of an already shrinking recruiting base.
So we need to make sure that we use evidence to guard against our biases and make decisions.
But also,
we should follow the advice of the chief of the air staff who said It is absolutely imperative that I do not build an Air Force for a 56 year old man.
It is there, the young airmen of today's Air Force, not martial.
But I think that the the final point that I'll make and this is the one that it's very hard for me to get my mind wrapped around.
But the difference between 19th century, the 20th century,
was this conception of the individual and organisation and how they they interacted with it.
As we see the gig economy where people tend to be moving around and expertise is kind of commoditized and corporations
are making very hard and hard news decisions about what sort of expertise we keep within the organisation.
And then using in-sourcing outsourcing, you know, freelance labour people are viewing the way that they react with their employer,
which is in some ways a way to deal with their role in society very differently.
And expertise is viewed differently and we've already started seeing this a little bit within
the military of bringing in people from the outside to advise us on corporate type of things,
acquisitions, management of the estate, all of this.
But if you follow that to its logical conclusion, and then the next step then is to bring them in not as lieutenants but at the mid-grade model entry.
And both armies are considering that very seriously. Well, if you are, you know, a great H.R. expert,
we'll just bring you in and we'll have you running out for us and we'll make you
a major write off or maybe a general as those sorts of practices go right now.
Just like Wagner said, I don't I only want to go this far. I don't want to go any further.
We say, well, okay, but repeat the military functions are going to be sacrosanct and we're not going to get into that.
But if you follow the logic of the whole force approach that we think is so important,
if we're in a stabilisation operation that is 90% governance and economics and all these other sorts of things, like 10% kinetic,
what's to say that we don't have a diplomat or development expert or maybe even
a CEO who seems to want to get things done coming in as a commander that would,
you know, make a lot of heads explode in the officers mess.
But there is a certain logic to it. And people view the, you know, expertise as being portable and being used for specific tasks.
And they're just not used to these top up structures.
When you go to work for TV and you're, you know, in the give way and you go up through the ranks,
then maybe that won't seem as far fetched as it does to me being a product of my own generation.
So with that, I would say, would all that come to pass?
And if it does, nothing says that the cultural change is good for military effectiveness.
It could be negative, but I make no firm predictions on either count.
Well, whatever does come will be driven by larger forces and not the needs and certainly not the wishes of the military.
I am confident, however, that at some point in the future society will undergo some change.
That will make my own notions of military professionalism seem quaint and antiquated.
Thank you.