Redefining the Modern Military by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2018-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

An Educated Military

Professional Education and the Profession of Arms

Simon Anglim

Introduction

Education is vital to twenty-first-century professional militaries, and likely to become more so, given the challenges they face.1 Education is related to but different from training; we must clarify this difference before we can continue: Training is, of course, the basis of any armed force: to fulfill their role, forces must shape the skills and attitudes of their members, especially recruits but also those in mid-career, with clearly defined aims and immediate, practical application. For instance, training must convert recruits who cannot fire rifles, drive tanks, or fly aircraft into trained personnel who can do these things with set minimum levels of proficiency. Likewise, officer training aims at instilling minimum levels of competence. At the tactical level, platoon and company commanders are trained to fight and to lead soldiers under fire; at the operational level, staff officers are trained to plan procedures and manage logistics, among other things. Training, therefore, is fundamental, clear-cut, and skills based.

A professional military, however, needs programs of personal development in areas beyond basic training requirements: it must instill knowledge, intellectual skills, and, most important, the ability for members to think about the world and the military’s place in it in an independent, informed, and logical manner. Personal development at this level goes beyond training and is more accurately referred to as education. Of course, in the military as in most environments, training and education overlap: training courses for potential officers at West Point or Sandhurst, or courses for middle-ranking officers at staff colleges, contain a strong element of education, while the British Army’s former education for promotion courses for senior NCOs included identifiable training, albeit in fields that require some application of intellect, such as management and administration.

Whereas training aims at building, maintaining, and improving work-related skills, and training in the military also aims at preparing personnel physically and psychologically for combat, education instills knowledge. Not just knowledge for its own sake, either—not just filling a student’s brain with facts or figures but expanding her understanding of the world in hope of steering her decision-making along routes that achieve more good than harm for herself and others. Thus, most professions have a degree of ethical education as part of their induction process, the aim being to enable people to think about why they do things beyond just how they do them, and how and why their actions might impact others.

Samuel Huntington can be disputed on many things, but he was right in arguing that a key component of any profession is awareness that it is, in fact, a profession, a group with specialist knowledge differentiating it from others, and that this specialization gives members status within society, balanced by a duty of service to that society. Professionals should never forget that their relationship with society is subject to circumstances of history, politics, culture, and economics, meaning in turn that technical expertise and specialist education must combine with a degree of liberal and ethical education, so that professionals understand their place in the world and how their actions might affect it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.