Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Do US military officers need college degrees?

Op Ed piece in today's Wall St Journal.  Probably not, the author says.  Mostly because a 2015 college degree isn't worth much he says.  He goes on to reccomend promoting successful enlisted men to officer rank.
   I did ROTC in college and then put in six years on active duty in USAF.  In those days we had a fair number of "mustang" officers, guys who started out as enlisted men and then went thru OCS and got commissioned.   It was generally accepted that a mustang officer was as good as any and better than most, and we needed more of them.  
  Of course, after achieving a commission, the mustangs mostly started working on a college degree via correspondence courses and night school.  The WSJ writer may have his doubts about the need for a college degree, but the mustang officers had no such doubts.
   The real and effective leadership of the troops came from the non-commissioned officers, the sergeants.  These men were all senior enlisted men, who had decided they liked the service, and after re enlisting, they had the experience gained on their first hitch, they knew their jobs, and knew the mission better than anyone else on base.  As a company grade officer,  I had to win the confidence of the unit NCO's to get any thing done.  This was not unduly difficult, the NCO's were always overjoyed to find a company grade officer who they could trust, and who would go to bat for them in hassles with other base organizations, (supply, base civil engineering, personnel, maintenance control, etc).   Success as a company grade officer was largely based on interpersonal skills.  In my case I drew more heavily upon things learned at Quaker prep school than upon things learned at college.  The benefit of doing college before going in the service was simply that as a 22 year old college graduate I was more effective than I had been as an 18 year old high school graduate. 

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