Let’s Abolish West Point

The service academies are all Potemkin villages, facades with nothing behind them: they don’t teach morals, they don’t make better officers, and they cost you a bundle. Most fundamentally, they combine two incompatible goals: military obedience and the freedom to question offered by knowledge. This is a combustible mixture as students ask why things are as they are and are told sharply that this is the way things are, and are punished if they insist. One day the lid is going to blow.

A confession: I believe in their mission, and so I am a disillusioned former True Believer, as indeed most of the students are. I would give anything if the service academies represented a real alternative to the largely soulless “take one course after another” factories of modern education. Or the only-liberals-allowed prepping for McKinsey.

I wish the academies were the mixture of Athens and Sparta that might solve the problems with today’s academics, the fusion of the Cartesian halves of body and soul. But they aren’t: they’re hollow self-serving grinds where perfectly nice kids suffer.

Still, it’s all paid for by somebody else and the head office assures your parents you’re doing fine. People fawn over you in your spiffy uniform in airports, and thank you “for your service.” Liberals are scared to object for fear of seeming anti-military. And you’re the Ken dolls of the conservatives.

I would disagree. The ability to use the English language is important. Graduating from a service academy with no more than high school English skills is ludicrous. I have know many highly educated engineers that cannot write a readable paragraph. Writing is an import skill for Officers. They are the ones that write evaluations, fit reps, tactics manuals, orders etc. Officers take complex military issues and, through their writing ability, prepare briefs, memo, and dissertations for the Congress, the White House, DOD officials. These in turn become, law, policy, procedures. Writing is second only to speaking in the ability to conduct military affairs. English instruction needs to remain a part of the service academy curriculum.

“Writing is second only to speaking in the ability to conduct military affairs. English instruction needs to remain a part of the service academy curriculum.”

Which they would continue to get in their curriculum through all the written reports required throughout their remaining curricular elements.

The leadership curriculum alone, Law and the Junior Officer and others, would give you the ability to crank this in minus the invariably socialist garbage you have foisted on you by the overgrown hippies in the English Department.

At the USCGA, you’d be surprised at how many draft dodgers went for the USCG instead of the other services, thinking they’d avoid the Vietnam war back when I was going through. Some of them learned the hard way that the officers operating the riverine patrol boats were USCG officers. My Org Mgmt instructor full-out admitted he joined the USCG to dodge the draft.

Academies are ingenious, in that you have incredible, outstanding examples of leadership teaching alongside some of the worst examples of leadership you can imagine. The contrast is important, in that it forces you to decide what kind of officer you want to be.

I doubt seriously if the instructors in leadership, or Military Law would consider checking for spelling, grammar or punctuation as part of their responsibilities. In the 21 years I was a commissioned officer, I had to write almost daily. The number of times that I needed Dif-Q or calc was nil. I really don’t care if an academy graduate can distinguish between Shakespeare or Poe, but they should be able to handle the English language at level commensurate with four years in a University. Picking it up in leadership or mil law courses is not the way to accomplish that objective.

I was an engineering officer for all 21 years. Cheng on 3 ships, ARO on a tender and with the design group at SUPSHIPs
Norfolk Naval Shipyard Still wrote a hell of a lot more than I ever calculated. Have certainly no problem with extensive courses in Military History and Military thought.
But again, the instructors should not be taxed with correcting, diction, spelling and punctuation. Not only calling to a students attention, but being able to demonstrate the correct usage in writing I am not saying the Academies need 4 full years of English. Dump instruction in lit,poetry, etc. But I do believe that dedicated instruction in college level writing and maybe public speaking are necessary.

“...In one of my visits to West Point, I found a library corner where Arnold was recognized as the key behind the American victory at Lexington. ...”

Must have been a very interesting corner indeed.

Benedict Arnold had nothing to do with Lexington.

In April 1775 - when the encounter at Lexington occurred - he was a merchant vessel master and an officer in the Connecticut militia. Word of the clashes at Lexington and Concord spread quickly, and he was seized with such fervor that he marched his outfit to eastern Massachusetts.

The colonials had just begun their siege of the British garrison in Boston. Someone realized heavy guns would be needed; someone else recalled that the British Regulars had some number of them at Ticonderoga, near the southern end of Lake Champlain. Arnold volunteered to take the place, provided someone gave him a commission and a set of orders. The Massachusetts legislature, overbusy with managing the large numbers of colonial troops from other areas who were still flocking to eastern Massachusetts, was only too happy to pass the job to him.

And so off Arnold went with a colonel’s commission in his pocket from the Colony of Massachusetts, no supplies and no men. No one knew, quite, in which organization he was serving

He linked up with Ethan Allen, leader of a rough band of pioneering colonials in the unorganized tracts east of New York, north of Massachusetts and west of New Hampshire.

They made common cause and descended on the thinly-garrisoned stone fort on the west shore of Lake Champlain, arriving before dawn on 10 May 1775. The gate was open, and the sole sentry’s musket misfired, whereon he fled the scene. Allen demanded that the British troops surrender, “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” (Congress, of course, had no idea anyone was demanding anything in their name - events had run away, proceeding far ahead of anyone’s vision, ahead of any semblance of deliberation or control.)

Tradition has it that the sole British officer on the scene met Arnold and Allen before he had a chance to don his breeches. It’s never been proven.

It was just the beginning.

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