Air University Review, May-June 1976

From the outset of our careers, most of us will remember the "whole man" concept as an ideal established for us--and an impossible ideal at that! To meet that standard, it seemed, one would have to spend so much time in the gymnasium and the library as to guarantee that he would never make major. Indeed, it is an ideal toward which we all strive but which few have really approached.

One of the aspects of this ideal was that the officer should develop his intellect in a wide variety of disciplines. Thus, every lieutenant was to have established a professional reading program that would keep him current in world politics, the latest strategic thinking, the technology of his own and sister services, management of resources, and many other areas. As often happens, the good intentions of most of us were enough to pave the road to hell, and the press of events often restricted us to little more than a cursory look at a weekly news magazine. Still, the ideal certainly is worthwhile, and even though none of us can hope to assimilate all the professional material available we should try to choose the best and learn as much from it as we can. This article will take a brief look at what is available in military periodicals and review at greater length one of the recent additions to the field: Armed Forces and Society.

To extol the virtues of the Air University Review here would be much like preaching the merits of church attendance to the congregation. Although the Review may be regarded as a company publication by many, its present editorial policy is directed toward offering more controversial articles, and the journal enjoys an increasing degree of academic freedom. For all of that, the Review is a government publication, its scope is fairly broad, but it does not often deal with the affairs of other services and seldom draws work from authors of other nations. While occasionally its articles are written by top scholars like professors Robert Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Theodore Ropp, etc., it is nevertheless difficult to compete with the academic journals for the work of many of the leading intellectuals who do not have a special interest in the military.

Other periodicals specifically oriented toward Air Force affairs include Airman, Air Force Magazine, and Aerospace Historian. Airman, like the Review, is a government publication, but its function is more to inform than to stimulate professional thought. Air Force is a private publication and accepts advertising. Since its goal is to promote preparedness through aerospace power, and since the interests of its advertisers inevitably have an effect, the range of articles found in it is defined by those parameters. Nevertheless, many of the pieces are highly informative and intensely interesting. The Aerospace Historian is published by the Air Force Historical Foundation, a private organization though most of its members are connected with the Air Force. Edited by Dr. Robin Higham, it has been devoted to the preservation of the air heritage for a couple of decades now. Of course, there are also numerous specialized periodicals published by the major air commands and several technical publications as well. For those needing immediate currency in the technical aspects of the profession, Aviation Week and Space Technology is probably one of the most reliable sources available--though it, like all other commercial works, is colored by the interests of its advertisers and by the technical backgrounds of its editorial staff. Finally, Strategic Review, which was examined at length in our November--December 1973 issue, is important as a source covering the thinking of a distinguished group of senior officers and various foreign and domestic scholars. An older British work, Survival, covers much the same strategic and political ground from another viewpoint.

It is not at all difficult for the Air Force officer to remain abreast of the latest developments in our sister services. The approximate Army equivalent to the Air University Review comes in two separate publications: Parameters, of the Army War College, and Military Review, the professional journal of the Army from its Command and General Staff College. Both are highly reputable works aimed at slightly different audiences. The busy Air Force officer interested in a quick survey of the Army scene would doubtless find Military Review the more useful. It is a monthly journal in English, Spanish, and Portuguese and carries articles on a wide variety of topics. If one's interest is a more leisurely study of strategic and political thinking, then Parameters should not be overlooked. The ground forces' rough equivalent to Aerospace Historian is Military Affairs. It has been published by the American Military Institute since 1933. Robin Higham is also the editor of this work, and it is more of a military history journal than one devoted purely to the past of the Army.

The Naval War College, our senior professional military education (PME) school, sponsors a journal called Naval War College Review. It is similar to, though smaller than, Air University Review. One of the oldest and most prestigious of all the military periodicals is the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, which has just completed its 101st volume. It is a private publication partially supported by an impressive array of advertisers. Like Air Force, it is dedicated to the promotion of national security through preparedness-- but naval preparedness. Like Air Force, consequently, its material is tinted by the purpose of the work and the interests of its advertisers. The Proceedings is worthy of the attention of the Air Force officer who wishes to keep up with the technical and strategic thinking of his Navy counterparts. The Marine Corps Gazette is similar in support and purpose to Proceedings and Air Force.

The one thing that all these publications have in common is that they are supported by rather specialized interests. Either they are government publications, their advertisers are drawn from the defense industries, or their subscribership is largely limited to persons who are connected with the military in some way. In fact, there has long been a need for a publication devoted to military topics but which is more or less independent of the military or the defense industries for its support. There is now something new under the sun in that the military studies have finally reached that status of academic respectability that enables self-support of a scholarly journal on the subject.

Armed Forces and Society published its first issue during the fall of 1974. It is sponsored by the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, which was formed more than a decade ago in this country and has since spread overseas. There was no civilian school in the land then which specialized in military studies, nor was there any one discipline fully qualified to examine all aspects of the subject. Thus, the Seminar is composed of distinguished scholars from many different countries, disciplines, and institutions. Among them are Raymond Aron, Morris Janowitz, Jacques van Doorn, Adam Yarmolinsky, Richard Rosser, and Amos Jordan--to name only a few. The stated purpose of the journal is to provide a forum for papers on war, arms control, armed forces, revolution, and peacekeeping. It was hoped that this would encourage research and discussion of these topics on an international plane and from a great variety of scholarly viewpoints.

At this writing, five issues of Armed Forces and Society* have appeared—it is a quarterly publication. Generally, each issue has a broad variety of articles, but the Spring 1975 issue was devoted to "Political Participation under Military Regimes." The effects of the creation of the all-volunteer forces and professionalism in the military are topics frequently addressed. Civil-military relations constitute another area of interest. Sociologists were prominent among the founders, and a good many of the articles arise from that discipline. But Armed Forces and Society is certainly not a sociology journal; it contains work by many historians, political scientists, and economists. It would be easy for the professional officer to assume that such a periodical would have a built-in antimilitary bias, but such is not the case. Though some of the articles certainly are hostile to the armed forces and especially to defense spending, some of the others are actually promilitary, and the greater number of them maintain a balanced viewpoint. Authors vary from the likes of Seymour Melman of Columbia (Summer 1975), who comes close to blaming defense spending for all the world's troubles, to William Taylor of West Point's Department of Social Sciences (Winter 1975).

*Armed Forces and Society, An Interdisciplinary Journal on Military Institutions, Civil-Military Relations, Arms Control and Peacekeeping, and Conflict Management, published quarterly by the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. Address: Armed Forces and Society, Social Science Building, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637. Subscriptions: Professionals and teachers, $12 per year.

The topic of the volunteer army receives much attention from the scholars; granting that the recruiting goals are being met, they are nevertheless worried about the social complexion of the ground combat arms and fear the possibility that the armed forces may become alienated from the society they serve. In one of the best articles so far published, Morris Janowitz and Charles Moskos address the problem and propose some solutions (Fall 1974). The early experience with VOLAR (All-Volunteer Army) has shown that there is a strong tendency for the black portion of the Army and Marine Corps ground combat arms to increase beyond that predicted by the Gates Commission. Since it is assumed that the armed forces must be as close as possible to a cross section of the society as a whole--anything else may cause group loyalty to take precedence over national loyalty--Janowitz and Moskos propose a number of steps that might correct the imbalance. One, designed to increase the individual's identification with his unit, would permit enlistment or re-enlistment for a particular unit and cut down on the number of transfers. They suggest that this might make service more attractive for the whites. Since the blacks seem to be enlisting and especially re-enlisting for economic motives, it is further proposed that the educational incentives be emphasized for two reasons: first, to make the ground forces more attractive to whites and, second, to make a transition to an economically rewarding civilian life more feasible for the blacks.

In a more recent issue of Armed Forces and Society (Fall 1975), Jerald Bachman and John Blair of the University of Michigan develop the educational idea a bit further. Basing their research and recommendations on a sample taken from the enlisted Navy, they suggest that the services deliberately promote a high turnover of first-term enlistees--that re-enlistments be purposely discouraged! They recognize that this would be an expensive proposition, but they hold that it would be highly desirable as a method of preventing the ideological alienation of the all-volunteer military. They would emphasize education as an incentive and thus hope to attract very high-quality enlistees, who, they hope, would compensate for the high costs of the education and rapid turnover by delivering superior performances for the short term they are in the service. Perhaps. Incidentally, a bit of the bias suggested earlier does creep into this article when the authors imply that the best of the enlisted men tend to be the most antimilitary and the least likely to re-enlist. Of course, such a judgment is highly subjective and would be wholly dependent upon one^’s definition of "best." It is certainly conceivable that the most able will be the quickest to see great economic rewards waiting on the outside; it is also conceivable that the least bold will go running home to mother at the earliest opportunity. Their sample was too small for the judgment arrived at.

Civil-military relations and military professionalism are other, related, topics which receive a good deal of attention. Much of the work on professionalism is done from a historical perspective. M. D. Feld of Harvard contributed two articles on the subject: one (Summer 1975) on the origins of the professional army in the Netherlands under Maurice in the sixteenth century; and the other (Winter 1975) on the evolution of the mass army from its inception at the time of the French Revolution to its apparent demise in the last few decades. William Skelton adds a superior article, "Professionalization in the U.S. Army Officer Corps during the Age of Jackson" (Summer 1975), which is accompanied by one from Great Britain: Gwyn Harries-Jenkins’s "The Development of Professionalism in the Victorian Army" (Summer 1975). The trends of thought among these scholars seem to be that the alienation of the officer corps from the rest of society is a possible danger, but not inevitable; that the days of the mass army are gone--with the implication that technology will have to do what bodies once did (or tried to do); that the military profession will decline in attractiveness but demand officers of an ever higher quality-and therein lies the problem for our policy-makers.

The education of the officer corps is a topic naturally of interest to an organization of scholars. Thomas Brewer of Eastern Michigan University wrote "The Impact of Advanced Education on American Military Officers" (Fall 1975) which addresses the subject. His conclusion is that education does not make a profound difference in the outlook of the officers concerned but only makes them a bit more articulate in their views and perhaps a little less rigid in their approach to foreign policy. The conclusion is probably sound enough, and not very surprising. The idea that a substantial number of successful men would radically change their views as a result of nine months of schooling is improbable in any event. The problem with the article is that the sample is far too small and the scope of the study is quite narrow. He deals with fewer than 100 individuals, most of whom are naval officers and, one would suspect, a substantial proportion of whom are Naval Academy graduates. Further, he does not address large portions of the curriculum nor discuss the purposes of the Naval War College. Finally, Brewer makes some rather sweeping generalizations about the impact (or lack of impact) of civilian graduate education on the thinking of military officers. For the data on this topic, he draws only upon those students attending a graduate program immediately associated with the Naval War College--one which could hardly be typical of the graduate education received by service officers at a very great number of civilian universities having no direct connection with the armed forces.

Sam Sarkesian and William Taylor, in "The Case for Civilian Graduate Education" (Winter 1975), assign a much greater effect to civilian graduate courses than did Brewer. According to them:

… Graduate education has a decided positive impact on professional competence, prestige, and leadership qualities, while reinforcing civilian control and democratic values; it must become an integral part of the professional career--not tangential.

The authors complain that civilian graduate education is a peripheral thing for the officer, that it has an inferior status to graduation from the (usually shorter) war colleges. They propose that it be given equal status to the war colleges insofar as it is a qualification for service at higher levels and that greater numbers of officers be sent to civilian schools instead of the professional military schools. To finance all this, they would eliminate the war colleges at Newport, Carlisle Barracks, and Maxwell AFB along with the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the National War College. They would substitute a national defense college. Taking the place of all the others, this institution would be staffed by officers from all the services. Rather a radical proposal, to be sure, but it might have more merit than only that previously cited as arising from civilian graduate instruction.

There are other fine articles in Armed Forces and Society by important scholars like Louis Morton, George Quester, and Morton Kaplan--to cite only a few--but there is not space here to review all of them. One last note about a piece written by Lawrence J. Korb, "The Bicentennial Defense Budget, A Critical Appraisal" (Fall 1975): His logical and interesting message is that cuts in defense spending are inevitable, and if we of the armed forces do not propose our own cuts based on strategic realities, then the Congress or the public will force cuts on a more or less random basis that will hurt us a good deal more. Korb is more than ready with a list of "marginal" programs that could be cut without damage to the muscle of the armed forces:

The B-1 program
The AWACS program
The three additional Army divisions
Many reserve formations
Any additional spending on counterforce.

It should come as no surprise to Air Force and Army readers that Dr. Korb is on the faculty of the Naval War College!

Armed Forces and Society does not provide a panacea for the problem we face in planning a manageable professional reading program. Of course, there is little or nothing in it on the details of technology. Few of the articles are aimed at the problems of any particular service. The book reviews, while interesting and useful, certainly do not cover the range of books of interest to the professional officer. There is some material on military theory and doctrine but not enough for the Air Force leader--and that which has appeared so far is in a form that does not help one's strategic thinking very much. Yet I do believe that the Inter-University Seminar has provided us with a worthwhile addition to our reading lists. First, Armed Forces and Society will give us more critical insights to our military institutions than are available in any of the professional journals-- and it will do so from a variety of disciplines. Second, it will give some understanding of the thinking of scholars from other lands--mostly European. Third, it might offer a prestigious outlet for the work of the officer-scholar. Finally, it makes available in convenient form a high level of social-science scholarship devoted especially to the problems of our military profession and its relationship to the society which it serves.