From today’s Washington Post, Tom Ricks writes: “They are crackerjack smart and dedicated to national service. They remind me of the best of the Ivy League, but too often they’re getting community-college educations.”
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Is this article a fracking joke? Yeah, let’s send our future military leaders to one of our ivy league socialist indoctrination camps.
How about we just cede leadership to the UN. It will be a lot faster that way.
Ummm, sounds like a troll to me. Ignore or risk giving the man a 15 minute career.
WTF?!
Rob, So you’re for closing the academies and sending the cadets to the ivy league? Interesting.
This article is amazingly retarded. Who is this donkey who wrote this and what authority does he have to label West Point a community college? Ivy League…that is hilarious. Even though we jibjab between each other, (VMI alum here speaking) West Point is a great institution and this article should be placed at the bottom of a dogs cage being house broken.
Interesting idea, But other colleges should be considered first, and mabe combining with the appropiate force structure should be considered. Or opening the colleges to civilian personnel, if the colleges are need ing excess funding for football.
Maybe opening them up as land war, air war and naval war should be considered, or changing the focus to the development of officers of men, independent of the service.
Change don’t always hurt.
OTOH, why not? The service academies have already become more like other colleges, i.e., they no longer have a single sanction honor code; lie, cheat or steal, and you might have to write a paper.
Ricks does make sense concernering the lack of PhD’s at service academies, VMI has more PhD’s in its Engineering departments than do any of the academies. Then again, do we want to “over-educate” officers so that they are competative on the civilian job market?
Since the service academies are the standard by which all ROTC and alternative officer training programs are measured, eliminating these institutions effectively eliminates the current standard. What a coup this would be for the socialists/communists who so desipse our capitalist republic.
Ricks has studied and written extensively about the US Military for decades (e.g., his book Fiasco about the lack of adequate planning for the occupation of Iraq). He has many contacts throughout the US military (they’ve learned to trust him to report the truth) and, while he’s his own man, this article wouldn’t have been written and published without lots of input and vetting by career military people. That means lots of career military people are thinking the same thing.
I just disagree. Ok, well maybe there could be some argument about the lack of PHDs or whatever, but to just shut down an institution because of contemporary circumstance is ridiculous. They or we should address those issues, not by someone who writes an editorial by someone ‘who has studied or written extensively’. I’m guessing this person is or was not in the military either. And we better take the log out of our first when it comes to VMI and the direction it is going.
I am curious if the author would be willing to expand on his last statement “And we better take the log out of our first when it comes to VMI and the direction it is going.” Townie 76
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