The points you both bring up remind me of some ideas I’ve had about the education of military officers. Since war is, on every level, a human endeavor, we would do well to give officers a thoroughly liberal education in the classical tradition. Not just at the service academies, but ROTC, OCS, and most other pipelines. We expect officers to be able to make decisions that impact many people—enemy combatants, civilians, their own men, commanding officers, policy makers… how can they make the critical decisions necessary if they have not been educated properly? I would trust an officer with a sound liberal education any day over one who may have studied “war studies” fanatically but has never considered what a good citizen, or even a good person, is. Funny enough, military education seems to kind of recognize this deficiency and attempts to brute-force this by simply war-gaming every kind of ethical dilemma possible. Crude and inefficient, but what else can they do?
Great episode. Some thoughts…
The points you both bring up remind me of some ideas I’ve had about the education of military officers. Since war is, on every level, a human endeavor, we would do well to give officers a thoroughly liberal education in the classical tradition. Not just at the service academies, but ROTC, OCS, and most other pipelines. We expect officers to be able to make decisions that impact many people—enemy combatants, civilians, their own men, commanding officers, policy makers… how can they make the critical decisions necessary if they have not been educated properly? I would trust an officer with a sound liberal education any day over one who may have studied “war studies” fanatically but has never considered what a good citizen, or even a good person, is. Funny enough, military education seems to kind of recognize this deficiency and attempts to brute-force this by simply war-gaming every kind of ethical dilemma possible. Crude and inefficient, but what else can they do?