Should You Attend A Service Academy Ig You Dont Know I Fyou Want To Serve Your Country

Naval Academy midshipmen and Due west Point cadets don't brand meliorate officers than their ROTC counterparts. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

Scott Beauchamp is a veteran and a author who lives in Portland, Maine. He contributes to the Baffler, the Atlantic and Al Jazeera, among other publications.

Most Americans are familiar with the prestige that surrounds the United States military service academies. Various names and phrases, spoken like solemn incantations, attest to their sacrosanct status: the Point, the Long Gray Line, Annapolis, cadets. Their graduates constitute a who'southward who of American greatness, including Ulysses Grant, Jimmy Carter, novelist James Salter and sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein, to name a few. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in a 1962 accost at Due west Bespeak, typified the veneration when he told the cadets that they were "the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national arrangement of defense."

The service academies — the U.S. Military Academy for the Army (West Point), the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Air Force University and the U.S. Declension Guard Academy — promise to educate and mold hereafter officers charged with leading the enlisted members of the military.

Simply they are non the hallowed arbiters of quality promised past their myths. Their traditions mask bloated government money-sucks that consistently underperform. They are centers of nepotism that plow below-average students into boilerplate officers. They are indulgences that taxpayers, who fund them, can no longer afford. They've outlived their apply, and it'due south fourth dimension to shut them down.

The most compelling and obvious argument is the financial one. Information technology officially costs about $205,000 to produce a Due west Betoken graduate, although a 2003 Government Accountability Role report put the toll tag at more than $300,000; officers at the Air Force and Naval academies are minted for $322,000 and $275,000, respectively. According to at least 1 measurement, that's almost four times as much equally it costs to produce an officer through the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which trains officershoped-for while they nourish civilian colleges.

One reason for the expense is that attendance at the academies is free for cadets. In fact, since they're technically members of the armed services, the students get paid for going to schoolhouse. As Bruce Fleming, a heretical professor at the Naval Academy, wrote for Salon, they receive "a government-sponsored guarantee of a golden ticket to life: college at taxpayer expense with no student debts, the highest salary of any set of graduates, and guaranteed employment and . . . wellness benefits for at least five years, frequently well beyond."

Perhaps risking your life in patriotic service merits lavish treatment. During my own Army service, not having to worry about housing or medical intendance surely allowed me to concentrate on my duties as a soldier. But graduates of the academies, which encompass every possible expense for four years, make up just 20 per centum of officers serving in the military machine. The balance are from the ROTC and Officer Candidate School, which is for college grads and enlisted personnel who want an officer's commission. Are those other officers less deserving of a "golden ticket"?

No, considering they are not merely more numerous — they are also as (or more) effective equally officers. No evidence shows that officers who attended civilian colleges, or any one of the U.S. Senior War machine Colleges such as the Citadel, are lesser leaders than their service-academy colleagues. Tom Ricks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning defence announcer, put it succinctly: "Afterward covering the U.S. armed forces for nearly two decades, I've concluded that graduates of the service academies don't stand out compared to other officers." After all, maybe the nigh preeminent Army leader in contempo times, Colin Powell, is a product of the ROTC, not West Point.

This parity in skill has been slowly expressing itself in a rising number of promotions for ROTC officers over the past few decades. Thirty years ago, almost Army three-star generals had graduated from West Indicate. As of 1997 (the last year for which data is available), but a third had. A study of naval officer rising using information from 2003 concluded that, on boilerplate, in that location were no real differences in promotion rates between Naval University officers and ROTC officers. Of course, these arguments from statistics can't be definitive, but they practice signal that ROTC officers are able to compete with their peers. Nearly half of the Articulation Chiefs of Staff serving over the past decade bypassed the service academies.

These days, likewise, a piddling thrift wouldn't hurt. The F-35 fighter jet, the almost expensive boondoggle in weapons history, is half-dozen years late, has already cost taxpayers nearly $400 billion and nonetheless doesn't work; in the latest budget, Congress allocated $120 meg for M1 Abrams tanks the Army says it doesn't desire or need; the Daily Animate being recently called the 2016 budget a Christmas nowadays for military contractors. Co-ordinate to the Project on Government Oversight, it includes billions of dollars in spending that the Pentagon didn't asking.

Quondam defense force secretarial assistant Robert Gates, who embodies bipartisan consensus, said at the Federal Innovation Summit concluding summer that "what is needed about of all are leaders who are prepared to challenge conventional thinking, break crockery, finish doing what doesn't work well or at all, and set a new class." Well, here's our chance.

Some arguments in favor of the service academies cite the rigorous selection process. But we really take no idea how elite their students are. Comprisal requires a nomination from a member of Congress, the vice president, a secretary of the respective military co-operative or other loftier-level officials. These nominations are doled out in a process with vague guidelines and nonspecific criteria, making political patronage inevitable. The academies admit recruits according to Title 10, U.South. Code, Department 6954 — which, for guidance, just says how many cadets tin exist admitted, who can nominate them and where they can come from. According to an investigation past USA Today, nepotism often governs the nominations, with many going to well-connected families or big-name donors.

Fleming has complained in numerous media outlets about the depression quality of the students he teaches at the Naval Academy, and he says 3 Freedom of Information Deed requests virtually the admissions process oasis't gotten him any closer to understanding why some students are admitted over others.

Gore Vidal (born at West Betoken and continued to the institution past heritage) depicted the service academies equally loathsome breeding grounds for a permanent war machine-elite grade of "ring knockers," as he wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1973. That's exactly why people take been trying to shut the academies down since at least 1830, when folk hero and Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett tried to pass a bill abolishing West Point. Some other attempt was made in 1863, when Sen. B.F. Wade (R-Ohio) said in the bill's defense, "I practise not believe that there tin can be constitute, on the whole face up of the Globe . . . any institution that has turned out so many faux, ungrateful men as have emanated from this institution."

As an enlisted Army infantryman, I served under platoon leaders who attended both West Point and ROTC. All were competent and professional. Merely the best graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara. What made him atypical was his bravery and his resourcefulness. He was willing, in small ways, to deviate from standard operating process when the state of affairs called for it. He also continued to the enlisted guys in an extraordinary way.

The service academies are institutions with deep roots, but bravery and resourcefulness are eminently more American than any item school. Our country deserves more officers similar my platoon leader, and we can accept them without the financial and social brunt of the service academies.

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Should You Attend A Service Academy Ig You Dont Know I Fyou Want To Serve Your Country,

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-we-dont-need-west-point/2015/01/23/fa1e1488-a1ef-11e4-9f89-561284a573f8_story.html

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