In Defense of the Army's Command & General Staff College: A Rebuttal to Tom by John Q. Bolton, Foreign Policy’s Best Defense
In a recent post, Foreign Policy’s Tom Ricks accuses the Army’s Command and General Staff College (CGSC) of treating its faculty in a “knuckle-headed way.” Using an internal staffing document Ricks proceeds to make broad generalizations about the College’s education priorities, staff, and, by implication, its raison d’etre.
Feeling the need to write a rebuttal to Ricks came as a surprise to me. He is one of my favorite authors; indeed, reading Fiasco during my first deployment in 2006 brought me some needed perspective as we cleared IEDs daily around Baqubah, Iraq. Moreover, in The Generals, Ricks taught me to question the military’s professional education paradigm along with the Army personnel system.
But his perennial criticism of CGSC is, at least in this case, off-base and borders on hyperbole. This article examines Ricks’ criticism before moving on to a general assessment of CGSC. The memo Ricks uses as evidence that, “the inmates are running the asylum,” is, in fact, a planning document that simply acknowledges that the CGSC curriculum, like many educational and governmental programs, has become too bloated…