Dr. Don M. Snider

Crossing the Plains on an expedition to Utah [in the 1850s], Major Charles A. May searched the wagons in an effort to reduce unnecessary baggage. When he reached the wagons of the light artillery battery, Captain Henry J. Hunt proudly pointed out the box containing the battery library. “Books,” May exclaimed. “You say books? Whoever heard of books being hauled over the Plains? What the hell are you going to do with them?” At that moment Captain Campbell of the Dragoons came up and asked permission to carry a barrel of whiskey. ”Yes, anything in reason Captain, you can take along the whiskey, but damned if these books shall go.”1

The Army’s new Chief of Staff just published his detailed vision for the Army in the near term. The focus is “to regain combined arms capabilities in tactical formations while improving key aspects of overall strategic readiness.”2 However, “to regain,” means something has been lost. And that something, in General Milley’s view, is nothing less than one of the Army’s core professional competencies—combined arms operations at the tactical level. But, how do military professions lose the ability to perform one of their key professional practices?

One way this costly tragedy happens is by a persistent cultural bias to anti-intellectualism in ways both small and large, often isolated, and yet by their effects very widespread, penetrating, and influential on behavior. The history of such anti-intellectualism has been cogently and colorfully displayed in a splendid essay by one of our finest soldier-scholars, Lloyd Matthews.3 I owe the epigraph above to the deep research displayed in his historical analysis.

Matthews ends his marvelous presentation with two notable conclusions, each one sentence long. “A profession lives or dies by the vitality of its professional expertise. If that expertise withers in stasis because the thinkers, innovators, conceptualizers, theorists, intellectual reformers, and philosophers have been dropped by the wayside, the profession will have no one to blame but itself.”4

Matthews’s first conclusion was informed by an earlier research project brought to fruition in 2002 in the volume The Future of the Army Profession, which he edited. In it Gayle Watkins and I concluded that the “anti-intellectual” issue within the modern Army boiled down to whether or not the post-Cold War officer corps was dividing into two groups, the “doers” and the “thinkers,” and whether the professional future for both groups was equally bright:

Since knowledge is the foundation of professions—expansion of that knowledge being fundamental to a profession’s evolutionary success—it is essential to have valued members whose role is to create and develop expert knowledge in addition to those who apply professional expertise. If the Army is to flourish as a profession, both types of Army Professionals need to be equally esteemed, and to have equally bright futures. Unfortunately, this is not the case today nor without deep cultural change is it likely to be so in the future.5

Whether or not the future of doers and thinkers is more equally bright now in 2016 than it was in 2002 is a fascinating and cogent question; but for a long monograph, not this short set of insights. What we can do, however, is explore here several instances of current adaptations to Army expert practices. If such evolutions are not using the best expert knowledge available then perhaps the Army is, once again, chosing “whiskey over books.” If, conversely, the best expert knowledge is being used then the “books” are winning, indicating positive professional potential for Army 2025.

So what expert knowledges are the stewards of the Army using today as they seek “to regain” needed expert practices amid a crunching set of...