You can read Tom Ricks for all that, but this essay from Armed Forces Journal is making the rounds, and today I got an email from a friend at one of our country’s distinguished institutions for military education expressing disappointment in the courses he’s receiving. Anyway, here’s MG Scales:

It’s that time again. About once a decade, the military services attempt to reform how they educate officers. This time, the catalyst is a series of Senate and House hearings on how well the services educate officers. The Defense Science Board will begin a study on military education reform soon. The defense intellectual blogosphere is electric with calls for reform. Other creative ideas for reform will follow in the coming days. And all will fail.

Oh snap. Why?

They will fail because the services will not be able to attract the brightest and groom them through proper schooling for positions of responsibility unless the intellectually gifted are rewarded with selection for promotion and command. Unless intellectual excellence is tied to the services’ personnel systems, true reform is impossible. Only once in the past century have powers of reform overcome the cultural glue that binds together the services’ systems of professional rewards. In the mid-1980s, Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., as part of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, forced the services to learn how to operate efficiently — the essence of “jointness.” Skelton’s effort gained traction because of the failure of the services to fight together as a team during the invasion of Grenada in 1983. Skelton leveraged the law to hold the services’ reward systems for promotion and command hostage to a meaningful commitment to jointness. To ensure that his reforms would last, Skelton legislated that staff and war colleges bring together student officers from all services to study joint as well as service-specific subjects.

This is a huge theme of The Fourth Star, by the way — officers like Petraeus and Chiarelli fearing that their time away from the “real Army” to pursue their intellectual efforts at places like Princeton or West Point’s Department of Social Studies would end up hurting their careers. Scales’ proposal:

Consider a reform scheme that establishes a Senior Strategist Program (SSP) that would identify key strategic appointments and fence them for officers educated in a program of demanding, selective advanced schooling and preparation. The system would reserve appointment of officers to the operational (G/J-3) principals and deputies on the service and joint staffs as well as all strategy, policy and political-military positions (G/J-2, 5, 7, 9) in these staffs. Added to the reserve list would be flag billets on the National Security Council, military representatives in other federal agencies and foreign area officers from all services. Similarly, key combatant command staff positions as well as faculty positions in staff and leadership in war colleges should be reserved for this new cohort of specially selected and educated officers. … [snip]

Some officers who survive the rigor of the global grand tour would then be assigned as instructors at service staff and war colleges. Others would command at the brigade/wing level before standing before a conventional service flag selection board. The system would be self-disciplining in that the services would not likely fail to pass on qualified SSP officers and risk losing out on prime flag officer billets.