Spartan or Athenian?

Last week, John Noonan at OPFOR posted a piece asking whether the U.S. service academies needed to shift their curriculum towards more liberal arts and less hard sciences. From his piece at The Weekly Standard:

This is a war where we fight an enemy who understands that the battlefield lies in the human heart, not in the skies or on the seas. And while the liberal arts curriculum is precisely the school of thought needed to effectively prepare our cadets to fight in the 21st century, not one of the service academies offers a Bachelor of Arts degree.

An Army platoon leader would be better equipped to administer to tribes in Anbar province if he had a degree in International Affairs and a minor in Arabic. A Marine infantry Lieutenant might be more effective unifying warlords in Afghanistan if he spent his four years at Annapolis studying the history of central Asia. U.S. Special Forces have been deployed to over 180 different countries since 9/11, and, to be sure, the military offers them the education needed to meet that goal. But in all that training an academy cadet will only get as much foreign study as he can squeeze into his schedule between orbital mechanics and advanced calculus.

The arts versus sciences debate predictably spilled over into the comments section at OPFOR, where some defended a science-heavy course load as one which teaches essential problem-solving skills, others countered by pointing out that leadership isn't about equations, and nobody was convinced of another's position in the slightest.

With all due respect, I think they're arguing the wrong issue.

The defining element of a military school isn't whether it teaches arts or sciences - in this sense, the curriculum is nothing more than an outward representation of its underlying philosophy. And in discussing that philosophy, Dr. Peter Foot has laid out the most useful terms of reference: Sparta versus Athens:

In her study of the US Army War College, political scientist Judith Stiehm puts the general point well: “Being prepared is certainly the military’s mission. For what is something of a puzzle.”7 The central issue, then, for any staff or war college, is how good sense and mature judgment can be nurtured, exercised and assessed – year after year – to a standard respected by the domestic political leadership, by senior civilians in defence departments, and, more broadly, by the staff and war college graduates of other countries alongside whom they will inevitably work and be deployed.



Quite rightly, I believe, we are back to the metaphorical but useful Sparta versus Athens debate that has always been a feature of professional military education. The ending of the Cold War blurred the distinction even more. Table 1 outlines the characteristics of the two ‘classical’ approaches. The lists are not comprehensive, but suggest either end of a spectrum of professional military training and education outcomes. All staff and war colleges are a mixture of the two sides. Indeed, a similar spectrum exists in law, divinity, and medical colleges – between collective uniformity and individual diversity. But it is ‘disastrous mistakes’ made by the military that have the greater capacity to embarrass political leaders in a democracy. For that reason, getting the balance right between the two ends of the professional military education spectrum is a responsibility that is both a national obligation and one that transcends the internal preferences of the profession of arms. Typically, officers progress from predominantly Spartan values to predominantly Athenian ones as they develop in their career. If this progression does not take place, the likelihood of future Somalia outrages, Tailhook events, Basra Road ‘turkey shoots’, abuses of Iraqi prisoners, or unexplained deaths at Deepcut Barracks – increases. One might say that the most obvious exponents and personal embodiments of ‘Spartan’ values today are members of al Qaeda and the suicide bombers of Baghdad.

Sparta teaches mastery of what is known; Athens provides the tools with which to deal with the unknown. The former is training; the latter is education. [Babbler's emphasis]

In this context, it seems to me that a curriculum heavy on black and white maths and sciences is Spartan, as it deals in rights and wrong, in absolutes. There is very little grey in an engineering degree. A liberal arts degree is much more Athenian, in that there are no absolutes.

In the past - and this echoes Noonan's point about the age of the Thayer system at the U.S. service academies - emphasis upon Spartan values, upon training rather than education, upon the technical skills of following rather than the art of leadership, have been predominant in the development of junior officers, and for good reason. In the past, more of the critical decisions affecting the outcome of a campaign or war were taken higher up the chain of command.

As Dr. Foot notes, however, the conduct of military affairs in western countries is changing:

Facing that uncertainty and ambiguity, Burridge lays out today’s appropriate professional military response to the cliché that generals – and by extension, staff and war colleges – prepare to fight the previous war rather than the next one. Taking his illustration from music, he sets the issue firmly in the context of usable skills: modern militaries have to adapt to the requirements of jazz, not continue their preference for classical orchestral playing. The argument goes like this:

• Orchestral parts, often written a long time ago, define the individual musician’s activity as to what to play and when, within a more-or-less established orchestra structure. The conductor determines tempo and creativity. Repeated practice ensures the whole is performed in perfect harmony.


• Jazz, on the other hand, is quite different. To begin with, there is no sheet music. All performers adapt to and around a central theme. No two performances are alike; the same tune treated differently each time. The band can be uniquely structured for each performance; conductors are redundant. Tempo will vary. Improvisational skills, not practice, are the key to everything.

Military adaptability to changing international conditions, Burridge argues, is the pre-requisite for applying national or international grand strategy at the military level, using information effectively, taking an effects-based approach, making careful judgments over legality, assessing risk, and being ready to act in a timely fashion. As with military campaigning, so it is with jazz. Basic skills are vital and are inculcated at an early stage. It is the later exposure to varieties, alternatives and examples that gives the new performer his or her special contribution to the whole.

As decisions get pushed further down the chain of command, officers need to utilize the Athenian rather than the Spartan at a much earlier point in their careers than previously. And this is where the debate should rightly begin: what is the optimal balance between the Spartan and the Athenian at the beginning of an officer's development, and how quickly should it progress along the spectrum between the two extremes from there?

As an OCdt at the Royal Military College of Canada almost two decades ago, I had the opportunity to observe the differences between my own Canadian schoolmates and those at USMA, as we had an annual exchange weekend with the West Pointers. It always seemed to me that they were the more constrained of the two, the more limited in their scope and responsibilities. It also seemed to me that they were the more disciplined and committed - we were halfway to Civvie U in comparison. So in some ways I envied them, and in others I didn't.

This isn't to say that the CF has it right, and our American cousins have it wrong. Parallel discussions are also ongoing regarding RMC, where some of the recent changes have been quite radical. None has been more hotly debated than the decision to allow fourth-year cadets to live in civilian housing in town. One of the longstanding complaints about the college is that, while it prepares the young officer for military duties, it doesn't prepare him or her for much else in life. Socialization was seen as a weakness, and allowing fourth-year cadets to learn to pay bills and manage a commute was the Commandant's preferred solution. At least one cadet likes it:

To much debate, the class of 2007 had the option to live off campus. Approximately eighty-five of us took that option. We ended up scattered across the city of Kingston, some of us moving into the “student ghetto” of Queen’s, some of us to the North Kingston ghetto, and some of us to the base. Though there have been various rumours spreading through the College on the rationale behind our monumental move, I personally feel that the fourth years are not worried about the controversy, and are extremely thrilled to live off-campus as we see fit.

The living out aspect of the Socialization Project is an opportunity for fourth year cadets to live in their own apartments or houses. As a student and officer who is living on his own (though I do live with three people), I am finally, at twenty-two, responsible for grocery shopping, cooking, and my own diet. I am responsible for car payments, the commute, and utilities payments. I am responsible for a flight of cadets, and have hours of meetings early in the morning and late at night and need to manage my time better. As a student and an officer candidate, I realize the importance of learning my subject material and my trade before I end up at my next posting. To this extent, I recognize, and so does the Military Wing, that I need to learn how to live on my own and still function as a student and an officer.

While this experiment is intended to give cadets the life-skills they need to become more productive and well-balanced junior officers, many question if it is going too far - correcting a mosquito of a problem with a cannonball of a solution.

But, again, it's the wrong debate. It's a question of methods rather than underlying principles. The real riddle is whether learning to follow, to colour inside the lines, to learn within a tight framework of rules and formulae is more important than learning to use judgement, to improvise and trust one's own instincts, to synthesize and be creative, to flounder in one's own bad choices in order to learn from them.

There's no definitively right or wrong answer to that question. There's no calculable perfect balance point between the Spartan and Athenian values for junior officers or cadets - and even if there was, it would be different for each individual.

I don't pretend to have an answer to that question. Oh, it's tempting to say that the Athenian should take precedence since young officers are being entrusted with such complex tasks and decisions in the murky world of COIN ops these days, but when your chess-match turns into a brawl in some dusty back alley between two mud walls, you want the Spartan at your side. Every decent young officer chafes at his or her own restrictions, and aches for more responsibility and more freedom to execute their missions (I could have written section "5.6 Leadership Training" of this study (pdf) myself fifteen years ago as a cocky third-year - the more things change...). But that doesn't mean they know what's best for their own development, any more than I did at their age.

Let's hope someone in the chain of command responsible for our military schools throughout the western world can figure it out and share that knowledge with the rest. Because I don't forsee any let-up in the requirement for exceptional young officers in the coming years. Far from it.

TDV!