Why doesn't the Army want to be a real Army, and think about its actual tasks?

As my old Group commander used to tell us when I was a young captain that one of our weakness is that we train our leaders to be battalion and perhaps at best brigade commanders because we like to think and act tactically.  It is where the action is and the rubber meets the road.  But as Professor Schmidt points out and we all know, we need to be successful at much more than tactical operations and our nation has required its military to think and act beyond tactical employment whether we like it or admit or not.  This is why I believe that the foundation of the Professional Military Education System should rest on 5 fundamental areas of study at ALL levels of education from pre-commissioning through senior leadership:

Military History

Military Theory

Military Geography

Operational Art

Strategy

If we ground everyone is those skills we will develop not only young leaders who can operate in today's complex environments but will grow up to be strategic thinkers whose best military advice will be able to inform policy makers on national policy and national security strategy (and yes also to be able to conduct effective post-conflict operations as Professor Schmidt notes).

Why doesn't the Army want to be a real Army, and think about its actual tasks?

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/06/why_doesnt_the_army_want_to_be_a_real_army_and_think_about_its_actual_tasks

Posted By Thomas E. Ricks  Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - 10:22 AM   Share

By Matthew Schmidt

Best Defense department of Armyology

The U.S. Army doesn't seem to want to be an army. Or, rather, they seem to want to be half an army, like (no offense) the Marines! They want to do the first part of war, the invasion part, but not the less glamorous, more difficult, messy part that is occupation. The Army's seeming disdain for doing the work of occupying a place after the Hollywood scenes of major combat are over betrays a culture that just doesn't get the nature of (modern) war.

To be clear, plenty of individual people in the Army do understand the importance of thinking about the post-combat phase of warfare, but the institutional culture, the code of language, and behavior that dominates the everyday world of the Army is decidedly focused on the minutiae of combat tactics.