Stephen
Kershar
Eliminate the Military Academies
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
March
30, 2016
The U.S. Military Academies are
important to American military leadership. It produces 20% of military officers
and in the past has produced many, if not most, of the most important
commanders. Generals Ulysses Grant, John Pershing, Dwight Eisenhower, and George
Patton, and Admirals Nimitz and Halsey, among others, led America’s most
important wars. Given the role of the academies, it seems to be important that
they produce the best products they can and part of their doing so involves
admitting the best. This becomes even more important if the army has less
accountability in the field than in years past, so failure to put the best
people into military leadership gets magnified in terms of subpar combat
leadership.
It
is unclear whether the academies are worth preserving or whether the American
people are benefitted by having the best and brightest go there.
The academies are inefficient in the
sense that they are a comparatively expensive way of generating officers. Writing
in USA Today, Gregory Korte and
Frederka Shouten note that an Air Force Academy graduate costs $487,000. Scott
Beauchamp writing in The Washington Post
points out that this is four times as much as a ROTC program. The same is true
for the other academies. Worse, many of the students come from pricey high
schools associated with the academies. Naval Academy professor Bruce Fleming points
out that 20% of the students who attend Naval Academy come from the Naval
Academy high school that costs roughly $50,000 per year.
Despite
being so expensive, academy graduates are not better. A 2003 study did not find
there was a difference in promotion rate between USNA and ROTC officers. The
same study found no evidence that that officers who attended civilian colleges
or any one of the other military colleges (consider, for example, the Citadel)
are lesser leaders than their service-academy peers. Even if they were better
officers, the military has a difficult time hanging on to them. About half of
academy graduates leave the military after their obligation of 5-7 years as a
junior officer.
Academy
graduates do not appear to be ethically superior to graduates of ROTC programs and
Officer Candidate School. About a third of the commanding officers removed in
2012 malfeasance – record numbers for Navy – were academy graduates. Academy
students have been found to have involved in various scandals (consider sexual
assault and cheating). Remember that as a baseline, only 20% of officers in the
military are graduates of the academies.
While
the admissions process is opaque, there is a concern for nepotism and
corruption. In 2012, 58% of students came from a congressional or vice
presidential nomination. The nominations are largely made in secret, done via
an inconsistent and opaque process, and perhaps corrupt. Pretty much what one
would expect of our sleazy congressmen.
More
specifically, the nomination process results in unequal competitiveness
(consider districts that differ in the number and quality of applicants) and
the process is opaque (nominations are made largely in secret), inconsistent
(there are no universal standards or ethical guidelines governing nominations,
each congressional office has its own process and criteria for awarding them),
and perhaps corrupt (some nominations go to children of well-connected
families, friends, and campaign contributors).
There are also allegations of nepotism.
Currently,
people may be appointed without a nomination if they are children of armed
forces members killed or missing in action, who have died or have a 100%
service-connected-disability, and children of employees who are in missing
status. Also, the president may appoint children of career military personnel
and winners of the Medal of Honor. This does not intuitively seem just, fair,
or, even, an efficient way to improve military performance, especially compared
to other compensatory means (consider, for example, money).
By analogy, consider how the
University of Iowa chooses its elite wrestlers. Iowa would never choose
wrestlers based on their pedigree. If it did, the team would do extremely
poorly because it moved away from merit-based assignment of positions. It is
unclear why avoiding subpar wrestlers is more important than avoiding subpar officers.
In
any case, on average, the best and brightest do not attend the academies. The
vaunted intellectual reputation of academy graduates as equal to that of the
Ivy League and its peers is inaccurate. Academy SAT scores are not elite. In
one 2014 Forbes ranking, Air Force
Academy was ranked 77th (1305) and ranked next to Occidental and
Villanova Colleges. West Point was ranked 98th (1283) and ranked
next to New College at Florida and UC-San Diego. Naval Academy was ranked 99th
(1280) and ranked next to UC-San Diego and UW Madison.
According
to Naval Academy’s Fleming, more than a quarter of the Naval Academy class has
SAT scores below 600 and the average is lower than the nearby state school
University of Maryland. These are respectable scores and the peer schools are
strong ones, but still not close to the scores that characterize the Ivies and
their elite peers (for example, MIT, Duke, and Stanford).
It is thus unclear whether the
academies are worth preserving and whether it is better to have the best and
brightest attend them rather go elsewhere. Without market discipline, there is
no clear way of knowing whether we want better, worse, or equivalent people
attending the academy than do so today. This lack of knowledge undermines the
case for trying to get better students attend the academy. It is not clear,
then, if it would be in the country’s interest were the academy to be packed
with Ivy-League-caliber students rather than the impressive, but not elite,
students it currently has.
On
a side note, this is true regardless of what one thinks makes one student
better than a second at the academy. For example, it is independent of whether
one student is better than a second in virtue of the first having more academic
ability, leadership, moral character, or so on.
