US military academies emphasizing language, culture

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Academies Urged to Focus on Culture

Baltimore Sun | Bradley Olson | February 05, 2007

A former Army officer and Middle East analyst has called on the nation's
service academies to trade in their focus on engineering for a more modern
curriculum on international relations. Andrew Exum, who led combat units
in two tours in Afghanistan and one tour in Iraq, said the engineering
coursework required at the U.S. Naval Academy and U.S. Military Academy in
West Point, N.Y., is a holdover from the 19th century, when that was the
direction of future warfare. Now, with constant challenges from unstable
societies and radicalism, cultural understanding should be the new norm,
he wrote in a new policy paper for the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy, a think tank where he is a fellow.

"The service academies have to get serious about international relations,"
Exum said in a phone interview yesterday. "We need officers to be more
culturally aware, more worldly and to have skills in the strategic
languages like Arabic, Mandarin and Pashtu, but to do that, they will have
to make some real changes to the curriculum." Senior academic officials in
Annapolis, West Point and at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado
Springs, Colo., say they are actively pursuing this goal using tens of
millions of dollars allocated by the Defense Department, hiring faculty
and sending hundreds of students abroad for language immersion and study
abroad programs. "I think the author, Andrew Exum, has really shown light
on exactly the right discussion," said William Miller, the Naval Academy's
academic dean.  "We all should be asking ourselves how we should be
preparing the next generation of leaders in the Navy, Marine Corps, Army
and Air Force for the 21st- century battlefield. We are always having that
discussion."

Exum, who was commissioned through the Reserve Officer Training Corps
after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, did graduate
research while attending the American University in Beirut on how well
junior officers in the Army were prepared to lead in the Iraq War.
"Compared to the greater American public, Army officers overall are more
worldly, much more likely to have lived abroad, more likely to read news
on a daily basis and are more likely to speak a foreign language, and
those are all good things," he said. "The bad thing is that they weren't
prepared for the cultural environment they found in Iraq and Afghanistan."
While he lauded recent strides to promote cultural awareness, Exum in the
policy paper, published Monday, made three challenges to Annapolis and
West Point (he left out the Air Force Academy because he said he was not
familiar with the training of Air Force officers).

First, the service academies should focus less on an engineering
curriculum, he said. Second, they should send more cadets and midshipmen
abroad, perhaps as many as 30 percent of all graduates. And third,
Congress and the Defense Department need to consistently fund the study
abroad programs.

Miller said the difficulty with changing the curriculum at the Naval
Academy is that many graduates need sufficient training to operate nuclear
reactors in submarines or work with other cutting-edge technology in the
surface fleet. Only 12 percent to 13 percent of each graduating class
enters the Marine Corps infantry field, officers who have been on the
front lines in the war on terrorism. And among those, 50 percent are
social science or humanities majors.

Still, he said, recent curriculum changes have modified the traditional
"Western Civilization" course requirements, instead offering a more global
picture of history and society and then allowing midshipmen to specialize
in one area. Officials at all three academies said they are well on their
way to sending 30 percent of cadets and midshipmen abroad and hoped to
surpass that figure. In the 2005-2006 academic year, the Naval Academy
sent 150 midshipmen through language immersion programs, 10 to full
semesters abroad at foreign military academies and others to train with
foreign navies during summer break.

The Air Force Academy sent 18 cadets to foreign military academies, 12 to
foreign civilian universities, 200 to short cultural immersion programs
and 225 to language immersion. West Point sent more than 150 to foreign
countries, and set a goal to send all language majors, about 10 percent of
graduates, for a semester abroad. Money for the programs is consistent,
officials said. The Naval Academy was given $3.2 million a year to send
students abroad, add language and culture faculty, as well as $10 million
to upgrade teaching facilities;  the Air Force Academy received $20
million over five years for the same purposes, and West Point $6.3 million
a year until 2011. "Our foreign language department is the best funded of
any academic program that I run at the academy," Miller said. "I think
it's indicative of the importance attached to this shift in emphasis by
other military departments."

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,124105,00.html

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