Bret Devereaux

And my institution is the best of them, in that we control the curriculum more than most military schools. But in the end, we are asking the military what the military should study, which always creates pressure for *training* rather than *education*. /4

Our schools are governed by the Pentagon, which for as long as I've been in PME wants more training and less intellectual squishy stuff. This is normal. If you ask military officers what military officers should study, that's the answer you'll always get. /5

This is why Petraeus argued in favor of sending more officers to CIVILIAN graduate schools, and he had a point. He noted that being the smartest boy in an Army school and then getting as ass-kicking at Princeton made a difference. /6

Not sure that's an answer, but can't solve the civil-military problem - which now is far more of a danger to us than foreign adversaries - by having the military define "education" and then sending officers to war colleges at the *end* of their careers and not the beginning. /7

Everyone involved in PME, civil and military, puts their heart into it, including me. But it's a "death of expertise" problem writ large: People who are not experts in education regularly explain what education is to...educators. This needs to be fixed - and won't be. /8x

I think we could really use a reading list on civ-mil relations, especially on things to do and things not to do. Any nice readings to recommend? (@BretDevereaux be nice if you chipped in a bit here too as a prof of mil hist)

So my perspective is less ye-standard-civ-mil (Clausewitz' trinity, S. Huntington, etc) and more based in my study of Rome, since part of what happened to the Republic was a catastrophic civ-mil failure.

On the Roman civ-mil collapse, old-but-relevant, R. Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939). There's also L. De Blois, The Roman Army and Politics in the First Century (1987) and A.W. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome (1999). For a general overview of the period...