The civilian-military gap and professional military education at the precommissioning level

Armed Forces and Society

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 249-272

  Snider, Don M ^a   Priest, Robert F ^b   Lewis, Felisa ^b  

^a UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035629104     PISSN: 0095327X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X0102700205     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. In what follows, every time we mention PME we refer to precommissioning PME.
2. Janet Newcity, "Description of the 1998-99 TISS Surveys on the Military in the Post Cold-War Era." Paper prepared for the "Project on the Gap Between the Military and Civilian Society, 1999" (forthcoming).
3. In this report values, attitudes, and perspectives are considered synonymous, even though they are often treated differently in parts of the literature.
4. John Hammill, David R. Segal, and Mady Wechsler Segal, "Self-Selection and Parental Socioeconomic Status as Determinants of the Values of West Point Cadets," Armed Forces & Society 22, 1 (Fall 1995): 103-115.
5. Jerald G. Bachman, John D. Blair, and David R. Segal. The All-Volunteer Force: A Study of Ideology in the Military (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
6. Robert Priest, Terrence Fullerton, and Claude Bridges, "Personality and Value Changes in West Point Cadets," Armed Forces & Society 8, 4 (Summer 1982): 629-42.
7. Gwendolyn Stevens, Fred M. Rossa Jr., and Sheldon Gardner, "Military Academies as Instruments of Value Change." Armed Forces & Society 20, 3 (Spring 1994): 473-484.
8. Similar studies, including A. A. Astin, Four Critical Years (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), had been conducted in civilian universities and in different professions.
9. Stevens et al., "Military Academies."
10. A survey developed for the 1986 Army Year of Values, see Arthur Gilbert, Trueman Tremble, Gary Brosvic, and Guy Siebold, "Military Values: Structure and Measurement." (Paper presented at the Military Testing Association, Mystic, CT (3-7 November 1986).
11. Robert Priest and Johnston Beach, "Value Changes in Four Cohorts at the U.S. Military Academy," Armed Forces &Society 25, 1 (Fall 1998): 81-102.
12. Volker Franke, "Warriors for Peace: The Next Generation of U.S. Military Leaders," Armed Forces & Society 24, 1 (Fall 1997): 33-57. This study has subsequently been expanded in Volker Franke, Preparing for Peace: Military Identity, Value Orientations, and Professional Military Education (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).
13. Volker Franke, "Warriors for Peace: The Next Generation of U.S. Military Leaders," Armed Forces & Society 24, 1 (Fall 1997): 33-57. This study has subsequently been expanded in Volker Franke, Preparing for Peace: Military Identity, Value Orientations, and Professional Military Education (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).
14. Franke evaluated patriotism on the basis of agreement with statements that concerned "allegiance and loyalty to the United States and attitudes toward serving and fighting for their country." Globalism was defined as attitudes toward the United Nations and their opinions of possible global peace accomplished under its auspices. Warriorism consisted of opinions concerning the state of the current military and its uses, the cadets' potential for deployment, and levels of personal satisfaction when serving on both combat and noncombat missions.
15. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relationships (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), James Davison Hunter and Carl Bowman, The State of Disunion: 1996 Survey of American Political Culture (Ivy, VA: In Media Res Educational Foundation, 1996).
16. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relationships (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), James Davison Hunter and Carl Bowman, The State of Disunion: 1996 Survey of American Political Culture (Ivy, VA: In Media Res Educational Foundation, 1996).
17. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1998).
18. The sample was drawn from a random selection of Duke seniors, but the initial response rate was low. After political science professors sent follow-up requests, the sample appears to have more political science students, or at least more politically aware students, than a truly random sample of Duke seniors would contain. Moreover, while Duke is an elite national university, even a random Duke sample may not be entirely representative of all elite college seniors; Duke is certainly more southern and possibly more conservative and religious than other elite universities. In addition, the Duke sample is overrepresented with women and, as we will see, this makes a simple Duke-precommissioned officer comparison misleading.
19. For a description of all the samples of the TISS data and their biases, see Newcity, "1998-99 TISS Surveys."
20. For purposes of brevity, only the similarity correlations are published with this article. Other data are available from the authors.
21. We used SPSS General Linear Modeling to estimate the "effect" of the predictors (generally demographic and political background variables). Most of the predictor variables were dichotomies (male vs. female, Republican vs. non-Republican, etc.), but the liberal, moderate, and conservative trichotomy yielded two "predictors." The age variable includes cases from some atypically young and old students, and we do not believe the regression weights for the age variable will be stable on a cross-validation, so we use extreme caution in interpreting the age effects in these models.
22. James A. Davis, "The Brass and the Mass: Attitudes and Opinions among Senior Military Officers and a US Cross-Section, 1989-1999," (report forthcoming from the TISS project).
23. Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, How College Affects Students: Findings and Insights from Twenty Years of Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991), 318-319.
24. See pages 121-122 in Alexander W. Astin, What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993).
25. For a discussion of the Powell doctrine, see Richard N. Haass, Intervention (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1994), especially 14-15.
26. Results of a recent four-year study of change in cadet values showed that cadets increased markedly on the importance they attribute to "civilian control of the military." See Robert F. Priest and Dennis R. Kelly, "Value and Attitude Change in the Class of 1999," Report 99-004 (West Point, NY: Institutional Research and Analysis, Office of Policy, Planning and Analysis, United States Military Academy, August 1999).
27. For purposes of brevity we report in this section only our conclusions from the field research.
28. Specifically, they are The Center for the Professional Military Ethic at USMA; the Center for Character Development at USAFA; and the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics at USNA.
29. HQ, U.S. Army Cadet Command, "ROTC Precommissioning Training and Leadership Development, Regulation 145-3" (Ft. Monroe, VA: 23 October 1998). For a thoughtful review of future needs of the Army ROTC program see, by the same command, "ROTC Future Lieutenant Study" (Ft. Monroe, VA: July 1999).
30. HQ, U.S. Army Cadet Command, "ROTC Precommissioning Training and Leadership Development, Regulation 145-3" (Ft. Monroe, VA: 23 October 1998). For a thoughtful review of future needs of the Army ROTC program see, by the same command, "ROTC Future Lieutenant Study" (Ft. Monroe, VA: July 1999).