Carved from Granite: West Point since 1902

Ch7: Toward a "Four-Class System": Leader Development at West Point

239 WITH ITS TRADITIONAL focus on character and intellect, West Point was slow to establish a discrete program for leader development. The Academy’s paternal guardians believed that leadership ability was a by-product of successfully completing the requirements for graduation; those cadets who could not keep up were therefore separated for failing to demonstrate the qualities required of an officer. The scant leadership training the cadets received during the nineteenth century came from observing the example of the officers around them and leveraging the occasional opportunities to serve in leadership roles during summer training and the academic year. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Academy began treating leader development more seriously. Reform-minded superintendents and commandants expanded opportunities for cadets to lead military training and to serve in chain-of-command positions. With few exceptions, however, these opportunities continued to be experiential rather than theoretical. Some superintendents —notably Douglas MacArthur—tried to strengthen leader development by loosening the Academy’s paternal strictures and adding psychology to the curriculum. These reforms, limited in scope and sometimes reversed, were harbingers of the far greater changes that would come later in the century. The Second World War began a period of rapid change in the Academy’s leader development program. A variety of initiatives—organizational changes, courses in psychology and military leadership, behavioral science research, improved leadership assessment methods, expanded counseling services, and graduate education for tactical officers—complemented the practical leader training that already existed. By midcentury a formal program of leader deChapter Seven Toward a “Four-Class System” Leader Development at West Point 240 CHAPTER SEVEN velopment was in place, and by century’s end it had brought major positive changes to the culture of leadership at West Point. I. Leadership through Osmosis The mission of West Point has always been to produce leaders of character for the army. In pursuit of this mission, the Academy designed a highly structured four-year experience intended to develop cadets in manifold ways. The honor code built character; the academic curriculum broadened intellect; physical education strengthened bodies; and military training provided a basis for professional competence. Under the paternal assumptions of the nineteenth century, the moral, mental, physical, and military exertions of the West Point experience provided all that was necessary to produce effective leaders. Under attritional assumptions, cadets who failed in any of those areas showed their deficiency in the raw materials of leadership and were therefore deemed unfit for commissioning as officers.1 Neither the paternal nor attritional aspects of the Academy’s leader development model would survive the twentieth century. Paternalism would be the first to go, as Academy leaders discovered the benefits of expanding cadet horizons through travel, added responsibilities and privileges, and exposure to new ideas. Insulating cadets from the world no longer seemed the best way to prepare them to lead in it. The American role on the world stage was becoming vastly more complex, requiring army leaders who were broadminded, mature, and self-confident. As we saw in previous chapters, cadets of the twentieth century had increasingly more opportunities to travel away from West Point than their nineteenth-century forebears, and they were becoming as cosmopolitan as any of their civilian peers.2 The culture of attrition would take longer to fade. Well into the twentieth century, West Point continued to be an unforgiving crucible in which to prove one’s moral, mental, and physical fiber. Believing that it was better to weed out the weak cadets sooner than later, Academy officials normally separated cadets who failed even a single course or who violated the honor code no matter how slight the offense or remorseful the offender.3 Tactical officers were stern taskmasters and enforcers of discipline whose opinions weighed heavily in decisions affecting the fate of cadets. Cadets, too, embraced the attritional mind-set when they resorted to hazing in the guise of testing the mettle of plebes and running out those too feeble to withstand the pressure. This baleful pastime flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries despite concerted efforts of every superintendent to eradicate it.4 Even as the worst TOWA R D A “FOUR-CLASS SYSTEM” 241 aspects of hazing subsided, however, attritional attitudes promoted a harshly negative leadership culture that taught cadets the wrong lessons about how to motivate soldiers. Whatever the shortcomings of...