West Point: Educating generals -- American-style
by
MARK LIEBERMAN*

What do America’s future generals learn about democracy at the US Military Academy -- which, incidentally, was named “America’s Best College” in last year’s Forbes magazine ratings.

How do they learn to conduct themselves as officers and gentlemen, in accordance with democratic principles, the rule of law and the West Point code: duty/honor/country?

The answer is that they do so by participating in a rigorous, four-year “Government and Civics Curriculum,” which teaches them the proper/legal role they must play as future officers of a republican government.

The course was created in cooperation with West Point academics by a five-year-old non-profit organization called ConSource -- the Constitutional Sources Project -- which has the admirable goal of producing a complete online library of documents and curricula “to facilitate research and encourage discussion of the US Constitution … to enable the people to interact with constitutional history.”

Since 1787, military personnel have been required to “swear or affirm that they will support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Teaching future generals how -- and why -- they must do so is the rationale behind the West Point curriculum, which includes detailed analyses of constitutional history, study of the system of checks and balances meticulously crafted by the founding fathers to prevent usurpation by any single branch of government and lectures and class discussions of the limits of executive power and where those limits intersect and overlap with the limits of a responsible military functioning in a representative democracy.

For each lesson, students are required to read primary and secondary source documents. Prior to the lesson on executive powers, for example, future officers read Article II of the constitution -- the executive power shall be vested in the president -- and must also be prepared to discuss the relevant sections of Hamilton’s “Federalist Papers” in order to understand without ambiguity the powers granted to the chief executive -- their commander-in-chief -- both in times of peace and times of war.

But the section of the West Point curriculum most relevant to the current discourse in developing democracies is the freshman-year module titled “Civilian-Military Relations.” The objectives of the lesson are “to understand the importance of military subordination to civilian authorities in a republic, to demonstrate an understanding of the specific provisions in the US constitution that shape civilian-military relations and to understand the tension between security and liberty as it pertains to civilian-military relations.”

In preparation, students are required to read Articles I and II, the 2nd and 3rd Amendments, David Trasks’s seminal article “Democracy and Defense: Civilian Control of the Military” as well as US Army Regulation 600-200, which prescribes the appropriate relationship between the army and the civilian population in a democracy.

Having completed this reading list, the young officers-to-be are required to think long and hard in class -- and to be prepared to discuss what the curriculum describes as the background of the lesson: “Civilian-military relations are often overlooked by educators, because they are taken for granted -- in today’s day and age, it is unthinkable that the military would conduct a coup d’état or attempt to override political decisions.” (Let it be quickly added that the West Point curriculum refers only to circumstances in developed democracies; modern history is littered with dozens of such “attempts” elsewhere.)

In the discussion section of the lesson, the instructor challenges the future officers with provocative questions such as “Does the military physically have the capability to overthrow the government [tanks and planes on Washington]? How does the constitution protect against military uprisings and ensure civilian dominance? How does the constitution empower the executive branch to control the military?”

The lesson concludes with an examination of Army Regulation 600-200/Appendix B: “Political Activities,” which lists “the regulations which apply to military officers’ participation in political activities.” The discussion centers on the following critical issues: Are these regulations too harsh? Too lenient? Do they adequately protect civilian leadership from undue military influence?

Harking back to the close of the Revolutionary War, the class studies a 1785 incident known as the “Newburgh Conspiracy” in which a dissident general and his colleagues counseled the 10,000-strong Continental Army not to disband -- an attempted military coup with which George Washington dealt decisively, ordering the plotters to disband immediately, thereby establishing the primacy of civilian control over the military even before the constitution was ratified.

The lesson concludes with a leap from 1787 to 2010 and asks the future generals to speculate on the hypothesis that “if Gen. [David] Petraeus, popular as he is, decided to incite the military to rebellion, would his men support it?” Cadets are also asked to comment on the closing of Guantanamo, whether or not to ban “enhanced interrogation” techniques -- and whether former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney should have been dismissed.

West Point’s history department tells students “Much of the history we teach was made by the people we taught.” Could a pragmatic curriculum such as West Point’s succeed on the banks of the Bosporus as it has on the banks of the Hudson? Of course it could. All that’s required is a modern, civilian superstructure to build on -- a truly republican constitution to which all future Turkish “history-makers” -- from private to paşa -- would swear to obey, uphold and defend.