Groupthink Makes Navies Stupid
"Want an intellectually inert U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard? Fine: stifle the free interplay of ideas and views on campus, and within the sea."
Groupthink makes navies stupid. Heck, groupthink makes any group of people stupid. Shame there’s such demand for it in U.S. Navy circles.
Or at least that’s the impression you’d get from the criticism flung Admiral Jeff Harley’s way in recent weeks. Admiral Harley, a surface-warfare officer now in his second year as president of the U.S. Naval War College, gave a recent interview with the Providence Journal touting his effort to make the College more like civilian universities.
Reporter G. Wayne Miller quotes Harley as saying: “We have to ensure that our academics have academic freedom to express . . . dissenting viewpoints, regardless of how painful sometimes that might be. You want the institution to look and feel like a civilian institution.” The bottom line, as Miller paraphrases it: “As such, Harley said, he expects the War College to more closely resemble schools such as Brown University or the University of Rhode Island.”
(For some reason the ace reporter uses your shy, retiring scribe as the poster boy for academic freedom—including, presumably, that bit about how painful hearing out the quarrelsome can be.)
The Journal story elicited an outburst from nattering nabobs in the press and on the internet. Former Naval War College military faculty member Colonel Gary Anderson held forth in the pages of the Washington Times, in a column sure to make you feel like the luckless patient in that old George Carlin joke. The pseudonymous navy blogger Commander Salamander piled on, joined by his commenters.
Alas and alack, this is not a one-off thing. Elements within the naval establishment have mounted a running effort to curb academic freedom—or “freedom,” as I like to call it—for years. This ten years’ war spans my current Newport life, but it’s a safe guess the onslaught commenced long before that. It is a mite distressing to see ex-seamen who ought to know better join the fray.
Generally speaking, the critiques fell into two categories: curriculum and academic freedom. The complainants took umbrage at the suggestion the Naval War College should be more like the University of Rhode Island (URI) or—gadzooks!—Brown. They appeared doubly vexed that a professional military-education institution would permit professors to criticize Big Navy or Big Pentagon from within. Still less should the College grant tenure—guaranteeing them the liberty to hold forth.
The first complaint is simply wrong. The second is a feature—not a bug—if you care about improving how the navy and Pentagon do business. Institutions that stand above criticism and debate are intellectual sluggards, prone to underperform.
Let’s take the complaints in turn. First, Colonel Anderson suggests Harley rename the College the “Naval University of Conflict Avoidance.” Witty. Commander Sal accuses him of trying to found “another university in New England with a self-preening Peace Studies program.”
Methinks the Brown Effect is at work here. Miller’s mention of famously left-leaning Brown University, our local Ivy League institution, seems to have waved a red flag in front of commentators. Invoking Brown has that effect on Newport oldtimers.
The Brown Effect has been a long time in the making. Once upon a time, in the early 1990s, I was a Naval War College student while Anderson toiled away in our research wing. At the time there was indeed a group, reputedly affiliated with Brown, pushing a zany scheme to rename the College and convert it into a peace-studies institute. The campaign made no headway—and never will. Time to let that one go.
Substitute “Providence College” or some other Rhode Island institute for “Brown,”and chances are the uproar over the story would have been more muted.
Be that as it may, both Anderson and Sal seem to assume reinventing the Naval War College to be more like the University of Rhode Island or Brown portends making the content of our coursework at NWC more like theirs. Not so. Harley’s “normalization” initiative, one pillar of his strategic plan, is mainly about making the professional climate in Newport friendlier to faculty research and publication. It’s not about remodeling our courses, still less demilitarizing them.
The initiative is long overdue. At present federal law forbids faculty to publish anything they write on company time under their own copyright. Meanwhile, their employment contracts demand they research and write for publication. Ergo, the words you’re reading were written in the evenings, on weekends, or on vacation. This arrangement endears professors to their families and friends. An enemy of faculty productivity could hardly design a better system to discourage it. This Kafkaesque system needs to be normalized into oblivion.
Now, the Naval War College is a college of conflict avoidance to be sure—in George Washington’s sense that “to be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” That’s the classic definition of deterrence and coercion. Constructing an insuperable military force, and making prospective foes believers in American martial prowess, represents the surest way to avoid conflict. If defeat is certain, a foe may well forego challenging the U.S. armed forces.
Peace through power. QED.
That will remain the guiding philosophy. The College is accountable to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for curricular matters, and the JCS has broadcast zero demand to soften the curriculum. The reverse, if anything: the rise of a maritime China, Russia’s awakening from its post-Cold War slumber, and Iranian and North Korean mischief-making have reinvigorated the military’s and U.S. Navy’s sense of purpose, and thus the College’s.
This year I oversaw revisions to the Strategy and War Course, one of our three core courses, and trust me: the course is well-named. Don’t believe me? Have a look.
Now, Admiral Harley’s strategic plan as a whole does pertain to curriculum: it’s about making the curriculum more operational in outlook while infusing new saltwater content into it. Hence the pillars he calls “operationalization” and “navalization.”
Operationalizing and navalizing is a matter of keeping up with the times as they change around us. NWC coursework, research, and wargaming took on a counterinsurgent cast after 9/11 because irregular warfare was what U.S. and coalition forces—our students—were doing in the real world. Now that the strategic center of gravity has shifted seaward, naval warfare is regaining its central place at the College. Mahan, not Laurence of Arabia, is the toast of Newport once again.
So much for transmuting the Naval War College into a self-preening Peace Studies program.
And second, Anderson and some of Sal’s commenters are peeved about academic freedom. Here’s how Anderson sums up the NWC strategic plan: “Adm. Harley wants to hire faculty who don’t necessarily agree with the Pentagon and bring in more foreign professors to internationalize the institution. He also wants to grant tenure so these progressive outside-the-box thinkers can be protected from retaliation by those who may believe that their ideas are loopy.”
Where to start? How about here: the “foreign professors” recruited to the College in recent years are retired commanders of foreign navies, including such close allies as the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, Royal Norwegian Navy, and Colombian Navy, as well as friendly forces like the Indian Navy. They’re counterparts to Admiral John Richardson, our top uniformed naval officer. Japan’s navy, moreover, has taken to stationing a captain at the College to research, write, and keep up alliance relations.
Pretty radical stuff, this bid to “internationalize” the Naval War College by populating the faculty with furriners spouting their loopy furrin ideas.
Next, tenure. There’s a mix of pragmatic reasons for offering professional security. For one: like it or not, tenure remains the coin of the realm in academe. It’s an emblem that an ambitious young scholar has arrived in his or her chosen discipline. Naval War College has a hard time competing for and retaining top talent without it. If we’re lucky, youngsters may come to Newport for a few years to accumulate some experience. But then, all too often, they’re off to more hospitable professional climes.
Make it hard to recruit junior faculty and discourage them from publishing if they do come; it’s not hard to foretell the impact of misbegotten policies.
For another: the nabobs seem aghast at the prospect that professors would take issue with the navy or defense establishment about this or that. Reserve the right to fire them and they’re apt confine themselves to safe opinions about safe topics—or remain silent altogether. A college with a docile faculty must be a smoothly functioning college.
No controversy, no problem. Right?
Er, no. Suppressing controversy might project the comforting illusion of an ultracompetent institution, but that’s all it would be: an illusion. All hail to the U.S. Navy’s great and powerful leadership, but expecting one person or a small coterie of senior officers or officials to bequeath wisdom to everyone else is a loopy idea. The navy, like all groups of people, is capable of boneheaded decisions. Exempting it from critical scrutiny amounts to begging for more such decisions. It renders the service intellectually inert—much as it did the Soviet Navy. The defeated foe is not an example to emulate.
John Stuart Mill’s renowned essay On Liberty constitutes a fixture in debates about the virtues of freethinking, and justly so. Fittingly, Mill couches his brief on behalf of the free interchange of ideas in terms of right and wrong. Underneath the moral argument, though, he pushes the utilitarian argument that squelching speech denies both speaker and listeners—indeed, humanity as a whole—the benefit of hearing dissenting views:
the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
Quite so. Quashing correct faculty views would deny the U.S. Navy leadership the opportunity to mend its errors. Quashing views that are partially correct would deny the leadership the opportunity to sift through them, extracting the correct bits and amending policy or official views by increments. And quashing wholly errant views would deny the service the chance to confirm its practices by exposing them to contending—albeit false—opinions.
So even loopy ideas are worth hearing, if only to reaffirm the wisdom of accepted practices. Even Anderson’s vacuous claim that NWC faculty should side with the navy or Pentagon, hold their tongues, or risk being fired adds value to the conversation.
Yale psychologist Irving Janis transposes Mill’s logic to organizational settings, where groupthink—a term he coined in the 1970s—is apt to prevail. Janis points out that the pressure to conform to the consensus view can be intense in group settings. Partisans of the consensus try to cajole a dissenter into joining it, then ostracize him if he persists with his heresy. Add career incentives and disincentives to group dynamics—awards and promotions, rebukes and penalties of all sorts—and you only amplify the pressure on outliers to conform.
In turn you impoverish debate over proper courses of action. Hierarchical military institutions are especially prone to groupthink—which is why the Pearl Harbor attack and Cuban Missile Crisis figure prominently among the cases Janis proffers as evidence.
He confesses that groupthink is an Orwellian term with an “invidious connotation” reminiscent of Big Brother’s doublethink and crimethink. The 1984 tie-in is deliberate. “Groupthink,” he declares, “refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures.” In short, groups find themselves estranged from reality when group members think in unison. Nor do such groups adapt easily when reality changes around them.
Groupthink is not something you want more of.
Janis’s prescription? That group leaders appoint a “devil’s advocate” to every group charged with making and executing decisions. The advocate deploys his utmost ingenuity to scuttle the consensus view—even if he doesn’t believe his own advocacy. Wise leadership makes that person’s career incentives contingent on executing the adversarial function with verve.
Seconded!
The U.S. Navy and Defense Department are in luck. They already have standing devil’s advocates in their employ, namely the faculty of the Naval War College and kindred educational institutions. All the military leadership needs to do is get out of the way and let the professoriate follow its natural instinct to critique officialdom. In so doing it will enliven debates over policy, strategy, and force design—and Janis and Mill will smile.
Want an intellectually inert U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard? Fine: stifle the free interplay of ideas and views on campus, and within the sea services as a whole. Good luck when you square off against a freethinking antagonist.
James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College, coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific (second edition forthcoming 2018), and, he hopes, a progressive outside-the-box thinker. The views voiced here are his alone.
Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (Aug. 21, 2017) Sailors observe a refueling-at-sea with the guided-missile destroyer USS Sampson (DDG 102) from the hangar bay of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71). U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Alex Perlman/Released. Flickr / Official U.S. Navy Page
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