Military Officer Education

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The officer corps has always been a vital component of armed forces: it is their leadership, it possesses and imparts professional expertise, it determines the military mind set, and it upholds and revises the military ethic. Its importance is witnessed by the host of studies that have examined it from a sociological standpoint 1 as well as those of other disciplines. Sociology undertakes the study of officership according to the same schemes applied to any group or social aggregate: it studies the process of newcomer socialization and its internal dynamics, the individual’s relations with the group, and the relations of the officer corps with other social groups and with society as a whole. In this chapter we look at the socialization process of those who enter the corps, by which term we mean the process by which an individual learns and absorbs the complex of rules, values, behaviors, and cultural models that a given social group has laid down for its members. The very concept of profession sanctions the status of an activity by establishing the main characteristics of the activity: (a) existence of sound theoretical knowledge (the “doctrine”); (b) existence of an ethic (values and norms) regulating individual behaviour to role expectations; (c) existence of a sense of belonging, an “esprit de corps”, peculiar to professional group members who recognise one another as bearers of competences and attitudes typical of that peer group. The basic education provided by officer training institutes today (2015) is going through a moment of difficulty in tackling the problems created by new, highly variable and volatile operational contexts. Officers’ basic preparation, which is now five years almost everywhere, does not currently appear to be sufficient, on its own, to give them the ability to operate effectively in such contexts. All the authors (see Moskos in Peace soldiers: The sociology of a United Nations military force. Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1976; Blomgren in The heritage and the present: from invasion defence to mission oriented organisation. Swedish National Defence College, Karlstad, pp. 233–242, 2008; Gentile in World Aff 171:57–64, 2008; Nagl in Let’s win the wars we’re. Center for a New American Security, Washington, DC, 2009) agree in believing that the traditional military preparation for conventional conflicts constitutes the indispensable base also for operations of asymmetric warfare. This preparation is no longer sufficient, however, and other skills appear necessary for the military professional faced with a new scenario.