Abstract: Parameter's Editorial Board Member Anna Simons responds to the preceding article in this issue, Intellectual Capital: A Case for Cultural Change. ********* I am all for Spain, Banks, and Mohundro's idea of Army Smart. I like to think any academic teaching in a professional military education (PME) institution would agree: brains should trump brawn. However, it is not clear to me that GPAs or, worse, standardized test scores accurately capture who is capable of daring thinking or sage leadership. Nor do I think having more PhDs or Masters-level officers in the force is altogether wise, or even necessary. As it is, too many officers and soldiers are earning diplomas from what are, for all intents and purposes, degree mills. They are doing so because education now counts for promotion. No question, being able to tally up pieces of parchment enables units to brag about how smart their soldiers are. But--if we sample just some of the written work turned in to earn those degrees, we would (or rather, should) be appalled. More troubling than the money and time being wasted, however, is the assumption that academic credentials signify talent. Yes, attending a 10-month Masters program or earning a PhD in 3 years (the military standard) exposes individuals to subjects they might not study on their own, which can be very valuable. But as anyone who has been around PhDs should recognize, just because someone possesses an advanced degree does not guarantee he or she is a particularly quick, deep, or profound thinker. Nor does it guarantee he or she can communicate effectively. To be sure, in our 18-month-long in-residence degree-granting program at the Naval Postgraduate School, we too have problems with students who can not express themselves particularly well in writing. We also graduate officers who would not be able to organize a Masters-level argument without considerable assistance. However, that does not mean our students are not smart--or curious, or able to absorb information by means other than reading and writing. I invoke our students because there are multiple kinds of intelligence, and while I am counting on the authors' argument to provoke a long overdue debate, my biggest quibble is with their criteria--which are stacked in favor of only one particular type of intelligence. In the not so hoary past, when reading books and not just emails was an avocation, used to distinguish between book smarts and street or people smarts. It was often thought that anyone with the former tended to lack the latter. Such a binary view seems of a piece with thinking women can not be both smart and beautiful, but it also lines up with the authors' contentions about motivation and intellect. Let's consider their motivation-intellect juxtaposition for a moment. I can not tell from the article whether the authors think this opposition informs people's choices consciously or subconsciously, is a by-product of Army conditioning, or what else. But if I have read them correctly, they believe the Army right now privileges the wrong thing (motivation) over the right thing: intellectual human capital. Even if we accept that Army leaders weight these two competencies against each other in favor of motivation, the authors' preferred means for assessing cognitive agility are puzzling. Especially when we consider neither standardized tests nor GPAs probe an individual's ability to assess novel or unfamiliar situations accurately. Nor is either designed to reveal who might be unconventional in their approach to learning, never mind problem solving. Consider GPAs. At most institutions, grades reflect little more than who has the mental acuity to absorb, regurgitate, or (at best) maybe synthesize information passed down in transmissible form via a teacher, books, or from some other authoritative source. Grades rarely reveal an individual's capacity for discovering information independently, let alone for generating new or different ideas. …