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Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers Kindle Edition
Saving Our Service Academies covers one man’s unrelenting thirty-year fight with the military bureaucracy to instill qualities of force and thoughtfulness in officers-to-be, to show young men how to be adults with other men and women, and to show young women how to deal with the men.
Bruce Fleming has spent over thirty years teaching midshipmen and future officers at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. This position was both a dream job and a nightmare for the enthusiastic, athletic, young Fleming. He found, in the thousands of midshipmen he taught, mentored, and exercised with for three decades, a heartbreaking waste of potential, as promising officers-to-be lapsed into apathy and cynicism because of the dispiriting reality behind the gleaming facade of the Naval Academy. What happened to duty, honor, and country at Annapolis? These values have disappeared in the wake of changes in the world, such as the rise of ROTC and the increase in expense of civilian colleges (the service academies are free to the students), and in the attempt to use the service academies as experiments in trendy social engineering.
A staunch advocate for military strength, Fleming shows how the smoke and mirrors of service academies produce officers who are taught to say “SIR, YES SIR” rather than to have the guts to say things their commanding officer doesn’t want to hear. Is that why the US hasn’t won a war since World War II? By writing op-eds about the waste, fraud, and abuse of government (and taxpayer) money, Fleming put a target on his back that the USNA administration used to fire him in 2018, despite being a tenured civilian professor. He was reinstated by a federal judge in 2019.
The service academies are government programs that no longer fill the needs for which they were created, and so like all government programs, can be re-examined. Indeed, as Fleming argues, they teach blind obedience in officers rather than informed and respectful questioning, and so sap our military strength rather than increasing it. They need to be re-imagined not as stand-alone undergraduate institutions that wall off future officers in an increasingly untenable isolation from the country they are to defend, but either be combined with the officer commissioning sources that currently produce over 80 percent of our new officers, or re-purposed to post-civilian college training institutions.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPost Hill Press
- Publication dateJanuary 9, 2024
- File size1785 KB
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Product details
- ASIN : B0CDJ6NRX2
- Publisher : Post Hill Press (January 9, 2024)
- Publication date : January 9, 2024
- Language : English
- File size : 1785 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 302 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,016,645 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #150 in Biographies of the Air Force
- #171 in Biographies of the Military Navy
- #2,999 in Military & Spies Biographies
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While Fleming illustrates the problems with the Naval Academy he also offers solutions by looking st service academies around the world, such as Britain’s Sandhurst. He has suggestions for fixing what he sees as the issues but cautions that change will take a concerted effort, starting with Congress, which he admits might not be feasible. But there are several ways to make the changes that Fleming feels are essential not just for the Naval Academy but for the military in general. Change for the military is imperative given our complex world and increasing world wide conflicts.