This is where “winging it” takes over, resulting in lives lost, time wasted, and resources depleted.
Eventually, they reach a level in which an understanding of war that goes beyond a couple years of professional military education is required, and they don’t possess it. None of these responsibilities require much in the way of self-study. They perform well as platoon leaders, company commanders, and battalion commanders. Unfortunately, many in the military do not invest small amounts of time throughout their careers in self-study. Neglecting our own self-development can have equally damaging results. Most of the marriages I have watched dissolve were the result of one or both partners neglecting the relationship over a period of years, and by the time they realized it they were in dire straits-it was too late. This idea plays out in other areas of life as well. You can skip a workout and not fail the APFT but start consistently skipping workouts over a month or a couple of months, and now you have a problem. When we study the lives of successful war-time generals they all share a common thread, they spent their entire careers preparing their mind. His ideas and actions are the result of a cumulative investment in self-study. I’ve heard him reference Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, Clausewitz’ On War, the works of Sir Michael Howard, and Jonathan House’s Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century, just to name a few. Yes, he is intelligent, but he’s also been a student of war for 31 years! If you actually dissect his speeches, they are an amalgamation of thought spanning human history. McMaster speak, I hear folks in the audience talk about how smart he is, and how he is going to missed when he retires. None of this happened over night or from reading a couple of books, but through a consistent investment of small chunks of time into the habit of self-study.Įvery time I’ve watched LTG H.R. Eventually, after a steady effort, I started developing my own ideas that were a combination of knowledge captured from several books, articles, as well as reflections from my own experiences. I would encounter a problem at work, and my solution would be informed by the vicarious experiences or theories I gained through reading. After my second year, I began making connections. I wasn’t great on the specific details, but I knew which book to find the passage to which I was referring. I remember after the first year of consistent reading, I was like a walking Google. It’s not the effect of one work out that aids in our improvement, but the cumulative effect of multiple workouts that impact our overall level of fitness. After a few weeks of consistently working out, you begin to see an overall improvement in running ability or WOD times. After the first workout, there’s no change. You come back from a deployment and your APFT score looks abysmal compared to where it was twelve months earlier. Most of us in the military have gone through seasons where our fitness levels dropped. There is a cumulative value to investing small amounts of time in self-study over a long period of time This doesn’t have to be the case, and I’ve learned three truths about self-study that I hope motivate you to start preparing now before your own test.ġ. The test is a practical exercise called “War.” If we aren’t prepared, the results can be devastating. The problem is that as time marches forward, we run the risk of the professor walking through the door and handing us the test when we least expect it. Some leaders even go twenty years without reading a single book outside of professional military education, and boast that they still made brigade command. We don’t get rewarded on our Officer and NCO evaluation reports for spending time on our own self-development. Let’s be honest, the military places little extrinsic value on self-study. Many go their entire careers without dedicating time to the study of war and warfare. While the logic is clear-cut in this scenario, it is lost on many leaders in their professional military careers. How would you approach studying for the test? Would you study for 20-30 minutes every night or would you wait until a week before the test and start cramming? You’re probably saying that this is a no brainer, and that you would spend a year studying in small increments so that you get a 100 percent and nobody dies. Imagine if someone told you that a year from today, you would be required to take a test in which every wrong answer resulted in the loss of a human life.