THE MED WALLS OF WAR

...This notion came to me the morning I spent with Colonel Roger Donlon, dean of the foreign officers...

...I expected to find all the coordinates of evil there, and hoped to be able to plot them neatly on a map...

...Long-range requirements, which must consider present and future technologies as well as the projected threat...

...Despite excellent academic intentions in such courses as "Geography and Geopolitics for the Modern Military Officer," one senses that the school's importance lies in its status as an essential step on the ladder of advancement in the corporate Army...

...Students take a certain number of required courses and then branch out for electives...

...Transition plan, which entails replacing old organization and equipment with new, and Organizational competence to accomplish all of the above...

...The emphasis is on the promotion of corporate loyalty...

...Courses are offered in such areas as "staff operations," "tactics," "combat service support," and "the profession of arms...

...Only a few of the faces hanging on the walls belong to truly famous members of the Hall of Fame...

...in addition to Geisel and Castello Armas, that year's graduates include Pedro Vargas Prado of Peru and Jose Maria Le-mus, who ran El Salvador from 1956 to 1960 but has yet to be inducted to the Hall...

...Viewed in this light, some of those stern portraits on display in the Allied Hall of Fame, America's contribution to the worldwide club of military tyrants, are better understood as representatives of American enterprise who successfully completed the sales course at Leavenworth...

...Sometimes, as part of the Security Assistance Program, the United States will pick up the tuition and training of allied soldiers, but for the most part foreign countries pay their own way...

...Army officers, thirty-two from the Air Force, ten Marines, three from the Navy, and 105 allied officers...

...They believe careerism had disastrous consequences for the military's performance...

...Preparation for battle is broken down into the following components: Mission areas—studies and analyses conducted at the TRADOC schools and integrating centers which examine specific battlefield functions...

...The Allied Hall of Fame inducted its first members—a phalanx of Latin American and Philippine generals—in August 1973, when the image of the United States as an ally had been badly tarnished by the fiasco in Vietnam...

...Gabriel and Savage conclude: "To adopt virtually intact the practices and ethics of a business corporation, leading senior officers to equate the international efficiency of a military organization with 'management,' and then to assume that this pattern would provide combat strength defined as unit cohesion and a will to fight, was disastrously wrong...

...The education of a foreign officer is the responsibility of the U.S...

...The profile of officers enrolled at the school closely matches that of corporate managers on the move...

...A fort was established on the site of the current post in 1827, and an account published in 1833 under the title Indian Sketches observed that "there is nothing here to tell of war: and but for the sentinels upon their posts, the lounging forms of soldiers, or the occasional drum...

...Prioritization of requirements, which must consider budget restraints...

...The lesson to be learned at Leavenworth—despite the notorious heavies honored in its Hall of Fame— is that war has become a business and the upper echelons of the military are just like the upper echelons of any corporate enterprise...

...The officers tend to be majors or lieutenant colonels with an average age of thirty-five and about twelve years of military service...

...In the wake of Vietnam, U.S...

...The old campus is a square of two- and three-story wooden frame buildings...

...Yes, it turned out, dictators-to-be had attended Leavenworth, but what did that prove...

...The slides showed not only the statistical accomplishments of the foreign graduates, but also the life of a student in an average year at the school...

...That comes in handy when decisions must be made about foreign military sales or when a coup brings about an abrupt change in government...

...Two former military officers, Richard Gabriel and Paul Savage, studied the performance of the officer corps in Vietnam and summed up their conclusions in their title, Crisis in Command...

...Anyone who wants to achieve the rank of colonel or better must show—in the Army's phrase—that his ticket has been punched at Leavenworth or one of the similar schools...

...I took it for granted that the college was a military heart of darkness, and that on the grounds I would encounter an assortment of Central American colonels learning the finer points of torture and assassination...

...Like almost everyone I met at Fort Leavenworth, Donlon produced a handy slide projector to give me a "little idea of just what we're trying to do around here...

...Army Training and Doctrine Command, with headquarters at Fort Monroe, Virginia—the Colonial Williamsburg of Army posts...

...The newer structures, including the one that houses the Allied Hall of Fame and the library, spread out from the old quadrangle in the haphazard style of most universities that try to mix new and old...

...With only slight modification, this statement applies today...

...foreign military sales program...

...The American or foreign student arriving for an academic year at Leavenworth encounters a catalogue that resembles, except for its military emphasis, a course guide at one of the major business schools...

...staff officers was founded in 1881 by order of General William T. Sherman...

...The program also gives allied officers a chance to look over the United States...

...To the left, farther along, is a golf course where Dwight D. Eisenhower allegedly hit his first golf ball...

...Last year, the class had 717 regular U.S...

...Without it, you can still fight, but you retire as a major...

...The foreign officers attended the same classes as American students and, on weekends, mixed with classmates or one of their three sponsors on the base, in Leavenworth, or in Kansas City, about a forty-minute drive away...

...But instead of a breeding-ground of repression, I found a quiet Midwestern town, a typical if slightly out-of-date Army post, and a training center—for both American and foreign officers—that bore closer resemblance to the Harvard Business School than to anything one would be likely to encounter in the novels of Ian Fleming...

...Who's really running the show...

...Professors' offices are stacked with papers and books...

...In somber brown frames hang the black-and-white portraits of 115 allied officers, many of them starting pitchers on anyone's all-time all-star team of authoritarians...

...The town of Leavenworth lies alongside the Missouri River just south of the point where the Santa Fe trail jumps from the farmland north of Kansas City to the Western prairie...

...The officers stand stiff and unsmiling, much as they appear in their nations' newspapers the morning after a coup...

...The campus grounds are much like those of a state college...

...THE MED WALLS OF WAR At Leavenworth's Command and General Staff College, the Army polishes tomorrow's brass BY MATTHEW STEVENSON In a hallway outside the library at the Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas, the U.S...

...The Brazilian contingent of fourteen includes two former commanders-in-chief who made it to the presidency—Humberto de A. Castello Branco, class of '43, and Ernesto Geisel, '45...

...Besides, the majority of the graduates serve out their careers with all the distinction and tedium of middle managers in a large insurance company...

...A gang of thugs can be compiled from the alumni list of any Ivy League college...

...Gabriel and Savage write: "By the time increasing numbers of the American officer corps took the field in Vietnam in 1964, the American military structure had already become permeated by a set of values, practices, and policies that forced considerations of career advancement to figure more heavily in the behavior of individual officers than the traditional ethics normally associated with military life...

...Total systems management, which integrates the entire package of training, personnel, hardware, and supportability...

...from Vietnam, Presidents Thieu and Khanh, class of '57, and President Duong Van Minh, '58...

...The Command and General Staff College is between the Federal penitentiary and the river...

...Time has been cruel to the Hall...

...Preparation for war is one of the few growth industries remaining in the economy, and it is obviously regarded as too important to be left to civilians...

...If everything else in the country has been turned into a business, why not the military...

...Even for war, an MBA is now required...

...The main gates resemble those that often guard security-conscious suburban developments...

...Also from the class of '45 is Carlos Castello Armas, whom the CIA installed in 1954 to rule Guatemala...

...allies needed reassurance about America's intent to honor its commitments, and the Hall was one small sign that perhaps we cared...

...The answer is to be found in a small book I found on a shelf at the Leavenworth bookstore...

...many officers were so obsessed with winning promotion that they lost the ability to lead and fight...

...The list of graduates reads like a Who's Who of great military leaders, featuring such names as Lee, Johnston, Sheridan, Stuart, Bradley, MacArthur, Marshall, and Stilwell...

...The idea of the Army as a corporation— albeit one without a cash-flow problem— dates to organizational orders issued by General George Marshall after World War II...

...There are no faded uniforms or memorable bullets on display and no recorded play-by-plays of the great battles, but in every other respect the gallery could be considered the Cooperstown of tyranny...

...From strictly a business point of view, enrolling foreign officers in the Command and General Staff College is a sound investment...

...At the Command and General Staff College, even the training of foreign officers is permeated with the values of an education designed primarily to foster the careers of those enrolled...

...allies in NATO, the Middle East, and Asia...

...In the class of 1982,1 learned, 105 foreign officers were enrolled from fifty countries, most of them traditional U.S...

...Fittingly, sunlight has bleached the photographs of the military tyrants we are pleased to honor as friends of democracy so that they look like an odd cross between old daguerreotypes and police sketches...

...TRADOC, as it is known in militaryspeak, assigns foreign officers after they have applied through our embassies abroad and have been accepted in Washington...

...The college at Leavenworth for the training of U.S...

...On the right as you drive up the main road is George Patton Junior High School...

...we would not have known that we were in the heart of a military station...

...Ignatius Acheampong, who took control of Ghana in a 1972 coup, class of '69...

...Its purpose is to pay tribute to foreign graduates of the school who have distinguished themselves "in a position of great importance" once they have returned home...

...A Korean officer might, for example, choose an elective in "Asian Military History...

...Donlon's record is outstanding—he won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam—and he insisted in our discussion that a crucial element of the school's program was "communication" between the United States and its allies...

...This equation was proven demonstrably false in the rice paddies of Vietnam...

...The life and times of General Alexander Haig provide an instructive example...

...TRADOC literature reveals the extent to which today's battlefield has been converted into a conference center for rival executives...

...More typical of these graduates than the handful of dictators are such officers as Sir Peter Hunt, '48, who became chief of staff of the British army, or Lieutenant General Hans G. Roos, who now holds a similar position in the Netherlands...

...It didn't matter that many of the newly elected members had become famous via the coup d'etat...

...Field trips were offered to Washington, D.C., and the state legislature in To-peka, Kansas (where some of the foreign officers kept asking Donlon, "Who's really in control here...

...The slides gave the general impression of college students here on their junior year abroad...

...in this case, the company is the United States of America...

...Since then, some 4,000 foreign officers have attended courses at Leavenworth...

...Few officers from overseas major in tyranny—especially at Leavenworth, where there is no field work and instruction tends to imitate the work of the better professional schools...

...As I was told at Fort Monroe, "We do business on a foreign military sales basis with ninety-eight countries around the world...

...One purpose of that orientation is to give the United States an opportunity to get to know the bright young military men on their way up in other countries...

...A course on "How to Be a Strongman" must have been popular with the class of Matthew Stevenson, formerly on the staff of Harper's, is now a free-lance writer in New York City...

...I visited Leavenworth and its program for allied officers on the assumption that the United States had exported a generation of dictators since World War II...

...Army has put together what it calls the Allied Hall of Fame...

...and Jaf-fer Numeiri, the current leader of the Sudan, '66...

...The armed forces were turning out the military equivalent of lean corporate managers for the automated battlefield, and like their corporate counterparts, they valued career advancement above all else...

...Officers attend classes, write papers, spend much time in the library, and mix with each other on such activities as a field trip to a nearby missile silo...

...As tours of duty go, this one is preferred...

...The alumni roster includes twenty-one heads of state, 148 ambassadors or ministers, and more than 1,000 general army officers...

...But as I viewed the slides of officers in casual dress frolicking alongside barbeque pits or ogling the Washington Monument, I couldn't help but feel these were new executives joining the firm, and their year here was the equivalent of an orientation program...

...Less than a decade after its founding, it stands as a monument to the worst impulses of American foreign policy...

...Most foreign officers are training here under provisions of the U.S...

...A selective list of others who attended the Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth but haven't made it yet into the Hall of Fame could, perhaps, be culled from the files of Amnesty International...

...45...

...The statement of purpose borrows heavily from the language of social science: "Instruction provides the professional training and education necessary to prepare officers for middle-management assignments, with emphasis on the command and staff skills required to win the land battle...

...Thus, when trucks are sold to Kenya, several Kenyan officers are sent to Fort Eustis, Virginia, to learn how to use them...

...Other familiar names from the alumni directory: Mohammad Zia Ul Haq, president of Pakistan, class of '63...

...The college has had a program for allied officers since 1894, although it was a limited operation until World War II, when a group of Brazilian officers trained here to fight against Germany...