The Utility of Janowitz’s Political Awareness in Officer Education

Abstract

In the pages of this journal, Damon Coletta and Tom Crosbie published a response to our article entitled, “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’s The Professional Soldier for the Education of Officers.” In that article, we argued that Janowitz’s emphasis on the need for political awareness in the U.S. military should receive greater attention in the education of today’s officer corps. Coletta and Crosbie suggest that we are too ready to abandon Samuel Huntington’s classic work, The Soldier and the State. In this continuation of that dialogue, we respond with three clarifications and three substantive disagreements. Huntington and Janowitz offer divergent perspectives on the issues of officer education and “political virtue,” we suggest, and Janowitz’s perspective deserves greater weight that it has traditionally received. Coletta and Crosbie also place greater emphasis on the separability of political and military affairs than is warranted, and Janowitz is more helpful here as well.