The art of asking your boss tough questions
By Kelly Kennedy
Times staff writer
FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — In a cinder-block classroom without windows, eight soldiers, ranging from chief warrant officer 3 to colonel, sat in a circle talking shop.
“Self-defense is motivated by selfish reasons, so it’s never defensible, right?” one soldier asked, scanning the book in front of him: “Ethics of War and Peace” by Paul Christopher.
“It’s the same as today — you can help others, but not yourself,” another soldier added.
“To say that, you have to be Gandhi or something,” a third soldier broke in.
Gandhi and the politics of saving one’s own skin don’t usually emerge in foxhole banter, but that’s the point here. Red Team University — the nickname for the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies — gives soldiers a unique base of knowledge so they can offer new ideas when it’s time to plan a battle. That base includes instruction on insurgent warfare tactics, the ethics behind what makes a war just, cultural anthropology and even how society might view the results of a battle.
When these soldiers go back to their units, they will be able to play the role of devil’s advocate for an audience that might not always want to hear that perspective.
in a command center planning a battle, these soldiers will have to be able to speak their minds, often to senior leaders, and the head-butting in class helps prepare them for that.
“The whole mind-set of the Army is the senior guy must have the right answer,” instructor Steve Rotkoff said. “We have to change the culture of the Army. We have to teach them to challenge assumptions and take different tactics.”
To do that, Rotkoff said, they have to change the students. For example, they learn ethics so they can encourage good leadership.
Students debated whether a war could be waged without collateral damage, or unintentional harm to people and property during combat, as well as how to justify that war.
“You could never wage a war if you did not accept collateral damage,” a student said.
“But both sides are always justified,” another said.
“You can choose to follow the rules or you can choose not to,” another student said. “That’s a choice that the soldier makes every day.”
This started a discussion about how to help soldiers make good decisions, pulling on lessons from antiquity to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Which led to a discussion about who’s going to rebuild a society after its economy has been reduced to nothing.
In the back of the classroom, retired Col. Greg Fontenot, who heads the school, finally broke in.
“you better be thinking about this stuff,” he said, “because you may need to question a command that’s going to lead you down the wrong path.”
And then he quietly slipped out the door. He said he wanted the soldiers to arrive at their own conclusions.