Over at Small Wars Journal, Benjamin Kohlmann wrote an interesting piece “The Military Needs More Disruptive Thinkers.” I especially agree on creative thinking rather than doctrine and diversifying military education. However, the author himself is too focused on business and technological innovation as in “look-I-made-a-cool-new-widget.” Frankly, a lot of people from diverse business and technology backgrounds [...]
Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
“Disruptive Thinking” and Questioning the Notion of Progress
Posted in Education, Military Culture, tagged Benjamin Kohlmann, CyanogenMod, Disruptive Thinkers, John Boyd, Paul Van Riper, Small Wars Journal, Steve Kondik on April 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Go Listen to LTG Van Riper on Midrats
Posted in Education, tagged John Boyd, M16, M4, Midrats, OODA Loop, Paul Van Riper, XM25 on March 26, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
As I bury myself in writing chapters and looking for jobs, I have not had much time to keep up with the blog circuit. However, I finally got around to this interview with LTG Paul Van Riper, USMC (Ret.), on Midrats–and it is awesome. There is a good amount of time devoted to John Boyd, [...]
On Teaching the COIN Canon and Speaking Truth through Fiction
Posted in Counterinsurgency, Education, tagged Robert Farley, Rupert Smith, Small Wars Journal on August 27, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Small Wars Journal published a short piece I wrote on selecting texts for a counterinsurgency course and the lessons we draw from them: In “Teaching COIN to a (Mostly) Non-Practitioner Audience,” Dr. Robert Farley discussed his experiences teaching a class on counterinsurgency at the Masters level. His intent is to give would-be instructors “a sense of [...]
Remembering 9/11 through Teaching
Posted in Education, tagged 300, Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, David Kilcullen, Paul Greengrass, September 11th Attacks, Stephen Crane, The Accidental Guerrilla, The Red Badge of Courage, The Wound-Dresser, Walt Whitman on September 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
This semester, I have been teaching a survey of American Literature course at the University of Florida titled “Narratives of War, 1865-present.” (For the initial draft of my syllabus, see this post. I have changed it since then.) We began the class with Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry such as “The Wound-Dresser,” Stephen Crane’s The [...]
Teaching American Literature through Narratives of War
Posted in Education, Literature, tagged Ambrose Bierce, AML2070, Art Spiegelman, Colby Buzzell, David Kilcullen, Dear Mr. President, Donald Rumsfeld, E.G. "Buck" Shuler Jr., Eagle Eye, English, Ernest Hemingway, Flight 93, Frederick Kagan, Gabe Hudson, James J. Lindsay, Jarhead, Jean Baudrillard, Jeff Withington, Jerome Johnson, Jim Stavridis, John Nagl, Joseph J. Went, Kayla Williams, Love My Rifle More Than You, Maus, Montgomery McFate, My War: Killing Time in Iraq, Paul Fussell, Randa Jarrar, Robert A. Heinlein, Roberto J. González, Rudyard Kipling, Sig Christenson, Spenser Ackerman, Starship Troopers, Stephen Crane, Survey of American Literature: Narratives of War, The Great War and Modern Memory, The Red Badge of Courage, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien, University of Florida, Walt Whitman, Yusef Komunyakaa on June 13, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Jeff Withington, posting at the US Naval Institute blog, shared an email exchange he had with Admiral Jim Stavridis on the value of an English major and the impact it has had on his life. Admiral Stavridis also recommends a “must-read” list for midshipmen before receiving their commission. Well, I have one-upped the admiral. In [...]
Education as War, War as Education
Posted in Education, tagged Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics, Counterinsurgency, Craig Mullaney, Dave Grossman, David Petraeus, John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Martin Evans, On Killing, T. E. Lawrence, Taliban, The Unforgiving Minute on May 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Recently, I had the chance to read Martin Evans’ Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics for the first time. One of the things that struck me most was it struck me how education (specifically, the philosophies of education) was a marked fissure in the rise of the Taliban. According to Evan’s account, [...]
