Once proud citadels of virtue, the US military academies have lost their way and are running on fumes. They need to be fixed before it’s too late. Saving Our Service Academies covers one man’s unrelenting thirty-year fight with the military bureaucracy to instill qualities of force and thoughtfulness in officers-to-be, to show young men how to be adults with other men and women, and to show young women how to deal with the men. Bruce Fleming has spent over thirty years teaching midshipmen and future officers at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. This position was both a dream job and a nightmare for the enthusiastic, athletic, young Fleming. He found, in the thousands of midshipmen he taught, mentored, and exercised with for three decades, a heartbreaking waste of potential, as promising officers-to-be lapsed into apathy and cynicism because of the dispiriting reality behind the gleaming facade of the Naval Academy. What happened to duty, honor, and country at Annapolis? These values have disappeared in the wake of changes in the world, such as the rise of ROTC and the increase in expense of civilian colleges (the service academies are free to the students), and in the attempt to use the service academies as experiments in trendy social engineering. A staunch advocate for military strength, Fleming shows how the smoke and mirrors of service academies produce officers who are taught to say “SIR, YES SIR” rather than to have the guts to say things their commanding officer doesn’t want to hear. Is that why the US hasn’t won a war since World War II? By writing op-eds about the waste, fraud, and abuse of government (and taxpayer) money, Fleming put a target on his back that the USNA administration used to fire him in 2018, despite being a tenured civilian professor. He was reinstated by a federal judge in 2019. The service academies are government programs that no longer fill the needs for which they were created, and so like all government programs, can be re-examined. Indeed, as Fleming argues, they teach blind obedience in officers rather than informed and respectful questioning, and so sap our military strength rather than increasing it. They need to be re-imagined not as stand-alone undergraduate institutions that wall off future officers in an increasingly untenable isolation from the country they are to defend, but either be combined with the officer commissioning sources that currently produce over 80 percent of our new officers, or re-purposed to post-civilian college training institutions.

The five United States military service academies are some of the most elite schools in the nation, taking the finest high school students and turning them into commissioned officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Merchant Marine. Over 60,000 students a year begin the arduous process of applying, and about 4,000 get in. At West Point alone, over 15,000 candidates start the applications process. Less than a third of them finish it. Some figure out that they aren’t going to be competitive, some get derailed with specific problems, and some get lost and drop out even though they might have gotten in. From applications to Congressional nominations, from athletics to medical qualifications, the process is unlike any other for getting into college. This book leads students and their families through the process step by step, offering the tools needed for the very best chance of success. Covering special issues and concerns like LGBTQ, women and minorities, criminal records, and more, the author also discusses whether attending a service academy is RIGHT for the prospective student, and what he or she can expect upon acceptance, admission, and attendance. Using his personal experience in helping his son through the applications process, Michael Singer Dobson provides all candidates with the ins and outs of the competition for a spot at one of these prestigious schools.

Academia versus the World Outside lays out the givens of the knowledge industry located within the ivory tower, colleges and universities. It then moves outside academia to consider this restricted world the way most people see it. The contrast between these two views of academia explains and is at the basis of the left–right animosity of our day. The knowledge industry, a creation of the post-Enlightenment modern age along with other industrial and post-industrial enterprises, is based on creating and adding to a store of knowledge as its own end. This makes academia alien to the more random and personal nature of knowledge acquisition in our everyday lives, as indeed every industry is alien to everyday life in the modern age. Yet most academics are so immersed in the peculiar project they have chosen as their life’s work that they are either unaware of or unsympathetic to the fact that people outside live very different lives with very different presuppositions. Most non-academics, for their part, find academia strange, and for very good reason. Academia versus the World Outside makes this contrast and conflict clear from both directions. This book is aimed primarily at academics, most of whom so take for granted the givens of what they do that they fail to understand why the vast majority of people outside find academia alien. This has led to an increasingly hostile and utterly predictable left–right political conflict, academia tending increasingly left and the world outside increasingly right. The goal of this book is to reduce the tension between both sides: if read by non-academics, this book may help these understand the givens of a world as strange to everyday life as any other specialized industry in the modern age.

Democracy’s Achilles Heel argues that the structure of democracy is a combination of two incompatible worldviews: one relativist and liberal, the other absolutist and conservative. This combination of opposites is essential for its survival, yet places democracy at risk since each worldview is prone to trying to engulf the other, creating threats from both the right and the left. This is democracy’s Achilles heel: it never goes away and can only be avoided. The nature of open societies means that absolutisms, for example of a religious kind, can exist quite comfortably within democracy, yet for democracy to succeed, they must permit other belief systems and worldviews, absolute or otherwise, to exist alongside them. Likewise, relativism can undermine the liberal nature of democracy itself in seeking to reduce the existence of absolutisms to nothing, thus threatening freedom and destabilizing democracy. Reacting to the recent clashes in Western democracies between left and right, and drawing on the theories of such now-classic thinkers as Fromm, Berlin, and Hoffer, as well as more recent sources such as Levitsky and Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, the author moves beyond the usual defenses of democracy, accepting the fact that democracy, because of its combination of opposites, is always unstable and always at risk, while urging those who live within democratic polities to strengthen its chances of survival by remembering its fundamental value and purpose. An impassioned defense of the democratic way of life even given (and indeed because of) its eternally threatened nature, Democracy’s Achilles Heel will appeal to scholars, students, and readers with interests in political sociology, philosophy, and political theory.

Committee Serial No. 66. Investigates whether present laws and regulations assure a professional military force representative of a cross section of the American people. Includes "Professional Training and Education of the Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy; A Final Report" Superintendent, USNA, Feb. 1967 (p. vii-clvii).

Includes history of bills and resolutions.