What's Wrong With Our Reading List?

Last week, I was reading in the April 2001 issue of Naval Institute Proceedings, about a reserve officer’s quest to find a reading list. Being something of the history and Navy buff myself, I was easily able to understand her plight. Of course, she found the CNO’s reading list eventually, but the short article got me to thinking about the list, and it’s relevance to the junior enlisted community.

Frankly, there isn’t much, and it’s a shame.

First, I understand that any reading list is designed to increase the professional knowledge, and sometimes, the esprit de corps of the people in the organization. So why not use professional readings to these ends for the junior enlisted, who are most apt to have low morale?

I spoke to one of my students who went to boot camp within the last couple of years (I get a lot of those in this job). He reported that they actually received a lot of information on Naval history, and not so much on traditions and their origins. Then I asked about the Naval Military Training that every command is required to deliver to its sailors over the course of each fiscal year. He asked, “What NMT? There’s history in there?”

Yeah, but not much. Out of the 24 monthly NMT lessons for the last two years since the new program started, only two (one per year) deals with any heritage-oriented subjects.

This is where the program is going to continue to fall short. Service School Commands have enough to teach with their own curricula. Operational commands have to squeeze NMT into already overloaded schedules. So it’s not surprising to me that a “minor” subject like history and tradition falls through the cracks.

With the drawdown of the last decade complete (at least until President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld start it up again), now it is more important than ever that a sense of transcendent pride be instilled in our sailors, especially in the lower ranks. Retention is of prime importance since it is far cheaper to keep someone we’ve already trained than it is to recruit and train new sailors to replace dissatisfied personnel who depart the Navy. If that sense of pride is developed, and is real, then retention is that much easier.

Now, is the CNO’s reading list bad? Absolutely not. I believe that it is, if anything, too complete and expansive. But it’s the size of the list that makes me think that it could be split up to be directed at specific levels of rank, rather than general levels of familiarity with military issues. The Coast Guard’s is, why can’t ours? (Also, their junior level reading list is much more relevant to their junior members than our list is to ours.)

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