S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
From the little league coach to the former addict helping those still struggling, hear from people from all walks of life how they show up as a vessel for service and drive for transformational change. Hosted by Theresa Carpenter, a 29-year active duty U.S. naval officer who found service was the path to unlocking trauma and unleashing your inner potential.
S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
The Military History USMA Never Taught… and Tried to Bury | S.O.S. #245
A forgotten reformer changed how we think about military education, then got written out of the story. We dig into Alden Partridge’s bold vision for the citizen-soldier, why his mastery-based model threatened entrenched interests, and how his practical ideas—shorter paths for proven mastery, rigorous field training, and decentralized leadership—can still fix what’s broken in today’s force.
Franklin Annis walks us through Partridge’s rise at West Point during the War of 1812, the political crossfire that led to his court-martial, and his pivot to building militia-focused academies that influenced Norwich and VMI. We connect the dots to modern pain points: time-in-seat schooling that bores high performers, career assembly lines that miss real talent, and a headquarters culture that mistakes long hours for results. You’ll hear how competency-based progression, pretesting, and mission command can restore merit, accelerate excellence, and respect the only irreplaceable resource—time.
We also ground the conversation in philosophy and practice. Stoicism offers a leader’s toolkit for fair discipline, self-accountability, and resilience under pressure. A constitutional view of defense argues for a lean active force backed by a trained, capable militia—an approach that can lower costs and improve readiness by leveraging real-world civilian skills found across the Guard and Reserve. And we wrestle candidly with standards and inclusion: equal dignity, equal rules, transparent consequences, and selection by performance.
If you care about military education, talent management, or building better leaders faster, this conversation gives you a roadmap rooted in history and tested by experience. Subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review with the one change you’d make first—what would you accelerate, and what would you cut?
Stories of Service presents guests’ stories and opinions in their own words, reflecting their personal experiences and perspectives. While shared respectfully and authentically, the podcast does not independently verify all statements. Views expressed are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the host, producers, government agencies, or podcast affiliates.
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What if you knew that there was somebody within military history whose legacy and their accomplishments and impact was buried by the powers that be? Well, I couldn't really believe it until I read this amazing book, Marching with Spartans, right here. And it's what is going to be the subject of our podcast today because unfortunately, there are people in history who have been talking about some of the same problems that we're even dealing with today, but were largely ignored. And it's time to have that conversation again. So welcome to the Stories of Service Podcast. Ordinary people who do extraordinary work. I'm the host of Stories of Service, Teresa Carpenter. And today we have a Franklin Anis on the show. Franklin, how are you doing today?
SPEAKER_01:Doing well. It's Anis.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, gosh. Franklin Anus. Oh gosh, I should have asked that from the beginning. I do apologize. But thank you so much for correcting me. And as I said, welcome to the podcast. As we always do, we're going to get this show kicked off with an introduction from my father, Charlie Pickard.
SPEAKER_00:From the moment we're born and locked eyes with our parents, we are inspiring others. By showing up as a vessel of service, we not only help others, we help ourselves. Welcome to SOS, Stories of Service. Hosted by Teresa Carpenter, here from ordinary people from all walks of life who have transformed their communities by performing extraordinary work.
SPEAKER_02:And today we're going to talk about this forgotten lineage of the American military education and being able to trace a straight line back to Captain Aldrin Partridge, the iconic clastic founder of Norwich University, whose ideas once defined American mystery, mil American military training before being quietly shelved by the very institution he tried to reform. Today he'll explain how Partridge championed a citizen-soldier model grounded in real-world evidence, intellectual rigor, and decentralized leadership long before these concepts became buzzwords. And then somewhere along the way, the army lost that thread. And instead of cultivating those, cultivating those independent thinkers, we're now bend drifted towards systems that reward conformity over competence. And that result, Franklin argues, is the leadership stagnation we see today. Welcome again. Thank you, Graham. Well, first off, as I always ask all my guests, especially those who are in the military, where were you born and raised and what inspired you to originally join the Army National Guard?
SPEAKER_01:Uh so I was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, although I spent a ton of time on my grandfather's farm in uh trainer, Iowa. Uh so even though I lived in the city, I spent a lot of time living on a farm. Um, as far as the the connection to the military, both of my grandfathers were in the military. My father was a former uh army drill sergeant. So it was kind of just a a military tradition in my family to go be a soldier before you were anything else in your life. Uh so that's how I just naturally followed suit.
SPEAKER_02:And what was your job or what is your job in in the military?
SPEAKER_01:Uh so currently I'm the branch chief of resource management for the uh surgeon of the Army National Guard. So control kind of the personnel, money, uh, IT, medical logistics, uh to support the 54 militias across the country.
SPEAKER_02:And how many years have you been in the military?
SPEAKER_01:Uh so more than 19 years now.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. So you're you're almost at that point where you can uh retire or continue on keeping on. What do you think you're gonna do at this point?
SPEAKER_01:Uh that's a that's an interesting question. I'm looking to see what opportunities uh open up to figure out what the best exit plan would be.
SPEAKER_02:I understand. I understand that feeling completely, having just retired myself in September. So before we get started, just a little backstory about how you and I met. We've been in touch for years on LinkedIn, and I got this book from you, I think maybe a year ago, uh, something along those lines. And thank you so much for sending it along. But as you guys can see, it is a very thick or a dense read. And it took me uh some time because typically uh I'll I'll be the first to admit I'm not a military historian. I served with lots of people who love reading military history, and I believe it's very important to understand military history. I've been through JPME, and if we don't understand what has happened in the past, as they say, we're doomed to repeat those same mistakes in the future. But I feel like that's just human nature. We're gonna repeat those same mistakes. But this was a particularly interesting read for a few reasons. And the first reason was the fact that you had a hard time bringing attention to it. So I would like for you to kind of take me back to what started this intellectual journey into studying this military figure.
SPEAKER_01:So I've always been kind of a body math person that kind of just liked studying or exploring thoughts. Um, and for that reason, uh in my own military career, I kind of continued my own education. It's actually what inspired me to work on a doctorate of education was never connected to you know wanting to be a certain job or certain employment, was just exploring things that I was interested in. And uh when I was working uh kind of on my dissertation and I was focusing on Army self-development, uh trying to uh create a manual to help uh officers uh essentially teach themselves if they recognize shortfalls. I ran across um only two major scholars uh that really dealt with uh self-development in a very powerful way, one of which is over my shoulder, General Krulak, which was a Marine Corps commandant, but the other one was Captain Alden Partridge. And what struck me is he wrote a theory of education uh around the 1820s that was so advanced in the understanding of motivation that his uh essentially premises wouldn't be proven to be true until the 1960s and 1970s. And that really got me thinking, how did a man it in army doctrine that knew the answers well over a hundred years into the future for education? How wasn't he included in every army education class? Um, and if it's quite remarkable, like really a man, true genius, no one knows of him. Um, and that's really started this exploration uh about uh why this man was hidden in history.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean it's fascinating. So let's be a little more specific. What was he writing about in the 1820s that came to fruition around the 1960s that was so controversial?
SPEAKER_01:Uh so he actually believed in the idea that we should not make education painful for individuals. So he would believe that when you went into college, if you had like a very strong adversion to some force, so uh we could imagine today if I uh had an officer come in and said, Hey, I I've tried to learn a foreign language, I'm working really hard, I just can't figure out this foreign language thing. Instead of saying, hey, you can't graduate until you learn a foreign language, he would say, Okay, we'll accept the fact that you are not good at language, and instead of forcing you to continue to try to practice at something that you are obviously miserable in, we're just going to have a greater expectation of you elsewhere in your studies. Um, so in a way, he created an education model that always made education enjoyable, and that's something we don't see in our contemporary education. So you go to modern college, there's a set number of classes you have to take. If you have a problem saying, you know, getting through certain math courses, you just end up not getting the degree uh where Partridge would say, hey, we need to tailor uh kind of education to maximize everyone's ability, and then have the talent management aspect on the other hand to recognize, hey, you know, if uh Lieutenant Annis isn't good at foreign language, we're not gonna leverage him there. But hey, if he's more interested in ballistics or mathematics, that's where we're gonna put him uh the work in his specialty.
SPEAKER_02:I can so relate to this because when I was accepted for my officer program, I desperately wanted to become a public affairs officer. But they told me that there was no way I could become a public affairs officer as an incense. So I was forced into going surface warfare. And it turned out to be a good decision because I had a really good chain of command for my first ship. But as far as aptitude or interest, I had neither. I was in a position where even though there was something I wanted to do that I felt like I was good going to be better at doing, I still had to spend two years in another field because that opportunity just wasn't available to me. So I totally see what you're saying. And and we do that also with time. And I saw that as I was reading this book, there was an emphasis for him to emphasize that if your studies could be accomplished in a compressed amount of time or in a shorter amount of time, there was no need to put you on the path to saying, okay, you have to be in school for four years. You have to be in school for for this amount of time. And it really made me start to think about colleges as being more of a business than being a place of scholarly work. How do you feel about that?
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, so Partridge had a beautiful phrase that it puts you on the same path as a sluggard. So if you took the average student how fast they went through college, anyone above average would be slowed down. So they'd be losing months or years of their lives where they could be productive. Um, or we might even look at it today and say, you know, we have uh an education model inside the military. If I'm a young captain and I need to go to the captain career course, maybe the institution says, hey, I'm going to dedicate a certain amount of time. Well, if that captain comes in, takes all the pretests, he's scoring, you know, 98, 90, 99, 100%. He already has mastery of the stuff for the captain career course. Why is he going to wait or sit through several months of the same training when he could go on to work on the kind of the more advanced uh course, ILE or college. And uh Partridge's use of time not only cut down the costs, because if uh if we think of modern college, if you're paying your way through college, you could do it in two years or do it in three years, you know, that's money in the bank. But it actually inspired people to actually like pay more attention to their learning. Um it would inspire students uh to be more engaged because it would be a cost-saving metric. And uh kind of sensitivity towards time was one of the major aspects uh that Partridge taught. And then at least military or even civilian-wise, right? The individuals that are more sensitive about not wasting time tend to be more productive in their lives, whether it's building uh civilian industries or uh just accomplishing more as military leaders.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I could totally relate. In fact, I just had a guest on last Thursday where we were talking about the 16, 17 hour days that the flag officers take on and how the rest of the staff feels, even when they don't have anything to do or anything to go on, anything going on. There's this pressure and this tension to stay in the office. And then the ones who are the most dedicated are the ones that find ways to play busy for the entire workday. And we've created that culture within the military, and there's no escaping it. Any headquarters that you go to, uh, you will routinely see people there showing up at eight o'clock, not leaving till four or five o'clock. And I can tell you there were days and days and days where maybe one hour of full work would be getting done. And that that is just a a sad reality within office environments. And there's even a book, it was a really good book called Bullshit Jobs that I read. And it was all about this idea that even within regular society, we have created busy work and we've created this culture where if you look busy, then you are busy, and we equate that to being successful. And unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing to do with being successful, but people have been bought into that cultural narrative. And so it persists and it drives good people away because, like you said, the star performers and the ones who are innovative and who do want to make changes and who do and who want to actually put forth a positive impact, they be they become very disillusioned by this culture that rewards those who are pretending to do something when they're not really doing anything. So tell me a little bit about as you were studying the book and wanting to write on it. What made you decide to actually do this entire book, though? You could have written a paper, you could have written an article.
SPEAKER_01:What why it's such a so it it actually was another author. So after I completed my dissertation, I went back to figure out why Partridge was written in the history in history. So there was a uh a scholar that actually commanded on D-Day, uh, Colonel Laster Webb, went into the National Archives in the 1960s and actually looked at the court-martial procedures of Partridge, actually saw the real records, and he wrote a book on it. Uh so he talked about the controversy. Uh, there is some bias to Webb's uh work because uh he's very a strong advocate of Partridge. And it doesn't, he doesn't always relay some of the mistakes that Partridge made in his work.
SPEAKER_02:Just for the audience, I just want to clear this up too, and just you know, give the long story up front. Partridge was an instructor at the US military academy. He he taught there. And while he was teaching in the course of the way he was teaching, he drew a lot of controversy because he was not doing his teaching in the same ways that others were. And how did that culminate? Tell me a little bit about what happened towards the end of his career.
SPEAKER_01:Well, to kind of get into Partridge, so Partridge was the third superintendent of West Point, and uh they claim that of all the early superintendents, he was the only man that ever wanted the job. Um in fact, he is probably single-handedly credited in the War of 1812 of saving that position uh or saving that institution, because at the time in the war, even though he had volunteered to go command and uh go see service in the field, the U.S. Army kept him at West Point to train officers. Um by the time he was relieved, it took seven officers to replace the things that he was doing at the institution. But what Partridge uh got him in trouble was was structurally when West Point was founded uh by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson even admitted it wasn't constitutional at the time. Uh, when West Point was founded, uh it was uh Jefferson put in uh a request for Congress to make West Point and then other um acts of supporting education at the federal level uh into the constitution or legislation. Uh at the time Congress said no, absolutely not. 10th Amendment belongs to the states. Uh, but we really needed a military academy, only had you know a few dozen cadets, so it kind of went under the radar. By the War of 1812, we were desperate for officers. The the college itself or institution itself grew uh considerably up to 250 cadets. Now it's in the thousands for the cadets. Uh but Partridge was highly sensitive, and you could call him kind of based in the anti-federalist camp of how to do national defense. So even when he was an instructor at uh West Point, he wanted West Point to take on a more active role in training the militia. The militia is the true national defense force for America by our constitution. Um, unfortunately, at the time, the structure of West Point didn't put the civilian instructors underneath control of the superintendent. So you had the civilians writing constantly to the president or the secretary of war complaining about conditions, the superintendent could never essentially assert control over those disillusioned professors. The professors wanted to turn West Point into a national academy. So they wanted to remove all the military aspects, and then if you failed or you were not a high performer student at West Point, then you would go to some type of military training and then be forced to serve. Uh, so he had a very hostile staff that continually made false reports uh throughout his career. He went through a court of inquiry because of false reports, found innocent. Same reports were sent back up, essentially got pushed into another inquiry. He got relieved um for his whatever because of the second inquiry. Uh, he returned to the only base he had ever known after taking a short leave, which was back to West Point. Uh, he was treated very disrespectfully uh after you know making several appeals uh to the officer that was in command to appropriately respect his rank and position as a senior officer on post. It was denied, so he relieved command of that officer. That officer falsely reported to uh the public and to his commanding officers that there was a hostile mutiny, a violent mutiny that took place at West Point. And then Partridge was basically arrested. Court-martialed, found innocent on all the charges that uh were against him in the court of inquiry, uh, but he was found guilty of uh essentially uh disobedience to what they viewed as a superior officer at the time. Uh the court asked the court martial assigned the lowest possible punishment that they could assign in that case called cashiering, and they recommended to the president the get rid of the charge entirely. Uh that went to Monroe and he actually dismissed the actual charges against Partridge. Uh Partridge requested to get reassigned to West Point. Monroe denied that. Partridge essentially would go on to resign his commission. Partridge at the day asked for copies of the court-martial transcripts because uh, you know, we didn't have Freedom of the Information Act back then. Monroe said, Hey, I'm going to just deny it. You can't have the copies of the transcripts where what actually occurred took place. Uh, Partridge took that very uh hard because false reports had been published in the largest newspaper that he had committed mutiny. Um, and then he essentially set his mind on creating private military academies uh to train the militia. So he left West Point, took his theories and started establishing military academies across the country. Uh Norwich University is uh has a direct descent from uh academy that he established, but he also had uh roles in playing in establishing other military academies like the Virginia Military Institute as well. Uh you called him an iconoclass, uh which would be like an individual that was against the times, but uh believe it or not, Partridge uh used a very renaissance education model, um, very much in the keeping of the time and the era. Um it's just unfortunate that his support of the militia interfered with the size and scope of active duty officers and the active duty officers that wanted a larger professional military in the Napoleonic model, uh, basically started writing him out of history, uh transferring his achievements to other individuals, and basically made were able to erase all of the major achievements, at least on the official record, uh in the army, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_02:This is crazy. I mean, when you when I when you tell when you talk about this, it it just it fascinates me. And I want to know what was it that the people who wanted the active duty side to be as large as possible and didn't believe in the idea of the citizen soldier, what what did they feel threatened by?
SPEAKER_01:What was their reason or their necessary think it was threatening, it was just not convenient. Um, like Monroe himself would have fought when he was a very young man in the American Revolutionary War. Uh, but the Napoleonic Wars would have happened in France, you know, these big empires being built by force of arms just before our War of 1812. Uh interesting enough, most of the major battles that were won in the War of 1812, the most significant ones, were actually won by majority militia forces like the Battle of New Orleans. Um, but it was kind of more romantic, or it was a symbol of uh kind of national pride to have these huge uniformed forces. Um, so I think at least the aristocracy or upper class or powerful class in America wanted a military institution that they could brag about and be equivalent to Europe. They wanted this big, pretty, really Napoleonic-looking military uh that they could brag about as well. And then the idea of militiamen where uh even during this time of period, you know, really the the only people that would buy their own uniforms would be officers. Like most civilians that were uh required to serve in the militia would show up with whatever their their normal hunting clothes was. So it's really not impressive to have a whole bunch of guys show up, you know, wearing what would be like car hearts or whatever real tree camo versus these pretty lines of you know blue blue jackets, white pants, you know, sure uniformed everything.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And so when you decided to take on this study after you had looked at what uh Mr. Webb had put together, what was the reaction? Did you try to contact people from West Point or do any research in in that direction? Like how did you even embark on this?
SPEAKER_01:Uh so so I went through the online archives of West Point, and their library helped quite a bit finding resources for me. A lot of times fit up at Norwich going through all the archives, um hunting through well, newspapers. I spent a ton of time across the country looking for uh just materials of that War of 1812 and just after a period. Um so George Washington University was uh another major archive that spent tons of time doing. Um as far as help with this, um, it's interesting that even the academies that were built for the militia under Partridge uh no longer operate on that model. So like VMI, Norwich University have become very dependent now on you know ROTC as we know it today, commissioning federal officers. So the idea that you could walk in and say, hey, you are supposed to be producing individuals for the militia. Here's your original model of education. Will you go back to this original model, which is highly cost-effective, really spartan, driving down the cost of the student, you know, letting the students go as fast as possible? That model pretty much threatens, as you said, today the business model that we have today. So partridge's school, you graduate college in as well as a year. Why would you want to go to that model where compared to now you know, hey, I have a student for eight semesters, I know the day that a student comes in, it's a very predictable profit margin for the university. Why would you want to accelerate or lose on those profits?
SPEAKER_02:No, you would fight against that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you yeah, and even the professors, right? So it's like, why would a professor now say, hey, I have to evaluate every student individually and custom tailor instruction for every student and let them be as successful as possible, versus, hey, I teach the same class every semester if you're exceptional, that's fine, just sit in the back and sleep if you're not, you know, try to pay attention, try to keep up.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, that's that's the American education model in a nutshell is the fact that everybody is at a different learning level. And unfortunately, you just get one type of teaching, and there's the the kids that are really, really slow that fall far, very, very far behind. And then, like you said, there's a lot of the kids that are just falling asleep in count class because they could get through it so quickly. And there really isn't a tailored learning plan to what people's aptitudes are or what their interests are, or what would help them quickly get through it as soon as possible and be a person who can contribute to society, which is quite unfortunate when you think about it, because there are a lot of skills, especially like in the blue-collar trades, that could be utilized quite faster and and in a better way if we had that kind of a model.
SPEAKER_01:And I think there's other aspects too. So even in Partridge's day, I think that intellectuals, what we think was normal college professors, have this idea that, hey, if I just stop training the next generation to fight, there'll be no more wars. And and certainly we've tested that theory for over 100 years now, and that's been proven false, like especially in our lifetimes. Uh huge decades of our lives have been spent at war when the average citizen was never taught anything about military arts and sciences. But partridge would have said, hey, the the instruction in military arts and sciences is important for everyone uh across the country. Number one, everyone that participates in voting should consider, you know, when you vote, is this person going to take us closer to war or away from war? Our our elected leaders that go out there and spend the money for national defense should have some understanding of what national defense takes. That way they're not unnecessarily wasting money. Um and the average average citizen itself. It's like go out, go to an encampment, learn what it's like to be miserable and cold and wet and raining and carry a rifle. And that way, when the next war starts, you can have at least some sliver. Um, obviously, you're not going to know the terror of actually being shot at, but you'll know some sliver of the misery of the soldier, so maybe you'll treat your soldier better than your society. But it's unfortunate because Partridge, uh many credit him to being like the main driving force for what became the Morel Land Grant Act. The Morel Land Grant Act that established all our state schools across the country has the requirement to teach tactics, and that requirement was supposed to be universal. So every graduate right now from a state college should be taught military arts and sciences. But ever since kind of the American Civil War, you know, professors really didn't want to do it, governments weren't really strict on enforcing it, and now we think, oh, as long as the college has an ROTC department and it's optional, that's enough. Um, but we're continuing to produce uh voters that see this huge professional military class as something that they can ignore because it's oh yeah, war is no longer their problem, right? We we have a soldier or we spend tons of money, or or even worse, right? We we have the largest military in the world, so we have to justify the cost, right? So if we have the largest military in the world, we better go use it because otherwise it's wasted money compared to the idea that Partridge would have is you know, make everyone kind of liable for military service through the militia, keep a very small active duty, which Jefferson would call a peace establishment, and uh be more like Switzerland, which is the modern example of a country that runs a militia-based system that has avoided wars for centuries. And that's what our founding fathers wanted. But every time you say that publicly now, everyone says, Oh, you couldn't live in the 21st century without this huge, massive military-industrial complex, even why Switzerland still sits there. So it's it's tragic that we we live in a country that's so far in debt, largely because we support this huge military industry, that then draws us into more and more wars that drives debt, and it really becomes profitable just for whatever arms manufacturers, or you could say even individual military officers uh benefit from that complex, right? Of retirement checks or or something else.
SPEAKER_02:To support this huge machine that continues to churn out people. And I think along the way, there's so many of us uh who became disillusioned. I mean, I spent 29 years and four months within this institution. And I will tell you, it wasn't until I got to about the 03 to 05 level where I started to see the cracks in the seam. And I said to myself, this isn't existing to fix problems. That that's really what I I understood at that point. I was like, there's no problems that this organization is fixing. This organization is only interested in staying on the tracks and and presenting an appearance and a story and a narrative that we are fixing things. But when you actually work in the system day to day, you really see that those that fixing problems is not rewarded. What is rewarded is looking like you're fixing problems and messaging that you're fixing problems, but you don't actually have to fix anything in order to be successful. And when I saw that, that was what really disappointed me. But I would argue that it's because this machine is so big that there are sections of the military that don't have to really operate very well and will still be continued, will still have continued funding and will still have continued resources thrown at it at it, even if it's not producing any results.
SPEAKER_01:Correct. And yeah, I I have to say everything here is my personal opinion. Uh, but even now, if you looked at the National Guard, really most of the soldiers in the National Guard aren't full-time soldiers, so they drill one week a month, two weeks a year, they go to training, which adds time, especially now in kind of recent history. We've had lots of demands on the National Guard. But the the National Guard soldiers that deploy tend to have higher levels of efficiency compared to active duty types. And I've worked in the medical field, so I can I can relate in terms of medical, where you know, deploy a platoon of National Guard or company of National Guard medics. You may be carrying around individuals that are carpenters, electricians, plumbers. And so when you set that company up, they can function and do far more than just function as a medical unit. Additionally, those National Guardsmen actually practice medicine. So they're paramedics, EMTs, firefighters, they get a lot more actual practice at handling emergencies in the civilian world than the equivalent that sits on an active duty post. So the idea that we need kind of only active duty or this massive active duty may actually be contraintuitive because your best soldiers are soldiers that are good soldiers, but they also hold down jobs and they also develop other skills, and they are also help the economy and grow the economy, and they're not just a burden on society. And I would love to see us shift more towards a model where we use more heavily towards a militia-based system, have everyone understand kind of the complexities of horrors and war so we can avoid that become a more peaceful nation and drive down the cost of the military-industrial complex. Um, but that's definitely not a popular opinion for us.
SPEAKER_02:No, it's not. But I would agree. I mean, even in my own community in public affairs, we often have reservists who have run for office, we have reservists who are TV reporters, we have reservists who put together films, and they have a level of expertise that our day-to-day mass communication specialists or public affairs officers often don't have because they've had to prove themselves in in the workforce where it wasn't about just having good paper. They weren't just going to have get a job unless they could show that they understood how to do some of these hard skills. So I think that there's a lot to be said for the citizen soldier. And I always appreciated my time working with reservists. Uh, unfortunately, sometimes there's a divide between the reservist and the active duty side, and there's some inherent tension. Uh, I think because of just what you said, one has got that experience with the real world, and the other has has become a has is a professional soldier. And so they just don't have that same same level of experience. Now, both can work together beautifully and accomplish the mission. And I've seen it happen time and time again where we did, but there is a lot to be said for reducing the size of our active duty, pumping up the size of our militia/slash reservist guard forces. And as you said, uh in our training pipelines, making sure that the people who are the star performers don't get held back by the people who are the slower people who might not be able to qualify for the same jobs. It's it's it's it's it's sort of the antithesis of DEI. And that was sort of the way we how we framed our episode. Because I I really don't like this idea that everybody gets to the finish line at the same time, regardless of merit, because we have to have a system that identifies the star performers and the people who are better at certain things than other people. That's life.
SPEAKER_01:So so it's interesting. So the tie-in here um, so the the US military really suffered with the industrialization of our personnel system, and uh Donald Vandergriff wrote a couple of amazing books on the subject, especially adopting mission command. Uh our society, uh, especially kind of post-1880s in the United States, became highly specialized. So we stopped training people, or at least educating people, to be complete citizens. We started educating them for very specific jobs. Um, and because of that, our military system developed very similar. So now we think of uh a model when we build units, we build very specific uh specialty positions inside there, and then we develop an industrial type of model to say uh it's really like an assembly line. So a soldier or service member should spend X amount of time in this position, and then they get stamped out or stamped through some type of educational experience, and then they move on to their next assignment, and then it's all plotted kind of previous to the functioning of the unit, and there's this idea that I could randomly grab 200 and some individuals, throw them together, and then push them into combat as a company, and and research demonstrates that's not true. A lot of how well units function is relationships and understanding of each other's, but we keep trying to use this industrialized process, and that industrialized process also cripples people. So if you have a really high-speed sergeant, it's very difficult in the modern military to take that sergeant and accelerate them into a sergeant major position. Um, so we need to have some type of corrections for that. Now, there may be some ways of jumping, you know, enlisted into officer ranks, but definitely not as flexible as what uh Partridge would have used back in his day. And the influence of industrialization has been so complete, it is very difficult to explain what American education was prior to the industrial model. So when we talk about Partridge or before 1880s in America, we had a very renaissance model of education. So when you learned at school, you followed interest through several different subjects. Uh, your purpose of attending school was to become like a full, complete human. Uh, that's why there's a lot of humanities in the more classical arts. Uh Partridge would say, right, military arts and sciences have to be part of that because you cannot be a free citizen in the republic unless you know how to defend the republic itself. So it has to be included. Um but as we go through time, we've lost that understanding of educating for a complete citizen, or at least evaluating people for their completeness. And now we're looking for very specific time markers and careers. We're looking for degrees that are really empty in terms of uh developing fully thinking, uh, fully functional, innovative human beings. We're looking for uh just markers of credentials to accelerate or pick uh who we place where. And that's become such a challenge in talent management nowadays. I'm hoping that we'll see reform in the near future uh that really get back to kind of competency-based, ability-based uh selection and have some type of ability to you know accelerate our best uh individuals to uh positions where they could best benefit uh society, really.
SPEAKER_02:I I agree, absolutely. There are so many people I know of who get into jobs that they hate, whether it be because their parents pushed them into it or they thought that this was the job that they needed to have for a particular status. And as I've gotten older, I realized even within my own self that the things that I thought were important in my 20s were not that important. I I thought by becoming an officer, I would finally get a college degree. And a college degree symbolized a level of status that I thought I needed to have in order to be a professional. I saw everybody else around me having college degrees. I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody went to college, but then I went to college myself for my undergrad, and I realized that, like you said, Franklin, it's just an assembly line of various classes. And I was forced to take calculus, I was forced to take physics. And I can tell you, I had absolutely no interest in it. I don't remember a thing from it. It was just a big waste of my time. It it did not translate to anything I did as a surface warfare. Officer or as a public affairs officer, obviously. I did take English and I was very good at it and just kind of sailed through that class. And I took my undergrad was in communications, thankfully. I didn't have to choose a technical degree, but I was pushed to take a technical degree, and I would have been more highly favored or in or or prized if I had. And I also realized that in the military, there just aren't as many people that they need for the kind of job that I ended up doing. However, looking back, I really wish that I had known that there could have been a straight path to public affairs and that I didn't have to go and be a swell first. I didn't have to go through all this calculus and this physics because it didn't really do anything other than it made me stronger. It it made me more of a stoic, I made me more resilient. And we'll talk about stoicism here in a second. So I I could say that that's that's the best that I got out of it is that I learned how to fight and I was able to get through and push myself through really difficult things because of how badly I wanted to continue on with my career. But honestly, you could have cut off years of my time uh to to get to where uh I am today uh doing doing this in my in you know on my own volition now without even being paid uh is is is where I wish I could have been uh many, many years ago. So to to to your credit, that's really something that I'm so glad that you took the time to research it and to talk about and to bring back. What was your uh process to publish? How did you go about getting getting the book out? And and for those of you who haven't seen the book, I've I've held it up a few times, but I'll I'll hold it up again on full screen as you're talking. But tell me a little bit about what it took for you to actually get this large and very uh, like I said, densely densely booked with maps and pictures and and all kinds of things in here. What did it take to get this thing published?
SPEAKER_01:So it's about 10 years of total research that got put inside that book. So I'm not sure. I'm probably one of the few people that could have enough interest in all the different topics it covers the to put it all together. Um, but one of the things that became apparent early on, because I did have like some conversations with publishers, is I wanted to bring out a lot of the original text as they were printed verbatim for someone not to say, oh, this is the opinion of you know Dr. Annis translating this document, but I don't get to see it. I wanted to put those documents in the back of the book and using a traditional publisher that that wasn't as profitable for them, so they wanted to limit the amount of kind of appendixes that I could attach. So once I learned that, it really set me on the course of uh self-publishing, and um, some of that is just being as bold as some of the men that kind of laid down education and theory originally was you know John Locke, which at his day and age was seen more as an educational philosopher than what we think of him now as a political philosopher. You know, he didn't have he didn't require like a publishing agency to do peer review what we do now. So, and like Alden Partridge never went through a publisher now that would say, oh, this is politically insensitive, or you can't say this, or we don't want you to frame these arguments the way you are. Um, so in some degree it gave me a lot more flexibility so that I can just write in my own style and not fearing some of the political adjustments that happen to get books published. And I've I've had even recent uh conversations with uh service members publishing in the realm of stoicism where they've had to artificially shift their arguments and the words they use just based on this current uh political narrative of you know, I could actually use the terminology used back you know 18-19th century without someone saying, Oh, you can't say man, you need to say individual, or you can't say, you know, whatever the the current trendy terminology is, um I could actually deal with the historical text with the historical language, um, which was uh I think a huge benefit for the scholarship itself, but it for that reason it's not going to be a huge mainstream book. Um, I have taken this to the individuals at the service academies that Partridge uh helped start and found or that originally operated on Partridge's model. Um I was kind of disappointed that it wasn't more well received uh in those institutions, um, especially since some of those edge some of those institutions have education departments that don't actually teach any of Partridge's theories. So the irony there is in inside Partridge's own academies, they don't teach Partridge anymore. Um to be honest, I don't think politically you could get professors now that would want to teach or want to deal with Partridge because of uh the philosophical shifts in our academia. Um, or I don't want, I don't think a lot of the academies really want to deal with them because they have to deal with the fact that they are no longer partridge in in their design, and having an academy that has to come to the truth that they sell themselves on this historic motif of you know being founded by this great thinker, and then they don't follow any of his logic, which is a tragedy.
SPEAKER_02:It is a tragedy, and there's a lot more in this book than just his idea of education. There's a big emphasis on physical fitness, on ruck marches. In fact, I have a ruck march-like event coming up, the Ryan Larkin Invitational Invitational Adventure Race, uh June 10th through the 14th in Montreus Cal uh, Colorado. It's the first of its kind, and it's being sponsored by uh 62 Romeo, an organization founded by my buddy Rob Sweetman. And it is exactly the kind of thing that Partridge would have advocated for, which is this idea of suffering and doing hard things, and how doing hard things built character. And I do believe that DEI smacks right in the middle of that, because DEI's theories are basically you guys all need to be treated equally. Everybody deserves to get to the finish line. It doesn't matter uh if someone is ahead of that person, if if there's a particular identity that we need, whether that be black, whether that be women, whether that be transgender, whatever it is, then we need to make sure that those people feel included. And while that sounds great on paper and sounds very empathetic and kind, what that does is it demotivates people from wanting to exude their best efforts. Because if they think that there's going to be somebody who checks a particular block who gets into a particular position, or if someone is in a particular position and is allowed to do nefarious things, is allowed to commit fraud, waste, and abuse, which I have a show coming up that will be covering that, then unfortunately, the people who are those star performers and who can get to the finish line first, they're not going to want to compete because they're going to realize that it's an unfair playing field and they're not going to want to rise to the top of their games. And I think that that's what Partridge was all about was let's let the best people stay standing and stay in the organization to make that those organizations better.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so as a military historian, I find a lot of kind of the recent approaches of DEI to be very destructive because um you can make an argument that the military is a social experiment, but the key players or some of the main characters that really opened the door or truly extended freedom, you know, across uh the United States and especially inside the military, we're not operating on uh what you would call a neo-Marxist or neo-Hegelian uh philosophy base. So you have like Thomas Wentworth Figginson, uh, was uh was a commander uh in the American Civil War, he was one of the supporters of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, commanded the first regiment of freed uh slaves that then became Union soldiers, wrote a beautiful book uh called Um Life in an Army Regiment or Black Regiment, and he talked about the need to treat all humans like humans. So it was all applying the same standard. And in his uh kind of approach to equal opportunity, I think the US military, especially the US Army, could take his approach and slap it back down in the 21st century and it would work fine, which is no one gets called different labels based on their race. Uh inside races, they don't get to call each other a different term. Uh exactly.
SPEAKER_02:A black person doesn't get to use the n-word towards another black person. We as white people don't get to say you're white trash. It's the same kind of thing, it's still disrespectful. Very great point, Franklin.
SPEAKER_01:That you know, we don't we don't appoint people to be leaders based on the color of skin. We appoint people as leaders is based on their capacity. Uh your leader doesn't fundamentally have more value as a human than the person that follows you. So a sergeant isn't morally superior or morally more valuable as a human than the private. It's just they've been selected for certain qualities to lead in that position, and hopefully uh the leaders in our formation see that kind of privilege as leadership as an actual burden that they have to serve everyone else below them. That would be the hope. Um, but it's tragic that when we had kind of the conflicts that happened a few years ago, that we didn't go back and say the US military had the answer, and this is the answer that's compatible with our constitution. Uh, this is the way it's actually been proven to work in history. Um, and some of that is really the stoic approach, too, right? Whether stoic or neo-stoic, uh humans are flawed. So no matter how history plays out, number one, history tends to be a lot more nuanced than anyone wants to give credit for. Uh, we're all human, we all make mistakes. Uh, if we assume that we're naturally flawed, then we'll start looking for ways of correcting errors at ourselves. Um it's the honesty of every everyone should eventually come to the conclusion that most of your own problems probably started with yourself before they started with other people. Um, so it's that internal reflection before the external reflection to solve problems and conflicts.
SPEAKER_02:Um, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:And some of that's also dealing with other people, too. And uh the great Roman uh Emperor Marcus Aurelius would say if you're a leader and you have to discipline one of your troops, the first thing you should do is think about a time in your life that you've done something similar. So, like the first thing that should come to your mind is, oh, I was once young and stupid, or you know, I could see how this could happen, and then we use that as a starting point to assign corrective action or how to uh correct things in other people. I think the faults in kind of the modern philosophies that um have have really infiltrated uh well all of American society. Uh some of the faults lay with Hegel. Hegel assumed kind of in a Darwinian thought that every generation was more involved and then therefore more morally correct in past generations. Um in a way he used that to justify the present, and then Marx would build on top of that idea that somehow the next generation will know morality greater than their parents. Um but that assumes that you're always getting more correct, and you know that humans can get less moral with time. Certainly, war can become more brutal with time than less less civilized. We've seen this in history. Um but it's the idea that as we interact with people, we should push ourselves to excellence, we should attempt to the best of our possibility that to treat everyone with dignity and respect just for the sake that they're human. Um but we can't, if we truly want to live in a free society, we can't make the assumption that any class or any group subdivision um identify or mark has is more fundamentally valuable than the next, and uh both internally of groups we belong to or externally of other groups that operate in society. And uh I think we've some of us have lost groups to be able to say that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, some of us have have lost the way with with being able to do that. And also what I have found too is if you think that you're oppressed, and if you live with a mindset that there's somebody out there who is pushing up against you to stop you from achieving or doing what it is you wish to do, then you will always have somebody else to blame for why things didn't go the way that you wanted them to go. And every single time I'm in a conflict with someone, every single time I've had a difficult or an adverse situation happen, that finger always comes first at myself to see where I could have handled that situation a little bit better, where could I have made a different decision to lead to a different outcome? And that's why even when I share a story about something that has happened that was a challenging situation, I'm always very self-reflective to own where I felt like I did wrong and where I could do better. And it's a balance because you don't want to own too much and say everything is your fault, because then you get into this self-defeating mindset where you're pretty much beating yourself up over things you have no control over. But at the same time, I think it's important to be reflective enough to look within yourself and say, what can I do to alleviate this situation? And sometimes it does mean for for many of us leaving the military. If if if if the organization and the institution is no longer a good fit for you, you have to know when the time comes to walk away. And it can be hard, it can be very hard for veterans because I think that we identify so much with this organization. And this institution has been such a huge part of our lives for so many years. But I think at the same time, that is on you to see when it's time to go and when you've done what you can on the inside to make it better. And then what can you do now on the outside as a veteran or an advocate to have a positive impact on the organization? And I really want to see what you're doing spread to more circles. I think that it has so much relevance to what we're seeing today in terms of this shift from DEI to a merit-based institution to the warrior mindset, but we're not necessarily fixing some of the systemic issues within the organization that are causing some of these problems, especially as it pertains to due process. And so what I hope going forward is that we not only take on some of these uh challenges and some of these leadership models that you advocate for that Alan uh Partridge pushed, but that we actually execute those philosophical ways of learning and ways of doing, ways of working, things that Julie Juliet Funt talked about last Thursday on my podcast. But until we do those things, what we're gonna be stuck having the same results and having unfortunately some of the same nasty news stories uh from people who've been negatively impacted by some of the fallout uh from not being able to uh really live up to their fullest potential while they're serving.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I think the biggest problem we face is for years we've uh kind of said that philosophy is like a very restricted field, that you need to be a philosophy professor. And I think we need to really break it down and say the philosophy is the business of every man. And especially in warfare, there's a very strict, um, narrow realm of philosophy that helped us figure out psychological resilience. Uh, it was used to build uh the laws of war as the Western society knows them. Uh, our famous, most famous uh military theorists like Tlapswich operates within that theory. Um, but if we don't take the time to actually get into the philosophical assumptions that people are using, then we're gonna misunderstand people. So there's lots of words that we throw out there and say diversity or inclusion. But if you're not getting into well, what fundamental assumptions are you making when you're using these terms, then we're gonna have disagreements because uh we're heading in opposite directions and we're not using language to clarify, we're using language to mask or um these deceptive, which is um has no place, especially in the military, but not in the republic either. Um, hopefully we can uh get back to the a time where we can agree on some fundamental uh assumptions and not abandon the philosophy that gave us the use of constitution, gave us the root the natural rights that we all enjoy as American citizens, um, or at least we recognize the danger of it. If we don't pay attention to philosophy, we are going to lose all those things that follow out of philosophy because we just chose to be ignorant or we uh chose to neglect our duties as citizens.
SPEAKER_02:I agree. And I mean that's the fundamental reason why I started this podcast was because I saw within the military space there was not room for these type of respectful, critiqued debates about what was happening to our service members and the ways that they were being treated. And when I would bring up some of the things that I was seeing, I saw that there was no appetite within my leadership to have these kinds of hard conversations. So thankfully, uh, we still do have freedom of speech. And we're seeing that play out on so many stages. I mean, I don't know if you're following what's going on right now with Sean Ryan and Dan Crenshaw, but I believe that that lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit is is has got major implications for the way those ways that we veterans talk about issues uh within our community. And it may only be playing out right now with the Navy SEAL community, but I believe that all of us when we take to media to have these kinds of discussions, we all face the threat that someone's not going to like what we have to say or they're gonna disagree with us or they're gonna try to slam us with words and they're gonna misunderstand what it is that we're saying. And so I think it's really important instead of swiping at one another, that we have these very thoughtful discussions and we're willing to sit down face to face with people that we disagree with and say, hey, I I might not agree with the way you see this, but let me listen to where you're coming from and then let me ask some follow-up questions, and then you ask me some questions. And I bet you by the end of that conversation, because I had this happen when I had two lawyers on that seemed very diametrically opposed. And it was very fascinating that towards the end of the conversation, they were agreeing on issues that I would have never thought I'd hear them agree on. And I believe the same thing will happen when we sit down face to face. Face with people that we disagree on and we'll actually solve problems. But when we don't even see people in Congress doing that right now, where's the hope for the rest of us? And then we have a military that's been silenced. I mean, I just had an 06 active duty officer tell me that she was advised not to come on my podcast. And I think that's really sad. And I just hope that one day we'll get to a place where having these kinds of conversations won't be controversial. They'll just be what we do.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, I would perfectly agree with you.
SPEAKER_02:So I want to thank you so much for taking the time. I know we're at the top of the hour. Uh, is there anything else that I didn't ask you about before we close out the call that you would like to say to our audience?
SPEAKER_01:Uh no, other than uh there's a lot of work inside uh the book that covers stoicism and the kind of tradition that runs through the military. Uh, we if we really don't understand the story of Cato, uh, we don't really understand the revolutionary war and what our founding fathers fought for. Uh but from there it flows really all of the army or military profession as we know it, from the laws of war and kind of what we aimed for as a republic. So if anyone doesn't understand the story of Cato, I would implore you to go read uh study and Goodman's uh Rome's Last Citizen and really start reawakening the idea of what was America really founded for and what are we wanting to fight for.
SPEAKER_02:I love it. Love it. All right, Franklin, I will meet you backstage as I go full screen to close out the call. But thank you again for coming on the Stories of Service podcast. Thank you. And that is a wrap for my four podcasts in one week. I will not typically do this, guys, but sometimes I just get excited and I want to have more guests on, and I know it's time to get them on, and so I just do it and then I go, Oh my god, I'm so busy. Well, I did it to myself. So next week I will not have any shows, and I'm actually going on a very short uh mini vacation, and then we'll be back at it, I believe, right before Christmas. I'm having Daniel Gade on. Can't wait to have Daniel Gade. He is the author of Wounding Warriors. So we're going to revisit the issue of veterans disability, which has been playing out also in the media recently with a four-part uh Washington Post series, a Senate hearing. I believe Senator Tommy Tubberville has also put together some kind of a committee. So uh we're just gonna get right into it. The VFW's been talking about it. So can't wait to have that show. I believe that's my next podcast. But uh, as I always do to close out these calls, please take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and enjoy the rest of your evening. Bye bye now.