December 12, 2025: Over the last few decades, American universities, and service academies, have pushed more STEM/Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics at the expense of the humanities. This has important military implications because improving military technologies is crippled if there is little or no knowledge of military history. Having the latest weapons and military technologies does little to improve the quality of your forces if the officers in charge have little knowledge of how new technologies were used in the past. Equally important is knowing how historical commanders dealt with changing technologies and which adaptations worked and which didn’t and why. Even the American military academies fell into this trap.

To make matters worse, the American military also has problems with recruiting, training, and retaining competent officers. This is nothing new because the United States traditionally had a small armed force and many of the officers were supplied to the army by West Point and navy by Annapolis. These were supplemented by officer training programs at colleges. The quality of these new officers declined since the Cold War ended. With no real threat, like the defunct Soviet Union, it proved difficult to get officer candidates to take their training and performance seriously. The military became another civil service job. European militaries had this problem before the Cold War ended. For Europeans, the end of World War II marked the end of more than thirty years of horrendous combat and losses.

And then there are the problems Russia is having obtaining a new generation of career soldiers and officers. In Ukraine so many officers have been killed that Russia was forced to offer commissions to the most promising sergeants or lower ranking enlisted men.

Russia has been forced to innovate. One of the more interesting innovations involves the use of under 18 children in the war effort. Russian teenagers 14-17 years old now have a military training course at school. Here they learn the basics of military life and are prepared for eventual mobilization into the military. Currently the children are put to work, learning how to operate and repair drones. Then comes building drones in school or at home. The young students get official recognition from their schools for their drone-related activities. So far Russia has brought over 600,000 children into these programs. In addition to military training the children are encouraged to participate in programs where they learn how to operate drones.

There are similar problems as India and China prepare for a potential war. India is acutely aware that it is falling farther behind China economically, in part because Chinese schools are much less corrupt and much more effective. In short, China has a much better educated workforce and that is driving economic growth that has made China three times per capita as productive as Indians. This translates to more and better officer candidates in China compared to India. Another Chinese and Indian advantage is that both countries take pride in their military histories and relish teaching and embellishing it. There are some problems in China with the government censoring some aspects of Chinese military history that reflect poorly on the current government. Thanks to the internet, diligent Chinese military history buffs can always fill in the blanks. That includes getting past the Golden Shield, the Chinese internet firewall meant to keep truth away from curious Chinese.