The Utility of Janowitz’s Political Awareness in Officer Education

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X211046372
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

1134644AFSXXX10.1177/0095327X20917183Armed Forces & SocietyLevy

research-article2022

The Utility of Janowitz’s

Political Awareness in Off‌icer

Education

Suzanne C. Nielsen

1

and Hugh Liebert

1



Abstract

In the pages of this journal, Damon Coletta and Tom Crosbie published a response to

our article entitled, “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’sThe Professional

Soldier for the Education of Off‌icers.”In that article, we argued that Janowitz’s emphasis

on the need for political awareness in the U.S. military should receive greater attention

in the education of today’s off‌icer corps. Coletta and Crosbie suggest that we are too

ready to abandon Samuel Huntington’s classic work, The Soldier and the State. In this

continuation of that dialogue, we respond with three clarif‌ications and three sub-

stantive disagreements. Huntington and Janowitz offer divergent perspectives on the

issues of off‌icer education and “political virtue,”we suggest, and Janowitz’s perspective

deserves greater weight that it has traditionally received. Coletta and Crosbie also

place greater emphasis on the separability of political and military affairs than is

warranted, and Janowitz is more helpful here as well.

Keywords

civil–military relations, professionalism, military education, Janowitz, Huntington

We read with interest the commentary by Coletta and Crosbie (2021) on the article that

we published in this journal entitled, “The Continuing Relevance of Morris Janowitz’s

The Professional Soldier for the Education of Off‌icers”(2020). In that article, we

1

Department of Social Sciences, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Hugh Liebert, Department of Social Sciences, U.S. Military Academy, 607 Cullum Road, West Point, NY

10996, USA.

Email: hugh.liebert@westpoint.edu

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X20917183

Armed Forces & Society

2023, Vol. 49(1) 201 –206

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X211046372

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