Crowe, William J. (1925-2007)

The Line of Fire: From Washington to the Gulf, the Politics and Battles of the New Military

New York

Simon and Schuster

1993

"Your mind, I tell graduates, is a lot like a parachute--it won't help you much if it doesn't open when you need it."

That thought disturbed me deeply at the time and still does. Breeding open-minded commanders is a high priority, yet we often seem to fall short in this regard. So much in service life even militates against it. But not having them is an invitation to disaster. A similar deficiency led to Great Britain's loss of a generation of young men in World War One. During World War Two Eisenhower had to discard a series of commanders before he found some who had the necessary qualities. In the Pacific during that war the Navy sometimes turned rigidity into an art form--in the way we initially used our submarine [End Page 210] force, for example, or in the early refusal to acknowledge that our torpedoes simply did not work. Struggling with this problem during the Gulf crisis convinced me that flexibility of thought was our single most crucial need. I have a line that I have used at university commencement exercises ever since then. Your mind, I tell graduates, is a lot like a parachute--it won't help you much if it doesn't open when you need it.
(p. 210-1)

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Crowe, William J. and David Chanoff. The Line of Fire: From Washington to the Gulf, the Politics and Battles of the New Military. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. <Link to Google Books>

05/15/2009