International Staff Ride 2011: Strat Studies Hits Spain
[May 2011 Issue]
By Rebecca Zimmerman
In the reflective stupor that always marks the painfully early morning after a staff ride’s final night, I sat in the lobby of the Hotel Emperador with department head Eliot Cohen, waiting for the bus. We spoke about the staff ride and why PhD students are encouraged to come, despite the fact that, as former MAs, most of us have already had more than our fair share of time on the famed ISR. On my second pass through SAIS, I see my discipline as a way of constructing answers to a reality that can never be fully explained, and I now see what Dr. Cohen calls “childlike” questions about the subject as the most penetrating. On this trip to Spain I asked how to define victory in war when it seems that so often it is achieved simply by avoiding self-defeat. I wondered about the minds of great men and the cycle of power, isolation and delusion that seems to destroy them all. I asked if later French heroes of counterinsurgency took conscious lessons from the Peninsular War, and even wondered how regiments became the size that they are today.
As a MA student, the field of Strategic Studies seemed too big to grasp. I always felt that I was operating without a sense of its taxonomy; that perhaps there was some master reading I had skipped my first week of school that told me everything. I found staff rides to be challenging exercises, as I tried hard to prove my mastery of a subject I didn’t feel I fully comprehended. Five years later, I slumped on the couch that rainy morning and wondered why this staff ride seemed both more fun and more satisfying than the others. From the department’s perspective, PhD students bring a different viewpoint to the trip, and I realize now how true this is.
Most of my MA classmates will go on to careers in government and business, enabled by this experience of scholarly inquiry to think more deeply than their inboxes normally allow. If the success of my peers from the first time around is an indicator, this is a powerful tool in the real world. But for a few of us, asking these questions is an end in itself.
Strategic Studies is more than campaign histories or policy memo assignments: it is the study of victory and defeat in all its impenetrable complexity, not to mention the consequences, both political and human, of those end-states. But more than other academic disciplines, Strategic Studies is tied to the world we actually live in and a belief that this knowledge, ably applied, can make a critical difference.
Nowhere in the Strat experience is this partnership of pragmatism and academia better realized than in the international staff ride.
Rebecca is a Ph.D. candidate in the Strategic Studies Program.
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