Nearly everyone agrees that the purpose of the various commissioning sources -- service academies, ROTC, OCS -- is to produce leaders. Yet nobody seems to know what this “leadership” thing is or how to get it. Somebody must think book-learning plays a large role. After all, a good portion of what we do in our “leadership laboratories” -- as the brass likes to call them -- consists of academics. And that's true of other commissioning sources too. ROTC-trained officers were students at civilian colleges. Even OCS involves classroom work. So what if it turns out book-learning has nothing to do with leadership? Boy, would we have egg on our face then.

Last February I came face to face, or at least e-mail to e-mail, with a barrage of people ranging from midshipmen to fleet officers asserting precisely this: there's academics, and there's leadership, and never the twain shall meet.

The occasion for all these people rising en masse to assert that academics weren't related to leadership was a flap I'd started about the Naval Academy's admissions policies in a piece for the Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine. (I'd spent a year on the admissions board.) By generating a number we call the Whole Person Multiple, we identify the high-flying well-rounded candidates -- who almost by definition have to be strong in sports too. Then we reject most of them, because we've reserved about half our slots for less stellar ones. We do this to staff the athletic teams so they win more often against civilian schools (we'd have pretty good teams just from walk-ons), to get a higher percentage of racially desirable students than we'd otherwise have, and to privilege applicants with prior fleet experience, in many cases less than a year.

The result of so many “set-aside” candidates (the term was my coinage; it refers to the fact that we guarantee their seats and make the more competitive candidates jockey to win their nomination slate) is that my classrooms are rife with students who couldn't identify the point of an argument, make logical decisions, formulate their own views, support these, or express them in a way that someone not inside their own head could understand.

To me it seemed what my students call a “no-duh” that these were important skills in the fleet, and hence part -- a large part -- of being a good leader. In English, we read Shakespeare and modern greats like D.H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf. Sure, the exercise is figuring out the point and discussing the issues they raise. But the real point is, learning how to figure out the point and how to discuss the issues. So yes, better academics do make better officers. It seemed pretty self-evident to me.

Yet what I heard over and over in the wake of my article was, “Professor Fleming just doesn't get it.” CNN did a segment on the furor my article had raised. The administration provided midshipmen to rebut my position on camera. In various forms, they said: This place isn't about academics. It's about leadership. (That's what about a third to a half of my e-mails said too; the other half said I was right on target.)

Of course I sighed at seeing people who by now are commissioned officers making such a howler in logic -- assuming that because I was saying academics had weakened and was concerned about this, I thought only academics mattered. Didn't they pay attention back in plebe English when we went over such logical errors as these? For that matter, did they even read my article?

I teach my plebes to consider seriously arguments antithetical to their own. I try to practice that too. Is it possible that book-learning really is irrelevant to leadership? The Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz (I've written on him for the Army War College's Parameters -- “Can Reading Clausewitz Save Us From Future Mistakes?) thought military leadership was about a sort of big-picture prescience. The best leaders are geniuses, not bound by rules or even theory: they look at a situation and know what to do. Though Clausewitz fought against Napoleon, it's usually agreed that Napoleon was the type of natural military genius Clausewitz had in mind here. Napoleon didn't have to pass Electrical Engineering, English, or for that matter so far as we know even French.

Then there's an allied point of view. It points out that leading people -- perhaps especially men -- is about charisma, a kind of aura, something that can't be taught. What we want is an LT (or for that matter flag officer) who looks fit in his uniform and who strides into the room, gives you a hearty handshake and a big grin (or a sober look, depending on circumstances), thanks you for coming, and immediately gets down to business. We call it command presence. You don't learn it in Electrical Engineering, or for that mater English.

But what happens next? Ah, there's the rub. What, in other words, does this personable, competent-seeming officer have to say after s/he has gotten everybody sitting up straight with an expectant smile on his/her face? That can be influenced by education. And though Clausewitz may be right about the once-in-a-generation geniuses, that still leaves a lot of officer billets to fill.

Education puts you through dry runs of the world so you can synthesize data, decide what's important, where to focus, and what to recommend. That's what we do in the classroom. You can get your foot in the door with the charisma, but after that you actually have to be good. The data that have to be synthesized may include what to do on the battlefield under conditions of stress when the plans have long since been torn up. Education is neither the necessary nor sufficient condition of being a good leader, but it does matter. A lot.

We can't control charisma, but we can help teach people to achieve competence -- and competence is what happens when the big grin and hearty handshake have faded.