When I attended West Point, we had several opportunities to participate in a variety of different types of training. Today's cadets have opportunities that would have seemed fanciful to us in the 1980s--they spend summers working in government, they work in embassies (a West Point cadet was awarded for her valor during the al-Qaeda attacks on our embassies in Africa), they participate in more military schooling--and now this.
We used to say that West Point was 200 years of tradition unhampered by progress. I'm glad to see these significant changes in just the past couple decades and have no doubt that more are on the way.
Don't worry, Walter. It's still *quite* stressful there. It's just a different type of stress than the always-yelling-always-hazing of 50 years ago.
ReplyDeleteAnd it appears to be working. Commanders in the field are more than pleased with the capabilities or our recently-graduated cadets. West Point continues to do it right, even in these changing times.