My experience echos DinoR’s. I was USAF ROTC and had the privilege of serving in USAF while attached directly to the Army for a portion of my career. So I attended both blue and green education and saw the results up close and personal.
My era coincided almost perfectly with Reagan’s two terms in office: 80-88. Which I believe is about 10 years before DinoR’s. My era was defined by the Cold War, continuous *sub rosa *skirmishes in the third world, and the echos of Viet Nam. So a very different era from DinoR’s.
The desired officer attitude then was smartly aggressive and deeply questioning. Up until it’s time to go, then just do whatever your assigned mission requires with all your skill and might.
USAF’s Founding Father mythos embraces people like Billy Mitchell versus the Navy, and Hap Arnold versus the Army. Innovation and questioning *status quo *authority is built into USAF’s very DNA.
As to the partisan politics of the USAF officer corps, it was pretty simple: Which party embodies larger budgets and more reflexive anti-Communism? That’s our favorite. It really didn’t get any deeper than that.
In that era it was pretty much the Rs who filled that particular bill. There have been eras in the past where that wouldn’t have been true. There may be eras in the future where it won’t be either.
The USAF at that time was deeply and aggressively anti-racist. We ate, slept, preached, and breathed absolute racial equality. And lived it, worked it, and believed it. Which was hardly mainstream Rism then or now.
IOW, the conservatism of the USAF officer corps was big government anti-communism with 1950s-style small-town Lutheran Leave it to Beaver overtones, not small government Southern fried racist Baptist post-9/11 jingoism.
I think we can all agree those are two very different things. Despite both being termed “conservative” in the 2016 lexicon.
This is ridiculous stereotype - the military population is generally a reflection of the public at large, therefore there are people of all political leanings in it.
The nutty right wingers type tend to be a loud, annoying minority but they are actually just an exception. Politics is simply a NO GO topic, and only discussed among the closest of friends and relatives.
That is absolutely the case in American service academies as well. With faculty having views reflecting all mainstream political ideas, both civilian and military faculty.
Again, the idea that military automatically equals conservative nut-bag is a terrible, false stereotype.
Agree in general. Also worth mentioning that “the military” is almost a silly term in this context. The demographic reality of, say, USAF officers compared to USMC enlisted are very, very different.
When I was USAF it seemed like about 70% of the officer corps was from Oklahoma or Texas. Reality was less lopsided of course, but OK+TX=USAF was certainly the standard caricature.
Conversely in my era Army enlisted, and particularly the first term enlisted, seemed to be 40% black inner city northerners, 20% rural southern black, 30% white rural (TX, OK, LA predominating), and 10% everything else.
Despite the jokes about kids from Iowa joining the Navy to see the ocean for the first time, IME naval officers and enlisted were much more heavily drawn from coastal states than were Army or USAF.
Anyway… one thing to remember is that most of the various military colleges and academies have a lot of civilian academic faculty, so it’s not like they’re necessarily always being taught by military officers.
Speaking as a longtime friend of a former civilian USMA faculty member, he’s not the kind who would rat someone out for having an unusual or unpopular opinion. He might expect you to have a really compelling argument or else face mockery or teasing though.
On the subject of demographics: my dad worked for AAFES for about 20 years, he joked that you could tell if an officer was Air Force or Army by looking at his wife. Air Force officers had Asian spouses, Army officers had European spouses.
EDIT: And Air Force NCOs have difficulties with English grammar, clearly.