In 2007, an Air Force general told a group of faculty at a service staff college, “There is nothing more important than deploying to support the fight; certainly nothing we do here.” He made it clear that educating officers was not nearly as important for the country (or for the officers’ careers) as deploying, and that deployment to combat zones and seeking further officer education were mutually exclusive choices.

He could not have been more wrong, of course, but his kind of thinking now dominates U.S. Air Force leadership. Anti-intellectualism has become firmly grounded in the Air Force at a time when its leadership should instead be trying harder than ever to cultivate warrior-scholars. The reason is that future wars are less likely than ever to resemble past ones. As important as experience is, it could be a wasting asset in a rapidly changing environment—an environment in which the definition of the situation we once more or less took for granted will no longer apply. When your playbook is exhausted, when all else fails, you have to think. God help anyone who has forgotten how.

It’s not that those who frown on intellectualism are themselves stupid. One can attain competency, even mastery, through instincts, character and moral sensibilities, as Colleen J. Shogan has put it. One can even make a case for valuing doers over thinkers. It is, after all, important to be technically proficient, and too many thinkers recapitulating and rehashing the same issues is not usually an effective way for a military force to respond to a challenge. But in the long run technical proficiency cannot substitute for an ability to analyze issues critically and apply every asset available to achieve a specific end in differing political and military contexts. Some people have got to know how to think clearly, and if not officers, then who?...