Revenge of the Nerds?

As my first week here at the Air Force's Institute of Technology progresses, I'm struck at how single-faceted this place is. Like the city of Oz where everything is green, everything here is only hi-tech. The school library is a 3-story modern facility, but only stocked with technical books and journals. Books, books everywhere and not a drop [of literature] to drink! I'm not surprised that there are no liberal arts degrees here, but it seems there would be value in at least some liberal arts classes. The only offering that comes close is a single elective on just-war theory. The military instructors are uniformed, but otherwise, stereotypical 10-pound brains. Yesterday, the faculty seemed to enjoy giving us a "diagnostic" math exam containing 50 advanced calculus problems. I might have scored a 10% on it. This is the revenge of the nerds.

More than grumbling, I hope to raise a point while I'm here that the military relies too much on technology to win our nation's wars. While effective in destructive power and precision, it only forces our enemies to wage asymmetrical warfare. And at this our technology is unable to bring closure to a conflict.

To balance our approach to warfare, we need to comprehend a culture where religion is not just an individual, private thing, as it is here. Our western leaders need to fathom a society knitted together by a single religious conviction, as we see in the Islam of our enemies. If we can't understand our enemy, but instead rely only upon our technology to kill them all, I'm afraid we can't find peace, much less victory.