Praise for “The Harding Project” & Breaking Down Barriers to Publishing
By Brigid Hickman
On September 11 of this year, Chief of Staff of the Army Randy George, Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Commander Gary Brito, and Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer penned an article for West Point’s Modern War Institute (MWI) calling on Soldiers to “revitalize our professional discourse.” Drawing parallels between the 20th century’s interwar period and today, the authors asked for a grassroots surge of written ideas on modernization, warfighting, and other topics pertinent to preparing the nation’s land force for future conflict. Dubbed The Harding Project, this effort aims to revamp Army branch journals as the primary public square for renewed professional discourse by: (1) updating policy to encourage modernization, (2) educating the force on the professional publication landscape, (3) improving archive accessibility, and (4) empowering volunteer editors.
Our team at Thought to Action (T2A) applauds this initiative. We launched T2A in May 2021 for many of the same reasons, believing that our branch journals had grown stale and had ceded widespread readership to newer (and in many cases, more relevant) platforms like MWI, From the Green Notebook, and Strategy Bridge. While most of our authors had published in these journals and others, we felt a gap existed across the military writing enterprise that necessitated the creation of a new platform. The rapid rise in popularity of the aforementioned journals often resulted in more submissions than the editorial staffs could respond to, review, and publish in a timely manner. And while any author aspires to obtain wide readership for his or her article, our goal has never been to write “click bait” pieces that merely meet the present moment’s appetite and then give way to the next day’s news cycle. We wanted to establish a new forum for diverse ideas presented in a professional manner, edited and vetted by peers, and exempt from the bureaucratic norms that seem commonplace at other outlets.
We had also arrived at transition points in our careers from company to field grade leaders. Our graduate school and broadening assignments provided the requisite down time to reflect on our service to that point, harness new knowledge from academia and on-the-job experiences at the Pentagon, and generate informed ideas about the profession of arms. Sometimes these ideas fit well within the prompts of papers for graduate school or met the threshold for publication in existing military journals. But more often, these written pieces felt like square pegs attempting to fit into round holes. After consulting with my West Point classmate and fellow Joint Chiefs of Staff intern Alex Boroff, we decided to launch our own writing project to create a home for our essays and articles that didn’t fit the bill of other outlets.
We reached out to close friends who shared our passion for writing and stewarding the profession. Without any particular quotas in mind, we aimed for representation across various Army branches and were blessed to bring in Jennifer Walters, an Air Force officer and brilliant writer who was serving as GEN(R) Milley’s speechwriter at the time. Thanks to the creativity and tenacity of Tara Middlebrooks, we built a website and drafted a mission statement highlighting the niche we aimed to fill in military discourse. Acknowledging that any project will only last as long as the systems that undergird it, we devised a publication and editing schedule that rotates between our authors. After expanding our original writing team from five to nine personnel, each writer now contributes an article once every seven weeks and edits one to two peer’s articles within that timeframe. The Google tool suite eased the tyranny of distance between our authors, at one point spanning the globe from Hawaii to Poland. We also leveraged social media to expand our audience and announce newly published articles, relying on our personal and professional networks to roll out Thought to Action.
Over the past two years, we have adapted these systems to better reflect the reality of our schedules. We originally published one article per week but quickly found that pace unsustainable with a volunteer team working full time jobs. We scaled back to publishing once every two weeks, adjusting dates around federal holidays and building in more cushion time for editing. While room for improvement certainly still exists, we are proud to still be “in business” for over two years, enduring through multiple permanent change of station cycles, deployments, births of children, and other competing priorities.
Any one of those factors would have been enough to derail or sunset our project, and perhaps these same factors can partially explain the broader drop-off in professional writing across our service. Acknowledging the myriad demands on Soldiers’ time, publication outlets should take a hard look at their internal processes and thresholds for publication. Of course we want to read well-written, cogent, and grammatically correct articles. The editorial process is a coaching mechanism to help authors develop into better writers. But it should not be an obstacle to any writer, regardless of experience level or credentials, succeeding in publishing his or her ideas in a professional forum.
As the Harding Project works to bring both print and media publications into the 21st century, it should encourage these outlets to expand their editorial staffs and establish tiered publication thresholds to encourage more first-time writers to contribute. Our non-commissioned officers, warrant officers, and cadets possess their own ideas and perspectives on the future of warfighting but are not as frequently published in major outlets. Mentors need to encourage these populations to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) to truly generate the grassroots revival that GEN George, GEN Brito, and SMA Weimer envision. GEN George’s monthly CSA writing award is a good start, and commanders and echelon would be wise to similarly reward their subordinates for publishing.
Those interested in reading or contributing to the Harding Project can do so through its Substack. Additionally, Thought to Action remains open to outside contributions. Send us a direct message on social media or contact us through our website. We believe the Harding Project is long overdue “call to pens” for the Army and that expanding the public square beyond branch journals, to include nascent platforms like ours, is the best way to optimize the unknown amount of time in today’s interwar period to write and think about the next conflict.
About the Author:
Brigid Hickman is a U.S. Army major and intelligence officer currently assigned to 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Camp Bull Simons, Florida.