Americans Tutor Soviet Officers in Military Role

A high-level delegation from the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Defense began a crash course Monday at Harvard University on the role of the military in a democracy.

The privately funded, two-week program brings 28 Soviet officers to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for classes ranging from a primer on the U.S. Constitution to lessons of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

Instructors include several internationally known public policy experts, including Bush Administration advisers Robert Blackwill, a former national security staffer who teaches at the Kennedy School, and Condoleeza Rice of Stanford University.

Lecturers also include several U.S. educators and economists who helped hammer out the “Grand Bargain” reform package three months ago at the Kennedy School, including Graham Allison of Harvard and Stanley Fischer of MIT. Guest speakers include Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; his predecessor, retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., and Gen. John R. Galvin, top NATO commander in Europe.

Among the subjects tackled will be outlines of U.S. society and government--the Constitution and the role of the White House, State Department, Congress and the press. The Soviets will also be instructed in U.S. national security decision-making processes, the future of arms control, nuclear proliferation and defense conversion.

The program is patterned on similar weeks-long seminars the Kennedy School offers each year to U.S. national security professionals and freshmen members of Congress. But it is the first to cater to Soviet officers.