The title of this article is a slightly edited sentence from James Michener’s 1953 novella The Bridges at Toko-Ri. On December 17, 1777, General George Washington recruited former Prussian officer Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben to strengthen professionalism in the Colonial Army. Von Steuben then wrote a manual outlining the duties and responsibilities of the noncommissioned officer (NCO). In essence, this hallmark document was the creation of the NCO in the U.S. Armed Forces. This article is about one of those NCOs.

For the first half of my 40 years in the military, we were largely a readiness-focused force. We deployed for exercises and demonstrations to send signals to the Soviet Union and to reassure allies. Certainly, we had forces forward based in Europe and the Pacific. But mostly we trained our forces in the continental United States, building readiness in case we had to fight “the big one.”

To the Editor: As I read Rebecca Patterson and Jodi Vittori’s article titled “Why Military Officers Should Study Political Economy” in Joint Force Quarterly 75 (4^th Quarter 2014), I reconsidered my own understanding of the term political economy. At one time I was admittedly unsure of its precise meaning, although I could make some informed guesses, and thankfully the authors do a good job of giving readers many opportunities to understand what it means based on context in various passages.