Reviving the Pen, Strengthening the Army Profession: The CSA Reading List and the Harding Project
The Chief of Staff of the Army’s Recommended Articles and the Harding Project are complementary engines driving the Army profession’s intellectual readiness. The CSA Recommended Articles list curates timely, operationally focused writing from across the force—on mission command, land operations in the Indo-Pacific, leadership, and more—giving leaders at every echelon a ready-made reading program to sharpen their warfighting mindset.
The Harding Project builds on that foundation by reinvigorating professional military writing itself—modernizing journals like Infantry with a web-first, mobile-friendly platform at Line of Departure, publishing articles more frequently, and reintroducing uniformed editors through the Harding Fellowship to renew the culture of debate and discourse that MG Edwin “Forrest” Harding championed in the 1930s.
The Army’s professional journals are uniquely important. Through open access, the journals inform the Army, share lessons laterally, provide an outlet for thoughtful dissent, allow us to learn from our past, and make us better communicators. At the institutional level, the Army is modernizing the journals through improved accessibility, incorporation into education programs, and an emphasis on embracing the digital age. But these changes are not enough. Leaders must also underwrite reasonable risk for their subordinates who take up the pen and encourage professional writing that improves our Army, even if they have dissenting opinions. – Lt. Col. Zachary Griffiths, U.S. Army
Together, these initiatives don’t just ask Soldiers and leaders to consume ideas; they challenge them to create them—reading widely, writing boldly, and contributing to the shared body of knowledge that will prepare the Army for the battlefields of the future.
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