WP's Lincoln Brigade

Surprise, surprise. In another commentary on the recent Petraeus broohaha, I learned the history of the Sosh department.
According to Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate (A General Lesson) the department was started by an innovative general officer who understood a thing or two about leader development.

The department, known as “Sosh,” was founded just after World War II by a visionary ex-cadet and Rhodes Scholar named George A. “Abe” Lincoln. Toward the end of the war, as the senior planning aide to Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall, Lincoln realized that the Army needed to breed a new type of officer to help the nation meet its new global responsibilities in the postwar era. This new officer, he wrote to a colleague, should have “at least three heads—one political, one economic, and one military.” He took a demotion, from brigadier general to colonel, so he could return to West Point and create a curriculum “to improve the so-called Army mind” in just this way: a social science department, encouraging critical thinking, even occasionally dissent.

Lincoln also set up a program allowing cadets with high scores in Sosh classes to go study at a civilian graduate school, with West Point paying the tuition. In exchange, the cadets, after earning their doctorates, would come back and teach for at least three years. Once they fulfilled that obligation, Lincoln would use his still-considerable connections in Washington to get them choice assignments in the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, a foreign embassy, or a prestigious command post.

He would later articulate a philosophy in personnel policy broadly: “Pick good people, pick them young before other pickers get into the competition, help them to grow, keep in touch, exploit excellence.”

Over the decades, a network of Lincoln’s acolytes—and the acolytes of those acolytes—emerged and expanded. They called themselves the “Lincoln Brigade.” When these alumni-officers were appointed to high-level positions, they’d usually call Col. Lincoln—or, later, his successors—and ask for the new crop of top Sosh cadets, or the most promising junior faculty members, to come work as their assistants.

One note - earlier in the article Kaplan says Broadwell "joined the light infantry officers’ corps as a paratrooper." So I guess you should be skeptical about the rest.