The problem is that our current elite class is, not to put too fine a point on it, worthless: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/our_worthless_elites/

In answering the question “What is my house worth,” an economist with fancy PhD, like me, is likely to build a complex statistical model based on a large database of home sales. An appraiser is likely to look around my neighborhood for comparable houses which have sold recently and then to use his informed judgment to adjust those prices for differences between my house and those. It is not obvious which approach is better, and slapping down the appraiser because he has no degree, doesn’t understand my model, and has never thought abstractly about where house prices come from is nasty and stupid.

But policy analysis is not merely a technocratic exercise. Which policy is best depends both on what is the good and on what is the relationship between policy choices and bringing about the good. JSP suspects, rightly, that elites disagree with him on the former and also suspects, sometimes rightly and sometimes not, that elites’ ways of knowing the latter are inferior to his own.

The real problem with Republican anti-elitism is not that it undersells the epistemic superiority of elite ways of knowing but that it applies with a vengeance to Republican positions. Who is more likely to be right about the prospects for Iraqi democratization or the morality of the bailout, Sergeant Sixpack or Messrs Frum, Kristol, and Kudlow?

So in terms of who has the better foreign policy “experience,” I agree that a JSP will value the just-returned soldier’s advice over a just-graduated FP wonk, and in part for the abstractness of the wonk’s advice and knowledge, but there’s an element of timeliness involved, too — a soldier’s viewpoint is valuable until he starts to act on it within the system, which necessitates promotion that, through pay raises and increases in stature, also bequeaths elitist status…

Culminating in: a never-ending cycle of intellectual class warfare.

The 20 year old “elite” knows much, but not history or how the world works. He doesn’t think strategically as much as he simply regurgitates his PhD thesis and those of others about what “should” work.

The same thing applies to economics (worse, they read Keynes instead of Mises). William Sturgis Lind does not come off as an elite, but he knows his stuff. As does Von Creveld.

There are differences. Those who graduate from the fancier universities are full of hubris and themselves and their parent’s allowance. Some are smarter, but perseverance and fortitude tend to count for more in the marketplace (or the battlezone) than raw intellect.