Educating America's Military

Joan Johnson-Freese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415634991
• eBook ISBN: 9781136158605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book offers a detailed examination of the professional military education system in the United States, from a critical, insider's perspective.

The mission of America's war colleges is to educate senior military officers in both the ways of war and the defence of peace. But are these colleges doing the best job possible in carrying out that important mission? Military education faces many demands, including a lack of preparation by the students, uneven quality of the faculty, and confusion over the curriculum. Many officers attend resident programs at the war colleges programs against the career advice of their leadership, despite the fact that they are virtually guaranteed graduation after less than a year of study, while others do their best to avoid it entirely. As the professional military education system has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism, some have even called for closing the war colleges. That answer, however, does not serve the United States well, especially in a complex, globalized environment, where military leaders need the best specialized education to prepare them for their future challenges. This volume examines the system that created and supports the perpetuation of this system, and why it is imperative that it be fixed.

Written by a faculty member at a military college with twenty years' experience of the PME system, this book will of much interest to students of the US Military, US politics and military education in general.

1
Why War Colleges?¹

Nail your whispers to the wall. Conclude the trilogy of read … think … and write. Is there ‘career risk’ in publishing? I suppose. Hasn’t hurt me too badly over the years, I’d say. But what matters is testing your ideas on the field of intellectual battle, so to speak.

Admiral James Stavridis, Speaking at National War College
Convocation ceremony, August 2011²

In September 2011, I appeared on the CSPAN television show Washington Journal to talk about Professional Military Education (PME), speaking from my near 20 years’ experience as a PME faculty member, including as a former department chair and current professor at the Naval War College. A skeptical viewer called in with a question about why the United States needed war colleges … wouldn’t we be better off having peace colleges? It is not an uncommon question and one I am always happy to answer. There is an inscription on the wall at the Naval War College, taken from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) charter, that sums up the answer well: “Since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that defenses of peace must be constructed.”

The caller’s question points out though that few Americans are familiar with the Professional Military Education system either in terms of goals or processes. Yet it is through those institutions that most military members receive their post-enlistment training and education. It is within War Colleges that “the minds of men” are shaped to better construct “defenses of peace.” The importance of these venerable institutions cannot be overstated, as it is here that American military officers should prepare to transition from operational leaders – those proficient in battlefield skills and tactics, to strategic leaders – those responsible for decisions at higher and broader levels.

With inevitable Defense Department budget cuts looming, all programs will be scrutinized, especially those not directly related to war fighting. War Colleges are too important to be considered low-hanging fruit. Consequently, it is imperative that decision-makers understand their importance, and that the institutions are able to demonstrate rigor and they are serving the purpose for which they were intended.

Therefore, the purpose of this book is twofold: to familiarize the American public and decision-makers with PME, specifically the senior War Colleges, and to encourage discussion on how to improve the execution of their important missions. The latter purpose stems from the idea that there is always room for improvement. Before improvement can take place, though, the goals must be clear. But whether War College goals are clear, and whether articulated goals are then supported by practices and processes at those institutions, is part of this discussion.

Admiral James Stavridis provided a succinct articulation of his view on War College educational goals at the 2011 National War College Convocation by describing his own situation when he arrived at National in 1991.

I knew what I was good at and what I knew well: driving a destroyer or a cruiser; navigating through tight waters; leading a boarding party up a swinging ladder; planning an air defense campaign; leading Sailors on the deck plates of a rolling ship. But I also sensed what I did not know or understand well: global politics and grand strategy; the importance of the “logistics nation”; how the interagency community worked; what the levers of power and practice were in the world – in essence, how everything fits together in producing security for the United States and our partners. [emphasis added]³

The goal of the War Colleges should be to educate students in the areas they are not familiar with and take them out of their comfort zones. War College students are senior military officers who are transitioning from career positions where tactical (often technical) skills are key – flying planes, driving ships, leading infantry – to positions requiring a broader view of the role of the military in U.S. security affairs, including areas of a non-technical, non-kinetic nature.

Global politics and grand strategy, as Admiral Stavridis states, are areas with which War College students are largely unfamiliar, but areas for which some will be responsible in their future positions, and others will support. Too often, though, educational achievement in those areas is diluted, sacrificed for expedience at the nation’s War Colleges. That being the case, America is neither getting what it is paying for with the millions – billions?⁴ – annually spent on our nation’s War Colleges, nor preparing its military leaders both to fight wars and construct defenses for peace. Admittedly, the broad range of War College students’ interests, abilities, intellectual bent, future jobs and missions, and the unique constraints of the military profession, creates challenges in Professional Military Education not evident at civilian schools. It also makes it even more important to be continually striving for improvement. Professional Military Education serves an array of purposes, through multiple institutions at varying levels, with War Colleges at the pinnacle for most officers.⁵

As part of the PME system, War Colleges are a large complex of institutions modeled on universities. They include the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, PA; the Naval War College in Newport, RI; the Air War College in Montgomery, AL; the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, VA; the National War College in Washington, D.C.; and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF), also located in Washington, D.C.^a Each institution has a distinct personality and individual strengths and weaknesses.

Professional Military Education, in general, includes training and education provided to military members by the military along what is known as an education continuum.⁶ It includes opportunities for enlisted personnel and officers in their specialty fields, as well as offering Bachelor’s degrees at the service academies and Master’s degrees at some staff colleges and all the War Colleges, and Master’s and doctoral degrees at the Air Force Institute of Technology and at the Naval Post Graduate School. The focus of this book is at the War College level, specifically the Army, Navy, Air Force, and National War Colleges,^b because it is there that senior officers focus on the things they do not know or understand well; non-technical, broadly focussed issues.

While all of these institutions excel in some or many areas, all also suffer to varying degrees from overriding institutional and cultural issues that hinder the education goals intended by Congress, and codified in the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Goldwater-Nichols was landmark legislation that fundamentally reformed U.S. national defense. It was intended to address issues created by inter-service rivalry that hindered U.S. operations in Vietnam, the Iranian hostage rescue mission in 1980,⁷ and Grenada in 1983.

In an engagement [Grenada] where U.S. military superiority was absolute, the interoperability of U.S. forces proved shocking poor. Communications between the Services was poor, if not non-existent in some cases, leading to deadly situations for U.S. forces as well as sheer redundancy of effort in an era where the United States could afford redundancy.⁸

The services needed to work better together, and Grenada finally provided the impetus for Congress to legislatively force “jointness” amongst the services through Goldwater-Nichols.

Goldwater-Nichols streamlined the military chain of command, strengthened the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS), and mandated that the services learn to work together, jointly, through combined/joint schooling. None of that would prove easy because of the high degree of military service insularity, or stovepiping, found historically. Beyond having the services learn to work with each other, part of Goldwater-Nichols also specifically mandated expanded guidelines for military education to open the military culture and to encourage intellectual integration with civilians and among the services themselves. That was prompted by military officers increasingly being left out of strategy and policy discussions because they did not have the capability to contribute from a knowledgeable position. They were good at what they did, but they had lost any sense of context.

Goldwater-Nichols was followed by the 1987 creation of a Panel on Military Education of the House Armed Services Committee, also known as the Skelton Panel after its chair, Ike Skelton (D-MO). Mr. Skelton believed that a strong joint educational system and effective personnel management practices had to be developed by the services in order to assure the “jointness” mandated by Goldwater-Nichols.⁹ The idea behind both was simple, reflecting the classic wisdom that “the society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”¹⁰ The military must be included in strategy and policy discussions. Military education was to be significantly broadened beyond the traditional “operations” focus of the past, to include subjects important for context. This necessitated adding more civilian academics to War College faculties to cover substantive areas beyond the scope of the largely military faculty of previous years, and Goldwater-Nichols paved the way for that.

Over a decade earlier, Admiral Stansfield Turner had similarly reformed the Naval War College (NWC). In his 1972 Convocation address, Turner stated that reform was needed because: “Rarely does one meet a graduate of any War College who said that he had been intellectually taxed by a War College course of instruction.”¹¹ He further warned in that speech that military officers must be able to hold their own with “the best civilian strategists or we will abdicate control over our profession.”¹² Thus, in the 1970s, as the Naval War College President, he instituted what has become known as the Turner Revolution.

Admiral Turner reorganized the basic curriculum of the Naval War College into three blocks, reinstating strong foundational theory and history components that had been weakened in the years since Naval War College founder Stephen B. Luce and strategist/lecturer Alfred Thayer Mahan had presided.¹³ Turner also significantly increased the number of civilian faculty that, according to Frederick Hartmann, former Alfred Thayer Mahan Chair of Maritime Studies and Special Academic Advisor to the President of the Naval War College, was “a more important change than the so-called ‘revolution’ in the curriculum.”¹⁴ Together, these two reforms were intended to enable military officers to be capable and competitive strategists by expanding the scope of military education beyond its natural inclination toward technical skill sets.

A key part of that Turner and Goldwater-Nichols military education revolution was to move military education away from what Samuel Huntington, in The Soldier and the State, had earlier called the “technicism” – concentration on a technical specialty – prominent in military culture.¹⁵ Technicism, however, is what the services were and are largely comfortable with and want; and understandably so, given the increasing military reliance on increasingly sophisticated and complex technology. Consequently, the expanded subject matter and accompanying civilian academics legislatively thrust upon the War Colleges by Goldwater-Nichols have often been seen by military leadership as peripheral to service needs. But, as the war on terrorism has vividly demonstrated, technology cannot provide the answer to all questions.

Whether the intent of Goldwater-Nichols, the Skelton Panel and even the Turner Revolution has been upheld is debatable. Naval War College professor Mackubin Owens suggested in 2006 that it has not:

I have heard too many Navy officers gloat about the “end of the Turner Revolution.” The new mantra has become “teaching to competencies,” which suggests the purpose of military education – to broaden the intellectual and military horizons of officers to encompass larger strategic and operational issues that will confront them in the future – has been abandoned for mere training.¹⁶

In 2009, the Secretary of Defense requested the Defense Science Board to conduct a review of PME, resulting in a major report.¹⁷ That report referenced yet another study, this one authored in 2008 by defense analyst Barry Watts.¹⁸

Watts argued that the military needs to develop strategists either by better educating officers or by institutionalizing a place for strategists to live. Both of these efforts are ultimately doomed to fail and neither for malicious reasons. The first is illustrated by the fact that our professional military education (PME) system believes that it is educating strategists/leaders. In fact, the curriculum normally reflects the flavor of the day; it is not necessarily aimed at selected critical thinkers but at officers who show acumen at following directions and who pass through the right jobs to get promoted. Moreover, staff college and War College attendees are deemed future leaders not by any scientific method, but by an inconsistent evaluation by senior leaders. Furthermore, school attendance is viewed more as a “rite of passage” than a serious and rigorous honor that few are given access to, and where they are expected to perform at a higher academic level …

Beyond whether or not the students were being given the right material at the right level to prepare them as future strategic leaders, rather than better tactical or operational leaders, the DSB authors also addressed programmatic rigor.

Finally, the very dirty and not so secret truth is that majors [O-4 rank] in PME today are the products of an educational system in which many colleges and universities no longer hold students to the standard of being able to write coherent, logical arguments. An informal survey among Air University academics reveals that it is even worse today than in 1996, when Foster¹⁹ said War College students did not write well and were “victims of a system that prizes decidedly non-objective advocacy.” T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Why War Colleges?
• 2 Warriors and scholars
• 3 The students: too valuable to fail
• 4 Faculty: but not necessarily in a collegial sense
• 5 The curriculum: moving toward intellectual agility
• 6 Recommendations and conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index