Experts and experts

The secrets to teaching national security strategy

I am delighted so many people responded to my conversation with Ambassador Dean Thompson yesterday, especially those who are joining us. I am honoured by James Schmeling’s recommendation on LinkedIn to read this as he captures why I do it. Yes, I taught at the National War College and am a big fan of many of our graduates and the mission of the place for nearly 80 years.

No, I am far from simply a cheerleader as I know better than most, if not everyone, the competing priorities, the outside pressures, the weak spots, and the rest of the story. As Dean of Faculty for three and a half years, following multiple positions in NWC’s academic administration from core course director to department chairwoman to associate dean twice to other positions, there are definitely things we could do to improve. I doubt any two people would see the answers the same, however, which is why the particular challenges are so difficult to correct completely.

I do, however, know a major reason Dean Thompson and the others who responded affirmatively to the piece felt they benefitted from the process the underwent. Perhaps the unique aspect of the institution is its learning model: the NWC seminar led by experts.

No, that isn’t a big deal, you’ll say, because all graduate schools use seminars and the claim great professors. Yes and no. Having studied in the British system for my master’s degree, I can say that their seminars are completely student driven. The faculty distributes a lengthy book (not merely articles but always monographs) syllabus the day the academic year commences, students determine which topics they will have to cover as presenters. Each student then concentrates on her topic for which she is completely responsible for running the seminar. Those topics one isn’t presenting get, in truth, considerably shorter shrift because preparing to handle a three hour seminar can be rather intimidating if you haven’t done it multiple times (even when you have sometimes 😉). Put another way, my experience was that British academic work drives students more deeply into specialized topics earlier than the U.S. system with a danger that one can get merely the most superficial taste of whole segments of the curriculum presented. This is totally student-dependent, of course, but quite a risk in developing a personal, repetitive thought process.

U.S. graduate schools also use seminars but they are still driven largely by what one former, largely unsuccessful NWC faculty member called ‘sage on the stage’. The faculty member imparts knowledge, often bit by bit, while encouraging students to embrace a topic but often the courses selected seem to be more driven by meeting sub field requirements or professor’s research interests than building a truly coherent program of study. One can argue that breadth is absolutely best but not everyone would agree. It depends, in other words, who you are growing intellectually—what is your mission? The focus more often is on written products as much as peer responses to the products, though this too can vary some in American schools.

The National War College approach involves all students studying a common core curriculum where they attend general lectures together but the active learning (measured as at least 70% of their time) is delivered through thirteen (occasionally different numbers but that is not generally the aim) students specifically sectioned into a seminar group according to their professional career fields (service or agency AND specialty within that service or agency) under the nominal guidance of a faculty seminar leader. This core constitutes again 70% of their ten month program (they also do elective courses by individual interests and write an individual strategy for the remaining 30%) for which the Middle States Association for Higher Education and, much more importantly, the Joint Staff Directorate for Education and Training accredits them.

Wait, what? Can’t they just choose? What about freedom to study what they want?

No. This program is for government offers and civilians who will advise the elected officials of our country to achieve our security requirements. We do this for you and the other nations sending students to Roosevelt Hall at Ft. McNair. And this is why we have honed the program for decades.

NWC students attend to learn about national security strategy: identifying it, conceptualising it, developing it, executing it, evaluating it. They do not attend to learn only about a single topic, service approach, or country. It is by design and by nature an integrative topic. When I was hired to revamp the Global Context in the summer of 1992, my first step was to stop spending all of our time seeing the world as a titanic struggle with the former Soviet Union as had been true since two years after the College opened in September 1946. I started with, unsurprisingly, some universal topics and then Asia as a crucial region. You have no idea the howls and cries as I was destroying decades’ thinking but the War College prizes strategic logic with evidence behind it. By 1993 when I executed my first run, I thought we had evidence the Soviet Union was no longer the biggest issue.

The College was created after the World War II experience where Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, Arnold, and others recognized we did poorly conceptualising strategy vis-a-vis our British partners. These leaders wanted an institution where Army folks discussed topics around a seminar table with Marines, Navy, and State Department Coreign Service Officers like Dean Thompson (other civilian agencies in the security field were a far later addition as the Cold War accelerated). Prior to this College opening in 1946, there were virtually no opportunities anywhere in the country for these different players to interact, much less understand each other. And the idea that aviators knew much about submariners or SWOs (surface warfare officers) even within the Navy, the service rewarding skills at sea over classroom chatter, mean gaps in knowing how to use our forces—an essential aspect of national security strategy—ran rampant.

The seminars are lead by FSLs but that does not mean they always know more than the students. Two thirds of the faculty have decades experience as uniformed personnel in all of the services to include Coast Guard and Guardians or civilian leaders in intelligence, diplomacy, development, law enforcement, information, or the other fields the government has available for strategy-making. THAT, my friends, is a distinct difference from traditional education in the United States. FSLs certainly bring experience from one of the now numerous civilian agencies studying at the college.

One of the most humbling seminars I led, Introduction to Statecraft where we introduced students to the panoply of things any strategist must understand to do the job, had a Department of Treasury student detail, in fifteen minutes, how sanctions against the North Koreans are really done. Even with more than twenty-five years teaching at the school at that point, I learned more in that fifteen minutes than I had ever known on sanctions, regardless what I had read. Notice it was a student who educated us rather the faculty member. Every faculty member knows volumes of material (with the traditional academics steeped in their own research field) but strategy, when a process, requires mental agility and knowledge so much broader than any of us alone actually has. The seminar, in fact, intends to replicate an interagency meeting format.all faculty are required to teach across the entire core curriculum which means learning and listening a lot.

Civilian faculty are hired with doctorates in a cognate field for strategy but it is highly desirable as well that each has experience within some arm of the government. This creates a cultural tension as the coin of the realm in traditional academe is publications but some of our least effective faculty over the years with our particular cohort of students are people who excel at writing while they do poorly at facilitating seminar discussions. Yet, we also don’t want civilians who can’t buttress our knowledge of various portions of the curriculum so we need faculty with the credentials and the commitment to spend with stupidness in seminar. That exquisite combination of attributes is harder to find than one might expect. Faculty facilitation is no guarantee that you’re the best educated person in the room; sometimes students around the table also hold doctoral degrees. Most War College students arrive with that least a master’s degree but not in national security strategy. When one hears student backgrounds at the beginning of an every new course with a new group of sectioned students, the faculty member is a fool not to feel humbled as are the students. NWC students are talented operators when they arrive, hopefully wedded with strategic thinking when they graduate.

The FSL enters each seminars with broad preparation for various approaches to present the particular topic to students but a truly successful seminar relies on the seminar members’ individual experiences to enhance everyone’s thinking. Dean and his alumni friends would acknowledge we don’t have all the answers but we can help with addressing misunderstandings. Thompson’s comments about explaining bureaucracy at work is a perfect example. One expects career security folks to KNOW peculiarities of politics but those truly successful in their fields, often without a prior a DC tour of duty, will not know. Seminars and the home rooms, known as committees, where students spend the entire year with the same 18 other students, allows the, to become more comfortable with each other, willing to ask hard questions without fear of embarrassment or some sort of career penalty. The entire year abides by the National Defense University strictly-observed ‘not for attribution’ policy to assure academic freedom to think.

Both seminars and committees also allow—desire—students to reconsider topics with each other later in the curriculum when they have an ‘aha!’ moment. The program is not a ‘one and done’ but a cumulative process of thinking, questioning, reconsidering, adjusting, and constantly re-examining expectations. Seminars and committees, replete with students sectioned by gender, service and agency, and nationality allow them to hear the competing ideas they likely will hear in interagency and multinational decision making in their futures. The international fellows are fully involved in everything, except the extraordinary instances of classified material.

The students arrive at a turning point in their careers. If selected to attend a war college, as another graduate responded to me today upon reading yesterday’s piece, the 60% of the class who are military students have the opportunity to rank which JPME institution they want to attend. Jim Hudson, as a retired Air Force officer, admitted many of his peers chose the Air War College in Alabama (as Army often prefer Carlisle Bsrracks for the zaddmy War College), to remain within the operational context where they have spent their previous two decades. National, with its entirely joint, interagency, and multinational background, cannot focus exclusively on promoting an Air Force-centric focus. Jim recognized how much he did not know, what he ought reading, and how he ought to question, crediting MWC and its unique approach with honing his intellectual skills.

Not every student loves the College. Some want us to be a place where they don’t really have to work hard; the academic rigour has increased substantially since the 1980s as the taxpayer deserves and as the global strategic challenges demand. NWC prides itself on assessment of students, curricula, faculty, and impact, honestly confronting deficiencies to create better. The idea that we don’t change anything is laughable. I suspect my greatest flaw as Dean of Faculty was a willingness to try new approaches, topics, and ideas because I knew we could revert, if we failed. But, it created churn as our preparation is careful and extended. We serve many masters beyond just the taxpayers as many stakeholders believe they get a voice which strains the system.

No, not every single seminar leader is the best person ever to walk into a classroom but we work diligently assure an overall quality program in ways I never experienced as a civilian educator. Other tensions include whether we are just like other JPME institutions, meeting the same learning objectives, or are we still focused primarily on national security strategy for which no other institution prepares students as thoroughly? What is the relative importance of experienced agency and military faculty who have been strategists versus academics studying it in their research? Are we still aimed at teaching the students first and foremost, or are we another graduate program where faculty (who are not tenured but are on renewable contracts contingent on DoD funding) need focus on their reputations through publishing? What is the balance between those two approaches?

Finally, we don’t profess to have all the answers. NWC educates the future leaders to develop their own thinking processes. Even that is open to debate as some see the framework for analysis, known as the national security primer, for how to approaching every question as an approved solution. I believe the founders wanted us open to all approaches but I have been gone fully two and a half years now and the subsequent leadership can always overturn decisions, rest assured.

Elected officials ultimately make the decisions rather than those of us who work at NEC. Elections are the country making that clear but it is our obligation to prepare best we can those who will advise the true decision-makers. Actions create consequences.

I welcome any questions, comments, rebuttals, or thoughts you have. Yes, I believe in JPME but I think lots of other ideas are vital to keeping us fresh and appropriate to the country’s needs.

Thank you for reading about your National War College and its incredible experts in virtually every seat. I appreciate each person reading this column and I so thank those of you who pay to subscribe because these are topics requiring more time to explain than you probably realise.

My last trip picture as we do appear heading home tonight. It was disappointing to get rained off the beach this morning and driven upstairs by fierce rain and wind but we were here several months ago when drought conditions were similar to what destroyed Lahaina on Maui only a few days before we arrived. Honolulu and all of O’ahu were a tinder box so I welcome the rain.

Be well and be safe.FIN