the eyes off the prize

frustration over JPME

I received a frustrated note this week from a long-retired colleague who is part of a chatroom I am in. His note resulted from the inability of others to grasp how we are not producing good strategy as have corroded the mission of joint professional military education (JPME) over the past fifteen years. He has a point. We have definitely taken our eyes off the strategy as the past eighty years evolved through a changing context.

The U.S. military offers, in fact de facto requires advanced education for its personnel to an astonishing degree. The widely-assumed knuckle dragging ignorance of the force is laughably incorrect, measured by their advanced degrees or by having an extended conversation with individuals. Can you meet an officer who isn’t schooled in everything you are? Sure but that is rare and it’s not because of the Defense Department making education available. Ignorant people exist in every field, including graduate education by the way.

Education is a process of expanding thinking capacity as much as acquiring facts about a place or history or a people. Just yesterday I noted that respect for the late Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Al Gray, included his continuing support for Marines appreciating education as an important part of their careers. In interviews with 24 serving and retired four stars in 2012, they all told me that learning is vital for our officers and the future of national security in the United States.

Military education began in the 19th century with the Army schools along the Hudson (Military Academy at West Point) and Ft. Leavenworth while the Navy initiated its service academy across town from my present location in 1845, then the Naval War College in Rhode Island in the 1870s. Various service-specific institutions for all levels of personnel expanded through the twentieth century. The services began expanding the knowledge and thinking of their members two hundred years ago because they needed capable folks.

JPME was a creation of the post-World War I reconsideration of our successes and failures. While the Joint Army-Navy Board moved extremely tentatively in the 1920s and 30s, the joint institutions—defined as more than single service and sometimes military and non-military (now expanded into whole of government) personnel—developed after World War II as Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall, among many, advocated for a system that would advance our government thinking on instruments of statecraft and objectives for our nation. These men saw the limits in our stove-piped service-centric education as we struggled to craft strategy in the face of interacting with our British partners. We thought we had time to think about addressing the post-war world so we wanted to educate our best to think braodly and systematically.

The looming Cold War was not yet obvious when the three initial joint institutions began in 1946. The National War College opened to focus on national security strategy, with a military, Department of State, and intelligence student body. Similarly, the Industrial College of the Armed Forces brought logistics and mobilisation focus to its students should we ever confront another conflict. These schools in Washington, D.C. brought in officers at the mid-career level to focus on these missions while additionally enhancing understanding of peers to assure the interweaving of the national security community. The third joint institution was the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, which was for military personnel and a handful of State Department officers at an earlier point in their working paths to understand how staff work operated in this new world.

The stand alone colleges became part of the National Defense University, created under the Ford Administration to do the administration for all schools. The greater change, however, for all of them was the Goldwater-Nichols (G-N) Military Reform Act of 1986 where Congress forced the concept of a joint U.S. force rather than one of four stove-piped services often in competition with one another. G-N required joint military education, validated by the J7 Exercise and Education directorate of the Joint Staff, to assure that the best personnel were available for designated joint positions for promotion to flag or general rank. G-N was a forcing function to assure the Navy, long preferring its sailors learn by doing at sea rather than in any classroom ashore, offered educational opportunities for its officers.

None of the services ever desired G-N, though the Navy probably registered the most public opposition to the concept. As an Army dean at NWC predicted in 1999, the revenge of the Army (he could have said any of the services) against jointness was coming. Indeed, he was completely correct as the services increasingly fought joint education like everything else. In the late 2000s, the services convinced the J-7 that their programs merited joint accreditation for the required appreciation of joint matters though a cursory examination of the curricula at the service specific institutions begs the question how that could be true. The service schools drill into their students an appreciation of the maritime, land, air and space, or amphibious capabilities with a handwave towards joint operations. Their student bodies are primarily constituted by that service with a token number of other services’ or whole of government (WoG) personnel which are vital in the traditional strategy programs.

What so annoys my former colleague is that the G-N reform led to an unintended consequence under appreciated long term. Over the past 38 years, the J-7 has increasingly homogenised the education at the warfighting level rather than allowing the National War College or the Eisenhower School for National Strategy and Resources (the revised title for the Industrial College) meet their original missions. Put otherwise, we no longer have DoD institutions tasked with considering how to develop national security strategy—period.

Specifically, the J-7 increasingly mandates curriculum focused on fighting a war with China rather than strategic-level work. This reflects the Joint Staff’s mission to fight wars using the military instrument of statecraft rather than the national level officials looking at the appropriate tools to achieve goals. While strategy might most appropriately use non-military instruments to achieve our goals, we focus increasingly on how to use the armed forces without appreciating why it may exacerbate rather than solve problems.

NWC and Eisenhower have evolved for a number of others reasons as well. G-N left the services in charge of career assignments, of course, but that rarely correlates the graduates to the positions relevant to what they just learned. Many who attend the traditional joint schools never use what they studied at the senior service level but he All Volunteer Force (AVF) of post-1973 gives the potential students a vote in where they study. Graduate education is a retention issue so many students choose a school because they seek to allow a high schooler to finish at a local school or allow a spouse to maintain his job rather than uprooting the family for a different JPME location.

Surprisingly, JPME increasingly looks like a traditional graduate education rather than a professional school targetting government strategists. As a result, it is also a ‘catch all’ venue for speakers and topics not covered elsewhere. The schools compete for prominent speakers even if their appearances do not align with the curriculum but this is an opportunity to lure students for prestige as much as mission. At times JPME also becomes a repository for topics someone ‘thinks everyone should know’ even if irrelevant to the mission. This distracts from studying strategy.

One of the greatest struggles within JPME is the nature of faculty. The Colleges were intended to bring practitioners who could speak to the contemporary challenges as well as the longer-term strategic implications. None of the truely joint schools ever offered tenure but required faculty who brought recent government experience.

Critics repeatedly whine that too many military and agency faculty do not hold doctoral degrees, but serve short tours based on their on-the-ground experience relevant to the curriculum. Over the past thirty years, many of those rotating faculty members again seem less directly relevant to the school’s focus but serving because of personal desires. I personally have seen extraordinary military and agency personnel in the seminar room at the same time I have seen inept PhDs but the increased emphasis on looking like civilan faculities is a more complex issue than it sounds.

Civilian accreditation, an oversight issue Congress pushed in the 1980s, also increasingly brings traditional academics who seek long-term employment. Their incentive structure is outside the classroom in professional research rather than in seminars with students. Tension between the groups is inevitable but also means that the curriculum evolves differently than it did in 1946 as academics tend to focus on theory of security while the ‘operators’ drill down into experience and how it is of value.

Perhaps this is sadly less relevant for the traditional joint schools. Anecdotally, it appears the services are channeling their best students to their service specific institutions as the officers with warfighting specialties from each of the services (combat arms in the Army, infantry in the Marine Corps, fighter or bomber pilots in the Air Force, or submariners/surface/aviation from the Navy) to preserve their schools. Now that all senior service colleges (there are ten) are JPME schools because their curricula allow JPME Level 2 certification. But this facilitates less understanding of the other services’ strengths and weaknesses, fewer connections between the future leaders across the security community, and little grasp of how the United States would function jointly in a future conflict where we might not have years to learn that function. NWC, for example, is receiving an increasing number of dentists, chaplains, and personnel specialists en lieu of those who would fight the conflicts in China or elsewhere. They need JPME degrees for promotion opportunities. This is an incredible missed opportunity because the homogenisation is eroding the value of strategic thinking. It’s not that I don’t like chaplains or personnel folks but their ten month degree programs aren’t truly relevant to their careers.

These traditional joint schools soon will all celebrate their 80th anniversaries. Their original missions, however, conflicted with the J7 desires so the missions are more lofty but vague. This leaves the nation with no one thinking about strategy. Strategy in our system, of course, is the purview of civilian elected and appointed officials with JPME graduates serving as senior advisors. Few graduates in fact go on to replicate Colin Powell’s or James Mattis’ careers. But, my former colleague is correct to be concerned both that we are blaming graduates who are torn in multiple directions rather than having a clear objective from the education they undergo.

Please do not misunderstand: I served in this JPME environment for thirty years at multiple levels. There is nothing wrong with the Air War College focusing on airpower but that is not strategic thinking. We need both strategic and warfighting rather than one or the other.

We have a system which offers many students a tremendous advancement in their individual thinking but are we addressing what the nation needs? Are we checking the block on warfighting or degrees in whatever location without recognising the dangers for the nation from some of our choices? That is what strategic education needs to identify, even if it is painful for all involved. As the Israelis right now about that question.

I think we may not appreciate that a series of conditions, overwhelmingly domestic, are undermining our military instrument. Some of our prior assumptions no longer seem operative yet we are not recognising that. JPME has become too many different things to too many people with no overarching goals agreed upon by all. It is assumed that we know we all want victory but the world’s threats are much more diffused than simply defeating China. What happens then? One might recall we did not do that well when it came to Iraq; imagine if we failed to understand a long-term war with China would have many effects. We are ignoring this reality at our peril.

Any thoughts are welcome as I have a lot of experience but no monopoly in knowledge. Thank you for reading this column. Thank you profoundly if you are a subscriber to this column as your support means more than you know.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Cynthia Watson, Military Education. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2007.