the taxpayers deserve

inherent contradictions in our JPME world

This guy got my attention on 1 February as we are not in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, or Hawai’i; we are still in the Chesapeake region where it was sunny but a chilly 50 degree Fahrenheit day. Thank goodness for optimists among us!

I met a former colleague (and ACC reader) for coffee this afternoon. We had an extended conversation about how the War College is these days, the state of Joint Professional Military Education, what to me sounds a paucity of students from traditional specialties assigned to the college educating strategists, and the challenges of educating officers and senior public servants getting too many mixed messages about our priorities. I left glad I had retired when I did as the National War College, like its sister institutions, appears ever more bombarded by a number of factors which undermine its mission.

NWC was one of nine dedicated professional schools educating military and civilian personnel for specific missions. NWC’s mission was national security strategy, the other NWC (the Navy War College in Rhode Island) educates about the use of maritime power, and the Eisenhower College of National Security and Resource Management (celebrating its centenary this month) focuses on logistics and mobilisation. In the old days, each mission was stand alone for the college within the national security commuity. Each educated the public servants who often advise ultimately the senior most world leaders around the globe.

When I was Dean, I had my famous ‘KYEOTP’ signs all over my office, anywhere my eyes could land. After people could not stand the suspense of trying to figure out what that meant, I would unveil my philosophy for success in our enterprise: Keep your eye on the prize. That prize, overwhelmingly, was the educate the future leaders on national security strategy. I had a stated position that if someone gave us a different mission, we would redefine the prize appropriate to that mission. We, as public servants, did not define what we did but how we accomplished it.

As true with so many things in the United States today, the ‘prize’ for National (and I suspect elsewhere) is less clear than it should be because we have added too many ‘easy to add’ things under the cover of satisfying so many stakeholders. In democracies, there are always more stakeholders and their interests than it originally seems because ours has always been a participatory system. That is a good thing.

But it also is a complicated thing. Today, the variety of stakeholders means the original mission the World War II victors sought to instill is more dispersed as the College, now under the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, rather than as a stand alone institution. The idea of having an educated corps of strategists confronts the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Military Reform Act mandating that achieving admiral or general rank need joint military education to serve in joint billets as stepping stones. These stepping stones are considered more important than higher level joint, whole of government, and multinational education so the joint education in the curriculum may force NWC or Eisenhower, as two fully joint institutions, to diminish their foci on strategic aspects to provide space and time for the ‘warfighting’ which is operational rather than strategic in nature.

Some scholars see the instruments of statecraft differently from in the past so time is needed for appreciating the use of international law, financial instruments, and all facets of a radically greater instrument concept in the world.

Just those changes redistribute the shifts in time allocation in the curriculum dramatically from say 1978 when cyber, lawfare, and jointness did not play in our strategy lexicon. The United States focused on the Soviet threat, responding to that threat, and protecting U.S. positions around the globe. Today’s concepts the college teaches are broader, more interwoven, and yet far harder to cover in the same amount of time because the volume of materials, participants, topics, and possible scenarios are greater in number. That makes them more intricate for any faculty seminar leader to address in a needed rapid-fire manner.

Additionally, as the professional reward system favours research over classroom time, it’s so easy for teaching to appear a ‘collateral duty’ as my colleague noted today. Unfortunately, as I laid out last week, NWC and NDU students are too experienced and too motivated for less than top performance by all in seminar so much frustration can result. We the taxpayer also demand these highly paid graduate students and faculty get our money’s worth in their quest to be best prepared for strategic thinking on behalf of our nation but that makes choices for time allocations dizzying.

I don’t envy those today delivering the best joint professional military education that money can buy. Some critics mistakenly believe that the colleges don’t spend enough on warfighting but that is far from true; the overwhelming push, to assure the National War College (and NDU colleges, in general) meet the letter of Goldwater-Nichols’ requirements, is to stress warfighting. It’s the other themes, materials, contexts, and applications like wargaming that get shortchanged.

Yet time is the one item unbending as the ten months U.S. students can matriculate will never expand, although efforts to curtail this education never end.

The U.S. role in the world has changed since 1946. We are no longer concerned about a bipolar, single focused-threat from the Soviet Union. The U.S. goal today is to retain the global dominance is has sustained since 1991; this much broader concern has inherent tensions extremely hard to reconcile. Without understanding that these contradictions exist, we are bound to struggle to identify our interests clearly and unequivocally as a good strategy always does.

I greatly miss seminar teaching as few things are as intoxicating for a faculty member like an ‘aha!!’ seminar for even a single student. But I confess to not missing the exhaustion that gradually ensued over the years as the increased mandates on what and even how to teach never received any relief from what we had been doing in the past. Put otherwise, we just kept adding to our agenda instead of discarding anything. That set of conditions wears down even the most committed educator.

Thank you for taking time to read ACC today. I welcome thoughts, queries, and rebuttals.

Be well and be safe. FIN