There is nothing equal to the intellectual delights of mutual discovery via the Socratic give-and-take in seminars at the U. S. Army War College (USAWC). Much like their counterparts in the various war colleges (Navy. Air Force. National. Industrial College of the Armed Forces and Marine Corps) the students are accomplished demanding talented and interesting. We have great colleagues teaching writing and interacting with the policy-strategy communities. The civil-military quality of the faculty is a model of professional collaboration. The personal and professional rewards are incalculable; so is the opportunity to contribute to our nation’s defense. The USAWC has become a center of academic excellence enriched by numerous initiatives such as the International Fellows Program the increased rigor of the master’s program the growth of a professional faculty and the productivity of scholars whose publications reach the national and international marketplace of strategic studies and the highest levels of our government. Deservedly the USAWC has become the destination of academic pilgrims from all over the world.
The USAWC is a great institution. Nonetheless we need to do a much better job at the core mission of teaching strategy. We teach about strategy we don’t teach how to develop strategy. We teach leadership and management explore theories of war and strategy budgeting the national security decisionmaking process the instruments of power and current and future threats. We acquaint students with various national strategy documents and teach joint processes and campaign planning. We offer a menu of electives that expand intellectual horizons including a good dose of understanding foreign cultures.
We teach well and innocently assume that these sequential efforts will synergistically yield strategists. Some students will put this learning together and become better strategists. Despite the excellence our efforts at teaching the normative
concept of strategy in the complex political-military national and international contexts are timid. Understandably the tyranny of time forces us to make triage within the 10 months. We skim over what ought to be the central component of the curriculum with the linear definition of strategy as “the calculated relationship between ends ways and means.” This elegant equation is good for framing the kinds of macro questions we need to answer to arrive at strategy but it doesn’t tell us how to calculate. It might help allocate resources in the era of industrial warfare but strategic pedagogy must include the human dimensions of the dynamic multivariable nonlinear interaction of opposing wills in the complex political-psychological realm of asymmetric 21st century conflict where state and nonstate actors collide “under the critical gaze of global public opinion.”
The ongoing “transformation,” with its emphasis on the sinews of military power has further orphaned strategy. Our experience in Iraq verifies this hard truth. Most of the literature leaves us with a rich lode of theory and military history. Thus we must rely on proven pedagogical techniques such as case studies that deal with both success and failure mentoring from senior leaders known for their strategic creativity self-study and writing. At the same time there is the terminological challenge of distinguishing grand strategy military strategy theater strategy and strategic planning. While theory may be the coagulant common to all four they are not the same. Grand strategy governs military strategy which governs strategic planning and theater strategy. All of them should constantly hold operations accountable to political purpose. The future strategist must understand the three interrelated realms. Because of the revolution in communication technology and the 24-hour news cycle in the 21st century it will be increasingly difficult for soldiers on the ground to differentiate operations from strategy; tactical operations can have dramatic strategic implications. Indeed. Clausewitz’s remarkable trinity of the people armed forces and the government now engages the global community.
They want the problem–now. So begin with a problem that stretches their capabilities and let them flail. As flailing becomes failing offer up theory to get them back on track. At some point sometimes after they have hosed up the exercise completely one of them will sheepishly ask: Has anybody ever done this before? . Talented experienced adults are aggressively impatient. They demand proof of relevance. The best method of proof is not to “show them” but to have them convince themselves. The roadmap is application-theory-history offered in seminar environment through real-world cases accompanied by active student participation in both the learning and teaching processes.
1. Develop an integrated strategy model as a pedagogical tool that can be applied to illustrate how all the instruments of national power are fused in the development and implementation of strategy at the various levels of peace and conflict. This should not be a mere chart on the wall but rather fully developed writing on how strategy is made in order to illustrate the nonlinear intellectual human dimensions. We need to teach the DIME (diplomatic informational economic and military) as integrated strategy not as discrete elements simply tossed into the crucible when the military instrument is found wanting. To achieve these goals we should summon the best minds on the teaching of strategy in the 21st century.
2. Develop strategy components in the core curriculum where students would be required to develop strategy for contemporary national security and military problems. Students should develop a national security strategy followed by a military strategy that would have to be budgeted and then applied to the real world. The intellectual challenge of developing grand national security strategy engenders the skill of thinking holistically a talent which can be transmitted to developing military strategy. If students simply analyze current strategy documents written by professionals schooled in statecraft they are spared the pedagogical rewards of having to grapple with the challenge of thinking and writing strategically. We deprive them of the benefits of their own creativity the fruit of trying labor. Let us recall that the 1930s generation of students at the USAWC produced the Rainbow Plans. According to Henry Gole another distinguished USAWC instructor of the 1990s: “The work produced by the students staff and faculty beginning in 1934 at the Army War College anticipated the very conditions faced by the United States in 1939-41.”
3. Mine extensively the case study method so that students understand how to make strategy. Case studies are among the most effective tools for adult learning they force students to become intellectually engaged in confronting the dilemmas of decisionmakers. In-depth case studies should be interwoven throughout the curriculum not simply appended here and there so that students fathom the correlation of theory with facts. The success of the Vietnam case study as well as the NSC 68 case study testifies to the pedagogical value of case studies. Possibilities abound: the decision to go to war conflict termination and post-conflict reconstruction and stabilization. There are some case studies available from Harvard and Georgetown but they do not address gaps in strategic pedagogy. We should develop our own tailored to the learning objectives we want to achieve such as the appropriate strategies for the levels of war. For example the USAWC should develop a companion text of case studies akin to the excellent
4. Emphasize “total strategy,” the integration of the instruments of national power in regional studies courses. Competence in strategy requires a sophisticated understanding of the state’s and society’s sources of power strategic culture and the employment of national and international resources to achieve the ends of policy. Since the United States is a global power with regional security responsibilities across the spectrum of conflict students need to have some understanding of how to create and balance priorities within competing global regional functional requirements and the interagency dimensions of these responsibilities. Regional studies are a fine vehicle for teaching about how the interagency works of bringing to bear the kinetic and nonkinetic elements of power. Understanding the interagency synergy adds immensely to the kit bag of the budding strategist. Regional studies along with case studies are the best way to study and learn “total strategy” of the kind contained in NSC 68 the kind required by today’s complex unconventional challenges to national security.
5. Send faculty to periodic professional development tours in the policy and strategy communities to gain experience and confidence in strategizing in making the link between policy strategy and operations. Such tours would also benefit the agency bureau or office in which the tours take place thereby projecting the prestige of the USAWC. The payoffs in faculty development are extraordinary. They will learn how to link strategic theory with practice.
6. Change the content and pace of courses to emphasize problem solving to include the writing of strategy something not done much in the current curriculum except in the interagency focused National Security Policy Program. This approach would require that students have more time to analyze and write. Of all the forms of learning writing is second only to actual experience. As mentioned above the problem-solving
tasking should be introduced early in the curriculum and completed at logical intervals along the way. For example students could be tasked to develop strategy for war termination and post-conflict reconstruction. The intellectual challenge and reward would have them evaluate and apply the gamut of strategic principles from realism to idealism the center of gravity just war war as policy by other means the integration of the instruments of power and many more.
7. Modify the calendar so as to allow maximum time for faculty and student preparation for problem-solving learning. For example a crowded course schedule suboptimizes faculty preparation (such as maintaining familiarity with the policy and strategy communities and professional development) and student learning because of quick turnarounds multiplicity of requirements and competing nonacademic requirements.
The USAWC has the mandate the resources (such as faculty and library) and the potential market to put together a small high quality doctoral level program in strategy which would capture the principal disciplines that we deal with in the curriculum. Such a program would engender a level of academic excellence that the faculty would aspire to as well as attract scholars of high quality to the faculty. Because 3 years are normally required to complete the Ph. D. which is very difficult for military careerists to accommodate the program could recruit civilian students on a tuition basis. The program would fill a serious void in American graduate education. Finally because the various war colleges have unique resources and similar mandates they could creatively combine efforts into a consortium to support the Ph. D program.
These are potentially revolutionary initiatives. Implementing them will require a different approach to the curriculum and a different form of faculty preparation because the pedagogical emphasis would be on analyzing problems and developing strategy while maintaining a sufficient foundation in theory. Such an approach to teaching would be very demanding on the faculty’s creativity because it is a different way of imparting learning. Accordingly it would require moving away from a curriculum sequence that is heavy in continuous seminar instruction and student recitation. Because of the 10-month master’s program the faculty maintains a relentless pace. The pace is hard to sustain notably for new instructors who must quickly master a vast amount of multidisciplinary material to be effective in the classroom.
The USAWC is a great institution whose potential we have not fully tapped. We need to retire old approaches gracefully move forward creatively and become the nation’s preeminent center for teaching strategy. This paper urges that the USAWC and the strategy community writ large begin a much needed dialogue on the making of strategy for the 21st century. It would be well to revisit the dialogue on a regular basis lest we become comfortable in our academic citadels.
1)While the Army War College is a fine PME institution and may even be the best of all the Senior Schools it is a bit of a stretch to refer to it as the destination of academic pilgrims from all over the world.
2) Marcella undercuts his own argument regarding the Long War and strategy by selectively citing authors that characteize the American Way of War as traditionally reliant upon “…plentiful resources technology kinetics and geographic conditioning. In fact the United States was one of the most successful practioners of and against irregular warfare throughout most of its history without reliance on those factors.
3) Steve Fought’s article and assertions may not be useful to helping the author’s argument. Why are USAWC students and their counterparts impatient with theory? Is it beacuse they are filling squares? Is it because they are not really thirsting for the rationale behind their tactical competence? Or is it because after almost 2 decades in uniform and more “schooling” than their civilian counterparts have had they are still not really prepared or interested in teh journey of the mind that will haelp prepare them to be better strategists? Application theory history may solve this but what might be better is for the services and their students to stop viewing attendence at USAWC as a mark of competence and a right of passage to higher rank. The students are not given the incentive to really study and learn. They just attend.
4) Yes. AWC students of the 1930s authored the Rainbow Plans and it appears they were spot on. But maybe this is only because we did not fight a prelude to WWII like the Spanish Civil War. Strategists and graduates have not fared so well since the reopening of the War College after WWII. Nobody anticipated Korea. Vietnam. Iran. Grenada. Panama. Iraq. Kosovo. Somalia or Afghanistan. Yet the war we really planned for. WWWIII vs the Soviets was successfully deterred.
5) The case study approach may pay dividends just as it has in B Schools. Balancing seminar with individual study may yield the best of both worlds but not unless the students are motivated to complete the academic journey. Sadly since most are assigned to AWC and not volunteers this assertion is open to question.
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Related article:
http://astropolitics.org/blog1/2007/12/11/is-this-how-we-should-be-teaching-strategy-to-our-future-military-leaders/
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