Tactics are simple, operational command-and-control more difficult, and a grasp of the strategic harder still. The greatest demand that war places on its practitioners is in the realm of strategy, "the region dominated by the powers of the intellect," as Carl von Clausewitz contends in his chapter on military genius in On War. The 21st-century warrior must be able to think about a problem in terms beyond his or her own personal and limited training and experience. Comprehensive education gives a leader the tools to do just that.
"To succeed," the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen wrote recently in his forwarding letter to the newly framed Capstone Concept for Joint Operations (CCJO), "we need adaptive, thinking professionals . . . who will act decisively in the absence of specific guidance." As I have outlined before in these pages, the Navy has taken some positive and definitive steps toward establishing policies and curricula to produce leaders with these attributes. It is at the operational and strategic level that this need is most acute. This is the where the diplomatic, military, economic, and informational elements of national power intersect and must be managed—a realm defined by a wide scope of responsibility, geopolitical consequence, complexity, uncertainty, and change.
But this is not new terrain for the warrior at senior levels of command. Indeed, cookbook solutions have seldom proved sufficient to success at any time or at any level. "Friction" and the "fog of war," as Clausewitz phrased it nearly two centuries ago, demand a much finer set of competencies and seasoned intuition. While many aspects of warfare have changed, it has always been chaotic, demanding special genius and the ability to "act decisively in the absence of specific guidance"—attributes that mere training can never impart. "Every operation of war is unique," former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote. "What is wanted is a profound appreciation of the actual event. . . . The success of a commander does not arise from following rules or models. It consists in an absolutely new comprehension of the dominant facts of the situation at the time, and all the forces at work." This is the fundamental, recurring theme in the CCJO.
Though the Capstone Concept recognizes that the nature of war may be as immutable as human behavior, its usefulness stems primarily from the coherency of its narrative and its focus on just what has changed—the means and forms of pursuing what is termed "armed politics" occurring against a "global backdrop of chronic conflict." The CCJO and its companion, the Joint Operating Environment, describe a global, information-intense environment where transparency of activity and real-time worldwide scrutiny of all actions can render strategic an otherwise insignificant event. As the concept outlines, "Commanders, even at subordinate levels will find themselves nearly as consumed with shaping the narrative of [battlefield] events as with . . . producing them."
Warfare will become increasingly irregular, and without clear distinctions between state and non-state combatants and non-combatants, military force may prove correspondingly oblique to strategic victory. As recent operations have illustrated, this is an environment where the commander is not only deprived of a clear enemy, but also clear terms of relations with other stakeholders and partners that must somehow act in greater concert. There may well be no common organizational chart. The commander and staff may discover that they are effectively in charge of very little, yet expected to deliver very much. The CCJO describes a "generic process of operational adaption designed expressly" to cope with this environment. And as it states repeatedly, "this has significant implications for doctrine, training, and education."
For the Navy, Admiral Mullen's previously quoted "necessity" is still more compelling. As our new maritime strategy argues convincingly, maritime forces must play an increasingly prominent and strategic role. This demands, among other things, close collaboration with a wide range of international forces and nonmilitary organizations in ways that are uniquely suited to sea-based forces and the traditional strengths of the Navy. The strategy also emphasizes the necessity to understand and employ maritime forces as a continuously engaged, globally distributed implement of national influence. This places an even greater premium in the Navy on building the genius necessary to think broadly, accommodate multiple perspectives, and grasp the essence of a problem—in short, to appreciate conflict in a strategic framework. It also assumes that the necessary competencies—cognitive and practical—will be in place to apply that force with strategic effect.
Fundamental Competencies for the 21st-Century Warrior
I borrow the expression "humanistic re-education" here from an out-of-print text by Morse Peckham, writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina when I was an undergraduate there. In the late 1950s Bell Labs officials asked Peckham to help them conceive an education program to help their executive leadership better cope with complexity. Over centuries, many sources have converged and aligned closely with the critical outcomes of education identified by Peckham, but none argues so persuasively and entertainingly. His work defines decision-making and responsibilities at the strategic level (of any large enterprise) and links them with the outcomes of education, thus defining the drivers for the curriculum. Beyond a nuanced and powerful argument that produced a program around a basic humanities curriculum, the several outcomes he discussed would clearly be among those we would seek to develop for the 21st-century leader.
Echoing the point made previously in the Churchill quote, Peckham stresses that education should produce leaders who can sort out from the past and present what matters from what does not, and then apply it to a particular problem or opportunity. Education must give leaders the ability to orient to vastly different perspectives, to relate different fields of human knowledge, and to simplify and resolve complexity and conflict. "What an enormous advantage," wrote Peckham, "this person has over one who can think of a problem only in terms of his own personal and limited training and experience!"
The functional objective of a liberal education is to foster rational analysis and dialogue to develop understanding and therefore reach agreement. This is also the objective of the strategic-decision process—one that operates simultaneously in intellectual, moral, and social dimensions. A humanistic education accommodates this breadth of complexity and creates the broad frame of reference and the critical thinking that fuel the process.
Education and Experience
Of course, education alone is insufficient to produce these competencies. But studies of senior leaders suggest that they not only have mastered analytic skills and decision-making processes, they also have an ability to make timely and sound decisions based on highly developed intuitive judgment—a "sixth sense," the enduring product of education.
The long-term utility we take away from experience is a function (among other things) of our ability to organize the information to discern connections and analogies and create coherent thought. Those more knowledgeable of the many different ways various disciplines have organized thought and the human experience will see more useful relationships and less randomness in their experience. And they are going to enjoy an increasingly greater return on the investment in any experience.
Higher education often uses case studies, not just for the ephemeral, specific information they contain, but for the general principles they convey (referred to as the heuristic method). So, too, experience yields great quantities of personally relevant detail of transient value. But buried in that detail are kernels of knowledge that endure long after the drifts of experience melt away. An oft-cited quotation, variations of which have been attributed to several people throughout history, puts it this way: "Education is what's left when you have forgotten all the facts."
Experience, then, is tactical to the degree that the specific learning supports a precise, predictable task. Your ability to execute that task can be measured with some precision, and additional experience—or training—will improve your score. On the other hand, however, the complementary component of tactical experience—the enduring, or strategic component—includes no clear map to when, where, how, or how often that knowledge will be applied. No one can predict or quantify how valuable it will be. This is where we tend to run into trouble with our ability to identify, appreciate, and produce those critical 21st-century leader competencies.
Valuing Humanistic Education
The 19th-century British Army officer and strategist Sir William Francis Butler famously said that "the nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards." Retired Admiral Stansfield Turner, former Director of the CIA, arguing for the overhaul of the Naval War College curriculum and its faculty, once insisted that the college "must be able to produce military men who are a match for the best of the civilian strategists or we will abdicate control of our profession." It is critical to recognize that the education both Butler and Turner had in mind, and that which is repeatedly suggested in the CCJO, is not vocational or technical education. According to the CCJO, "War may involve the use of advanced technology, but it is waged by people. . . . Because war reflects a clash of opposing wills, the human dimension is critical."
The suggestion that humanistic studies might well be key to building critical-thinking professionals, and therefore claim a more substantial portion of its professional military and advanced education program, is likely to strike many in our Navy as counterintuitive. After all, a recent study chartered to provide the basis for a new education strategy asserts categorically in its very first line that "the Navy is a technical institution." But this excellent work goes on to explain that this assertion is simply a widely held belief, and then shows that it might be true only as it applies in a narrow fashion to the early stages of a career in some communities.
Such conclusions notwithstanding, the Navy has recently established a policy for scholarship midshipmen designed to "maximize the production of technical degree students," requiring a 65-to-35 ratio of technical-to-nontechnical majors. The "Academic Major Policy for Scholarship Midshipmen" reads, in part:
The Navy needs an officer corps rooted in a strong technical foundation. Therefore, the Navy will use this authority to align academic major policy for United States Naval Academy (USNA) and Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC), improve the technical competencies of its officer corps, and enhance our ability to meet the Navy's future needs.
There is no intent here to argue against that need to access an inventory of officers with aptitude in the hard sciences and technology fields sufficient to meet narrow community manpower demands. Matriculating these curricula has been required for a number of jobs in the junior officer ranks (primarily associated with nuclear engineering assignments). But other consequences could well arise. Forcing the majority of the most promising students to pursue tech degrees will, over time, also ensure that senior Navy leaders will have predominantly technical backgrounds, and those inclined to excel outside the engineering domain will go elsewhere.
The Navy must be sure that this is the outcome it wants. Such a policy diminishes efforts to cultivate aptitudes and interests in disciplines other than technology and engineering, thus creating something of a caste system within Navy culture. This sort of bias shows up in selection-boards and could result in Navy leadership that is less diverse and ill-fitted for the 21st-century leadership requirement discussed here.
An Up-Hill Fight
Other bureaucratic processes are already against educational investment in general and humanistic education in particular. In any business, building a case for resourcing investments as opposed to operations is generally a problem. The focus is on near-term risk and return—the more easily quantified and the clearer, more certain payoff. Long-term strategic investments are less predictable and sometimes impossible to quantify. So there is a natural bureaucratic aversion to foregoing current for future investment. Managing training and education in the same portfolio (e.g., "learning") can blur critical distinctions between the one (training), which is managed as a cost, and the other (education), which must be managed as a strategic investment. Otherwise, as the comptrollers conduct triage over competing demands for education and training, the arguments for training systematically win out.
We can, for instance, establish an indisputable requirement for the numbers of high-pressure welders to support a statistically valid estimate of repairs, testing, and maintenance required per foot of high-pressure piping, per specific system, per ship, per set of operating assumptions. We can also create a satisfying cost-benefit analysis to show how much should be spent to recruit, access, and train these welders. Then we can auger in on doing it all better, cheaper, and faster. But figuring out how many and which Sailors we need with the rational powers, interpersonal skills, cultural awareness, and regional expertise required by the new maritime strategy and the Capstone Concept is obviously a different problem. It is also one that belongs to senior leadership rather than the comptroller.
This bureaucratic dilemma is compounded within the education account, as non-technical programs and curricula compete for the same pool of resources. In the absence of algorithms and comprehensive data (or the intervention of senior leadership), the budget process looks for the arguments that most closely resemble those for training and that can be tied directly to shipboard systems: technical education.
Professor and military strategist Eliot Cohen, commenting in the Wall Street Journal on the "perfect storm besetting professional military education," views this predicament as particularly worrisome in the context of wartime operational tempo and budgets:
A lack of experience in delivering higher education makes officials—seeking to save money . . . eager to accept the claims of the purveyors of pedagogical patent medicines. Manpower economists, who think of management as putting round pegs in round holes, limit the exposure to higher education in the social sciences and humanities—although some of our most successful commanders in Iraq declare that their masters and Ph.D. degrees in history, or political science, or anthropology, provided some of the best preparation possible for the novel challenges of insurgent warfare. Senior military leaders, and a few civilians, acknowledge the existence of the problem but seem to lack the ability or the will to do something about it.
A Recent Observation
A large amount of effort is currently under way in the Navy to help clarify specific competencies required by commanders and staffs charged with the adaptive operations envisioned in the Capstone Concept and the global operating concepts suggested by the new maritime strategy. But logic should allow us to begin responding now with a greater emphasis on strengthening the humanistic element of education. There are some empirical data as well.
After nearly five years at the Naval War College I concluded that one of the vital functions of the curricula there was to eliminate a glaring deficit in fundamental cognitive skills. The average student shows up tactically astute and usually well-grounded in systems technologies. On the other hand, many, if not most, arrive lacking the intellectual attributes so urgently needed as each transitions to senior leadership levels and the 21st-century environment. Basic skills of reading, listening, writing, and thinking critically have not been well developed. I have often remarked, with some irony, that one of the world's pre-eminent graduate institutions of professional education is effectively providing remedial education in the liberal arts.
For many, having faculty read closely and criticize specifics of their work—to teach—is a new experience. So is participating in a small seminar of peers, with each bringing different expertise and perspective into the discourse. Unable to hide in the back seats and distant reaches of university auditoriums, students are forced to develop and defend positions and to move arguments forward before professional, face-to-face scrutiny of informed classmates. The process is Socratic in the sense that the participants are not focused on winning arguments, but rather on advancing them through analysis and rational discussion, toward agreement. Working in this fashion has long been proved to be an effective way to build the rational powers, to cultivate the intellect, and to develop the habits and skills of discursive engagement we demand of the 21st-century warrior.
More to Be Done
The Navy's educational institutions provide some of the most sought-after learning programs among the services. But our senior leadership recognizes that it needs leaders who bring more fully developed competencies to the complex tasks at the operational and strategic levels. This demand occurs at the same time the Navy is tailoring its Total Force and putting fewer people in each ship, in each squadron, and on each headquarters staff. All this—in an era where image, information, and influence move instantaneously and without regard to borders—places an absolute premium on a comprehensively educated force.
Many thoughtful people have recognized that the current force and how we deploy and employ it must respond to a new security environment—and we have worked hard on this for most of the past decade. The new maritime strategy and the Capstone Concept represent significant, clarifying narrative.
Military force—naval force in particular—will increasingly be employed in strategic concert with national and international diplomatic, informational, and economic efforts to achieve specific political effects. It will be strategically dispersed, more effectively engaged, and more reliant on sustained relationships, fostered by a more comprehensive understanding of partners as well as competitors. Command-and-control of these forces will flatten, and responsibilities and authorities will devolve accordingly, placing a premium on individual awareness, initiative, creative thinking, and good judgment. This force, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff insists, must be adaptable, strategic-minded, and broadly educated.
1. ADM Mike Mullen, Capstone Document for Joint Operations, in his forwarding letter, dated 15 January 2009, p. v.
2. RADM Jacob Shuford, Commanding at the Operational Level, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 2007.
3. Sir Winston Churchill, Marlbourgh: His Life and Times, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 edition).
4. Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, p.5.
5. Morse Peckham, Humanistic Education for Business Executives, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960).
6. As argued by Andrew Chrucky, "The Aim of Liberal Education," in the traditional annual address to incoming students on "The Aim of Education" at the University of Chicago, 1961.
7. As quoted in Hattendorf, Simpson and Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars, (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1984), p. 285.
8. Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, p. 9.
9. David M. Rodney, et al, "Developing an Education Strategy for URL Officers," Center for Naval Analyses, March 2008. The study examined (among other things) the claim that the number of technically educated officers in the Navy has declined. The study found this not to be so.
10. CNO Letter dated 19 October 2007 on Academic Major Policy for Scholarship Midshipmen.
11. Eliot A. Cohen, "Neither Fools Nor Cowards," Wall Street Journal, 13 May 2005, p. 12.
12. Capabilities-Based Competency Assessment, a research-and-development effort initiated in 2005 by the Naval War College.