The most influential official document of the 20th century issued not from the desk of a head of state but from the hand of an officer in charge of a military planning staff. The aims and assumptions of Germany's Schlieffen Plan reflected the vainglory of European civilization as well as the antagonisms and rivalries that in maturity would undermine a culture that was more than 500 years in the making. War is the single greatest actuator of human progress and misery, and one cannot understand the 20th century—culturally, politically, demographically—without also grasping the causes of World War I and its aftermath.
War plans determine who we fight, how we fight, where and under what provocation—and to a large extent they shape the peace that follows. All plans take into account the uncertainty of war, but those that are judiciously conceived limit the unattractive options that confront civilian and military decision-makers once the shooting starts. The best way to strengthen our ability to write war plans would be to establish a first-rate joint staff college. What exists today under that name is more akin to a vocational/technical training center, staggering beneath the yoke of a sclerotic administration, than a reputable graduate program.
What We Have
Faculty hiring at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, takes no account of traditional standards of academic achievement or teaching ability-which may explain why the curriculum is built around off-the-shelf PowerPoint slide shows. Several faculty members hold the rank of "associate professor" and there are at least two academic "chairs," but when measured against civilian counterparts the titles are freighted with meaninglessness.
The faculty development program would fit neatly into a K-12 teacher-training program but is out of place at an institution that claims to be "our nation's premier joint professional military education institution." This is not an insult but a description. During my teaching tour at the college, one faculty training session focused on how to erase a chalkboard so as to avoid creating the distraction of a wiggling posterior. Another lesson was given over to building origami—to what end I cannot recall.
The culture of the staff college is such that intelligent initiative, on the rare occasions when it flickers, is snuffed out. Publishing articles that challenge conventional thinking is greeted with indifference or hostility. An essay I wrote while serving on the faculty, "The Wellsprings of Transformation," which appeared in the December 2005 Proceedings, brought forth a written rebuke from the college´s senior leadership on the grounds that the article was an "attack on the U.S. military."
Aggravating matters is the college's ponderous bureaucracy. In addition to a chief-of-staff and a "Director of College Relations," there are at least six deans holding the grade of O-6 or the civilian equivalent even though only one of the college's four schools—the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS)—confers an academic degree, which is awarded once a year to about 30 students. Despite the ballyhoo found on the school's Web site, JAWS cannot even compare favorably to middle-tier graduate schools serving other professions. Intellectually, JAWS is on par with any ordinary online university. One might say that our approach to education reflects the unique circumstances of military culture—but should "different" mean "worse"?
What We Need
Building a joint war college to replace the ersatz one we rely on today demands that our assumptions about military education be given fresh and unflinching scrutiny. To begin, the college should not be located near Washington, D.C., which breeds a temptation to bring in guest speakers, take students on excursions that masquerade as "field research," and so on. There is nothing objectionable to inviting guest lecturers once in a while, but having more than three or four a year undermines the coherence of the curriculum and deprives the students of time needed to accomplish solid academic work. Field trips are nothing more than a form of tourism. Students spend hours attending briefings that might be reviewed online or, better yet, absorbed by the curriculum in a substantial form. Asserting that such trips allow students to see first-hand how staffs actually work is unpersuasive—if only because the students are not members of the staff but guests for an hour or an afternoon.
Locating the college away from the nation's capital would also reduce the possibility of outside authorities meddling in curricular matters, influencing faculty hiring and promotion, and exerting pressure in ways that serve an end other than intellectual excellence. The ideal location would be near a combatant command but also close to a metropolitan area with a reasonable cost of living, adequate transportation facilities, and some cultural amenities. The college should not be a tenant unit—an administrative distraction—but should occupy its own real estate. The chain of command should flow directly from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the president of the college. Students and faculty should reside on campus, which would offer facilities that one would expect to find at a first-rate graduate school, including a bookstore.
More important, the foundation of a first-rate joint staff college would eliminate the need for the senior service colleges. Currently no single institution exists in which the intellectual aristocracy of the armed forces can work together for an extended period of time. An elite joint staff college would occasion the meeting of the military's best at an opportune moment in their professional lives, when they are old enough to have gained a critical volume of experience but still possessed of a vibrant curiosity and free of the contempt for innovative ideas that bureaucratic culture inevitably instills.
A Challenging Curriculum
The curriculum, which would take from 18 to 21 months to complete, should correspond to the exacting responsibility that staff college graduates can be expected to bear. One can imagine the objections: Operational tempo and manpower shortages argue for reducing rather than extending the duration of in-residence programs. But acting on this point of view would be penny-wise and pound-foolish. A proposal to halve the duration of pilot training or Ranger School would not be countenanced for a moment—and rightly so. Why then do we believe that pursuing excellence in preparing officers to build operational plans-which, more so than any other factor, determines the fate of armies in war—is somehow of lesser value than technical proficiency?
"War theory" should comprise the first block of instruction at our notional staff college and take about nine months to complete. Major theories of war would be studied, not surveyed—Clausewitz´s On War, for example, must be read in its entirety—and serious thought given to the context that produced them. Campaigns that illustrate, modify, or refute a given theory of war would be studied intensely. Memoirs, biographies, histories, and other commentaries should constitute the reading list.
Military strategy would comprise the second block and take about three months to complete. Here students would read widely in the masters of strategic thought and thus acquire a sound understanding of the relation of war and politics. The final block, of six to nine months' duration, would focus on campaign planning: Writing a draft plan, war-gaming, submission of a final plan. The war plan should not, as is the case at the Joint Forces Staff College, be a mere test of how well the students grasp administrative matters. Rather, students would be expected to come up with a plan that can serve as the basis for an actual contingency.
War-gaming should be a demanding activity. Students should know about logistical and technical issues as well as demonstrate familiarity with the culture of the postulated enemy and also evince a solid knowledge of the enemy's political and military leadership. Fog and friction should come into play. Students would be expected to explain the reasoning behind their decisions, and accompanying the final plan would be a closely argued dissenting point of view. This requirement would demonstrate that the students carefully weighed plausible alternatives and reasoned their way to a final decision. Senior leaders of the Joint Staff should be encouraged to review the students' work by the lights of existing war plans. In other words, the plan is not simply an academic exercise but potentially a contribution to national security.
A word must be said about the elements missing from this curriculum but that figure prominently in current joint education programs. No time is allocated for "service perspectives." Completing a thesis is not required. Successful applicants to the college will have demonstrated a solid understanding of each service's doctrine and culture as part of the entrance exam—in which answers take the form of essays. The day-to-day life of the college will build on this foundation. Writing a thesis—a research project of considerable length that argues an original point of view—takes too much time to fit within a 20-month course. The submission of a final war plan squares perfectly with the mission of the college and will require great mental exertion. It is thus comparable to the thesis requirement of civilian programs.
The manner of instruction at the college would also differ markedly from current practices. The seminar method would still be used, but far less time would be spent in the classroom—no more than three hours per day of a four-day week. The students would be issued books but these would only form a skeleton reading list. Students would otherwise be expected to read widely and bring this enriched perspective to class discussions. Writing assignments would depend heavily on interaction between the individual student and a faculty member. Letter grades—a method of evaluation that is most effective at the high school level and below—would be replaced by narrative evaluations.
Advocates of our current manner of proceeding might argue that such a system lacks the rigor that only coercion can deliver. But if we truly believe that the officers we send to in-residence graduate programs are shirkers eager to ply their trade—which means that the faculty are not mentors and role models but professional minders—then what is the point of having a staff college in the first place?
Academic Freedom
One indispensable feature of an elite staff college would be academic freedom. Military professionals are often wary of this idea, and not without reason. Armies exist to intimidate or liquidate opponents on the field of battle. Reasonable dissent—calling attention to overlooked details during a commander's conference—has its place, but once orders are issued the soldier is obliged to obey them. All of this of course is quite sensible, but the deeply held suspicion that academic freedom might undermine military discipline or bring disgrace on the profession is founded on a misapprehension.
A good definition of academic freedom is: "The open exchange of ideas that bear on operational matters, without fear of intimidation or reprisal." Academic freedom is not meant to provide cover for the trumpeting of weird notions, rather quite the opposite. The military professor does not traffic in opinion. The sum of his experience, education, professional conscience, and academic position sets him apart from his peers by qualifying him to seek truth not for personal gain but for the good of the nation. Every once in a while, a military professor might assert an unworthy idea or otherwise draw hasty conclusions that are expressed in a clumsy or abrasive manner. But imperfections of this kind are rare, and placing restrictions on academic freedom because of them would do a great deal of harm.
The custodian of academic freedom would be the president, a person of high intelligence and stout moral courage. The president must have wide experience in both military and academic matters, and approach the demands that each would make on the college without prejudice. The president must demonstrate a keen understanding of how innovative ideas are generated and, correspondingly, have a firm comprehension of the sources of resistance to them.
The location, curriculum, and pedagogy of our notional staff college are inert if we are not careful as to who teaches at the college and who attends. Faculty should be drawn chiefly from three sources: graduates of the staff college who demonstrate exceptional professional and academic ability; military officers who have served as faculty at the other war colleges and the service academies; civilian professors with distinguished scholarly and teaching credentials. The hiring process should produce faculty members who relish teaching and who have proved to be not only efficient custodians of their careers but have demonstrated an intelligent appetite for studying their profession. Academic promotion will fall in line with the standards that obtain at reputable civilian graduate programs.
Focus on the Humanities
ROTC and service academy graduates with outstanding academic records—particularly in history, philosophy, political science, and English—would make ideal candidates for admission to the staff college. One reason that the United States has not in recent times produced a military theorist of the caliber of Clausewitz or Mahan is because we continue to encourage, indeed demand, that officer candidates have a strong grounding in the material sciences. That the armed forces need officers with degrees in engineering is so obvious that no discussion of this point is necessary. But we also need officers with degrees in the humanities given the character of war planning in particular.
True enough, planning a military operation often boils down to questions that bring to mind engineering problems: what weight of effort is required to subdue the enemy? By what means are we to move forces, and are there places of embarkation and debarkation that can support operational timetables? What effects will climate and geography have on a campaign? Are there suitable logistical and communication assets ready to hand?
Even so, this information is of limited value. Unless we have a full understanding of the prospective enemy—how he thinks; what is the likely range of his actions; what motivates him; what are the sources of friction that might frustrate his war aims—we will sooner or later be taught no end of a lesson by a latter-day Napoleon or Hitler. Yes, at the end of the day we will prevail on account of our immense material strength and the inexhaustible bravery of our forces. But the cost in lives, treasure, and national morale will almost certainly be much greater than had we looked upon the enemy as a human being rather than as a malleable object or system—which is precisely the foundation on which joint doctrine is currently based.
A humane education sharpens the military mind in ways that engineering cannot. Work in the humanities requires the careful weighing of evidence, the due consideration of competing views, and the clear, efficient expression of complex ideas. These skills can only be acquired by wide reading in the masters of English prose, by extensive and demanding practice, and by studying under the tuition of highly esteemed teachers found in our nation's top liberal arts colleges. We currently make great play of the importance of understanding other cultures, but such is impossible without the right frame of reference. One can't claim to understand Germany, Venezuela, or China simply because one has completed a short course in the appropriate language.
Ideally, one would master the language as a first step—followed by an intensive study of the country's historical, philosophical, and imaginative literature. Reading these works in translation is an acceptable alternative. Having gained a sympathetic apprehension of a given country's culture—i.e., its common historical memory—the staff officer would be qualified to make judgments as to what sort of decisions an opponent's statesmen and commanders might take, because people within a given culture tend to act in ways that, while not predictable, fall within a finite compass. All of this, of course, must be built upon a thorough grounding in the history and culture of the United States.
A decisive advantage of the humanities over the engineering vocations is the way in which graduates of such programs tend to absorb and transmit information. Engineering equations and the characteristics of inanimate materials can be reduced to bullet statements, graphs, statistics, and the like, which is perhaps at the root of our promiscuous reliance on PowerPoint. The engineer inclines toward formulaic solutions and instinctually seeks linear means of understanding and solving problems. While teaching at the Joint Forces Staff College, the present writer was often dispirited by students who preferred a PowerPoint presentation to substantial reading, on the grounds that they were "visual learners"—trade-school jargon that reflects an impoverished understanding of what constitutes knowledge.
The engineer is by definition a specialist—civil engineering differs sharply from astronautical engineering, which bears little in common with mechanical engineering, and so on. What is more, the study of engineering is unmoored from disciplines such as history and the philosophy of war that are pivotal to effective operational planning. One can buttress an engineering curriculum with survey courses but these are nothing more than introductions that are not designed to inculcate a firm understanding of a field of knowledge. And many engineering students are encouraged to approach required courses in "fuzzy" subjects with acquiescence rather than with a proper appreciation of their worthiness.
By contrast, the graduate of a humanities program is much more likely to be a discriminating judge of human affairs in all its variety and so is well suited to war planning especially. An operational planning staff needs both types of intellect—but the outlook provided by a humane education is very much muted if our manner of selecting and training staff officers and our adoption of the system-of-systems approach are anything to go by.
In sum, we will best prepare for whatever sort of belligerent future is heading our way by exploiting fully the intellectual capital of our officer corps, which beyond all else requires a more perceptive understanding of the art of operational planning and the formal education that is indispensable to it.
Lieutenant Colonel Hanley teaches at the U.S. Air Force Academy and writes on national security issues. He holds advanced degrees in English from the University of Oxford and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.