In May 2020, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) called for updated leader development strategies, including professional military education, to better counter the rapidly changing security environment and help the services develop intellectual overmatch against adversaries. The vision statement defines overmatch as rooted in producing officers that are strategically minded, critical thinkers, and creative joint warfighters. The JCS paper also includes talent management and an outcomes-based model. The services continue to address these and other proposals for improving the military’s strategic capacity through human intellectual capital, but there is room for additional improvement in how the war colleges tackle senior professional military education. All requirements can be tailored into an interwar approach to leverage the intellectual capital already resident in the senior service colleges, with little or no additional financial cost.
In the interwar period, the Marine Corps revolutionized its small force to take ownership of amphibious landing operations. They wrote doctrine, developed an operationally focused headquarters and task-force organizational structure, and conducted training in conjunction with Navy exercises to counter the hard lessons learned at Gallipoli. Through a rigorous wargaming and war exercises program, the Marine Corps was able to modify and validate the organizational, equipment, logistics, and supply requirements to support their audacious new doctrine.
The creation of amphibious doctrine and planning was conducted simultaneously with two other significant planning initiatives—one focused on competing below the level of armed conflict, and the other on integrating air assets into ground combat. Critically, these innovations were achieved primarily by harnessing the intellectual capital of the Marine Corps schools, suspending the standard curriculum to leverage the officers in professional military education as writers, wargamers, and strategic planners. Thus, the Marine Corps was able to use the interwar period to tackle the most challenging elements of their contemporary environment and maintain a critical relevance on the global stage.
In that same interwar period, the Army War College linked student officers directly with the Army General Staff and War Plans Division, conducting much of the initial strategic design and planning that would become the basis for the Rainbow Plans used at the outset of World War II. These plans were then used during the extensive joint wargames at the Naval War College, the results of which were incorporated back into updated strategic plans. These creative, strategic iterations enabled the services to transition from post–World War I thoughts of limited wars and isolationism to how they would posture for a global conflict lasting multiple years duration, well before U.S. politicians and the American people were prepared for that potentiality. Each service demonstrated it was able to use the professional military education system at the senior level to prepare officers for war, as demonstrated by officer performance in World War II, while training officers to think creatively, develope strategic plans, and prepare detailed operational plans for potential conflicts.
The joint services face similar challenges in military planning today, with more requirements than they have planners to address environment of changing global technologies, circumstances, and relationships. But the services do not have to wait for a supportive grand strategy to ensure the joint military strategy is honed for war. Crafting an interwar-style enhancement of professional military education to meet the JCS request could be done in a few steps, some of which are already underway as service-specific initiatives, and others that are offered as specialty electives to small groups of students. To this end, the following initiatives could better leverage the intellectual capital in joint services professional military education and gain significant results in strategic growth across the Department of Defense:
- Maintain the strategic breadth of the core curriculum and specialty lectures, continuing to include the programs’ latest initiatives and specialty deep dives.
- Transform the “electives” periods to tackle Joint Staff and combatant command strategic planning requirements.
- Ensure an iterative briefing and assessment process between student/faculty groups and Joint Staff and combatant command operational planning team leads to ensure academic rigor and repetitive iterations.
- Establish self-selected planning teams based on follow-on assignments and mentor recommendations, nested with service talent management programs.
- Increase joint assignments at service war colleges to as balanced a ratio as possible (providing for true joint staff planning), while maintaining the Joint and Fellow Senior Service College programs.
These measures, as historically seen in the innovative strategic-development and war-plans creation in the interwar period, are just part of the emerging service strategies for talent management and intellectual overmatch. Importantly, they address JCS concerns for strategic intellectual overmatch as well as recent critiques of the academic rigor in war college curriculums. Creating a strategy and wargaming real-world scenarios requires creative thinking to overcome an evolving adversary. Similar opportunities exist at each senior service colleges already, and these measures would expand and link those opportunities to the larger student population and to existing strategic planning requirements.
The War College Students
Developing strategically minded officers involves two levels of education and practice—grand strategy and military strategy. The core curricula of the service war colleges—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—are similar and include courses in national strategy and policy, strategic leadership, and military strategy. Each also includes specialty lectures from faculty and invited guests to cover a wide range of skills and topics. Maintaining established curricula, which are evaluated and rewritten on a cyclical basis, will give students the foundation in strategic thinking they need to conduct planning and wargaming.
Using the war colleges for strategy development, for either the Joint Staff or the combatant commands, would serve two critical and complementary roles in establishing intellectual and strategic overmatch. From a strategic overmatch perspective, it would leverage the intellectual resources inherent in the war colleges’ student population, which numbers almost 1,000 senior officers, to tackle the challenging missions of warfighting, contingency planning, and day-to-day global campaigning.
In addition to supporting national security strategic objectives, the proposed methodologies would also promote strategic thinking in the war colleges, as teams move through multiple iterations with their supported commander or planning section. In a common criticism, Richard Hooker opines that the war colleges are missing the rigor inherent to academic assessments and are no longer the “laboratories for wars” they once were for previous conflicts. Even if core curricula do not provide the requested iterations, the joint strategy planning repetitions would certainly provide the opportunity to generate and test multiple strategic options. Using the service war colleges for joint planning would answer concerns about the education of the military’s future strategic leaders. Any strategy products, by necessity, must meet real-world evaluation and assessment criteria. The separation between contingency planning, operational plans, geographic combatant command (GCC) campaign plans and functional combatant command (FCC) plans requires different training and approaches to strategy for different groups of officers, thus forcing diversity in education. Operational planning groups may be focused more on military strategy, while GCC groups could focus more on different elements of national power integrated into their campaign plans.
Linking student working groups with combatant command or Joint Staff planning teams has a distinct benefit beyond the obvious relevance to the mission requirement. Each service, as evidenced in the Army’s Talent Management Task Force to the Marine Corps’ Talent Management 2030 initiative, is focusing on programs to ensure the talent is available and incentivized to perform at professional military education, and liaison with next assignment would only further incentivize. Currently the war colleges are struggling with how to assess student performance and reward top performers beyond a simple notation on their efficiency reports. Both challenges would be mitigated in using students as joint planners.
Services are already identifying ways to match senior service college students with follow-on assignments prior to attending their respective war college, and this match—even for those already selected for O-6 command—increases those officers’ reputation and knowledge when liaising with their next assignment. Nesting the planning team assignment with service talent management processes allows for short- and long-term officer development.
Increasing the joint mix of the branch courses takes advantage of the similar time frame and year-long change of duty location for most senior service college assignments. There would be little additional cost in assigning more Army students to the Naval War College or vice versa, and the advantage to a joint planning team would be significant. In the interwar period, naval officers might attend the Army War College only after spending a year at Norfolk, thus ensuring their familiarity with Navy plans. An expanded joint ratio would preclude requiring a two-year schooling requirement, while still ensuring appropriate representation replicating a joint staff.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff asked for outcome-based measures that will develop officers into trained, innovative strategists that will win the next war. The services need to take innovative measures to meet the global challenges of today. Though the challenges themselves are different than those of the past, the U.S. military can nonetheless look to past solutions. Reinvigorating the senior service college warfighting and strategic planning capabilities and linking them with real-world planning requirements will build a depth of intellectual overmatch and leverage the opportunities emerging from global interactions in unprecedented ways.
