There is no better way to consider the state of U.S. professional military education (PME) than to quote then–Secretary of Defense, retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, in the Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States: “PME has stagnated, focused more on the accomplishment of mandatory credit at the expense of lethality and ingenuity.”
The assessment is damning, not in the particulars of the curricula offered by the schools, but in the institutional failure of the services to link their education policies to the needs of the operating forces. The reorganization within the Navy staff (OpNav) to create a powerful Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) for Warfighting Development (N-7) offers some hope for a tighter linkage between fleet requirements and Navy education structure, but there are significant obstacles to overcome.
Officer education should include research on new concepts that inform Navy force development efforts. This philosophy was reflected in the Naval War College (NWC) from its founding in 1884 up to World War II. Students not only learned about the higher aspects of naval warfare, but also used gaming and research to develop new concepts. Officers so educated will be better prepared to lead an evolving force.
From an individual perspective, the ideal would be for every officer to become a reflective practitioner; someone who asks why things are done the way they are and has the capacity to find not only answers but alternatives. This is not to say that the officer corps should consist of rebellious iconoclasts, but neither should it consist of officers who seek only to master the knowledge and skills—and credentials—necessary to operate the current force in the current ways and achieve promotion. Individual characteristics will govern whether an officer is able or willing to achieve true and effective reflection, but if PME is correctly structured, the officer corps will likely contain more reflective practitioners than it currently does, and produce a healthier, more effective Navy.
A Little History
Excellent books by Trent Hone, Albert Nofi, and John Kuehn have chronicled the symbiotic relationship between the Naval War College, the Navy staff, and the fleet from the late 19th century to World War II.1 That ground will not be revisited here, other than to note that research was fused with teaching and force development with the educational process. After World War II, the schools became either cogs in the bureaucracy of promotion or, like the NWC, sidelined and irrelevant. Overall, officers attended to get some downtime from their busy careers, to gain a promotion credential, or simply because they were available. The rigor that characterized the schools in the first half of the 20th century evaporated.
Perhaps the first shot at improving the rigor of Navy PME involved the NWC. Starting in 1966, at the behest of then-CNO Thomas Moorer, the NWC focused on bringing in highly qualified civilian academics, first as visiting professors, and then as full-time faculty in 1972. The focus shifted to national strategy and teaching methods were adopted from Harvard, including letter grading. The NWC quickly attained a reputation for being the most academically rigorous of the service colleges. Eventually, the NWC sought and was granted by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges the accreditation to award master’s degrees. This prompted the other service colleges to seek graduate degree accreditation, which they all eventually achieved. However, NWC Navy students still consisted largely of staff and restricted line and non-career-viable line officers. In contrast, the other services and international navies sent their rising stars.
A progressive separation of teaching and research at NWC also followed post–World War II. Since nuclear warfare seemed to invalidate the research tool of wargaming, it became more of an exercise to reinforce concepts introduced in the classroom. A small Center for Advanced Research was established to keep the research function alive, but it was not until 1981 that the organizational stovepipes were put fully into place with the establishment of the Strategic Studies Group and the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. While some students were offered advanced research opportunities—either individual or sometimes small seminars in which students could do research projects as an elective or in a few cases substitute full time research for one of the three core courses—they were vehemently opposed by the teaching faculty.
The 1972 “Turner revolution” generated by then-President Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner established three core courses, each about 13 weeks in length: Strategy and Policy, Defense Economics (now National Security Decision Making), and Tactics (now Joint Military Operations). Both senior and intermediate students were presented with essentially the same curriculum. The college also shifted the order the in which the courses were presented to each class so the same faculty could teach both. Moreover, since the courses were not sequential, no course was prerequisite to either of the others, and students could matriculate at three different points during the school year—a boon for detailers.
In the wake of the Desert One disaster, Congress felt compelled to force greater service cooperation and coordination. A key element of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act involved the service colleges. Officers were to be schooled in “joint matters” and could not be promoted to general/flag officer rank without a joint specialty designation, among whose requirements was joint education. The system that emerged mandated a set of learning objectives and standards that each institution had to meet to grant the necessary joint education credential. Theoretically, this would force the Navy to send high-performing officers to PME courses. However, many of the most competitive officers took the course by distance or managed to snag a National War College slot as part of their Washington tour. Moreover, there was a nuclear-power waiver for several years, so the officers most competitive for flag did not have to have any PME.
The other services have structural functions for PME. The Army Command and General Staff course at Leavenworth, Kansas, produces competent staff officers. The Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, socializes future generals, as the Army places considerable stock in the personal relationships among its senior leadership. Both Air Force schools at Maxwell Air Force Base are in the business of turning out effective air power advocates. The Marine Corps command and staff course at Quantico, Virginia, has a function similar to Leavenworth but tailored to the particulars of Marine Corps organization. The small senior war college there was established to create faculty for the command and staff course. In contrast, the NWC has no such function for the Navy; it simply provides what it considers useful background preparation for senior commanders, although relatively few of its graduates have acceded to such ranks.
The Fleet–OpNav–NWC Connection
Today, there is a robust connection among the three major nodes of Navy force development. The NWC has accreted new functions and branches over the past several decades, including absorbing the Senior Enlisted Academy and the Center for Naval Leadership. In response to the adoption of the Joint Force Maritime Component Commander (JFMCC) command-and-control concept in the fleet, NWC established the College of Maritime Operational Warfare, which conducts courses ranging from one to thirteen weeks for personnel that will be assigned to JFMCC duty. The Center for Naval Warfare Studies (CNWS) conducts on-demand wargames for both OpNav and fleet commanders, in addition to ad hoc research assignments such as occurred in the development of the 2007 A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. In addition, the biannual International Seapower Symposium held at the College is an important engagement tool for OpNav.
Although the Navy possesses several engineering and research facilities, such as the Naval Sea Systems Command (NavSea) Newport Undersea Warfare Development Center and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), its key operational and strategic center of thought is the NWC. The Center for Naval Analyses in Washington, D.C., provides the Navy with a powerful analytical tool, but the NWC is better positioned to go beyond analysis to conduct explorations of future concepts. Further, the NWC’s academic ethos provides a unique dynamic in which operational and strategic ideas both emerge and can be objectively tested.
All this constitutes a robust interconnection among the three elements of Navy force and strategy development, but it is important to note that a gap remains. Inside the NWC, there is no real linkage between the teaching side and outside agencies, other than the few student-advanced research groups. Similarly, connections between NPS and the NWC are limited to the research side (although the NWC distance education course is also taught there). Thus, teaching at the college occurs in a vacuum in which, following academic best practices, the teaching faculty determine what is taught and how it is presented. While the faculty presumably makes every effort to keep curriculum material up to date, organizationally, the Dean of Academics organization is stovepiped. While there is a working collaboration among OpNav, the fleet, and NWC, it is not the same as it was in the first half of the 20th century. The vast majority NWC graduates do not become part of the Navy force development process and do not acquire the associated and critical fleet-level warfighting skills, nor does the teaching curriculum do all it could to develop reflective practitioners—the ones needed to spur innovation in the fleet.
The NWC curriculum must change and adapt to current and emerging needs, not only to develop needed skill sets among naval officers, but to better support the overall Navy force development process. However, the current NWC structure presents severe obstacles to adaptation and change, and this will be the subject of Part II.
1. Trent Hone, Learning War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018); Albert Nofi, To Train the Fleet for War, Naval War College Historical Monograph Series no. 18 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press); and John Kuehn, America’s First General Staff (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2017).