LTC Jason Dempsey, USA guest-posted at The Best Defense ("Tom Rick's Daily Take on National Security") about how to improve professional military education.
Money quote(s):
"The Scales and Kuehn discussion on PME has piqued a long-running interest of mine in the failures of professional military education (PME). While obviously I am more with Scales in my overall assessment of the system, I think Kuehn's piece helps frame the debate because it highlights some of the confusion over the purpose of PME. Specifically, it seems our colleges cannot decide whether they are in the business of training or educating. This confusion has led to a muddied curriculum and a faculty that is required to cover both educating and training, and which as a result fails to do either one very well."
The semi-public debate to which Col. Dempsey* alludes is, somewhat, inside baseball. But serious students of national security would do well to pay attention. What gets decided will have very real consequences for decades to come.
Training and education are executed quite similarly, have extensive areas of overlap, and serve parallel purposes. But they aren't (quite) the same thing.
It's perfectly fine if the military wishes to combine the two purposes into single curriculae at the various service schools and colleges, but it should be quite clear and transparent, to both faculty and staff, as to which courses belong to which categories.
"(L)et's look at the faculty. These are typically officers on the verge of retirement who have been out of the operational force for several years and are interested in academia, but have not yet completed advanced degrees or had any classroom experience outside of the military system. This places them on the fringes of both the operational force and academia. Yet we ask them to cover both the 'core curriculum' and electives, essentially guaranteeing mediocrity in both areas."
Looking over Col. Dempsey's bio blurb (see below), he appears to have personal experience in the PME swamp up to the Command & General Staff College (CGSC) level. Plus whatever research he did as a Ph.D. student and/or researching his book.
Not to knock or discredit him personally, but CAA's experience with PME faculty appears to have been considerably more positive.
Yes, in the course of CAA's military and diplomatic careers, CAA attended at least one service college. Frankly, CAA was stunned at the bright lights that were hidden under that particular bush. And if we're being credentialist, even the serving military members had advanced (graduate or higher) degrees from civilian universities.
(One secret about the stars in the PME constellation: vanishingly few of them are accredited by anyone other than the Department of Defense itself. So while the diplomas look nice in a frame, good luck getting much credit for them at civilian-accredited institutions.)
"The 'core curriculum' at our service colleges should be restructured with a singular focus on training officers for the command and/or staff responsibilities they are about to assume. This is largely the case now, but the focus should be similar to what occurs at the pre-command courses, where senior leaders rotate in to provide insights, mentorship, and current operational perspectives. At CGSC this would mean that commanders and their staffs at the brigade and battalion levels would be the ones rotating in to instruct and to facilitate scenario-driven staff exercises. This would ensure that students received the most relevant training available while reinforcing to the officer corps the importance of taking the time and effort to properly train the next generation."
The point about bringing in operational commanders and staffs as instructors is an interesting one, particularly if training is the objective.
As for scenario-driven exercises, CAA used to live-and-breath them, and is a huge(if closeted) believer there in.
"As for the elective portion of PME, at least at CGSC, the list of offerings should be considered an outright embarrassment. Again, because of not understanding the difference between training and education, valuable time -- that could be spent broadening -- is instead spent on 'courses' that are mere recitations of doctrinal manuals or job descriptions and are about as far as you can get from anything broadening or academically rigorous ('Logistics for the Battalion XO', etc.). This is not to say that there are not great instructors and courses out there (the history departments are indeed strong, and I'd be remiss not to tip my hat to Don Connelly for carrying the torch for the study of civil-military relations). But, as Kuehn notes, these few good courses are drowned out in a curriculum that could only charitably be described as vo-tech for field grades. So long as we aren't kidding ourselves that this is a broadening experience or equivalent to education, fine, but if we are serious about the need to get officers to think critically and out of their comfort zone than it is this portion of PME that needs the most restructuring."
Frankly, CAA always thought that C&GSC was all about "vo-tech for field grades" in the first place, although my recent reading of World War I history gave me a somewhat different understanding of how and where American general staff training originated.
But for much of its history, C&GSC has been more than the sum of its parts that way, going beyond "vo-tech" into actual and broadening (professional military) education.
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* "Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey is a career infantry officer and a graduate of a couple levels of PME, including the infantry officers basic course, the amphibious warfare school at Quantico, and CGSC. He also holds a PhD from Columbia University and is the author of Our Army: Soldiers, Politics and American Civil-Military Relations."
6/4
