re: "To fix PME, decide whether you are training or educating officers -- and do it!"

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.

_____

* "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

re: "Overcoming Our Dearth of Language Skills"

Morgan Smiley at the Small Wars Journal blog ("facilitates the exchange of information among practitioners, thought leaders, and students of Small Wars, in order to advance knowledge and capabilities in the field") looked forward at meeting the foreign language requirements of the future.

While this is from a military perspective, this is of diplomatic readiness relevence as well.

Money quote(s):

"In order to fully appreciate any culture we are learning about, especially if we expect to conduct operations in that particular culture, it follows that learning the language will not only help one learn about that culture but be able to operate more effectively once immersed in it."

This so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever served abroad, in uniform or out, as to seem fairly condescending when plainly stated. It's not. Not condescending, that is. Those of us who serve their country abroad at any time in our lives are a minority of Americans. Let's not fail to make a persuasive argument by not laying the logical foundation necessary.

".... the importance of culture and language training by the US military due to the changing nature of the global security environment in which state-on-state conventional wars have been supplanted by smaller scale regional conflicts, trans-national and non-state terrorist actions, and other irregular security challenges conducted among local populations and lasting several years if not decades."

The language requirements of the State Dept. are much more constant and diffuse. State is responsible for over 260 diplomatic and consular posts requiring staffing by U.S. personnel speaking scores of languages, and the need to reliably refresh those positions with language-proficient replacements every 2-3 years.

"(W)hat languages & regions to focus on given the changing security environment and our role in it. After all, conflicts affecting US and allied interests - whether they involve foreign internal defense, counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism, or post-conflict reconstruction efforts - could spring up most anywhere."

Language proficiency is a labor-intensive undertaking, and carries the opportunity costs, particularly for military personnel, of whatever training is forgone in favor of that gaining, and maintaining, that skill. It's also something of a long-lead-time item, resistant (up to a point) to surge procurement, since qualified language instructors don't just grow on trees either.

"Read Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" and Thomas P.M. Barnett's "The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century". In "Clash of Civilizations", Huntington talks of potential conflicts arising along cultural "fault lines", for example, where Christianity meets Islam (Central Asia/ Turkey/ Caucasus regions) or where Hindu culture meets Sinic culture (Himalaya/ Central Asian region). In "The Pentagon's New Map", Thomas Barnett posits that the world is divided between the "connected" (primarily Western) regions/ countries and the "disconnected" or "Gap" areas, with many of those "gap" regions being in Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, etc. Given these two authors & ideas they put forth, the Army may want to look at educating Soldiers in Turkish, Persian, Hindi, and Chinese as well as focusing on those areas for cultural/ regional education." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Here Brother Smiley makes a mildly adventurous but intellectually-defensible leap about how to hedge one's future bets about where language training should be focused as a long-lead-time item, making an educated guess about where future conflicts are likely to be found.

"(W)e may want to revive the British concept of a "shooting leave" (we'll call it something else of course). During the period of British rule in India, both Company and Government, a "shooting leave" involved a British officer taking a few weeks or months of leave in order to travel through potentially hostile lands and gather information and intelligence, which involved the possibility of shooting or being shot at. For our purposes, our officers ought to be able to take a sabbatical, perhaps no more than 3 to 6 months, and embed themselves in non-governmental organizations (NGO) operating in one of the regions we are interested in (with Doctors Without Borders in Tajikistan for instance) so that he may use/ improve his language capabilities, learn first-hand information about the region he is in, and work with organizations that we may end up dealing with should we become involved in those areas."

Embedding military personnel, unless they are also medical personnel, in NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders is problematic, to say the least. There still seems to be something of a cultural wall between the two worlds, although perhaps a program of this nature would help in this regard.

"Building partner capacity has been identified as a key area of concern as we look for better, and cheaper, ways to assist friends and allies, and help others defend themselves as Mr. Gates put it. In order to do this effectively, we must field more leaders that can communicate with host-nations forces in their own languages which will allow us to better understand those host-nation environments since little will be lost in translation and cultural understanding will be enhanced. Improving our language skills may lead to more effective and efficient techniques for building the capacity of our current and future partners and reduce the need for deployments of robust US forces." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

8/23

re: "AAD Report: Under-investment in diplomacy has left Foreign Service overstretched, under prepared"

Domani Spero at Diplopundit ("Just one obsessive observer, diplomatic watcher, opinionator and noodle newsmaker monitoring the goings on at Foggy Bottom and the worldwide available universe.") summarizes this professionally-relevant report.

Money quote(s):

"Among its recommendations are 1) fully funding of the staffing initiative under Diplomacy 3.0, 2) creation of a 15% training float, 3) long-term commitment to investing in the professional education and training needed "to build a 21st-century diplomatic service of the United States able to meet the complex challenges and competition we face in the coming decades"; 4) strengthening and expansion of the Department of State’s professional development process ; 5) establishment of a temporary corps of roving counselors to address mentoring problems caused by the mid-level gap; 6) a study that will examine best practices in the field to determine how on-the-job training can be most effectively conducted for FSOs; 7) completion of a year of advanced study related to FSO's career track as a requirement for promotion to the Senior Foreign Service; and 8) appropriately targeted consultations before a new Chief of Mission (COM) even begins pre-assignment consultations."

1. Failing to fully fund staffing means jobs go unfilled means FSOs juggle multiple jobs means decreasing quality of all jobs. And that even more jobs are simply left unfilled.

2. A "training float" means that officers are able to take the training needed to perform new duties or learn new languages before they go to new jobs. A lot of the hiring under the old DRI was intended to make this good, but then a war broke out and things like PRTs and two or three of the world's most highly-staffed embassies soaked up that safety margin like a sponge.

3. The Foreign Service Institute does a pretty good job training officers but not, so far as I've seen, such a good job at educating them. There's sort of an unspoken attitude of you-should-already-be-fully-educated-when-you-get-hired.

That's not the attitude, by the way, one encounters in DoD. Funny how it's the killing-people-and-breaking-things agencies that actually value education.

Odd how these legacies of the old WASP establishment era of American diplomacy seem to linger on, when the actual Foreign Service looks "a lot like America," as the saying goes.

State needs to consider establishment of an institute focused on education, and learn the difference between training and education. There is one, which is one reason you generally can't get college credit for courses taken at FSI. Not to disrespect FSI too much because it's actually pretty good at the training piece, but while it's got many of the trappings of an educational institute (coat-of-arms, deans, registrars, &tc.) that's all surface gloss.

4. SecState Powell did a phenomenal job at establishing and implementing the beginnings of professional development training because he understood, coming from DoD, why it's important. He got that there's a continuum of training necessary during the life-cycle of a career officer, whether they are military or civilians.

5. I'm not sure what "roving counselors" are intended to accomplish, where they're supposed to come from, and what mid-grade jobs will they leave unfilled while they're "roving." (If mid-grade FSOs weren't facing a 24% pay cut for serving overseas, perhaps it'd be easier to make up the shortfall in their numbers.)

6. Best practices are always good to share, Consular bureau makes this a near fetish (and I mean that in a good way).

7. Another requirement for "passing the senior threshold" may or may not be a good thing. Making it a requirement means the Department would need to make it a possibility rather than the fairly rare opportunity it is now. FSOs are eligible to bid on a number of out-of-Department training opportunities once they become tenured. Some of these are at non-governmental universities, others are as sort of exchange students at DoD schools like the various war colleges. Making this a requirement for promotion means either providing a lot more opportunities (governmental or otherwise), expecting FSOs to be independently wealthy enough to take year-long leave-without-pay (LWOP) sabbaticals to accomplish this, or deciding relatively early who's destined for "flag rank" and who's not.

A word about governmental/DoD schools: they generally seem happy to have a State Dept. person or two in any given class, as well as from other civilian agencies, in the various war college and other DoD schools. But if we're going to start really trying to load more FSOs into their training system, perhaps we should consider establishing our own advanced educational program, based at FSI for instance, where they can send their own exchange students. See #3 above.

8. I'm not quite sure what this intends. Is the idea that there should be more general pre-COM training for new ambassadors before they begin focussing on post-/country-specific consultations?

S&S - USAREUR cuts back summer training exercises in eastern Europe

From my archive of press clippings:

Stars and Stripes

USAREUR cuts back summer training exercises in eastern Europe


By Seth Robson, Stars and Stripes

European edition, Sunday, April 18, 2010

Seth Robson / S&S


Spc. Brett Gardner, 25, of Las Vegas, with Company B, 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, prepares to ambush a group of Romanian soldiers during an exercise at Babadag Training Area in Romania.

GRAFENWÖHR, Germany — Combat deployments and limited resources mean fewer U.S. military personnel will train in eastern Europe this summer compared with last year, according to U.S. Army Europe.

Read the whole article here.

Snippet(s):

"About 1,000 personnel are expected to train in Romania and Bulgaria, down from the 3,200 who deployed there last summer, said Lt. Col. Daniel Herrigstad, a USAREUR public affairs officer.

In recent years, the U.S. has conducted regular training aimed at building relationships with both militaries, which have fought alongside U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

re: "Train as you fight. Fight as you train."

The Armorer at Castle Argghhh! mentions something I've experienced myself, when deployed with Coalition forces equipped with ex-Soviet vehicles and armor (see the bottom quote below).

Money quote(s):

"One of the lessons learned and relearned by armies throughout history is that if you train against your own troops using your own tactics... you get really good at fighting yourself. Which, absent civil wars, you just don't do very often.

Plus, if you don't give your tactical intel guys realistic training, they tend to give unrealistic assessments, and don't have skills, like order of battle analysis, that would be nice to have."

"(T)he State Department, peaceniks, and some foreign nations get, well, downright cranky when you just throw some real, sovereign nation out there as the enemy you train against."

&

"(M)y trigger finger got all itchy, in a "those were the days" kind of reverie."