[House Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office]
[H.A.S.C. No. 111-93]
CHARTING THE COURSE FOR EFFECTIVE PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION
__________
HEARING
BEFORE THE
OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD
SEPTEMBER 10, 2009
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OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas, Chairman
JOHN SPRATT, South Carolina ROB WITTMAN, Virginia
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California WALTER B. JONES, North Carolina
SUSAN A. DAVIS, California MIKE ROGERS, Alabama
JIM COOPER, Tennessee TRENT FRANKS, Arizona
JOE SESTAK, Pennsylvania CATHY McMORRIS RODGERS, Washington
GLENN NYE, Virginia DOUG LAMBORN, Colorado
CHELLIE PINGREE, Maine TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania
William Johnson, Professional Staff Member
Thomas Hawley, Professional Staff Member
Trey Howard, Staff Assistant
C O N T E N T S
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CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2009
Page
Hearing:
Thursday, September 10, 2009, Charting the Course for Effective
Professional Military Education................................ 1
Appendix:
Thursday, September 10, 2009..................................... 29
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THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2009
CHARTING THE COURSE FOR EFFECTIVE PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Snyder, Hon. Vic, a Representative from Arkansas, Chairman,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee...................... 1
Wittman, Hon. Rob, a Representative from Virginia, Ranking
Member, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.............. 2
WITNESSES
Barno, Lt. Gen. David, USA (Ret.), Director, Near East South Asia
Center for Strategic Studies................................... 4
Murray, Dr. Williamson, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, The Ohio State
University, Senior Fellow, Institute for Defense Analyses...... 9
Williams, Dr. John Allen, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science,
Loyola University Chicago, President, Inter-University Seminar
on Armed Forces and Society.................................... 7
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements:
Barno, Lt. Gen. David........................................ 38
Murray, Dr. Williamson....................................... 58
Snyder, Hon. Vic............................................. 33
Williams, Dr. John Allen..................................... 49
Wittman, Hon. Rob............................................ 35
Documents Submitted for the Record:
[There were no Documents submitted.]
Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:
[There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.]
Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:
Dr. Snyder................................................... 85
CHARTING THE COURSE FOR EFFECTIVE PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION
----------
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee,
Washington, DC, Thursday, September 10, 2009.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 10:07 a.m., in
room 210, Capitol Visitors Center, Hon. Vic Snyder (chairman of
the subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. VIC SNYDER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
ARKANSAS, CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Dr. Snyder. Good morning, and welcome to the sixth in a
series of hearings on Officer in-Residence Professional
Military Education, which we know throughout the military and
here on the Hill as PME.
Our hearings thus far have explored various aspects of the
service-specific and joint institutions that make up the
current PME system. We have examined missions, curricula, and
standards of rigor, the quality of staff, faculty, and
students, and organization resourcing at the precommissioning,
primary, intermediate, and senior PME levels.
Professional military education is an investment in the
most important element of our military, our people. The primary
purpose of PME is to develop military officers throughout their
careers for the rigorous intellectual demands of complex
contingencies and major conflicts. We can't afford to be
complacent when it comes to producing leaders capable of
meeting significant challenges whether at the tactical,
operational, or strategic levels. As a matter of national
security, we must invest wisely.
The PME system bears a special responsibility for staying
relevant amid change. As a key mechanism for individual and
force development, PME must both respond to present needs and
anticipate future ones. The PME system must continually evolve
in order to enable officers to assume expanded roles and to
perform new missions in an increasingly complicated and
constantly changing security environment.
For instance, we know that PME can empower officers to
contribute to interagency and multinational operations and to
effectively utilize foreign languages and cultural skills. We
have heard from some of the schools that they are currently
striving to embrace these and other important educational
priorities. Are they doing a good enough job?
In short, the PME system must consistently improve. Twenty
years ago, the Skelton Panel report on PME stated, ``Although
many of its individual courses, programs, and faculties are
excellent, the existing PME system must be improved to meet the
needs of the modern profession at arms.''
That statement is true today. Twenty years ago, we were
educating officers to engage against our Cold War adversaries.
Clearly, much about our military and our world has changed
since then. Much will continue to change as we look to the
future.
With respect to PME, these questions should always apply:
How well are we educating our officers presently, and what
should we be doing to educate them more effectively in the
future?
Our witnesses for this hearing are prominent former senior
military and civilian academic leaders, each of whom has
significant experience with the PME system. I look forward to
hearing your views.
I now recognize Mr. Wittman for any comments he wants to
make.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Snyder can be found in the
Appendix on page 33.]
STATEMENT OF HON. ROB WITTMAN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM VIRGINIA,
RANKING MEMBER, OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. Wittman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It is an honor and privilege to be here today on this
panel, and also I want to thank our witnesses for taking time
out of your busy schedules to join us and give us your thoughts
and ideas on what we can do to enhance our system of PME here
in the United States.
This morning the subcommittee conducts its sixth and final
scheduled hearing on Officer in-Residence Professional Military
Education. We began the study with testimony from outside
experts who posed issues for the subcommittee to consider, then
conducted four sessions in which we heard from many Department
of Defense (DOD) and military service witnesses, who discussed
various components of the PME system and how it all fits
together. We will conclude this final hearing with additional
thoughts from you very well-qualified witnesses and your
thoughts and ideas on what we can do to make sure we round out
this PME experience for our men and women in uniform.
I think our approach as a committee is sound and hope that
today's panel will put the issues in perspective for the
subcommittee and suggest a path forward.
During the course of this study, I have come to respect and
admire our professional military education system. There is
nothing else in the rest of the Federal Government or, to my
knowledge, private industry which begins to emulate the
significant and continuous investment we make in educating and
developing our military officers.
It is important for all of us to keep in mind that today's
system produces quality, successful officers, who operate in a
wide range of demanding and difficult positions. That does not
mean that there aren't areas that need improvement, but we
should not lose sight of the fact that we have a system that,
for the most part, serves us well.
Through this process I have had the opportunity to listen
to witnesses, travel to PME institutions, and meet with senior
leaders alongside Chairman Snyder. In fact, this past Friday I
visited the U.S. Naval Academy and had the unique opportunity
to observe some of the quality training our junior officers
receive at the service academies.
By the way, I was there as the football team was leaving to
go play Ohio State, and I can tell you it was an exciting
Saturday for our midshipmen there, where they were almost
victorious against Ohio State. Quite a great day for them.
From all of these visits and discussions, two recurring
themes stand out in my mind as the most valuable aspects of
PME. First, I heard mostly from the students is the value of
interacting with fellow students of differing background,
particularly those from the State Department, international
students, and those from other military services.
The second most valuable skill these students can develop
is critical thinking, as there is no way to anticipate the
ever-changing situations officers face in today's world of
continuous deployments.
Whatever we may suggest, I think it is imperative that we
retain these aspects of today's PME system. It was time that we
undertook this effort, and I am pleased to have been a
participant in what I think is an extraordinary effort, and I
want to thank Chairman Snyder for his leadership and all of his
direction in pursuing this effort.
Over the past 20 years, the United States has significantly
changed the way it employs its military forces, sending troops
abroad to address regional issues with far greater frequency
than we did during the Cold War. It is also apparent that the
system, like any large system involving people, faces
challenges in today's dynamic environment of high operational
momentum. Even so, I think today's PME system, by and large,
serves the Nation well; and we should carefully consider any
potential recommendations from this committee.
Again, Mr. Chairman, thank you for your leadership; and I
look forward to hearing from the witnesses.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Wittman can be found in the
Appendix on page 35.]
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Wittman.
Our witnesses today are Lieutenant General David Barno,
U.S. Army Retired, Director of the Near East South Asia (NESA)
Center for Strategic Studies; Dr. John Allen Williams, Ph.D.,
Professor of Political Science at Loyola University, Chicago,
and President of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces
and Society; and Dr. Williamson Murray, Ph.D., Professor
Emeritus, the Ohio State University, and Senior Fellow at the
Institute for Defense Analyses.
We appreciate you all being here. Your written statements
will be a part of the record. I have read your written
statements, and I am excited about this discussion today.
We have mentioned our previous five hearings, the visits we
have had. We have been doing a lot of wading down in the weeds,
as you know, when you get down talking about tenure of a
professor, all those kinds of things that are important to
academics. I think you all have backed us up a little bit
higher to get a look at the broad views, which I think is very
important as we go into the next phase of this.
The next phase of this, by the way, is now, with a whole
lot of staff effort, to put together everything that we have
learned on all their visits and travels and our meetings and
our hearings and what recommendations can we make to the
Congress and the military to move ahead on this. So your
comments today are very helpful.
So, General Barno, do you have a light down there? We will
put on the clock for you. If you see that red light, it means
you have gone five minutes. If you still have some things to
say, go ahead and do it, but it is just an idea to give you an
idea where we are at.
General Barno.
STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. DAVID BARNO, USA (RET.), DIRECTOR, NEAR
EAST SOUTH ASIA CENTER FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES
General Barno. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member
Wittman. Thanks to all of you and to the committee for the
opportunity to appear here today and talk on an extremely
important topic.
I feel a bit out of balance on the table here since I am,
in one sense, probably the only nonacademic in terms of my
overall background here. But I hope that, despite having gone
through the entire professional military educational system and
done some graduate school work in the civilian world as well,
but that, combined with my time having commanded from
lieutenant, as a company commander all the way to lieutenant
general as a commander in Afghanistan, will provide a bit of a
balanced outlook to what may become academic in some respects.
But professional military education is a critical competency of
the military.
I am involved in the academic world today. I have been for
the last three years as the Director of the NESA Center at
National Defense University, but I will give my comments today
of my own personal views, as opposed to speaking for the
government.
I would also highlight to the committee that I have got a
personal stake in this, with two sons in uniform; two Army
captains out there in the field, one who served a year in
Afghanistan already. So I have a vested personal interest in
ensuring that our long-term professional military education
remains strong.
I think I would like to talk a bit about some of my
characterizations of where we are today and some of the demands
on the force today in terms of our leadership and then
highlight in my opening comments here five recommendations for
the committee to consider.
First, I would note that we are in an environment where
warfare is changing at a very rapid pace. If we were to have
this hearing just 10 years ago, in 1999, and we had some
distinguished military officers up here to ask about what the
future of war was going to look like, we would have heard them
talk about rapid, decisive operations and precision strike and
focused logistics and information dominance; and they would
have drawn their understanding of warfare from the 1999 Kosovo
air war, which would have just concluded, which involved no
ground combat troops at all.
And if we were to just move them forward a couple of years,
they would have seen a lot of those ideas played out in the
opening gambits in Afghanistan, where we were able to collapse
the Taliban regime in about 90 days after a standing start, an
important reminder this week with the anniversary of 9/11, and
then a few years later in Iraq, where in a six-week lightning
ground campaign we saw our military forces overwhelm an
extraordinarily large and capable army by really shattering
their ability to resist. That would have been their view of
warfare.
Today, if we asked that same group what warfare looks like,
we would have found a very different description of warfare.
Today, we are clearly actively involved in two major irregular
warfare conflicts--one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan--which have
taken us down a very, very different road than our outlook on
warfare just 10 years ago at the beginning of this decade.
So I highlight that fact because I think it describes the
complexity of the challenge that face our military leaders
today, all the way from the tactical level as platoon leaders
and company commanders, all the way to our senior-most
generals. The bloody, uncertain, chaotic nature of war has not
changed, but the character of war, how it plays out, what the
options are, are ever changing between irregular warfare,
conventional warfare, and now what some are now calling hybrid
warfare--a combination of the two--such as we saw Hezbollah
fight in south Lebanon in 2006.
This is an extraordinarily more difficult environment to
think about warfare than the environment I entered into in the
Army in 1976, where the Cold War was very much still the
centerpiece of our very predictable military confrontation. So
we have set the bar higher for the requirements, I think, for
our military leaders.
I would also I think characterize some of our
decisionmaking and strategic thinking over the last 10 years as
somewhat questionable. We have a number of pundits who would
certainly ascribe to that view. There have been a number of
books on the Iraq War that have cited what authors have
described as a failure of strategic leadership.
I read recently a report by Andrew Krepinevich and Barry
Watts here from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments that had this observation in it: ``The ability of
the U.S. national security establishment to craft, implement,
and adapt effective long-term strategies against intelligent
adversaries at acceptable costs has been declining for some
decades.''
They went on to say that, ``reversing this decline in U.S.
strategic competence is an urgent issue for the American
national security establishment in the 21st century.''
I am not sure I would go as far as my friend Andy
Krepinevich would in this, but I think he is onto an issue of
concern, which is our ability to convert our current
educational establishment and development of officers into
effective strategic leadership.
We have seen articles, such as ``A failure in generalship''
by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, that have been very
critical of America's military leadership.
Of course, all of our military leadership, myself included,
have gone through our professional military schools. So I think
it is appropriate to look at how we are teaching, how we are
developing officers, and ask questions about whether we have
got it fully correct or not.
I would say, however--and I think all the panelists would
agree with me, as I heard already from the committee members
this morning--that we have an amazing military. We have an
incredible force. We have some of the best leadership we have
ever had in the field, under the most difficult conditions; and
I think that that is a hallmark of who we are.
Preserving that asymmetrical advantage we have and our
intellectual capability in the military is extraordinarily
important. And I would highlight that I think the majority of
our investment in a lot of ways has been made at the tactical
and operational level, and I look at the amount of time we are
spending at the strategic level throughout our programs,
especially as officers reach flag rank, and I have some
question in my mind as to whether we have got that quite right.
Specifically, I think that our educational development for
officers peters out. It diminishes to near nothing at the flag
officer level, at the brigadier, at the one-star admiral level.
Whereas, as a lieutenant I might go to a course for six months
before I stood in front of a platoon of 40 soldiers, as a flag
officer, the longest course I will go to is six weeks long.
There is something perhaps not right about that, given the
complexity and the impact of the demands at that level.
So, five brief recommendations.
First, I think we need to look at our civilian graduate
programs and incentivize that for our highest-performing
officers. There is no substitute for a civilian graduate degree
to sharpen the thinking of our officers as they move up through
the ranks and they become senior officers. That helped me
more--my graduate schooling here at Georgetown University as a
captain helped me more than perhaps any other developmental
experience at the strategic level. Most officers today will not
have that experience. The vast majority will not. They will
have master's degrees, but they will get them from military
schools. That is a major change from when I was a young
officer.
Second, I think we need to make military intellectualism
and military thinking and thinking warriors respectable again.
We have been in a war now for the better part of nine years. We
have a great muddy boots generation of leadership. We need to
make sure they are thinking muddy boots leaders, and we need to
incentivize with our senior leaders in how they speak about
thinking about warfare, that being a military intellectual is
an expectation of all of our leaders. To be a thinking warrior
is what we are looking for.
Senior service college. Our senior service colleges, the
Army War College, National Defense Universities are the last
major investment we make in education for our officers. I think
we have to look very carefully at that curriculum to ensure it
is rigorous enough, focused enough on strategy and that we
don't outsource aspects of it to fellowships that don't have
nearly the same degree of rigor, which is becoming a common
practice, particularly in the U.S. Army.
Fourth, service officer personnel systems. Personnel
systems drive the selection and development of senior leaders.
I think we have to look very carefully at that. We now have, in
effect, a 40-year career for our generals. We should invest
more of that time in their education. The time is available. I
cannot be convinced that we can't find time to invest in the
most important part of an officer's education than at the
senior and most strategic level.
Finally, the flag officer program, which reinforces that. I
think our current six-week Capstone program has major
shortfalls in it. It has been reduced from a nine-week program
just a few years ago. It has very little educational rigor and
is not representing the needs and requirements demanded of flag
officers. I think we need to revisit that and look at how that
might be improved.
So, again, Mr. Chairman, thanks for the opportunity to
present these views. I look forward to following up in more
detail during the questions. Thank you.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, General Barno.
[The prepared statement of General Barno can be found in
the Appendix on page 38.]
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Williams.
STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN ALLEN WILLIAMS, PH.D., PROFESSOR OF
POLITICAL SCIENCE, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO, PRESIDENT, INTER-
UNIVERSITY SEMINAR ON ARMED FORCES AND SOCIETY
Dr. Williams. Thank you. I thank Chairman Snyder, Ranking
Member Wittman, and the distinguished members of this
subcommittee for the opportunity to be here today. It is a
genuine honor.
Military success requires adaptive leaders and strategists
who are able to deal with ambiguity, imagine the unimaginable,
and handle the unruly strategic environment that is upon us.
Studying theories about war must never make war itself a
theoretical exercise, however. Military scholarship must
contribute to the primary purpose of the force, which is to
prevail in combat. The military education system must support,
not subvert or detract from rigorous military training and the
mindset that makes victory possible.
I propose two goals for the military PME system: first, to
develop strategists and leaders to meet future complex and
ambiguous challenges and, secondly, to strengthen civil-
military relations.
During the Cold War, the prospective enemy was apparent. We
knew how he would fight. We even knew the likely axis of
attack. With the attacks of 9/11, however, a new, much less
certain paradigm emerged. Unfortunately, traditional threats
still remain and the major military mission became all of the
above.
Domestically, militaries reflect the societies they serve,
whether it is the Vietnam-era tolerance for drug use or the
evolving comfort level with diversity of all kinds and with
nontraditional roles for women. Demands for the military to
change accordingly will not be far behind. It will require the
most educated and adaptive leadership to manage the military
successfully as such changes inevitably occur.
The military might also be called upon to operate
domestically in ways never envisioned, with posse comitatus
restrictions waived in view of a civil emergency. This could be
to restore order in the wake of some catastrophe or even to
enforce a quarantine. We want the most broadly and humanely
educated officers thinking about how to operate in this
environment.
The military education system should encourage potential
strategists, broaden their intellectual horizons, and help them
develop the skills they need to be effective, and to do so as
early in their careers as possible. It must also ensure that
all officers form the habit of thinking strategically. Rigorous
educational experiences will help students develop the
intellectual capital they will need later in their careers.
This applies to the increasingly professionalized enlisted
ranks as well, the subject of further study, I think.
The mix of technical, social science, moral, and humanist
components in curricula at all levels need to be rebalanced if
we are training officers to lead people as opposed to machines.
It is past time to reemphasize the importance of the humanities
and social sciences, deemphasized in the Navy, for example, for
at least three decades because of the presumed need for all
officers to emphasize highly technical competence above all
else.
We need to retain also a variety of commissioning sources.
Many Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) programs at
prestigious universities were lost in the Vietnam era. These
are an important link with the civilian society, but there must
also be sources of officer accession that are not subject to
the political whims of university professors.
The service academies are repositories of service culture,
a source of pride to the American people, and, by virtue of the
appointment process through this Congress, ensure a wide
representation of students. Their abandonment would be a
serious mistake; and, once destroyed, they could never be
rebuilt.
Officer Candidate School (OCS) programs can be expanded
rapidly with no need for the government to fund the college
education for the inductees.
More engagement with the civilian academic community would
be beneficial to officer PME. Examples include accreditation
programs for the military's master's degree programs; first-
rank civilian professors at military residential schools;
participation in rigorous scholarly professional societies,
such as the one I have the privilege of heading, the Inter-
University Seminar on Armed Forces in Society; and enhanced
civilian graduate education opportunities, especially at the
mid-career level. As General David Petraeus noted, this
experience helps bridge the gap between those in uniform and
those who have had little contact with the military.
As the Congress considers these issues, I recommend that
the following six items be included as important
considerations: not to repair a broken system but to make an
excellent system still better; enhancing the role of the
humanities and social sciences, including language and cultural
studies; considering the effect of the PME system on the
relations between the military and civil society; encouraging
the flow of highly qualified civilian instructors into the
academic portions of residential military PME programs, whether
as visiting professors or permanent staff; encouraging the best
officers to interact with civilian academic institutions and
organizations; making performance in educational institutions a
strong factor in subsequent assignments and promotions.
Finally, focusing on the increasing professionalization of the
enlisted force and considering how enlisted educational
opportunities can better meet evolving security challenges.
Thank you, and I look forward to our discussion this
morning.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Dr. Williams.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Williams can be found in the
Appendix on page 49.]
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Murray.
STATEMENT OF DR. WILLIAMSON MURRAY, PH.D., PROFESSOR EMERITUS,
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY, SENIOR FELLOW, INSTITUTE FOR DEFENSE
ANALYSES
Dr. Murray. Dr. Snyder, it is a great pleasure to address
the committee and yourself.
I would begin by commenting that, as you well know, the
medical profession takes its education of its future doctors
very seriously. I would argue that the military is a
profession, perhaps the most difficult of all the professions,
not only because it is so physically demanding, but I would
argue intellectually demanding. And it is intellectually
demanding, I would suggest--and I don't want to go through my
paper in great detail--but I think as a historian looking at
the past 100 years, we are going to be surprised in the 21st
century. We are going to fight opponents who we cannot conceive
of today.
Maybe all one has to do is think back to the summer of
2001, and if I had lectured at one of the war colleges and
suggested that we were going to send a large force to overthrow
the Taliban in Afghanistan, I would have been laughed off the
stage. But that kind of surprise is going to come out of the
woodwork and bite us in the 21st century, and we have got to
develop an intellectually adaptable officer corps that
understands other cultures and other histories.
Let me--because I think most of you have read my general
comments, let me just sort of run through suggestions that I
have and gave considerable thought to.
First of all, I think Congress needs to fund a sufficient
overage of officers at all grades to allow sufficient time for
serious study without penalty either to their careers or to
operational requirements. It is particularly acute now, but
once the pressure is off I think it still will be useful and
important for Congress to make available to the military the
kind of latitude that allows officers to go to the best
graduate courses and best graduate degrees in war studies,
strategic studies, military history, international relations,
not just in the United States but around the world.
I think there is another great difficulty--that was my
second point--and that has to do with, of course, personnel
systems, which Congress has given, I think, considerable
greater latitude than was true 20 years ago. But, by and large,
personnel systems are not using that latitude, if you will, to
encourage people to step outside of the normal career paths,
like General Petraeus did and H.R. McMaster, being two specific
examples in terms of the Army.
I would also suggest the professional military education is
being underfunded. I think this shows in terms of the capacity
of those institutions to reach out to bring in scholars from
around the country.
The great advantage that the United Kingdom enjoys is that
it just takes a train ticket to bring somebody from Edinburgh
down to London. Here, if you want to bring somebody from
Stanford, you will pay a ticket across the United States. And I
think this is absolutely essential, that our military and its
educational system not be confined too narrowly to the experts
within Washington or the experts within particular educational
systems.
The fourth point--and I think this is very important--is
the presidents and the commandants of the various schools need
to be far more carefully selected than in the past. I think the
services themselves, the senior leadership, need to give far
more support to those individuals.
If you look back at the history of the last 25, 30 years at
major successful PME reforms--Stansfield Turner, the Naval War
College, 1970, supported fully by the Chief of Naval
Operations; Chuck Boyd at the Air University in the early
1990s, supported fully by the leadership in Washington; Paul
Van Riper, establishing Marine Corps University, supported by
General Gray; and the creation of School of Advanced Military
Studies (SAMS), supported with three incredibly brilliant
officers, Rick Senreich, Vasta Sager, and General Don Holder,
fully supported by Army generals at the four-star level, Otis
and Richardson in particular. We have simply got to be willing
to do that and not treat these schools as a nice place for
admirals and two-star admirals and two-star generals to retire
in.
I think that the services need to focus more seriously on
professional military education from the very beginning of an
officer's career right through to the end; and having taught at
the Naval Academy for 2 years--a wonderful experience, great
midshipmen--I don't think they are prepared the way they should
be across the board in issues dealing with military strategy
and military history.
Finally, I just want to give the committee my compliment
for--I discovered my last, seventh point, is overtaken by
events. You have done precisely what I recommended. You go out
to the institutions and talk to them.
Again, I think one of the ironies in looking at the
landscape of professional military education is the Naval War
College still remains, by far and away, a world-class
institution for the study of strategy; and not to have an
equivalent type of institution down in Washington, a national
war college, I think, is a shame. But I think the gold standard
should be met by the other war colleges.
Finally, General Barno's suggestion, I think, is a
brilliant one. The Skelton Committee report of 1988 or 1989,
whatever it was, the finest study on professional military
education ever done anywhere, anyplace, recommended the
creation of a strategic college for general officers. I would
recommend that Capstone be turned into the equivalent of the
British higher command and staff course, which not only gives
officers I think it is a four- or five-month course, very
rigorous course, but they are ranked at it, and who gets the
two- and three- and four-star joint assignments depends upon
how you did in the higher command and staff course. I think it
would focus the services a little more seriously on preparing
the officers both for the course and then to more seriously and
rigorously educate officers so that we don't have to make the
kind of mistakes that were made in the Iraq War and the Afghan
War post 2001, post 2003.
Thank you very much, sir.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Murray can be found in the
Appendix on page 58.]
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, gentlemen, for your comments.
We will put ourselves on the five-minute clock and have at
least two, if not more, rounds.
The first question I wanted to ask you--I just wanted to
give you each an opportunity. You all are involved in academic
work in some way and are used to critiquing things. I would
like to give each of you the opportunity to either critique or
compliment what the other folks had to say.
Is there anything you want to amplify on, General Barno,
that Dr. Williams or Mr. Murray said?
General Barno. I don't hear too many things I disagree with
with either of them. I think one of the benefits of this panel
is that we are not required to defend a position which we may
or may not agree with in public. I think all of us are free to
speak from a lot of experience in this arena and a lot of
commitment to where this goes.
I think, as I have noted down the comments from both my
contemporaries here, I see little to quarrel with. I do think I
would just reinforce that I think the senior-most level PME is
the area where I have the greatest concern; and I think that,
to a degree, is shared on my left.
We seem to have built a program that has created
extraordinary tactical and operational officers, and a lot of
that I think could be attributed to the fact that most of the
program is at that level of their careers--lieutenant,
captains, majors. We have done far less well, in most of our
estimation--I think I heard that from each of the witnesses up
here. We have done far less at the strategic level. We need to
ask why and what can be done to rectify that.
I am not sure I would agree that that has to occur at the
beginning of a career. I think we really have to look at the
more senior levels and how we grow these people and develop
those people when they become senior for those senior jobs.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Williams.
Dr. Williams. I am pleased to hear the General emphasizing
the importance of civilian graduate education. I am sure Dr.
Murray agrees as well. But I am more concerned about the junior
and the mid-career.
General Petraeus wrote a great article for Armed Forces and
Society when he was a major, back in 1989, on the military
advice on the use of force and how effective it was, advice to
the civilians. So I think there is a lot more spade work that
can be done and development done early. But the time you are in
war college, you are going to be polishing some things up, but
it is too late really to start anything, I think.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Murray.
Dr. Murray. I think we are 98 percent in agreement.
Let me just extend General Barno's comment. I think it
begins to a certain extent at precommissioning. But the crucial
point, I think, is the captain level. If you look at people
like Don Holder and Petraeus and various other individuals who
have gotten the mark as first rate strategists, they have
gotten that mark really in terms of beginning to fill their gas
tank at the captain level.
And here I think sending individuals out to graduate school
for a couple of years to get a master's or Ph.D.--in fact, at
Ohio State, we got a significant number of our officers through
in two years, All But Dissertation (ABD), and able to write
their dissertations at the next level.
So, again, I think this sort of education developing and
opening officers' minds to the wider aspects of their
profession is crucial.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Murray, I think you in your written
statement referred to the challenge of the whole system
educates in stages. Wasn't that your phrase? Early on, you
compared PME with medical education as a family doctor.
But we don't educate in stages in medical school. You come
right out of medical school, then you do your residency, then
you may do an additional fellowship. So, for example, a
cardiologist, four years of medical school, three years
internal medicine residency, then probably a couple of years,
at least, of a fellowship. But that is probably it for the
career. For the next 50 years, they will practice based on
their continuing medical education. But it is a different
system, isn't it?
Dr. Murray. It makes it much more difficult. Because I
think the crucial element--talking to people like Tony Zinni--
the crucial element in developing I think great military
leaders comes down to the willingness of the officers, with
certain encouragement from their senior commanders, et cetera,
to continue each stage the educational process. That it
shouldn't be just you get something at the basic course, you
get something at the captains' course, at the amphibious
warfare school--or it's now called expeditionary warfare
school. In fact, it should be a continuous process in which the
officer is educating himself for the next level. And I think
that is very difficult to do, particularly given the kinds of
commitments our forces have today. But a significant number of
officers do it, and they are the ones who should be rewarded,
providing they are doing equally well.
Dr. Snyder. There is an old line about what do you call the
person who graduates last in a medical school class? Doctor.
You don't call the person who graduates last at West Point
General. I think that is the challenge we have.
Mr. Platts for five minutes.
I am not sure we have formally welcomed you to this
subcommittee. It is great to have you. Todd and I have talked
about some of the issues involving professional military
education. He has had an interest in it for quite a few years
now. We appreciate your being on this subcommittee and being
here today.
Mr. Platts. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is an honor to join
you and all of the fellow members on the committee.
I am a new member to the Armed Services, all of about 3
months, although I have been trying to get on it for 8\1/2\
years. So delighted to be here with you.
I appreciate each of our witnesses' testimony and your
important work, both civilian and in uniform.
General Barno, I had the pleasure a good many years ago.
Although not on the committee, I have been to Iraq nine times
now and Afghanistan five and continue to educate myself out
there hands on and hopefully will be back in Afghanistan in
about two weeks. So I appreciate your long service.
I guess the first question to all three of you is: In my
interactions overseas, and especially in Afghanistan, I have
seen the importance of our work between our military commanders
and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Foreign
Service officers, Department of State Foreign Service, but
especially USAID; and in Afghanistan in one of my visits in the
Jalalabad area that partnership was clearly critically
important to the success we were having in the work of the
civilian and military personnel.
Do you think we need to strengthen that in the training or
the education programs, the PME opportunities, and have a
greater presence of the Department of State Foreign Service
officers or USAID Foreign Service officers as part of this
education process and suggestions in what way or to what extent
should that occur?
General Barno. Great to see you again. I live on the edge
of your district there in Dickinson Township. So I have spent a
lot of time at the Army War College, and you have been a
tremendous supporter of that great institution as well.
I think that we are seeing a very slow growth of players
from across the U.S. interagency participating as students, and
particularly the war colleges now to a lesser extent, the more
junior schools such as command and staff college. I think that
is very good.
What I find as the limiting factor, though, is that the
other agencies--government and USAID, Department of State,
Justice, and so on--simply don't have enough people to be able
to spare any to go to school. In the military, as we alluded to
earlier, we have a pool in the Army called the training
transient holding and school account of people who are
basically over-strength to allow a substantial number of
officers to always be in school. So if I take someone out of a
seat, I have got someone else that will take the job for the
year the captain or major is gone. In the State Department,
that is not true. In USAID, that is not true. So they are so
tightly controlled with the number of oversees requirements
they have that they simply can't get people to go to school. So
perhaps that should be addressed.
But the benefit of that is huge for both their people that
go to these schools, such as the Army War College or National
War College, and it is equally huge for the military people
that get exposed to this other thinking before they get to meet
these people on the battlefield, which is not how you would
like to see that evolve.
Dr. Murray. I think there is a larger issue here, which is
that the other government agencies simply don't have the school
system that the military has. I think--not only that. One of
our best graduate students at Ohio State in the late 1980s came
to Ohio State, wanted to get a Ph.D. He asked for a leave from
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and they said no. No
interest in terms of the external world to that kind of
broadening experience.
I think Congress--it is obviously beyond the purview of
this committee, but I think the larger issue is that the other
agencies of government need to have something along the lines
similar to the military's broadening experience if we are going
to have the kind of interagency cooperation in places like
Afghanistan.
Dr. Williams. I think Congressman Platts raised an
important question. It is difficult to do, get the services to
come together and do joint education and work in everyone's
career path. It becomes exponentially more difficult when you
have the interagency process as well, with different career
paths, different gates they have to go through as well. Plus,
they are perhaps even less robustly staffed than the military.
The military has enough problems.
To make it even more complicated in that environment, you
are also dealing with nongovernmental organizations of various
kinds that you have no control over, and they may not be
American ones at that. So it becomes a very, very complex
environment.
I accept the problem. I had no idea to how to solve it.
Mr. Platts. I appreciate all three of your perspectives.
Dr. Murray, your focus about the other agencies not
emphasizing education or allowing for those opportunities I
think is kind of the catch-22. Because they are not yet--they
are expecting their Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) to be out
there right with military leaders hand-in-hand and not have
that opportunity to build that relationship ahead of time.
With Lieutenant Colonel Linda Granfield and Michelle
Parker, a USAID officer, it was an amazing partnership that I
saw and actually have kept in touch with both of those
individuals since they have come back and have taken on new
assignments because of how impressed I was with their
abilities.
I will save my additional questions until the next round.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Platts.
Mr. Wittman for five minutes.
Mr. Wittman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, I will ask all of you this question. In looking
overall, we have heard a lot recently about the whole-of-
government approach to our contingency operations. In taking
that in perspective with the current PME system, how do you
think this system can emphasize interagency, intergovernmental,
and multinational aspects of our future military activities
into the instructional efforts that we are currently
undertaking now in our PME system?
General Barno, we will begin with you.
General Barno. I think that is evolving and is under way as
a result of the experiences that Congressman Platts described
out in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now military officers are much different than 10 or 15
years ago, running into all these people and finding in many
cases that they now have to have a partnership that works with
these other parts of government in order for them to accomplish
their military mission. That is a completely new environment
than what anyone would have envisioned 10 or 15 years ago. So
they have already brought that knowledge with them when they
come to these military PME courses.
I think where we could probably add some more capacity is
having instructional support at the colleges, the war colleges
and the command and staff colleges, that are either from those
agencies in the government or are retired members with
experience in the field doing those types of things. It is not
good enough for a colonel of infantry to talk about USAID
operations and how they are structured and what their culture
is and how they think and how they approach things. The
credibility simply is not there. That is what we have to rely
on because of how we are set up at some of our institutions.
But having them on the staff and faculty, having more than the
students, as we noted before, I think would be very, very
valuable; and it is replicating what is already happening in
the field. That's the irony in a way, is that the school system
in some ways is behind best practices out there in Iraq and
Afghanistan today.
Dr. Williams. One of the purposes of the education system
is to plan and game through things before you are in a crisis.
The kinds of initiatives that the General is talking about are
quite good. We open up as many opportunities for people from
those other agencies and abroad to come and study in military
colleges. If they need to increase their funding to be able to
do that, I would hope that Congress would support that as well.
This tends to be something that builds on itself. Because
as they become accustomed to working with one another and
understanding the need to do it, it would become a higher
priority for everyone. Plus, personal connections will be
formed. I think this will benefit in the long run.
Dr. Murray. Let me put a caveat here. Because I think we
have to realize that, for example, a year at the command and
staff level or a year at the war college level is a very
limited time in an academic sense. And these institutions have
been created specifically to study war and strategy. I don't
think in many cases they do enough of that to prepare officers
for the complexity of the kinds of wars and the character of
the wars that we are going to be involved in.
What we have seen over the past 20 years to a certain
extent is not only stuffing more and more stuff into an
officer's career, gates that they have to pass, but stuffing
more and more various subjects into what are supposed to be
graduate level programs. I absolutely believe they have to be
graduate level programs. And we want to take two weeks away
from the strategy and policy course at Newport, which is a
world-class course, to teach something which 10 years from now
our officers may not be involved in.
Again, I realize the importance of it, but I think we have
to understand the difficulties inherent in terms of just
getting our officers to the level that they need to be in terms
of understanding war and the use of force.
Mr. Wittman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Snyder. I wanted to ask about an issue that came up at
our very first hearing. And you all may not be able to have a
comment on this.
The phrase was used in terms of how to help move this
process forward. The comment was made by at least a couple of
our opening panel witnesses, I believe it was, that the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs I think the word was ``needs to
take more ownership of PME'' in terms of making sure that I
guess it has a champion, that he or she knows what is going on,
that they have a resource issue.
Do you all have any comments on that concept?
General Barno.
General Barno. I think that is the case today, in talking
with Admiral Rondeau, who is the new president of----
Dr. Snyder. Which is the case?
General Barno. That he is taking a greater role in this. I
have seen here even recently with regard to at least National
Defense University--I can't speak to whether he has that
charter for the service schools or not. I would argue that for
joint PME that he is the right point of contact, and he needs
to be a visible champion of that. That is beginning I think to
evolve from his relationship with the new National Defense
University president.
I also think it is equally if not more important that the
service chiefs are visible champions of their PME programs of
their service colleges or their staff colleges. And that varies
widely, as we would expect, given the demands that the service
chiefs have, their personalities, their backgrounds, what
schools they went to or didn't go to; and so that becomes
rather erratic.
But I think the broader issue that I have got in my notes
here is that we have to have four-star champions of military
education. And I would argue that in a lot of ways all four-
stars have to be champions of military education. They have to
talk about it. They have to make it respectable. They have to
convince up and coming officers this is part of their
professional responsibility. Even though what we want to have
individuals, service chiefs or the chairman have ownership, I
think all senior leaders have got to spend a lot more time
talking about the seriousness of study of this profession.
During my time on active duty, I rarely, if ever, heard that,
especially in the last five years or so. I think that is
extremely important.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Williams.
Dr. Williams. I think it is important that the most senior
officers of the services and, of course, the chairman himself
do take ownership of this. Because at first it sets the
culture. It becomes all right to be a strategist and be an
intellectual. You can see examples of people who manage to be
very effective warfighters who are also intellectuals as well.
Also, of course, in terms of resource acquisition, the
higher your proponent, the more likely you are to get them.
Also, the four-stars are in a uniquely good position to ensure
that follow-on assignments and that promotion boards and such
take the proper notice of these accomplishments of the officers
and their education.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Murray.
Dr. Murray. I couldn't agree more with what has just been
said.
I think a couple of additional points. One is in terms of
promotion boards. I think an officer's record and standing
performance in whatever PME school they have attended should be
as important in terms of judging that officer for promotion as
service in the field. I think that there has also been,
unfortunately, as I said earlier, far too little--and General
Barno obviously feels this way, too--far too little attention
paid by four-stars to professional military education.
I can tell you the innumerable times I have heard, sitting
in the various auditoriums of the war colleges, four-star
generals say, have a great time here, play golf, get to know
your family. And that is just the worst kind of
irresponsibility. But it happens far too much. And only a few
times have I heard somebody like Tony Zinni say, this is the
most important year of your military career. And it is. I think
it really is, given the kind of environment we confront in the
21st century.
Dr. Snyder. I am going to run out of time. I want to spend
some time talking about the issue of the civilian graduate
degrees. Let me set myself up for the next five minutes.
But do you all have any hard numbers right now--because I
don't; I don't know if staff does--on what percentage of our
general officers have civilian--meet the standard that you are
setting? Do you prefer they have a degree from a good civilian
school? Does anybody have those numbers?
General Barno. I don't have any with me. I know that
Professor Leonard Wong at the Army War College did a study on
this in the Army, one-star selects, just a couple of years ago;
and he compared it with one-star selects about 10 years past.
And that the number of officers plummeted to single-digit
percentages in the newest group compared to 10 years ago
because all the officers in the newer group had graduate
degrees, but the vast, vast majority came from military
institutions. Whereas 10 years ago there were a substantial
number that came from civilian institutions.
I am sure we can get that study. That pertains only to the
Army.
Dr. Snyder. I would assume the number is fairly small.
Dr. Murray. Dr. Snyder, let me give you one figure which
the committee might find interesting.
General Scales, when he was commandant at the Army War
College and I was working for him as the Johnson Professor of
Military History, came up with a figure which I think is truly
astonishing in 1999. I can't vouch for it today, but it would
be interesting the look at.
Basically, he discovered the PRC, the People's Republic of
China, its officers, it had more officers in American graduate
schools than the services had in American graduate schools.
Dr. Snyder. Mrs. Davis for five minutes.
Mrs. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am sorry that I haven't been here for your remarks
earlier, but I did want to ask you about an issue that I had a
chance to go over and hear a number of people speak on the
other day. There was a summit, if you will, held on sexual
assault and prevention of that in the services, and different
services presented, as well as a number of other experts. They
met both Monday and Tuesday. And I am wondering if you believe
that there is sufficient focus--is there focus on these issues
as it relates to military culture within the education of our
men and women and the programs that you are very much engaged
in? What are we doing at that level and what do you think about
that education and where should the focus be?
Dr. Williams. Well, of course, the Tailhook scandal turned
out to be a teachable moment for everyone. I think from that
point on it was a very high priority of the Congress and
therefore of the military, but also people inside the military
who were horrified by the events and other things that
occurred.
It became no longer part of the culture to regard women as
the other rather than regard the women officers and enlisted as
part of the us and part of the total force. You can't operate
without them. They are absolutely vital. They need to be
treated at all times with dignity and respect. And when those
occasions occur that they are not, it is and should be a
career-seeking missile to anyone who would behave
inappropriately.
So I think--and even in the civilian world it doesn't ever
reach perfection, but I think it is so much better, and I think
it deserves continuing attention so it can continue to be a
priority.
General Barno. I am not sure I have visibility today
currently on how that has evolved, since I left active duty
three-plus years ago. I do know at that time it was an embedded
part of all the training programs as well as a unit training
requirement. There has been a tremendously larger emphasis
placed in the three years since I last looked at it, but I
can't give you any current information, particularly at the
senior levels.
Mrs. Davis. Thank you. I appreciate that.
One of the concerns that has been expressed is that, as
people are looking at advancement, how our leadership handles
those issues as part of their unit, that that should be
considered as seriously as any other issues that would go
before any panels. Would you concur with that? Do you think it
should be an important metric, if you will, of whether or not
somebody actually is seen as moving up in leadership?
Dr. Williams. I would hope anybody reaching senior levels
would be sensitized to this issue. Obviously, there is always
the possibility of someone having an undeserved bad reputation
over some issues, because people differ on what happened and
when and what was done. So as long as the standards of fairness
are observed, obviously I quite agree with you that this does
need to be a consideration.
General Barno. I would look at it I think from the overall
performance standpoint. This is an important part of their
leadership responsibilities. Are they exercising it
inappropriately or are they involved at the right level?
There is some risk that if we get too focused on
individuals' performance in this area that we get across some
legal thresholds, because most commanders have got legal
responsibilities. I think we would be not well advised to
intrude and make decisions or make judgments based upon what
their legal decisions were in that system. But I do think it is
clearly and I am very confident that all senior officers look
at this as part of the leadership responsibilities that every
officer has out there, and how they perform in that obviously
will dictate their future promotion potential.
Dr. Murray. I would argue that it is a training issue that
needs to be hammered home from the first class that an
individual takes at a service academy or at a university in
terms of ROTC. I am not sure it is an educational issue,
because if they haven't gotten it by the time they are an O-3
then they shouldn't be wearing the uniform.
Mrs. Davis. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Platts.
Mr. Platts. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I just first echo Congresswoman Davis's focus on the issue
of sexual misconduct. In the Oversight and Government Reform
Committee in the past session we have had hearings on the
National Security Subcommittee specifically focused on the
service academies. And, you know, thankfully there is more
focus and attention to this issue, because I think it is at a
critical stage where we do send that message that there will be
zero tolerance for this type of misconduct and it will be
treated.
Unfortunately, when we had that hearing and we had, I
believe, all the commandants or the senior officials from the
academies in the one hearing, and only one of them ever used
the word ``crime'' in their remarks. Because that is what we
are talking about here in the type of conduct being considered.
And that message that this is a crime, whether you are in a
service academy or wearing a uniform and you sexually assault
another person, that is criminal, and that needs to be dealt
with. And that message needs to be reinforced day one at the
academy or the ROTC programs, wherever, so that they are not
wearing the uniform if they engage in that conduct. So I
appreciate the importance of that.
I think I know the answer, General Barno, to the question,
based on your statements and written testimony. It is a little
bit of a follow-up to where the chairman concluded. And that is
on the issue of advanced degrees, Ph.D.s. My understanding is
the service-specific schools and the joint PMEs are looking at
increasing Ph.D. possibilities for their students. That seems
to run contrary to your belief in the importance of getting our
senior leaders into civilian institutions for those higher
degrees and to have that education opportunity outside of the
cocoon. Am I taking your remarks in the right context?
General Barno. No, I think it is encouraging to see that
there is movement forward to try to expand the number of
Ph.D.s. But, in my judgment, that ought to occur in civilian
educational institutions. To try and build that--again only my
opinion--to try and build that inside our military educational
establishment really deprives you of an existing world-class
capability that the United States has that is recognized all
around the globe and also, again, doesn't advantage the
military officer by getting them into the civilian world and
the thinking out there, nor does it provide access to the
military officer around those civilian faculties and among
those civilian students. We lose out in both regards there.
One footnote I would also I think add on. That is that I do
have some concerns about the high-grade civilian educational
opportunities both for master's and Ph.D.s if those military
officers who go to those programs come back into our military
and are then marginalized and are no longer part of the command
track in the military. There is some risk that as we expand
these opportunities that we are specializing these officers
into fields that don't any longer include command.
The Army has a wonderful program called Functional Area 59
Army Strategist. And, typically, at the senior captain/major
level, a few lieutenant colonels, they go into this program,
they get an educational experience at the Army War College, and
they go out to the field and they serve on senior staffs as
strategists. Wonderful program.
None of those people will ever command again. They are in a
specialty now that they have been designated a strategist, and
they will never be a commander because they are now single
track in that specialty. I think that is very risky; and there
is many more examples of that I think out there, particularly
in the Army, from what I have seen.
Dr. Murray. It is worth noting that one of them has
actually just been promoted to brigadier general, Bill Hix.
Because nobody thought that anyone would ever be promoted to
general but Bill Hix. He will not command.
I think there is another issue here, which is I have
watched as a military historian over the past 25, 30 years of
my career, and that is the significant decline of military
history programs and strategic studies programs in the United
States. It is worth noting in Canadian universities and in
British universities there will always be one professor, and
usually two or three, dealing with these issues. The number of
major university programs in the United States dealing with
military and strategic history is down to about two or three,
and that is I think a significant weakness and a dangerous
weakness.
Dr. Williams. General Petraeus talked about the importance
of civilian education and the importance of the military going
outside the cloister, close to what you said, Congressman
Platts. I think he is right on that.
In terms of civil-military relations, I want our elite
military officers meeting the brightest, most elite civilians,
and I want them interacting with each other. I want them to put
a human face on one another. I want the military to get how
civilians think, and I want the civilians to get how the
military thinks and not be lured into stereotypes. I think it
would be beneficial for civil-military relations, especially
since they don't really have to come together on many
occasions.
Mr. Platts. I agree wholeheartedly. Because as we have a
smaller percentage of the population having any tie directly or
family to the military, and we are blessed with amazing
military families, and having the privilege of representing the
Army War College, where I see my senior officers that come
through there and then their sons and daughters are the second
lieutenants coming up, you know, it is an amazing commitment
those families make. But it means we have a smaller percentage
of people who understand the sacrifices being made.
I use my family as an example. My dad was one of nine
children. He and his four brothers and all four of his brother-
in-laws all were military. One generation later, one of us five
boys and girls, son or daughter or in-laws, one of five
military service. And that is not good I think for that
understanding of our history and the needs of our military and
the important role. So the more interaction that we can
promote, I agree, is critically important in whatever way we
can do it.
Dr. Williams. The fact that reserve forces are actually
mobilized and actually used and interact and are themselves so
penetrating in the community, I think that fills in for some of
it.
Mr. Platts. Yeah.
Dr. Williams. That is something that isn't often thought
about in terms of reserve forces. But the civil-military
dimension is crucial there.
Mr. Platts. In the current environment, you are right. That
is, I guess, one of the silver linings of the demands we are
putting on the Guard and the Reserve, is that the population as
a whole maybe is getting better educated because of that level
of deployment.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Platts.
We will begin another round of questions.
I wanted to talk more about the civilian degree issue, too.
Give me some practical--your practical thoughts about how it
would work if you are all recommending that that be increased.
And I assume you mean increased in fairly large numbers. So,
you know, what kind of numbers of people would you be talking
about?
I assume this would primarily be master's degree levels,
but some Ph.D.s. Would there be like a list of schools that
would be considered acceptable? I think you all say civilian
degree at high, you know, quality institutions. Would there be
a list of kind of approved colleges, universities that the
military would have? Would there be a list of fields that it
would be in?
You all are advocating in terms of broadening of experience
and visions and all. But there are some very narrow graduate
fields, you know. You can get into a very specific field of
advanced mathematics or chemistry or information technology.
Give me your ideas--and we will start with you, Dr. Murray--on
some of the specifics of how you would flesh out that in terms
of numbers and expense and all.
Dr. Murray. The only place where I have real experience
with that is the Army at West Point. Because Dr. Allan Millett
and myself, running the military history and strategic studies
program at Ohio State for a 20-year period, there was the
history department at West Point had a very clear list of
institutions that they regarded as being first class in
military history or western European history or American
history. And the officers were given latitude in picking which
institution they went to, but they were constrained, and they
had to get accepted at the institutions.
Given the quality of the officers--and here I think one
isn't really talking about sending the entire cadre of Army
captains to graduate school. I think it should be an elite
program. I recommended to General Mattis when he was down at
Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC) that the
Marines try a program for captains, and maybe six or seven a
year to go out to get a Ph.D. and then come back into the
Marine Corps after two years.
Dr. Snyder. The Ph.D. I think all of us would recognize
would be a fairly small number. But if you are talking about
master's degree programs--you are advocating master's degree
programs at civilian institutions, I assume those would be in
much greater numbers. What kind of numbers?
Dr. Murray. Again, I don't think you want to send a huge
number out. And, again, the people who I would send out, I
would send them all out to get master's, and some of them
within the two-year confines of certain universities get the
ABD when they walk out. And I think West Point is a wonderful
example. They are then brought back to do a two- or three-year
tour at West Point teaching their specialty. The services could
bring these officers back to any number of institutions for a
two- or three-year payback.
The crucial element General Barno mentioned is they
absolutely must not be punished for--and there is an element in
the service cultures that somebody who has gone out, gotten a
Ph.D. or a master's degree for two years and then taught for
three years is no longer qualified to be an outstanding
officer. And, you know, H.R. McMaster is an example of how
stupid that approach is.
Dr. Snyder. Would you have some restrictions on what fields
they could go out and get the master's--would that be a list of
approved subject areas?
Dr. Murray. Yes. I think so. I think there are certain
things that the military is interested in, should be interested
in. And this, of course, includes hard sciences as well. I
think it is absolutely essential that some officers go out and
get master's or Ph.D.s in engineering and et cetera.
But, again, I think it should be guided by both the short-
term interests of the service--and, for example, the Navy would
right away say, well, we are to send everybody to get an
engineering degree. And yet if you look at people like Admiral
Stavridis, Admiral Blair, very clearly they are individuals who
have gotten degrees in something other than hard sciences and
profited by it.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Williams, do you agree that the numbers
even for the master's degree program would be small?
Dr. Williams. I don't think it would have to be for
everyone. And I think the nonresidential programs do serve a
need. You can't send the whole military to graduate school.
That is not feasible in a whole lot of dimensions.
I have no problem with outlining what courses of study
would be most acceptable for the military to pay for or to give
time off to do. And certain locations. Obviously, some of the
great programs out there. And I think there would have to be
some flexibility for someone who proposes something especially
interesting and useful, to make exceptions. I mean, for a
student to be able to go study with Charlie Moskos back in the
day at Northwestern was a great idea, even though there are
lots of places at Northwestern that would not at all be useful
for a military person to go to.
In the case that Dr. Murray was talking about, if you know
your follow-on assignment, they can have some impact on that.
In the case of West Point, it is perfect. Because they know
what they want, they know where they have had success, and it
works very well.
But I would reinforce the comments made. You can't punish
these people because they were out playing at an educational
institution rather than standing on the bridge of a ship at
zero dark 30 with binoculars around their neck. Because every
week you are at graduate school it is a week you are not doing
that.
Dr. Snyder. Any comments on that, General Barno?
General Barno. I have got several thoughts on this. And I
note in my written testimony that I think that it ought to be
focused and probably incentivized for officers that are
promoted early, that that should be an expectation maybe not
the first time but from then on anyone who is promoted early
ought to have gone to a civilian graduate school. And the
service ought to design a program to do that.
Interestingly, the Army offered----
Dr. Snyder. Excuse me for interrupting, but, by putting an
incentive for that, that makes the numbers really, really high
in conflict with Dr. Murray.
General Barno. No, that is about five percent of each year
group, roughly. It is quite small.
What is interesting to me in this is that the Army, to its
immense credit, in my judgment, about five years ago, four
years ago, put a program in place to offer top-notch up-and-
coming Army captains a two-year option either to go to graduate
school with no follow-on assignment to West Point that would
take them away from the field for even more years. They could
go out, they would go to graduate school, they would sign up
for a little bit of additional required duty in the Army, but
it was designed to retain high-quality officers.
And anecdotally is what I heard from that is that, after
running it for three years, it was undersubscribed, and it was
not attracting the top tier of candidates. Just the opposite of
what you would expect.
And this gets into this issue of the muddy boots Army at
war right now. And we all recognize that the Army is in a major
fight. The Marine Corps, the services are all fighting in Iraq
and Afghanistan, so the expectation has been that I am either
back here getting ready to go to Afghanistan as a captain or I
am in Afghanistan or Iraq as a captain. And if I am out at
graduate school in a time of war, this is even more
debilitating for officers' careers than it would be under
normal conditions. So we have got to again change the senior
leadership mind-set of what is most valued.
And I note in my written testimony as well that, you know,
in talking to some individuals that are involved in one-star
selections here recently, those repeat operational tours are
what counts.
Dr. Snyder. A bias towards tactical----
General Barno. Absolutely. Absolutely. When we take people
out of the pipeline for even two years of graduate school in
the midst of a war, and that is not really incentivized by a
requirement that I can't get promoted to early promotion to my
next rank if I don't do this, if we don't connect that as
almost a requirement, then we really have devalued that in
force.
A final note is that I think West Point assignments are--
and I saw this even when I was a captain--are broadly looked
down upon inside the operational career force. That those are
viewed now as assignments that you will pay the five-year price
to go there following graduate school, but you will come out of
there and you won't be a commander any more. You will be a
specialist. You will no longer be competitive for command. You
won't be the Dave Petraeuses of the future or the Marty
Dempseys of the future because the system simply isn't going to
give you that latitude. Especially among your peers, again, who
have spent the last five years rotating back and forth to Iraq
and Afghanistan.
So we have created, particularly in the last 9 years or so,
an absolute muddy boots force, the results of which may play
out in some not happy ways for us 10 or 15 years down the road
in terms of who is available to be our senior leaders.
Dr. Murray. Let me add something, because I think this is a
very important point. There are some exceptions. H.R. McMaster
is a very good exception who not only was the outstanding
squadron commander at 73 Easting, destroying with his squadron
an entire brigade of Iraqi tanks, went to the teaching program,
graduate program at University of North Carolina, wrote a
dissertation, wrote the finest book on how we got into Vietnam,
a sad story indeed, and then went out to I think it was al-
Anbar or one of those places out there--no, north of that--did
an extraordinary job as cavalry regimental commander out there
and had a very difficult time getting promoted to general even
with this extraordinary record behind him.
So I think we are dealing here with a very difficult
problem; and it goes across all the services, not just the
Army, a cultural problem that somehow you haven't been doing
the right thing if you have been out in school or teaching at
West Point. And I think that is very, very deleterious; and I
don't know what to do to change it.
Dr. Snyder. Mr. Wittman.
Mr. Wittman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, in our last question we talked a little bit
about how do we emphasize the interagency experience a little
more in PME; and some of the feedback you all said was we want
to make sure we get folks there from the different agencies,
from State, from USAID there as instructors. And I think not
only in addition to that, we probably ought to get them there
also to study.
The question is, are there enough qualified people within
those agencies to be instructors or to get to the PME
experience to study? And, if not, what do we do within those
agencies to create policies or initiatives to direct people
into the PME system both to instruct and to study, to sort of
round out that experience?
And I know we have heard from some other folks in the past
that there is some inertia there within the agencies that say,
hey, listen, that is outside of our bailiwick. We don't want to
participate. They don't see value in it. But it seems like to
me if we are going to really round out this experience we have
to have that, and we have to find ways to make that work in a
way that the agencies actually want to make that happen, rather
than to say or internally to say, well, yeah, you can go that
path, but, guess what, it is not going to help you
professionally down the road?
General Barno. Well, perhaps a couple thoughts.
My expertise in the other agencies is not deep at all. But
having worked with them in the field, I think that one of the
great benefits the military has that perhaps could be mandated
in the other agencies of government is to at least establish a
small schools account of officers, of 10, 15, 20, whatever the
right number is, that that agency is required to keep in a
school environment. And, theoretically, you could build their
end strength, their resource end strength up to that level.
State Department actually did this when General Powell was
Secretary of State a few years ago. But the immediate expansion
of State requirements consumed all those people, and they went
out right out to Iraq and Afghanistan. So they had the right
idea, they got it all the way to fruition, and then they were
consumed by a new, unexpected requirement.
And in many of these other agencies I think it could be a
much smaller number. But the fact that the number today is zero
gives them no incentive. Even if they were to establish a
school float, if you will, of 10 people to attend schools on a
regular basis, that would help give them the top cover to be
able to do that.
On the instructional side, I tend to think that was almost
too hard for them and that perhaps retired Foreign Service
officers, retired AID employees at the senior level could be
recruited in to do some of the school work. But I think from
the student standpoint you have to build that institutionally
into their organizations.
Dr. Williams. You know, we talk about how hard it is to get
all the services on board and sending the best people to joint
schools and then rewarding them when they get out of it. I
mean, how much more difficult is it for people looking at their
own career when they are outside of the military thinking,
well, do I want to send this person here, and why would I want
to go there? Because I am going to be hammered when I get home
in my own agency. That is a problem. I don't know how to get
into that one.
Dr. Murray. I would argue that the problem goes even more
deeply than that. That, for example, the Army War College,
which I have had the most recent experience with there, and
there is an extraordinary number of colonels who come in or who
eventually retire there, but who have been the West Point route
or some other route and have a Ph.D. in military history or
strategic studies or international relations, an outstanding
academic background, and the problem is that if you bring
people in from the CIA or from Treasury, whatever, they have no
academic background at all. And so you are dealing with then
you are almost making the interagency process look like a
catastrophe.
Because the people who are brought in, unfortunately, my
experience has been that the various war colleges--and maybe it
has changed now--is that the agencies don't pick their best
people to go there. Some of them do go there, but it is usually
idiosyncratic or somebody just simply is interested and wants
to do it.
Mr. Wittman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
Dr. Snyder. Dr. Murray, we met a student at one of the
colleges from the State Department who was there spending I
think it was almost a full academic year, but he was a State
Department security guy. And he was there and he was a good
person, he was a very good security guy, but they kept coming
and asking him to comment on foreign policy. And he said, I am
the security guy. But that was the problem that the State
Department has currently with their lack of a float.
Mrs. Davis.
Mrs. Davis. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Maybe just following up on that question, because I think
that one of the frustrations that we have certainly had is that
when it came to the individuals serving over in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the professional military education as well as the
training that people had received put them at such a much
higher level than State Department personnel and others that
were coming from other agencies in terms of their, you know,
their breadth of experience really at that level.
And what you are saying about the interagency, that in fact
people coming from other agencies don't have the academic
background to be able to actually fit in and to be able to make
a contribution--I mean, I think that is what I heard you
saying. And that is interesting. And I am just wondering, how
do we mitigate that? What are your thoughts and ideas about
that?
Dr. Murray. I am not sure there is an answer. I think there
is an additional problem to the one you just raised, which is
the fact that military officers from the beginning of their
career are used to running things, running a large group of
people. Even a platoon commander is going to have 40 or 50
people who he is responsible for. And he has got to organize
his training. He has got to deal with seniors in a very complex
environment.
And that is not simply true of the experience of officers
in other agencies. They don't run large groups. And they are
staff. They are part of a bureaucracy which is very important
and essential, and so they are coming from a handicap from that
point of view.
And it is very difficult. I don't have any answers. But it
is well worth sort of underlining the difficulty, because
somebody needs to start thinking about addressing the problem.
Mrs. Davis. Yeah. Anybody else have any thoughts?
General Barno. I think it is a huge issue. The fact that we
are having to put people there at all doesn't make it any
better. The only mitigating possibility could be to try and
either encourage or require those participants to have served
in the field in that setting with military officers so that at
least they have an experiential background, even if they don't
have an academic background, to be able to contribute to the
dialogue at the senior level that is going to go on at the War
College. And there are going to be an increasing cohort of
those people out there in all these agencies. So I think
tapping them then for follow-on school assignments could be
quite valuable.
Mrs. Davis. Yeah. Part of it is the openness of the
services as well. Because I think that, again, this is really
more at a different level rather than education, but clearly
the military has a much deeper bench than the civilian
community does, certainly than the State Department does, and
so people can float more easily. You don't have as many people
to pull.
And I thought your idea about trying to preserve a number
of positions that actually are not just--it is almost not just
for their own education, but it is also for their opportunity
to provide their perspective to others. I mean, they are in a
very different role when they are doing that; and we need to
try and facilitate that process. I am not sure of the answer
either, but I think it is an important one.
I wanted to just ask you briefly about the role that
professional military education has in ROTC. I mean, typically,
that is a recruiting and perhaps a superficial level of
training in some ways that ROTC has had a role in that way. I
know just speaking from my own experience with a number of ROTC
instructors, wonderful, wonderful people, but probably were not
able to play a broader role in terms of the education of many
of the men and women in ROTC.
Do you think that we should be focusing more on that?
Should DOD and should the schools be trying to use that as a
much stronger vehicle for helping to at least inspire young
people, whether they actually go into the service or not, but
learning more command and control structures, how to get things
done, whether it is a national security, homeland security? Is
that a role and would that be of benefit to you as you see
young people coming into your schools as well?
Dr. Williams. I have a vested interest in this, I guess. I
did teach at the Naval Academy, and I came from OCS myself. But
I worked closely with the Navy ROTC (NROTC) program at
Northwestern University, because Loyola students go up there on
a crosstown arrangement. It is an excellent program, and the
people that go through there are as fine as any I saw at
Annapolis. They have a very rigorous and a very serious
military component to their program; and they have required
courses that put them in my classes, for example, and other
classes at Northwestern that sort of meet the requirements I
would hope that they would be doing. So it is an excellent
program. I strongly support it. Plus it has the civil-military
implications I discussed earlier.
Mrs. Davis. I am glad to hear the strength of the programs
that you have seen. I suspect that is probably not the same
throughout the country, although there are exceptional
programs, yeah.
Dr. Murray. Let me just add something, too, because I think
it is a rather interesting perspective. And it may well be out
of date because I retired from Ohio State in 1996. What I think
Allan Millett and I noticed over that span in terms of ROTC
programs is there were outstanding officers sprinkled here and
there throughout the various cadres. But the only service that
consistently placed outstanding officers and only outstanding
officers in positions of the ROTC was the Marine Corps.
Consistently, Marine officers, the POIs were outstanding. In
fact, sort of along those lines, with the huge number of
officers that came through Ohio State to teach in ROTC, the
only people who got advanced degrees in military history and
strategic studies were the Marines, which I think says a great
deal about the level of professionalism that the Marines--in
terms of the selection of officers. And my sense is that in the
other services it is not regarded as a crucial key billet,
whereas I think very clearly the Marine Corps regards it. And
it should be. It should be.
General Barno. If I could just add, I think it absolutely
needs to be reinforced. And it is the production mechanism for
the majority of officers. Although in the Army it is beginning
to be outsourced or outcompeted by officer candidate school in
the last couple of years. And this issue of the quality of the
cadre who lead the ROTC detachments is absolutely essential.
Those are the role models, those are the motivators, those are
the recruiters that bring the best people into these programs.
And in the environment we are in today, I can think of no
better place for someone who has come out of combat in one or
two or three tours to go and to mold young people and to have
that experience and be with them for three years or so to be
able to get them to come into these programs. Because that is
going to be the future high-quality officers we are going to
have.
Now, that, too, has been stressed by a variety of factors.
In the Army, a number of ROTC detachments, I think most ROTC
detachments now have at least one wearing a uniform on the
detachment who is a contractor, that they have taken a lot of
the deputy professors of military science and contracted those
positions out. So that is probably not in a lot of ways a
helpful development in terms of the ability for those people to
be role models for young 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds. They are
not in the force anymore. They are not going to be as energetic
as someone who is a 32-year-old captain just out of two tours
in Iraq. So I think we have to look very carefully at that.
And then keeping these people, keeping these quality
graduates beyond that, we haven't really talked about that in
the hearing today. But this issue of how we preserve this
talent once it comes into the force, particularly the
intellectual talent, and not let it leach out of the force at
year six, year seven, year eight, year nine, I think that is
something that is part of PME indirectly, it is part of this
professional education system and the development system of
officers that we don't want to have the wrong officers at the
year 20 or 25 mark out there because all the real high-powered
officers have gotten out because they have gotten discouraged
because of their prospects.
Dr. Snyder. Gentlemen, we appreciate you being here. Those
buzzers are we have a series of votes going on. We may have
some questions for the record, if you would respond to them in
a timely manner.
Let me suggest to you, too, if there is anything
additional, written comments that you would like to make, would
you please send that to us. And we will consider this an open
question for the record to amplify anything you would like to
talk about today.
But thank you for your service here today and for all three
of your long careers for helping our country.
We are adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:32 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
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A P P E N D I X
September 10, 2009
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PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
September 10, 2009
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[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING
September 10, 2009
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QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY DR. SNYDER
Dr. Snyder. What lessons can be gleaned from current and
foreseeable contingencies for educating officers? How should the PME
schools vet lessons learned from current operations into their
curricula?
General Barno. There are a myriad of lessons that today's
contingency operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and globally can provide
to our PME programs; likewise, the prospects of other ``foreseeable''
or unforeseen contingences should help us assess where we are today and
how we can better prepare for an uncertain future. Army Colonel Joseph
Buche, currently a fellow at the Center for New American Security has
written that while training can play a central role in preparing us for
well-understood threats, only education can help our leaders truly
prepare properly for threats characterized by deep uncertainty--I
wholly agree with this premise. Today's operations, especially in the
field on counter-insurgency, have now been well captured in military
doctrine (e.g., the Army-Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24). This
``institutionalization'' of COIN will now create spillover effects in
many other military arenas, which in concert with focused deployment
training for units about to embark to Afghanistan or Iraq, will instill
a solid depth of understanding in these sorts of wars. I am confident
that the military school system will rigorously incorporate the
tactical (battlefield) lessons of current operations into their
curricula; I am much less sanguine that they will even attempt to
understand and incorporate the operational and strategic ``lessons
learned''--in fact, I have seen little to no effort in this arena. Even
more troubling is the likelihood that today's wars will only partly
resemble tomorrow's, and that leaders will not have sufficiently
``opened the aperture'' of minds strongly influenced by current
experiences and training to the wider prospects for rapidly evolving
forms of war. Broad and demanding educational experiences--either in
civilian graduate institutions or in improved senior level military
colleges--are essential prerequisites to future success in America's
wars. Unfortunately, there is too little emphasis accorded to the vital
importance of this level of military education. The efficacy of today's
PME to produce skilled leaders comfortable not just in joint
operations--the focus of the 1986 Goldwater Nichols legislation--but in
national military and national security strategy has been largely
unexamined.
Dr. Snyder. Is the PME system doing enough to integrate PME
curricula, emphasizing joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and
multinational (HIM) concepts? How should lessons incorporating these
concepts be extended to junior officers to best prepare them for
engagement in combat, security, engagement, and relief and
reconstruction operations?
General Barno. I believe that the PME system has done relatively
well in attempting to integrate the concepts of JIM into today's
curricula, particularly in light of the lack of structural or
conceptual integration of these disparate entities in the real world!
Increased civilian participation in PME establishments would
significantly strengthen this exchange of ideas and experience, and
might require some directed ``educational float'' within the civilian
departments of government to support educating this population as well
as connected them in PME to their military counterparts. We no longer
have the luxury of sparing civilian leaders from the demands of working
in these organizations and we need to address ``junior'' civilian
education; however we should avoid adding additional JIM curricula into
junior level officer schools that must continue to focus on tactical
and operational unlikely subjects.
Dr. Snyder. Is the only way to achieve the Skelton Panel Report's
recommended joint (and now increasingly interagency, intergovernmental,
and multinational) acculturation through in-residence education or
should distance or blended learning opportunities be more broadly
embraced by the Services?
General Barno. Beyond in-residence education, I believe that
providing more cross-departmental assignment possibilities would help
each department's officers gain a better understanding of the
challenges, capabilities and limitations of their colleagues across the
government. These experiences should also have a structured educational
component (such as visiting senior leaders, seeing different parts of
the department's responsibilities) so that the experience is as
broadening as possible. Characterizing and structuring such assignments
as ``intergovernmental fellowships'' might be a way to highlight their
importance and encourage a selective application process.
Dr. Snyder. In your testimony you stated that ``fellowships (with
very few exceptions) should not be a substitute for SSC [Senior Service
Colleges], but an additive experiential development opportunity.''
Would you please elaborate as to why there shouldn't be substitutes?
General Barno. The recent nearly unconstrained expansion of
fellowships at the Senior Service College (War College) level--
especially in the Army--diminishes the number of highly competitive Lt
Colonels and Colonels who can attend the structured War College (Joint
or Service) programs and sometimes provides little by way of a
substitute in comparable fields. While all fellowship attendees must
attend the JPME 12 week program at Joint Forces Staff College in
Norfolk, this often occurs years later and does not in itself provide
any educational exposure beyond planning joint operations; national
military and security strategy is not included in any depth. The
second-order effects of these proliferating programs is that the
competitive quality of the officers attending service war colleges is
declining; to fill slots left vacant by fellowships in the Army, for
example, the service is dipping deeper into the reserve components and
non-operational career fields with a resultant notable dearth of active
duty combatant arms commanders in war college seminar groups this year.
The quality and rigor of fellowships vary widely; certain fellowships
(e.g., Harvard's program) have been in existence for years and are
rigorous and productive, others (to include several inter-governmental)
have little or no academic component and can become simply ``work''
programs using ``borrowed military manpower'' to fill a seat vacated by
an absence. This approach in particular provides very little in the way
of educational development for the ``fellow'' but simply offers the
experience of how another organization works from within. These type of
programs in particular ought to be separate developmental opportunities
characterized as ``experiential'' rather than ``educational'' and be
viewed as an additional opportunity above and beyond SSC schooling--not
as a substitute. Broadly, one would expect that the threshold of
educational achievement required to graduate from a senior service
college-level program would be rigorous and demanding; and if so, a
significant number of fellowships on the books today should be
excluded. Unfortunately, there is no such threshold established as to
what specific knowledge, skills and attributes attend to a graduate of
SSC fellowships, so virtually anything goes.
Dr. Snyder. How should officers be selected for in-residence PME
and JPME? Would you use any kind of quality cut? How would you decide
who goes to the joint PME institutions, the National War College, the
Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and the Joint Advanced
Warfighting School (JAWS), in residence?
General Barno. Selection for in-residence PME and JPME should be
rigorous and competitive to reinforce the highly valued nature of these
programs. Non-resident programs of continuing education should once
again be employed primarily for those who were not as competitive for
in-residence selection--as was the case at least for the Army until
about 2004. Approximately 50% of each ``year group'' should be able to
attend in-residence PME; this should perhaps be slightly higher for
those in the command-track/operational career fields given the nature
of both school curricula and the needs of that population. One would
this reasonably expect as a result that nearly 100% of those that
command at the Lt. Colonel level should have attended in-residence
intermediate PME. The most significant aspect of returning to this
system would be to increase the prestige and importance of attending
full-time in-residence PME. Spending ten months devoted to education in
the art and science of war at intermediate and senior levels alongside
carefully selected peers from sister services and agencies creates an
intellectually stimulating environment of shared learning with those
very officers and civilian interagency leaders with whom one will spend
the rest of a professional career. These officers at intermediate and
senior levels should be identified by competitive selection boards
similar to those used to screen for command today: again, this harkens
back to the model used in the Army post-Vietnam until the mid-2000s
with much success. The services could continue to ``slate'' attendance
at both joint and service schools from within this overall competitive
selection; that is, the board selects the individual and the service
``slates'' them to the appropriate service or joint school, based in
part on individual preferences. The protections built into the quality
thresholds extant in JPME schools would ensure those institutions
continue to receive an exceptional quality of student; that has been an
unchallenged outcome of establishing this requirement in the 1986
legislation and will remain so.
Dr. Snyder. Your testimony asserted that: ``no officer in a command
track should be promoted below the zone to lieutenant colonel without a
civilian degree from a first tier institution.'' How should the
Services' personnel systems identify and select the best candidates to
pursue these civilian programs? How would you balance command potential
versus intellectual qualifications?
General Barno. One of the pernicious dangers of the current system,
particularly in the Army, is that there is increasing potential for the
most intellectually gifted officers, beginning at the rank of Captain,
to be weaned away from the operational (or ``command-track'') career
path in order to become specialists who will neither command nor in
most cases ascend to senior rank. If this trend takes hold, many of our
future commanders may become among the least broadly educated and the
least intellectual members of the force--hardly a recipe for sustained
military success. In some ways, this outlook harkens back to the
rightfully maligned British interwar system wherein the ``regimental
officer'' was seen to be most highly esteemed by his peers--in part,
because of his utter lack of outside education and experience beyond
``the regiment.'' The current Army Officer Personnel System
inadvertently supports this type of model for combat arms and
operational track officers. It is a ``single track'' system as opposed
to the ``dual-track'' system that produced the current generation of
Army leaders. Those in the single track operations career field today
are expected to spend all of their time either in the field with troops
or in operational or training staff billets, such observer controllers
at the Army's Combat Training Centers. Despite the recent promise held
out by the Army's so-called ``Pentathlete'' program under then CSA
General Pete Schoomaker, graduate education for the most competitive
operations career field officers has faltered. The ``Pentathlete''
concept posited that Army officers should aspire to be, must be multi-
skilled warrior-diplomat scholars and seek out a broad diversity of
career and academic experiences. Unfortunately, the demands of two wars
and the competitive nature of repeat combat assignments have caused
many of the most highly talented and competitive officers to avoid time
``out of the line.'' Those that seek out civilian graduate schools are
often en route to teaching assignments at West Point, a route that more
and more commonly now leads officers to leave their basic branches and
convert to ``specialty'' career fields. These deeply educated captains
and majors thus often do not return to the operational force but become
single-tracked as ``Army Strategists'' or ``Information Operations''
gurus. Incentivizing operations/command track officers to attend
civilian graduate schooling must take many forms, including citing it
as a waypoint institutionalized in officer career development roadmaps.
But to put teeth in the system, it should also be written into
selection board guidance as a pre-requisite for a second (not first)
below the zone early promotion. This would provide additional time for
officers to reach this goal--at least 12-14 years. Regarding ``command
potential'' as intellectual qualification, I do not believe that
command selection should be somehow tied to any set of intellectual
criteria--performance and potential for future contributions in command
of troops should remain the most important criteria. That said, we
should strive to increase our numbers of well-educated commanders--this
must be a talking point for senior leaders, and most importantly--must
be a serious criterion for selection to flag rank. Education for
strategic leadership and dealing with wicked problems may not be
essential for battalion and brigade commanders, but it is vital for
flag officers. Our system, paradoxically, will serve up the best
tacticians to be selected for flag rank--where we will expect them to
magically re-create themselves as strategic leaders. We must find,
educate and retain intellectual talent in our commanders--for it is
from this group that our senior-most leaders will derive.
Dr. Snyder. How would you alter force development policies (in the
Services' personnel management systems and in the PME system) to
address the challenges associated with the joint, interagency,
intergovernmental, and multinational operational environment?
General Barno. Given the increasing demand for officers to serve in
developmental assignments and receive educational experiences, there
may be a need to provide additional officer authorizations to ensure
sufficient officers can receive these experiences without impacting the
fill of operational billets in the force. This ``buffer'' of officers
above unit and staff billets is absolutely essential to achieve the
goals of dominating the intellectual battlefield; the uncertainty of
the future environment argues for greater numbers available for
schooling, not fewer. This is also manifestly needed at flag officer
rank.
Dr. Snyder. Considering the demands of the twenty-first century
security environment, does the United States need more theoretical
strategists (i.e., idea generators) than the few contemplated by the
Skelton Panel Report? Do we need more applied strategists (i.e.,
practical implementers) than we did twenty years ago?
General Barno. We need more of both, and we need far more of both
to populate the ranks of our flag officers. Again, our system generates
the very best tactical commanders to be teed up for selection to flag
rank. We then continue to pick from this very small cohort for all of
our flag positions--and ultimately, our three and four-stars as well as
other positions with a myriad of duties requiring strategic leadership
understanding and skills. If a service picks forty brigadiers per year
(Army) or ten (Marines), that is the entire bench from which their
future four-stars are selected from. In the Army and Navy, that bench
is further reduced by internal selections for division (Army) or battle
group (Navy) command at the one/two-star level. From this limited pool
comes virtually all of the service four-stars 5-8 years hence. Thus the
importance of selection for the first star becomes overwhelming, as do
the internal thresholds thereafter which may artificially constrain
even among the broader flag officer population who may be competitive
internally for four-star rank.
Dr. Snyder. How might the PME system better enable strategists to
become fluent in geopolitical trends and potential causes for conflict
in the next quarter century?
Trends in: demographics, globalization, comparative
economics, energy supply and demand, food production and distribution,
water scarcity, climate change and natural disasters, pandemics, cyber
connectivity, and the utility of space; and
Contexts for conflict like: competition with conventional
powers, regional influences, weak and failing states, nonstate and
transnational adversaries, the proliferation of WMDs, technological
advancements, strategic communications, and rampant urbanization.
General Barno. Strategists (either full-time specialists such as
the Army's FA 59 program or future generals) absolutely need civilian
graduate education to fully hone their skills and expand their thinking
to the broadest dimensions of strategy in a non-military,
intellectually diverse academic environment.
Dr. Snyder. How should rigor be defined within the PME system in
the future? Should the Skelton Panel Report's notions of rigor (i.e.,
challenging curricula, student accountability, and measurable student
performance) be updated or expanded?
General Barno. Rigor in PME at Command and Staff and War College
programs should be re-examined. Some schools do this well through an
environment more akin to a civilian graduate program with competitive
grading and characteristic graduate programs (Naval War College, for
example). In other programs, grading is pro forma and has no impact on
the student for good or ill; no one can ``fail'' in effect, regardless
of academic performance. There is also an argument to be made that
academic performance ought to be a ``plus'' for future promotion
(including early promotion) and assignments; today, it has little or no
impact on either.
Dr. Snyder. Your testimony asserted that we have not invested
adequately in the education of our senior military leaders, especially
with regard to strategic thinking. You essentially concluded that PME
ends just as flag and general officers reach the apex of leadership
responsibility. What ``measurable educational objectives'' should we
apply to ensure that flag and general officers receive rigorous PME? In
your testimony, you mentioned the United Kingdom's program for
educating flag and general officers as a potential model for reform.
Would you please describe the UK model and its potential benefits?
General Barno. Given the fact that I am not an academic by trade,
and that most of my time in uniform has been as a commander, I am ill-
suited to define ``measureable educational objectives'' for any level
of PME. That said, I believe that flag officers should be held to a
high post-graduate level standard of writing and speaking; that their
performance in one-on-one interviews and persuasive conversations
should be evaluated; that their knowledge of war and warfare at the
strategic level and underpinnings of conceptual understanding of war
should be assessed; and that each of these objectives should be
facilitated by a robust course content in an academically challenging
higher command and staff course of 6-10 months duration, offered to
Major General/Rear Admiral-selects before their first O-8-level
assignment.
This course could be modeled upon the British Higher Command and
Staff course. Although the British course is designed for brigadiers,
the advantage of an O-8 select course in the U.S. would be a narrowing
of focus and of students--no more than about sixty O-7s are selected
for O-8 each year, thus creating a precise cadre of future three And
four-star officers. The Higher Command and Staff Course conducted by
the British Joint Services Command and Staff College, is a 14-week
course for officers (O-6--O-7) destined for higher joint command and
senior staff positions (O-8 and above). The course is primarily focused
on the military-strategic and operational levels of war set in the
wider strategic context. The course is intellectually demanding. Graded
tests, exercises, and a written dissertation are required. Most
importantly, future assignments and promotions are influenced by the
official academic report produced by the college. In the final
analysis, a more robust program, based on the British Higher Level
Staff College would be of great value to the US PME system.
Dr. Snyder. In your testimony, you asserted that ``it will only be
our imagination and intellectual agility, or lack thereof, that will
determine our success or failure in navigating an uncertain and
dangerous future'' and that ``[o]nly an educational background that has
prepared the senior officers of the United States to understand the
fundamental nature of war as well as the enormous variety of contexts
within which it may take place can provide officers with the mental
agility to adapt.'' Would you please elaborate as to how the PME system
should best support the breadth of knowledge and nimble adaptive
qualities that you think are required of successful officers?
Dr. Murray. There are two clear parts to this question. First, I
believe that the whole system from pre-commissioning through to war
college in all the services needs to focus more clearly and effectively
on the fundamental nature of war than is the case at present. Such an
approach demands a deeper and more thorough emphasis on military and
strategic history for those officers who are to rise to the senior
ranks. Thus, study at the staff and war colleges must have war, its
history, and its present dimensions at the heart of what they teach. At
present, only the Naval War College and specialist programs like SAW,
SAAS, and the Army War College's Advanced Strategic Arts Program have
such a focus.
The second part of the question, as to how promote the qualities of
intellect that lead to the nimbleness of mind and ability to adapt, is
more difficult to answer. I believe that at its heart such an
improvement in the PME system would demand a more careful selection of
officers for command level billets--a selection process that would
place performance in the school house as being as important as service
in the field for command at all levels. Those officers who excel at the
staff college level would then receive the opportunity for additional
educational opportunities in civilian and military (such as SAW, SAMS,
and SAAS) graduate schools to widen their intellectual horizons. \1\ In
addition, the services need to select a smaller number of officers at
the O-3 level before they even reach the staff colleges for serious
graduate study in strategic studies, military history, and area
studies. Such changes would demand a fundamental shift in the cultural
patterns of the services, particularly in their personnel systems as
well as their career patterns.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Parenthetically, the Navy needs to create such a second year
program as a follow-on to the Naval Staff College and support the
second year programs of the other services with officers who are on the
fast track to command.
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To facilitate such a program I would urge Congress to increase the
number of O-3, O-4, and O-6 slots (the last strictly for input to war
college faculty) that each service is authorized with these additional
slots specifically targeted for officers enrolled in Ph.D. programs
dealing with military and strategic history or strategic and national
strategic studies (such as Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School).
Authorizing ten slots each year for each service (five for the Marine
Corps) would result in a steady output of officers who were not only
well educated, but who had intellectual contacts with some of the best
minds in academic life outside of the military and produce future great
military strategists like Admiral William J. Crowe and David Petraeus
(both of whom earned doctorates at Princeton). One might designate
these fellowships Congressional fellowships with serious competition
for these places.
Dr. Snyder. Is the only way to achieve the Skelton Panel Report's
recommended joint (and now increasingly interagency, intergovernmental,
and multinational) acculturation through in-residence education or
should distance or blended learning opportunities be more broadly
embraced by the Services?
Dr. Murray. Here, I would suggest that what is need is not more
education, but better education. Thus, I would argue that sending more
outstanding officers out to graduate schools early in their careers
represents a major step in the right direction. Distance education can
also improve the system of professional military education, but only if
it is properly resourced, and the record of the services on this issue
has not been uniformly good. But a first-class distance educational
system that allowed for smaller, in-residence staff and war colleges
would provide a substantial improvement both in the quality of the
student bodies and the faculty at these institutions by allowing a more
careful selection process of the very best.
Dr. Snyder. You emphasized in your testimony that the Service's
personnel system are both outdated and out of synch with the PME
systems, and you have advocated ``significant reform.'' What specific
reforms would you recommend to ensure that PME becomes a higher
priority in the promotion, command selection, and assignment processes?
Dr. Murray. In the largest sense what is needed is a detailed
examination by the HASC of the whole personnel system of the services.
Such an examination would need to go into the kind of detail that your
committee is involving itself in with its examination of the PME
system. I am not an expert on personnel systems; I am an educator. But
there are several suggestions that I am willing to make.
First, as suggested above, the performance of officers in the
various schools must play a major role not only in the selection of
those for early promotion, but in the command selection processes.
Those who do not measure up as outstanding academic performers in the
staff and war colleges must be eliminated for command selection, just
as those who do not measure up in performance in the field are
eliminated from command selection.
Second, the attendance at staff and senior service schools must be
by selection boards.
Finally, Congress must not only allow waivers to mandates, but
demand that the service personnel systems utilize such exceptions.
Dr. Snyder. The Skelton Panel Report considered faculty as the
determinant factor in quality education. What policies would you
suggest be implemented to ensure that the highest quality civilian and
military faculty and senior leaders are assigned to the Services and
joint PME institutions?
Dr. Murray. Faculty along with the nature of the curriculum is the
basis of excellence in any academic program. Unfortunately, while there
have been considerable improvements in the faculty over what was
typical in the late 1980s, there remains considerable room for
improvement. There are a number areas that need improvement:
First, there is too much emphasis on academic credentials instead
of academic and teaching excellence in the selection of faculty. This
has been driven by the desire to give students attending staff and war
colleges master's degrees. This has added an entirely unnecessary
burden on selecting outstanding faculty.
Second, the service personnel systems have consistently refused to
give waivers to those applying for programs to earn a Ph.D. in a
civilian institution in order to teach at a war college (and then have
sufficient time for a pay back tour). Here the competition for such
slots should be open to all O-6s regardless of the time they have
remaining until retirement with the understanding that they will serve
the necessary years beyond 30 to satisfy the requirements for pay back.
Third, a number of staff and war colleges have adjunct faculty not
only to teach in distance-learning programs, but to augment special
programs like ASAP at the Army War College. The whole payment system
treats distinguished professors and academics (like Rick Atkinson and
Eliot Cohen) as well as other serious contributors to PME from the
outside as if they were making widgets for F-22s. Congress needs to
give the war and staff colleges the latitude to pay such outside
professors and augmentees as special cases.
Fourth, if the United States is going to possess world-class
faculties at its PME institutions, then it needs to provide them not
only with salaries above those in the Title 10, but the manning levels
to allow their faculty to have sabbaticals to expand their knowledge
and understanding of war and strategy which in turn will contribute to
the knowledge of these difficult topics they impart to their students.
Finally, let me note that there is a serious impediment to the
bringing on board of world-class faculty in the power that service and
joint personnel offices exercise over the hiring of new professors and
the setting of their salaries.
Dr. Snyder. Will the future security environment require shifts in
the way we formulate and execute military strategy? Will it require
changes in how strategy is taught in PME institutions? If so, can you
describe these shifts and changes?
Dr. Murray. Let me stress here that the fundamental approach to the
study of strategy and policy that the Naval War College developed in
the early 1970s under Admiral Stansfield Turner remains the clearest
and deepest examination of strategy that has ever been developed. Some
of our greatest academic institutions (Yale and Ohio State) have based
their grand strategy courses on that of the Naval War College. What
needs to change is that the other PME institutions should come up to
the same benchmark. Humankind has always lived in a world of change;
but the fundamentals of human behavior remain the same. We do not need
new gimmicks in the study of strategy. What we need is not to forget
the past. We have repeated all too often in my lifetime the mistakes
that previous generations of civilian and military leaders have made.
And we should not forget George Marshall's comment in an address at
Princeton in 1947 that if you want to understand the strategic
environment, read Thucydides.
Let me emphasize here that I am not advocating the teaching of
academic history, but rather using academic history to examine and help
in understanding the present as well as to think about future
possibilities. The ``Joint Operating Environment,'' published by Joint
Forces Command in November 2008 represents an example of how history
should be used to think about the future.
Dr. Snyder. Considering the demands of the twenty-first century
security environment, does the United States need more theoretical
strategists (i.e., idea generators) than the few contemplated by the
Skelton Panel Report? Do we need more applied strategists (i.e.,
practical implementers) than we did twenty years ago? If so, what
percentage of the officer corps would need to exhibit these skills?
Dr. Murray. There is no way to measure the right number. One would
be sufficient, if she or he were in the right position. The crucial
issue is not necessarily to develop theoretical strategists, rather it
is to insure that those at the highest levels in the American military
have a thorough intellectual grounding in strategy. And they can only
gain the insights necessary for such grounding in a deep education in
war and strategy, gained through the study of history.
Dr. Snyder. How might the PME system better enable strategists to
become fluent in geopolitical trends and potential causes for conflict
in the next quarter century?
Dr. Murray. I do not mean to be flippant here, but most of these
can be readily grasped by a coherent reading program of the nation's
great newspapers (readily available online) and by reading an
intelligent selection of major news magazines. The hard part comes in
understanding what such trends might mean. As Joint Forces Command's
``Joint Operational Environment'' makes clear, humankind has confronted
throughout history an environment of constant change. We have been
caught by surprise in the past and we will be caught by surprise again
and again in the future. Only by having a grasp of what the past
suggests can we begin the processes of preparing to adapt.
Dr. Snyder. How should rigor be defined within the PME system in
the future? Should the Skelton Panel Report's notions of rigor (i.e.,
challenging curricula, student accountability, and measurable student
performance) be updated or expanded?
Dr. Murray. The improvement in academic rigor in the staff and war
colleges has been considerable since the late 1980s, but most of the
other PME institutions have not come up to the standards of the Naval
War College or the mark set by the Skelton Panel. Above all,
intellectual rigor depends on the presence of a first-class faculty.
The crucial issue to me, however, is that until performance at the
staff and war colleges becomes a major player in promotion and
selection for command billets, rigor will remain almost meaningless in
the development of a military leadership with strategic and operational
vision.
Dr. Snyder. Are there elements of rigor that should be standardized
among all PME institutions? How much discretion would you afford each
individual institution in defining rigor?
Dr. Murray. Here I believe that the institutions must define their
own approach to education. Having watched the services and the joint
world operate for the past fifteen years, my sense is that should there
be efforts to achieve uniformity in a common approach, standards would
fall to the lowest common denominator. The crucial issue is that each
staff and war college should render to each individual officer's
service an academic report that has rests directly on the student's
academic ranking in his class: A ranking that would delineate the top
10 percent; the second ten percent; and the rest with a clear, rigorous
examination of each student's strengths and weaknesses.
Dr. Snyder. You have asserted that the PME system is ``seriously
underfunded,'' and you have noted that this undermines the ``quality of
faculty'' at PME institutions. Would you please describe how increased
funding for PME might alleviate that problem and any other problem for
which you think funding is the issue?
Dr. Murray. I believe there is a fundamental mismatch between the
stated desire of possessing a world-class faculty and the reality.
First, if you want the best people, then you should be prepared to
pay them. Equally important, if you expect them to do serious research
in military or strategic history and issues, then these institutions
must make sabbaticals available. This, in most cases, will not only
involve fully paid leaves of absence, but travel funds so that faculty
members can visit archives, attend conferences, and visit U.S.
commanders and their staffs not only in the United States, but in other
parts of the world.
Second, these institutions need to have the funding to sponsor
major conferences of leading academics, theorists, strategists from
around the world, not just from the immediate area, as is so typical of
what passes for strategic conferences in this town. Travel is
expensive, but the cost needs to be borne, especially in exposing the
students to great thinkers from elsewhere than just the United States.
Third, greater funding is needed for inviting outside speakers to
address the student body on fundamental issues of military and
strategic history.
Finally, I believe that the National Defense University remains
still part of the Army's budget. If this is so, it should receive its
own funding line, independent of any service within the Department of
Defense. Moreover, it should be directly placed, if possible, under the
Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the JCS.
Dr. Snyder. What are your views on the current military and
civilian leadership and academic requirements for: Presidents,
Provosts, Commandants, Deans, CAOs, Deans of Students, and Chiefs of
Staff? Should we adjust any of these requirements?
Dr. Murray. I can only give the most general of answers, because I
have been an observer rather than a participant in the PME world for
over a decade. But in general, I would suggest that most of the
individuals who head up the staff and war colleges have received their
appointment not because of their academic qualifications, or because of
their intellectual interests. Instead, most have been selected on the
basis of providing them a sinecure before they retire. Let me stress
that this has not always been the case, but it has been the case too
often, given the importance of these institutions.
Moreover, those who are qualified for the job because of their
interest and qualification, rarely have the time to make major changes
in the quality and culture of an academic institution. A three-year
assignment, which is the consistent practice, is simply too short a
time to make major changes in most cases. Here, it is not so much a
matter of adjusting requirements, but rather encouraging the
appointment of senior, qualified general and flag officers to these
positions for sustained periods of time. And I would recommend that the
position of president or commandant at the war colleges should be a
three-star position rather that two stars.
In conclusion, let me emphasize that I have been honored to
participate in your effort I would also like to express my admiration
for your efforts to repair some of the deficiencies that exist in the
current system of professional military education.
Dr. Snyder. You concluded in your testimony that, ``maximum
exposure to rigorous civilian academic standards will strengthen PME,
better prepare the military to deal with future challenges, and
strengthen the bonds between the military and society.'' You also noted
that the military will be increasingly called upon to perform its
missions among civilian elements both at home and abroad in a new
``hybrid'' security environment, blending international, transnational,
and sub-national threats. How should civil-military relations be taught
within PME curricula to optimize preparedness for civil-military future
requirements?
Dr. Williams. The best curriculum for teaching civil-military
relations in both the military and civilian environments begins with a
solid grounding in the classics of the discipline, starting with the
works of Morris Janowitz and Samuel P. Huntington. At the risk of
omitting other scholars whose work I also admire, Charles C. Moskos,
Sam C. Sarkesian, David R. Segal, James Burk, Peter Feaver, Richard
Kohn, Eliot Cohen, Don Snider, Deborah Avant, Moshe Lissak, Bernard
Boene, Christopher Dandeker, Anthony Forster, and many others come to
mind as scholars who revised and supplemented this early work in
important ways.
Most military officers are familiar with the theories of military
professionalism of Samuel P. Huntington. These reinforce the dominant
internal narrative of a professional military occupying a distinct and
somewhat separate position with respect to civilian society. There
should also be a deeper understanding of work of Morris Janowitz,
especially his view that the military is closely related to society--
growing out of it and sharing its values.
The discipline of civil-military relations is well developed and
has a rich literature. Much of the best work is found in the pages of
Armed Forces & Society, an interdisciplinary and international
scholarly journal dedicated to the study of military professionalism
and the relations between the military and society. (This journal,
edited by Patricia Shields, is the official journal of the Inter-
University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, which I have to
privilege to chair.)
Prior to this detailed study, however, officers need to be educated
in such a way that they are intellectually curious, able to analyze
complex and ambiguous situations, understanding of foreign cultures,
and capable of expressing themselves clearly. These are core
competencies not only of budding strategists, but anyone who will
conduct military operations in situations where the human terrain is a
factor and victory is not based on firepower alone. These competencies
are best developed in highly demanding academic programs based on the
social sciences and humanities.
Dr. Snyder. Is the only way to achieve the Skelton Panel Report's
recommended joint (and now increasingly interagency, intergovernmental,
and multinational) acculturation through in-residence education or
should distance or blended learning opportunities be more broadly
embraced by the Services?
Dr. Williams. There is no substitute for in-residence educational
experiences of the highest quality as early in an officer's career as
feasible given the requirement for specialty training at that stage.
Education and training go hand in hand, and in-residence training is
irreplaceable for education. The acculturation recommended in the
Skelton Panel Report requires face to face interactions with members of
the groups with whom officers will be called upon to serve. Only in
that way can members of the various institutions get to know one
another and understand their respective institutional cultures. It is
not always true that ``where you stand depends on where you sit,'' but
institutional factors powerfully affect the attitudes and positions of
otherwise similar individuals. It would be best for officers to have a
visceral understanding of these before they work together in a crisis
environment.
From a budgetary perspective, distance learning makes a great deal
of sense; from an educational perspective, it makes less--especially in
the humanities and social science courses required to develop critical
analysis and communications skills. Whatever the budgetary
implications, distance learning does facilitate access to the far-flung
military population. One could imagine some kind of blended program in
which fact acquisition--as opposed to acculturation and socialization--
is performed outside the traditional classroom, but the ratio of in-
class interaction to online actions should be as high as possible. Of
course, a great deal of individual self-study is required for
professional development before, during, and after formal educational
experiences.
Dr. Snyder. Your testimony was very encouraging of increased civil-
military interaction, especially in the academic arena. Would you
please elaborate on how specific types of scholarly interactions might
benefit the PME system, and the officer corps as a whole?
Dr. Williams. There are many opportunities for the sort of civil-
military interactions that would benefit both the PME system and the
officer corps as a whole:
Broadly based ROTC programs at our best universities are
an important link with civil society and provide a diverse infusion of
new officers.
Civilian graduate education brings the most talented
military and civilian students together in the most demanding
educational settings; it also exposes high-potential officers to
civilian academic ways of thoughts and to the highest intellectual
standards and puts a human face on the military for future civilian
leaders. It goes without saying that the selection process for these
assignments must be based on individual merit and potential for
distinguished future service.
Highly qualified civilian instructors in military PME
institutions, either on a permanent of rotating basis, bring a bit of
the civilian education experience inside the military PME system.
Participation in appropriate academic conferences
promotes meaningful professional interactions between the civilian
academic community and the military, to the advantage of both. It also
stimulates officers to write papers and eventually publish their work.
Membership in scholarly societies such as the Inter-
University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society provides important
professional interactions and a network of professional contacts.
Publication in rigorously reviewed scholarly journals
ensures a wide audience of expert civilians for the authors' work and
the publication process generates a great deal of useful intellectual
feedback.
Dr. Snyder. The Skelton Panel Report considered faculty as the
determinant factor in quality education. What policies would you
suggest be implemented to ensure that the highest quality civilian and
military faculty and senior leaders are assigned to the Service and
joint PME institutions?
Dr. Williams. Others are better positioned to comment on specific
assignment policies, but I would note that training future strategists
and implementers has implications for recruitment, future assignments,
and promotion. The most appropriate officers must be selected for PME
positions as both students and faculty. All must utilize the
competencies they develop in their future careers, which must be long
enough for the Services to benefit from their educational experiences.
In addition, time spent in educational institutions must not be in
itself a negative factor in subsequent promotion decisions.
Dr. Snyder. Considering the demands of the twenty-first century
security environment, does the United States need more theoretical
strategists (i.e., idea generators) than the few contemplated by the
Skelton Panel Report? Do we need more applied strategists (i.e.,
practical implementers) than we did twenty years ago? If so, what
percentage of the officer corps would need to exhibit these skill sets?
Dr. Williams. As the question implies, both idea generators and
practical implementers are needed in an increasingly complex and
ambiguous security environment. Both benefit from highly rigorous
training in a broad humanistic curriculum. This is especially useful
because the future grand theorists may not be identifiable early on,
but they will sort themselves out during the course of study proposed
here. What the precise ratio should be is impossible to predict in the
abstract, but it is not possible to have too many idea generators.
Those officers would likely also have the ability to implement
policies, although the reverse cannot be assumed.
Dr. Snyder. How might the PME system better enable strategists to
become fluent in geopolitical trends and potential causes for conflict
in the next quarter century?
Trends in: demographics, globalization, comparative
economics, energy supply and demand, food production and distribution,
water scarcity, climate change and natural disasters, pandemics, cyber
connectivity, and the utility of space; and
Contexts for conflict like: competition with conventional
powers, regional influences, weak and failing states, non-state and
transnational adversaries, the proliferation of WMDs, technological
advancements, strategic communications, and rampant urbanization.
Dr. Williams. Despite the importance of technological
sophistication in the early part of some officers' careers, especially
in the Navy and Air Force, there is no technical education that will
produce strategists able to deal with the complexity described above.
The only solution is a comprehensive education broadly based in the
social sciences and humanities with an emphasis on history, such as
Admiral Stansfield Turner instituted over great opposition at the U.S.
Naval War College in the early 1970s.
This does not seem to be the path the Navy, at least, is taking.
Recent Navy policy to require that 65 percent of midshipmen at the
Naval Academy and in NROTC programs have technical majors seems
shortsighted, especially in view of the heavy technical course
requirements required of all midshipmen, regardless of major. Indeed,
all USNA midshipmen graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree anyway.
This is not a new trend in the Navy, and was accelerated under the
otherwise beneficial influence of ADM Hyman G. Rickover and with the
assumption that a high proportion of the U.S. Navy fleet would be
nuclear powered. There does not seem to be a significant constituency
inside the Navy (or perhaps the Air Force, which I know less well) to
combat this trend successfully. Its reversal will not occur without
outside inquiry and direction.
For a more detailed exposition of these points, the Subcommittee
may wish to consult ADM James Stavridis and CAPT Mark Hagerott, ``The
Heart of an Officer: Joint, Interagency, and International Operations
and Navy Career Development,'' Naval War College Review, Spring 2009,
pp. 27-41, and RADM (Ret.) Jacob Shuford, ``Re-Education for the 21st
Century Warrior,'' U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 2009, pp.
14-19.
Dr. Snyder. How should rigor be defined within the PME system in
the future? Should the Skelton Panel Report's notions of rigor (i.e.,
challenging curricula, student accountability, and measurable student
performance) be updated or expanded?
Dr. Williams. I cannot improve upon the Skelton Panel Report's
criteria for academic rigor. The challenge will be to operationalize
these criteria so they can be the basis of an effective program. The
most important student outcomes--developing innovative strategists and
effective implementers--may not be apparent for years. I would offer
the caveat that an overemphasis on achieving measurable outcomes will
increase the focus on the technological issues that can be measured
most easily but which contribute the least to developing strategists.
Fitness/efficiency reports for periods of academic study should be used
to help determine future assignments.
Dr. Snyder. Are there elements of rigor that should be standardized
among all PME institutions? How much discretion would you afford each
individual institution in defining rigor?
Dr. Williams. Different programs should be alike to the extent that
they provide a challenging and intellectually open environment in which
officers can develop their cognitive and expressive skills as
effectively as possible. They will differ in the ways in which they go
about achieving this result. Too much standardization is not desirable,
as it stifles initiative and experimentation. I would allow a great
deal of discretion to the educators and administrators at the various
PME institutions, subject to a common understanding on the importance
of academic rigor as stated above.
Dr. Snyder. Each PME school has a different internal organization.
Is a unique organizational character necessary at each of the schools
to optimize the PME mission? What, if anything, should be standardized
among the schools with respect to their organization?
Dr. Williams. I can think of no particular organization of the
schools in the PME system that would further the goals of the Skelton
Committee Report most effectively. Standardization should be at the
level of a common understanding of the educational purpose and the
seriousness with which it should be pursued, not at the level of
organizational details. There is also much to be said for maintaining
the unique character of the various schools.
Dr. Snyder. What are your views on the current military and
civilian leadership and academic requirements for: Presidents,
Provosts, Commandants, Deans, CAOs, Deans of Students, and Chiefs of
Staff? Should we adjust any of these requirements?
Dr. Williams. The leading academic officers of PME institutions
must have strong administrative skills, but they must also understand
the academic process and support its goals. I am not sufficiently
familiar with the details of current statutory requirements or
administrative regulations in this regard to have an informed opinion
on specific guidance. It is imperative, however, that appointees to
these key positions have strong academic qualifications and are
committed to promoting a rigorous educational program in their
institutions. Continued Congressional interest in this issue will be
helpful to focus attention on these criteria and ensure that appointees
are of the highest quality.
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