Thread by @MMazarr

For those hardy few interested in professional military education: Another misleading take on the role of war colleges in producing national tragedies. I get the idea and agree w/their ire at jargon + abstract guidance. But many problems w/this thesis
city-journal.org/putting-the-wa…

1: Generals don't set national strategy. Blaming the "graduates of this [PME] system" for Iraq and Afgh. presumes that bad military strategy was the source of failure. Instead it was the choice to go to war combined w/fact that the conflicts weren't resolvable by military means

No magic PME curriculum will generate strategists able to overcome the problems the US faced in Afghanistan. We do need military leaders more willing to state openly that a given mission isn't feasible--but that's an issue of service culture + civil-mil relations, not PME

Indeed if there was a problem in recent wars, it wasn't that military leaders weren't prepared to tackle the operational requirements of winning. It was that some were *too* focused on military operations to the exclusion of the factors that would produce success

Example: McChrystal's famous first assessment after arriving at ISAF was all about governance as the linchpin to success. What PME curriculum would have prepared him to win that war? Looking at Cannae and Waterloo and Kursk, or a big component on state-building?

2: They claim, "Here is what we know: the only standard that matters is whether our military officers can prevail in war." This is just wrong. Senior officers get 70-80% staff jobs, conduct diplomacy, work interagency and Congress. Mostly non-warfighting tasks after 0-6

Even at lower ranks it's true. Army officers for eg engage w/partner militaries, do rotational deployments, train and advise missions, HADR. All of that is classic peacetime military activity + especially critical in competition with RU and CH. Should war colleges ignore it?

And anyway, what does it take to "prevail in war"? Critical thinking, seeing holistically, being open to new information, etc. Much discussion at NWC was always about the challenge that producing strategists + strategic thinkers is not the same as producing military historians

3: In the 21st century being ready for warfighting = a lot more than force-on-force engagements. Leaders need to know about cyber, AI, drones, space systems, etc. They must focus a *lot* on information warfare (including that waged vs societies), because our rivals are doing so

They need to know something about alliances and international institutions, because both will affect their ability to conduct operations. We don't know what *kind* of war we'll fight so they need to think about COIN, CT, combined arms ops, hybrid ...

... and their day-to-day activities will often be focused on competing below the threshold of war. So they need to understand competitor strategies in these areas, recent gray zone operations, approaches that tend to succeed etc

So now we have a needed curriculum for wide-ranging, strategic, mostly staff-job-doing senior leaders that is way beyond looking at Great Battles of History. And the subjects I just mentioned overlap probably 80% with all the war college curriculums I was familiar with

4: They argue that "By contrast, earlier students at senior military schools studied past wars and military campaigns." This distinction is just false: The fact is, *War never left the war college.* At National we had a very big course on it surveying exactly those things ...

... and sought to use wars and wartime issues as major cases throughout the rest of the curriculum as well. At least according to its web site, the Army War College seems to have plenty of war and military operations in its program of study:
armywarcollege.edu/experience/aca…

PME always has to balance the proper + inevitable core focus on wartime operations w/wider topics that are (1) essential to understanding changing trends in conflict and (2) set the wider context that generates many of the tasks for senior military leaders. No balance is perfect

Finally they suggest that war colleges "must teach graduates to reject simplistic analogies, aphorisms, and the latest 'revolutionary' developments in warfare." Rejecting new developments in warfare doesn't sound like a recipe for wartime success to me

American PME does need shaking up, but the main problem is not that the study of war disappeared from war colleges. It never left; it just became balanced with other critical issues. Needed changes are much more complex and bureaucratically tricky ...

... including a relentless focus on quality of instruction, forcing students to think creatively and strategically, an atmosphere of blunt feedback, allowing schools + profs to innovate, and most of all services sending the message that performance in PME matters for careers

If there's a risk it isn't the absence of war. It's the creeping bureaucratism of a system always ready to impose more guidance, more "metrics," more Joint pubs. The risk is that all militaries have a strong temptation to turn education into training ... and that won't win wars