Forged in War: Joint Professional Military Education and Great Power Competition
Joint professional military education provides the best preparation for an unknown future by introducing students to a wide range of scenarios while grounding them in the importance of understanding unique contextual factors.
Currently, there are exactly zero members of the active-duty force who have engaged in peer-level conflict in which nations armed with the most advanced technology directly engage in conflict. While this type of conflict is least likely, the reality is that peer conflict poses a greater existential threat. This begs the question: if a nation does not have experience fighting a peer war, then how does one prepare for it? Joint professional military education (JPME) critically builds and enhances lethality and readiness across the joint force by grounding officers in the theory and history of war. Furthermore, JPME teaches officers about the capabilities and limitations of each warfighting domain which further supports their ability to apply this foundational learning to wargaming and joint planning in practical situations. Given the closing technology gap between the United States and China, JPME is one of the few areas in which the US possesses a clear advantage, making it essential for victory.
JPME has existed in the United States (US) since 1943. The need for educating officers in joint operations has only increased since then given the new domains of cyber and space as well as the rising importance of the electromagnetic spectrum. Indeed, this is the very idea underpinning the US military’s most important doctrinal development in recent decades as it seeks to integrate and coordinate action across multiple military and non-military environments. To make this complex doctrine successful in peer competition requires more thorough joint education than ever.
The Origins of Professional Military Education
Leaders have long recognized the importance of military education to victory. The Treaty of Versailles, for example, required Germany to shutter the doors of its staff officer school, the Kriegsakademie. The Prussians established the school after the costly losses at the battle of Jena-Auerstedt during the Napoleonic Wars. The Kriegsakademie resulted in the transformation of the German military into a highly effective institution in the ensuring years, such as during the wars of German unification between 1863 and 1871.
The US also has an enduring legacy of recognizing professional military education’s importance. In the United States, William Tecumseh Sherman established what became the U.S. Army’s Command and Staff College in 1881. The Navy lagged it by only three years, establishing the Naval War College in 1884. The Army subsequently introduced its own senior-level education, founding the Army War College in 1901 in response to deficiencies noted during the Spanish-American War.
The ability to think clearly under pressure is not a gift innate to leaders; it is a cultivated discipline honed by thinking deeply about the interconnections that allow successful joint operations.
It took the US almost another 50 years, however, to recognize the importance of joint education. In 1943, the Joint Chiefs of Staff established the Army and Navy Staff College, a four-month program to prepare officers to plan and oversee large-scale joint operations. Senior leaders did not anticipate the college being a complete separation from current operations. Rather, as Commanding General of the Army Air Forces General Henry H. Arnold explained, the college “should translate lessons learned in the field to appropriate doctrine.”
The US also benefited from the education its officers had already received. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, for example, missed combat in World War I. But two years of professional military education prepared him for success in World War II. He applied this expertise to become an exceptional planner and staff officer, serving under General MacArthur in the Philippines. Subsequently, his superior planning performance at the 1941 Louisiana Maneuvers, one of the nation’s largest pre-war exercises, paved the way for his appointment in November 1942 as Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. From there, he commanded the allied military force and partners that destroyed German forces across North Africa, led that force through the conquest of Sicily, and spearheaded the amphibious assault into Italy. During the final twelve months of the war, Eisenhower oversaw the Allies’ complex landing at Normandy, liberation of Western Europe, and the successful invasion of Germany. Taken in whole, Eisenhower’s leadership contributed to Germany’s unconditional surrender and the Allies’ victory in World War II
Emphasis on joint education intensified even further with the realization of a looming new period of competition with the Soviet Union as the outlines of the Cold War emerged, as seen in the tripling of the number of schools devoted to JPME.
Having orchestrated the greatest victory in modern military history, Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, George C. Marshall, and Henry “Hap” Arnold doubled down on their focus on joint military education by establishing the National War College on November 1, 1945. This college continued the mission of the Army and Navy Staff College in encouraging joint mindedness while creatively driving how the US planned to fight its future wars. As Eisenhower explained, “The War College approach to any problem should not be bound by any rules or accepted teaching. If this is not done, the War College loses one of its most valuable and essential assets. The course should be designed to develop officers for high staff and command positions in both peace and war.”
Since 1945, the emphasis on jointness has increasingly spread through additional levels of professional military education, especially intermediate- and senior-level colleges. As Eisenhower explained to students at the Army War College, their “formal education up until the time of the War College had been concerned with the techniques, the tactics, the logistics of the battle, of campaigns; the preparation and the operation of troops. Now you are thinking about war and about victory in war, or better, about keeping us out of war.”
The passage of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act reinforced this approach, with the act’s Title IV providing a path to get the best officers into joint positions and supporting them with improved joint education. In 1989, Congress followed up, assessing this approach’s results by producing the Skelton Report to measure joint education’s effectiveness. The panel suggested a low student-to-faculty ratio of four or three students to one faculty member to ensure time for faculty research. The report also encouraged careful mixes of faculty and student bodies to ensure adequate representation from sister services. Interestingly, the report focused more on the composition of PME than it did on the curriculum. Since the Skelton Report, joint education has increasingly “permeated” individual service curriculum far more than perhaps envisioned, but that makes sense in terms of the progression of US military doctrine.
Why We Need Joint Professional Military Education Today
The rationale for the necessity of joint professional military education is not just historical. Today, JPME continues to integrate the study of military capabilities across all domains while acculturating students in planning language.
Since October 2023, US military operations in the Middle East have demonstrated the complex nature of contemporary warfare. Forces assigned to US Central Command have engaged in major operations, including defending commercial shipping against Houthi missile and unmanned aerial system attacks, contributing to the defense of Israel from missile and one-way Iranian attack drones, building temporary harbors at Israeli ports, and defending US bases from small drone attacks launched by Iranian-backed Iraqi militia groups.
Most of these operations are combined in nature, with the US military working closely with Israeli, British, French, and Jordanian forces. Those same operations routinely integrate air, naval, ground, space and cyber actions against the most modern threats, using emerging technologies in novel combinations against friendly forces. Each operation requires creative problem-solving to overcome the array of operational changes, to include the utilization of emerging technologies. However, these operations are not representative of the potential danger associated with a conflict involving a peer competitor—they are geographically limited, and do not place the U.S. homeland in danger. Joint professional military education provides the best preparation for an unknown future by introducing students to a wide range of scenarios while grounding them in the importance of understanding unique contextual factors.
The most precious and rare asset in the profession of arms is the time to think before acting.
In the near future, as the joint force contemplates potential operations against the pacing threat of China, the resurgent Russian military, or a rogue nuclear state such as North Korea, joint education will become even more important. The pace of change of the character of war and warfare is changing rapidly. War is becoming increasingly rapid, with the ability to levy global threats in a very short period of time. Modern warfare requires diplomatic, economic, military, and information forces while requiring more complex mixtures of conventional, irregular, and special forces. Moreover, operations have moved beyond the simple coordination of independent service capabilities, to require synchronization of various domains to have an outsized effect. Sophisticated planning helps to provide a different kind of mass given that today’s military has fewer uniformed personnel than at any time after 1945. This process is impossible without joint education, because leader development in units invariably takes on service rather than joint perspectives. Joint education offers students the opportunity to consider the contributions of other services and domains, and to set aside the conventional wisdom that so often reflects the lessons of past conflicts without being translatable to future engagements.
The need to integrate and coordinate action across multiple military and non-military organizations can be thought of as joint operations with an order of magnitude greater complexity. Learning how to wield all of the instruments of national power prior to doing so against a determined enemy is a key element to setting the conditions for victory. Orchestrating the employment of the traditional domains of air, ground, and sea with the newer domains of space and cyber is required to create more significant effects when employed together. Joint education is critical to the success of all future US military operations but is particularly applicable to peer competition as the speed and intensity of war intensifies. Students must become proficient in understanding how to develop an “overarching maneuver strategy” so that effects can converge. Retired Army officer Dr. Jeff Reilly also notes that this proficiency may require more strategic thinking to be built into staff and war colleges because planners must incorporate interagency, political, and multinational collaboration, across five rather than the traditional three domains, to achieve alignment. Adaptation has always been a key element of successfully prosecuting warfare, whether it applies to the incorporation of technology, new organizations, or revolutionary employment of assets. To enhance the ability of warfighters to adapt to ever-changing conditions, joint education has the challenging responsibility of educating planners and operators beyond a simplistic understanding of basic capabilities held by the military services, to a broader understanding of all the mechanisms of national power that might be required to prosecute a conflict.
The Role of Civilians in JPME
If JPME is so critical to successful joint military operations, why not ensure that only military officers teach at military institutions? There are two practical reasons. First, the operational tempo relative to the size of the force does not allow enough military officers to be spared to dedicate the time to educating them and to allowing them to spend years at a staff or war college. Second, civilians cost far less. Civilians finance their PhDs themselves before becoming faculty, and they receive fewer benefits than military personnel. By contrast, military officers enrolled in PhD programs like the Army’s Advanced Strategic Planning and Policy Program, or ASP3, cost the Department of Defense their salaries and benefits for the three years they are enrolled in civilian institutions, often sometimes resulting in only a few years of service before their retirement. Civilians also tend to have greater teaching experience, providing continuity to evolve the curriculum and mentoring to prepare officers to teach effectively in the classroom.
Conclusion
JPME does not offer military officers a break from the fight. Rather, it provides the officers with the time they need to educate and mentally and physically prepare themselves for the next fight. JMPE cultivates in those officers the mental agility to draw unseen connections, question assumptions, and bring order within a world of chaos. In combat, military professionals will not have the time to read and reflect on Clausewitz’s provisions on war or revisit the strategic relevance and operational considerations regarding the Taiwan Strait Crisis. But their experience in JPME does provide the mental preparation they need to master the problems associated with these types of challenges.
The most precious and rare asset in the profession of arms is the time to think before acting. General James Mattis epitomizes this approach, explaining: “Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation…Reading doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often the dark path ahead.” His library was his armor, and his reading helped him make better decisions when making those decisions could cost lives. Similarly, Clausewitz argued that “The role of the commander is to bring clarity to confusion.” The ability to think clearly under pressure is not a gift innate to leaders; it is a cultivated discipline honed by thinking deeply about the interconnections that allow successful joint operations.
(Disclaimer: These views are the authors’ own and do not represent the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, or the U.S. Air Force.)
