The Curriculum Wars: How the Naval War College Became the Bradley Fighting Vehicle

Everyone Owns a Requirement. No One Owns the Graduate.

Abstract

The Naval War College has developed a curriculum in which nearly every individual requirement can be defended, yet no single actor is explicitly accountable for the overall weight, sequencing, and coherence. Using the Bradley Fighting Vehicle as an analogy, this article argues for student-centered governance built around a graduate mission profile, a fixed curriculum-weight budget, explicit trade-offs for additions, sunset dates, cross-departmental integration, periodic zero-based review, and a senior academic leader accountable for the complete graduate experience.

In the 1998 satire The Pentagon Wars, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle starts life as a troop carrier. Then, various stakeholders advocate for various requirements: It must scout! Destroy tanks! Carry a cannon, missiles, armor, ammunition, and sensors! It must move quickly, survive enemy fire, cross water, and still be light enough to transport an Infantry Squad! Every demand has a sponsor, and each sounds reasonable on its own. By the end of the briefing, the vehicle’s original purpose is hard to discern beneath everything it has been asked to become.

The film is a caricature, not an acquisition history. The real Bradley became an enduring combat platform, and official accounts describe decades of battlefield service and modernization. Contemporary reviews nevertheless documented disputes over its changing mission requirements, testing, and survivability. The satire endures because it captures an institutional habit much broader than acquisition: when many stakeholders can add requirements, but no one can force a trade-off, organizations tend to solve every problem by attaching one more thing.

Professional military education has its own Bradley Fighting Vehicle. At the US Naval War College, history, theory, planning, leadership, jointness, maritime power, research, writing, technology, ethics, regional knowledge, accreditation, and fleet priorities all make legitimate claims on the academic year. Every course, department, center, committee, and external stakeholder can explain why its requirements matter. Much of the resulting curriculum is excellent, and nearly all of it can be defended. The harder question is whether the whole can still be governed as a coherent design. Every addition is defensible, but the cumulative result is not necessarily coherent.

The Original Requirement

The Naval War College’s mission begins with a clear requirement: educate tomorrow’s leaders. Its published outcomes describe innovative and ethical graduates who can understand complex security environments, think and plan strategically, master operational art, and lead maritime, joint, interagency, and multinational operations. That is not a vague aspiration. It is a description of the product that the nation expects the College to return to the force.

The College has redesigned itself before. The Turner Revolution of the 1970s established a permanent civilian faculty, increased academic rigor, emphasized individual student effort, and adopted seminars, case studies, and electronic wargames. The College’s account of that period presents the reforms as a decisive response to Cold War demands. Turner did more than add material to an existing program. He reconsidered the educational system itself: who taught, how students learned, and what kind of intellectual work the College demanded of them.

Turner’s reforms worked so well that many of their structures now feel permanent. Departments built deep expertise and durable courses. A distinguished faculty became central to the College’s identity. Degree authority, civilian accreditation, joint education, research, and fleet support brought new responsibilities and new constituencies. The College’s own institutional history shows how, over time, each era layered additional purposes onto the institution Turner reshaped.

The next reform should preserve that achievement while dealing honestly with what has accumulated around it. A faculty-centered structure was essential to building academic quality. But a college can become so good at protecting expertise, courses, and stakeholders’ claims that it loses the ability to choose among them. The question is no longer whether each component has value. Most do. The question is who has the authority to make the tradeoffs required to produce the graduate the mission describes.

Everyone Gets a Turret

Curriculum usually grows through a series of individually responsible decisions. Congress requires Joint Professional Military Education (JPME) to cover national military strategy, joint planning, doctrine, command and control, requirements development, and operational contract support. The statutory list is a floor, not a ceiling, within a three-phase JPME structure. The Joint Staff adds standards. The Navy adds service priorities. Accreditation brings its own expectations. Senior leaders introduce initiatives, and faculty add knowledge they believe military officers need. None of these actors behaves irrationally. The problem arises when their claims overlap within the same finite academic year.

If The Pentagon Wars were remade in Newport, the briefing slide would show contact hours instead of armor thickness. One officer would argue that artificial intelligence has changed warfare. A historian would answer that officers cannot understand technological change without history. A planner would want more operational applications. A leadership professor would ask who is responsible for exercising judgment under pressure. An accreditor would ask for evidence. A committee would ask whether the right voices had been consulted. Everyone would have a point. The calendar would still gain another block.

The College’s breadth makes this tendency stronger. Its resident core curriculum spans strategy, national security decision-making, joint military operations, modern war, and leadership, while approximately 120 electives extend the range much further. That breadth is one of Newport’s strengths. It also means there are many legitimate sponsors competing for the same scarce resource: student time and attention.

A curriculum can become overloaded without anyone ever deciding to overload it. The safest local choice is to protect the existing component and place the new priority somewhere else. Addition creates a visible constituency that can point to progress. Subtraction creates a visible loser who can argue that the institution no longer values a subject, department, or mission. Under those incentives, growth becomes routine administration. Reduction becomes institutional combat.

The Myth of ‘Just One More’

The pressure to add is not only institutional; there is a psychological explanation as well. People often fail to consider subtraction as a feasible option. In a series of experiments published in Nature, researchers found that people systematically overlooked subtractive improvements, even when removing a component produced a better solution. The tendency grew stronger under greater cognitive load. The institutional and psychological explanations are complementary rather than competing. Additive bias helps explain why individuals confronting a gap reach for a new requirement first. Organizational incentives help explain why, once added, that requirement becomes harder to remove. One makes addition cognitively easier; the other makes subtraction institutionally harder. Together, they make “just one more” both an intuitive response and an institutionally durable one.

At the US Naval War College, additive bias sounds like ‘just one more.’ One more reading will supply essential context. One more lecture will cover the latest priority. One more assessment will prove the course is rigorous. One more event will connect the College to an important stakeholder. Each addition appears small because it is judged against the existing curriculum rather than the fixed capacity of the academic year. The cumulative cost becomes visible only when the student must carry it.

Academic organizations are especially susceptible because ideas do not register on a scale. A vehicle eventually exceeds its lift limit. A curriculum can continue to include readings, objectives, lectures, papers, guest speakers, special emphases, and administrative requirements while appearing almost unchanged in the catalog. The weight appears elsewhere: rushed preparation, thinner discussion, colliding deadlines, abandoned reflection, and fewer chances to return to difficult ideas after the first encounter.

More material is not necessarily more rigorous. Rigor is sustained intellectual demand directed toward consequential learning, not the sheer volume of work assigned. An overloaded curriculum can expose students to more subjects while giving them less opportunity to master any of them. Coverage begins to substitute for choice. Busyness begins to masquerade as relevance. A curriculum does not become rigorous merely because nothing else will fit inside it.

An Idea Factory Needs Quality Control

The Naval War College is often described as an idea factory. Ambition is right, but the metaphor leaves out an important step. Factories are not judged by how much raw material comes through the door or how many components workers can stack on the floor. They are judged by what leaves the building and whether it works. At a War College, lectures, scholarship, games, papers, and policy proposals are inputs. The product is an officer able to exercise judgment on behalf of the nation.

That makes disciplined exchange indispensable. An idea factory needs dissent, but dissent is not the same thing as derision. It requires people to test claims against evidence, listen seriously to arguments they dislike, and accept that no course, policy, or departmental preference is exempt from examination. The distinction appears when a joint-learning requirement, accreditation expectation, or college-wide policy is treated as something imposed by “them” rather than as a constraint the institution collectively must satisfy. Faculty may have good reasons to challenge the requirement, and the rule may deserve to be changed. But while it remains in force, the curricular problem of satisfying it is the College’s as a whole.

Individual contributions may all have value, but preserving each one simply shifts the burden to the student. The goal is not to produce fewer ideas. It is to subject them to harder exchange, make choices among them, and assemble the strongest combination into an education that hangs together. But an idea factory that never rejects an idea is an idea warehouse.

Vetoes Without Ownership

Requirements accumulation is ultimately a governance problem. In a departmentally organized college, responsibility for the parts is clear. Chairs and course directors protect disciplinary integrity, sequence material, assign faculty, and maintain standards. Faculty governance protects professional judgment and gives scholars a voice in academic affairs. The Naval War College’s creation of an advisory faculty senate strengthened that voice and brought the institution closer to practices common in civilian higher education.

Those arrangements have real value, but they create an asymmetry. Many faculty members can object when their component is reduced. Far fewer are routinely required to decide that the complete program has exceeded its weight limit. Yet, formal authority is not absent. The College’s Faculty Handbook assigns the Dean of Academics responsibility for coordinating resident academic matters, including course content, teaching methodology, scheduling, and assessment, while department chairs are charged with coordinating relevant curriculum across departments for integration.

The gap is therefore not a missing chain of command. It is that the existing structure does not make total curricular weight, sequencing, redundancy, and opportunity cost an explicit object of continuing governance. A department can explain why its course requires an additional session. An external sponsor can make the case for a new subject. An accreditor can identify an expectation. A faculty body can raise a legitimate procedural concern. The student experiences the accumulated result. Senior academic leaders can adjudicate among these claims, but doing so in the face of several well-founded objections carries a real institutional cost.

Accreditation answers a different question. The College explains that accreditation assures institutional quality and educational opportunity, but does not guarantee every course, program, or graduate. The current NECHE standards address mission, integrity, students, learning, and effectiveness. They cannot decide whether a particular Newport lecture, paper, or event should survive when it competes with another worthwhile demand for the same hours.

The deeper problem is that ownership of the parts is stronger than ownership of the whole. Departments own courses. The faculty owns the content. Committees’ own processes. Sponsors’ own requirements. Accreditors own standards. Students alone experience the integrated product. When everyone owns a piece, no one is fully accountable for the weight, balance, and maneuverability of a War College experience.

The Student Carries the Weight

Focusing on the student is not a promise of convenience or lower standards. War is complicated. Strategy requires history. Joint planning requires doctrine. Leadership requires moral seriousness. Graduate education should be demanding, and officers should expect to work hard. The question is not whether the College should lower the burden to improve satisfaction. It is about whether the institution is deliberately spending students’ effort.

A student experiences one academic year, not a collection of independent departmental years. Only the student encounters the full sequence: the repetition, the collisions, and the opportunity cost. A paper that is entirely reasonable inside one course may fall short of a major requirement in another. Two valuable sessions may perform nearly the same intellectual function. A timely lecture may crowd out the unscheduled time in which students would have argued about it, reconsidered it, or connected it to something they learned weeks earlier. A requirement can be good and still cost too much in the context of the whole.

That is why placing emphasis on the student is better understood as a governance principle than as a pedagogical fashion. The student is where every institutional choice finally converges. Organizing around that fact means governing the total demand placed on the officer so that difficult work accumulates into development rather than simply into activity. The relevant question is not only whether a requirement is worthwhile. It is whether it is more worthwhile than the learning it displaces.

The College’s public academic catalog already acknowledges its authority to change, eliminate, and add policies, courses, and academic requirements. The harder constraint is cultural. Adding something signals responsiveness. Removing something can be read as a retreat. Until subtraction is treated as an ordinary form of stewardship, students will continue to absorb the cost of the institution’s reluctance to choose.

There Is No Clean-Sheet Curriculum

Curriculum reviews often begin with the existing curriculum spread across a wall or screen. That starting point quietly turns every inherited element into the baseline. Reformers are asked what they want to add, trim, or modify, while the old requirement survives simply because it is already there. The result is usually renovation rather than redesign.

A genuine redesign would start with an empty academic year and the graduates the College is supposed to produce. Leaders would allocate time to the mission before restoring courses, lectures, assessments, and events. Existing components would return because they earned a place in the design, not because they held one in the previous catalog. No institution should rebuild its curriculum from scratch every year. It should, however, be willing to treat inheritance as evidence rather than entitlement periodically.

Established requirements collect protective arguments over time: successful graduates, respected faculty, senior sponsors, tradition, canonical readings, or claims of necessity. The institution remembers why each item was added, but rarely records the opportunity cost that justified keeping it. Gradually, the curriculum becomes an archive of prior decisions rather than a design for present needs.

Recent reforms show that Newport can make these tradeoffs deliberately. When Perspectives on Modern War was introduced for the academic year 2024–25, the College’s 2024 NECHE self-study reported that one credit hour each from National Security Affairs and Strategy & Policy had been reapportioned to support the new year-long course. The new priority was not simply stacked on top of the existing program; its cost was made visible, and existing components yielded space. That is precisely the discipline this article argues should become routine: additions should enter through explicit institutional choice rather than by default accumulation.

Turner escaped that trap by changing the College’s operating concept. The same willingness to separate enduring purpose from inherited form is required again. The permanent faculty, seminar method, rigorous scholarship, and emphasis on individual student effort are capabilities worth preserving. The precise distribution of time, ownership, and curricular authority is not sacred merely because it emerged from a successful reform half a century ago.

A Program Executive Officer for the Graduate

That asymmetry does not require another office. It requires a clearer mandate for the existing authority.

The Naval War College should make that responsibility explicit by designating an existing senior academic leader—most logically the Dean of Academics—as the program executive officer for the graduate program. This need not mean another layer of bureaucracy or a new billet. It would add a clear mandate and decision-making framework to the authority that already exists in substantial form. That official should own the graduate mission profile, the total curricular weight, the integrated calendar, the sequencing of major requirements, and the final tradeoffs among competing claims. Departments should retain authority over disciplinary substance and teaching quality. They should not have an indefinite claim on a fixed share of the student’s year.

Defense Acquisition University warns that weak stakeholder requirements definition can lead to requirements creep, rework, cost growth, and delays. Its requirements roadmap connects mission, outcomes, standards, responsibility, and evidence. Curriculum is not a weapons system, and the analogy should not be pushed too far. But the underlying discipline is useful: a requirement is not validated simply because a stakeholder wants it. It must fit the system.

For the College, that discipline should take six forms:

1. Define a graduate mission profile

Translate the College’s broad outcomes into a concise description of the officer it intends to return to the force. The profile should identify a small number of integrated capabilities rather than restate every subject in the catalog. Each curricular claim should be traced to one of those capabilities. If a proposed requirement cannot explain what the graduate will be better able to do because of it, the requirement has not yet earned time in the program.

2. Establish a fixed curriculum weight budget

Treat time and attention as finite strategic resources. The budget should account not only for classroom hours but also for reading, writing, preparation, coordination, and recovery between major intellectual demands. Senior academic leadership should approve the total load. Departments should make a case for how to use an allocated share rather than assume the current share belongs to them permanently.

3. Require displacement with every addition

No internal proposal should enter the common curriculum without identifying what it will replace, combine, shorten, or make unnecessary. This should not become a mechanical one-hour-in, one-hour-out rule; some additions create efficiencies elsewhere. But every sponsor should have to confront opportunity costs before senior leadership approves the requirement. ‘Where will it fit?’ is a scheduling question. ‘What will it displace?’ is a strategy question.

4. Put expiration dates on requirements

Special topics, recurring events, additional assessments, and internal curricular directives should expire unless affirmatively renewed. Statutory and accreditation obligations remain, but the College’s chosen way of satisfying them should not become permanent by default. A sunset date forces a sponsor to show that the requirement still matters and gives leaders a routine opportunity to subtract without declaring the underlying subject unworthy.

5. Make faculty responsible for the seams

Faculty should continue to have disciplinary expertise, but cross-departmental teams should steward capabilities that no single course can produce on its own. In an idea factory, the faculty’s collective obligation is not merely to generate ideas; it is also to test, integrate, and sometimes reject them. Strategy, judgment, communication, jointness, and ethical leadership all cross organizational boundaries. The College should reward faculty who reconcile frameworks, eliminate redundancy, coordinate major requirements, and improve the sequence of experiences students encounter. Integration is not administrative overhead. At the program level, it is academic work.

6. Conduct a periodic zero-based review

At fixed intervals, rebuild the common curriculum from the graduate mission profile rather than editing the existing schedule. Every major component should be returned by affirmative choice. The review should record why each requirement exists, who owns it, what it costs, what it displaces, and when it will be reconsidered. A decision log would help keep institutional memory from hardening into myths about what is supposedly mandatory.

Stop Bolting Things On

None of these changes requires the Naval War College to abandon its identity as a graduate institution or turn faculty into contractors executing a centrally scripted syllabus. Academic freedom, disciplinary expertise, shared governance, slow reading, historical depth, and theoretical disagreement are essential to serious military education. The purpose is not to subordinate scholarship to the latest headquarters demand. It is to keep the scholarship from being crowded out by every demand at once.

Student-centered governance also does not make students customers. Students should not get to veto difficult material, choose only theories they find agreeable, or bargain away standards. They are the institution’s principal work product. A shipyard organized around the vessel is not surrendering authority to the steel. A war college organized around the graduate is not surrendering academic judgment to student preference. It is about aligning expert contributions with the institution’s purpose.

The Naval War College does not suffer from a shortage of excellence. It has accomplished scholars and practitioners, demanding courses, an international student body, deep maritime knowledge, and a mission with unusual clarity. The cultural problem is that excellence is easiest to see and defend in components, while coherence exists only in the student’s complete experience. The components have owners. The whole mostly has advocates.

The next Turner Revolution should therefore be a revolution in institutional choice, including what Newport means by calling itself an idea factory. Turner built the faculty and academic methods his era required. Today’s leaders need the authority and habits to govern what that successful institution has accumulated. That means assigning responsibility for the graduate, treating student attention as finite, forcing tradeoffs into the open, rewarding subtraction as well as addition, and making inherited requirements compete for their place.

The answer is not to strip off the turret, missiles, or infantry simply because they add weight. It is to decide what vehicle the nation needs, determine which combination of capabilities can accomplish that mission, and give one accountable leader the authority to protect the design. Until the College can subtract with the same confidence that it adds, students will keep carrying every priority the institution has accumulated.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the US Government, US Department of War or its components, including the Department of the Navy or the US Naval War College.