Professional Military Education: A Highly Peculiar Missing Link
by Tom Clark
If the Army Learning Concept is correct that we must out-think our opponents to win at competitive learning, then we are reframing knowledge as a commodity. This shifts our educational aim from the systematic study of a body of knowledge to the concept of leaps in learning. The actual problem is that our existing professional military education (PME) vocabulary has no word or governing concept for dealing with knowledge as a creative and artful endeavor.
We have been in this place before.
In the 1980s, US Army leaders engaged a similar issue when filling the void between winning battles while failing to achieve strategic goals. TRADOC commanders began a "public debate over what doctrine should be."(1) All sides in the debate came with strong beliefs on the topic of operational art.
The debate was difficult because as Edward Luttwak observed, there is a "peculiarity of Anglo-Saxon military terminology that it includes no term for the operational level of warfare."(2) The same void exists in professional military education.
Over the past decade, various studies, reports, and inquiries set lofty developmental goals. Noteworthy examples include an Army Training and Leader Development Panel's need to develop officers with enduring meta-competencies of self-awareness and adaptability to set conditions for lifelong learning. US Army War College faculty found a need for leaders with refined capabilities to learn "almost anything very quickly," and with mental agility at "recognizing patterns and converting abstract knowledge to appropriate action." A recent House Armed Services Sub Committee report called for military education to produce leaders with greater capacities for critical thinking.(3)
At lofty, strategic levels, the educational system works well in setting worthwhile goals.
While in practice, a highly centralized, task-focused curriculum controls the learning environment. At this tactical level, we have an efficient model to transfer knowledge.
As a result, professional military education often mimics a closed system for students to demonstrate mastery over the theory or principle of current interest. A learning system based on simple facts or "the ancient narratives."(4) An approach that is sometimes necessary at the military science tactical learning level, but never sufficient at the leader development, operational art level of education.
In a competitive learning environment, classroom activities are not an end in themselves rather efforts to set conditions for success in the real world. Neither technology nor lesson content can power education aimed at competitive learning. The most elegant curriculum and comprehensive lesson plan are of little importance in comparison to learning situations that require students to figure things out and then decide what needs to be done.
Accordingly, I offer two proposals. First, that we define the operational level of education as the art of generating and using knowledge to dominate unfamiliar adversaries, events, or situations.
Second, that we employ one independent and two dependent principles to frame the operational level of education.
The independent principle is to recognize education is an open system that responds to influence more than control.(5) Senior leaders provide an educational intent linking goals with necessary learning conditions and program outcomes. Centralized curriculum and instructor centered classrooms give way to collaboration and action learning. For example, a curriculum that presents students a terminal learning objective in a directed course of action is a closed system. Alternatively, presenting students problem sets along the lines of a leader reaction course is curriculum that influences thinking.
Momentum in learning supersedes unity of effort in classroom activities. Time-based schedules give way to purposeful activity that takes learners through goal directed projects to develop refined abilities in adaptive problem solving. For example, a four-hour lesson on an important topic followed by a narrowly scoped exercise is a much different experience than an open-ended question that requires students to create, integrate, and apply knowledge to a particular issue.
Student minds engaging real-world problems trump lessons emphasizing content coverage. The military science focus on mastery of a system of knowledge gives way to the art of transforming innovative ideas into decisive actions. For example, poring over an artificial standardized scenario is considerably less relevant than developing a plan to employ surge forces in an active theater.
The operational level of education emphasizes effectiveness over efficiency. The key measure involves learning seminars where leaders respond to complex real world problems. Concurrently, leaders come to understand what they are learning as well as how their efforts relate to their future in real-life situations. There are activities to develop new knowledge and to broaden reasoning skills in order to use both as a combat multiplier.
The Army Learning Concept makes salient the notion that creating, integrating, and applying new knowledge represent combat power.(6) Educational art aims to establish momentum that helps leaders learn faster and apply learning more quickly than any adversary.
PME needs to more than a series of check-the-block activities. Educational art is the missing link that enables PME to be an ongoing "aha" experience.
Notes
1. Swain, R. (1996). Filling the void: The operational art and the U.S. army. In B.J.C. McKercher & M.A. Hennessy (Eds.) (pp. 147-161). The Operational Art: Developments in the Theories of War. Westport, CT: Praeger.
2. Luttwak, E.N. (1981). The operational level of war. International Security, 5(3), 61-79.
3. See Department of the Army (2001). Army Training and Leader Development Panel, Officer Study Report to the Army. Reed, G., Bullis, C., Collins, R., and Paparone, C. (2004). Mapping the route of leadership education: Caution ahead. Parameters 34(3), 46-60. U.S. Congress House of Representatives, Report of the Committee on armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations. (2010). Another Crossroads? Professional Military Education Two Decades After the Goldwater-Nichols Act and the Skelton Panel. Print 111-4: Washington, DC.
4. Smith, L.T. (2005). On tricky ground: Researching the native in the age of uncertainty. Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y (Eds.) (pp. 85-108). The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.). (Eds.). Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, CA.
5. See chapter 2 in, Alberts, D.S. & Hayes, R.E. (2005). Power to the Edge: Command and Control in the Information Age. CCRP Publication Series: Washington, DC. Also see, Mr. Y. (2011). A National Strategic Narrative. Woodrow Wilson Center: www.wilsoncenter.org.
6. For a discussion of combat power in other forms, see Dempsey, M. (2009). Our Army's Campaign of Learning. LandPower Essay 09-03. Association of the United States Army: Institute of land Warfare Publication.
Tom Clark is an Associate Professor at the US Army Command and General Staff College.
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