Would guess this is probably an Army problem, mostly. Various parts of the military at various times have downgraded the value of the senior service colleges for their front-runners (nuke submariners never did send their best and probably do not do so now, e.g.). But USMC has always held the colleges high in regard (a future commandant was classmate of mine at National) and so has USAF (a future Air Force Chief of Staff was a classmate of mine at National). This blog has earlier carried suggestions that Army is downplaying PME in general and this seems part of that. But would not generalize Scales' comments to all Services without more info.

And should this not be seen as further evidence that My Favorite Army is going through a bad patch? Clueless on strategy and on procurement programs, unresponsive to the scandals at Abu Ghraib, inert on sexual harassment in deployed units, My Favorite Army seems to cry out for reform. But no one seems to hear that where it might matter. Big issue. Big worry.

And good to see Proceedings coming forward with this. Have been telling them for years to expand their ambit to all the Services and to joint issues. Best military journal around - nothing else like it. Wilkerson is winning....

Delighted to see RD give a well-earned salute to 'Proceedings', the best professional military journal of them all by a nautical mile.

You two should really get a room somewhere - then you can congratulate yourselves and the Navy all day long.

Those of us that don't know what a nautical mile is don't care...; - )

Memo to Beltway Bobby Scales: The "Best and the Brightest" aka competent officers have been leaving the Army in droves once they realized our corrupt political and military leaders weren't really serious about WINNING the GWOT!

the issue isn't up yet, and even if it is, it's probably behind a subscriber wall. If not, could you please give us more direct links?

Thanks
anon_anon

...Mr. Ricks, that Scales' overarching argument isn't to close the senior PME institutions, which is implied in your brief exegesis of his piece. Rather, it is to re-create them i ways more meaningful to strategic leadership. One can argue usefully about the value of service academies, to be sure, but only a charlatan - with due respect - would suggest that staff college education is dispensable. Scales, like any historically-literate observer of military affairs, would recoil from your gratuitous assertion that "[i]f we're looking to trim the Pentagon budget, that sounds like a good place to start."

i won't apologize for the cliche -- in this midst of all the things our military could focus on -- would we really rather our best military officers go teach or lead units in combat?

I think we should promote guys w/ the right intellectual stuff - but if you're a lousy Bn or BDE commander with a PHD -- you will probably be that much more of pompous smart GO.

Tom - I know you have been rough on TRADOC and the Service Academies - but I've been on active duty since 1994 and must admit today's Army might not be as focused on these TDA activities as it once was -- BUT I DON'T MISS THE GLORY DAYS - where a TRADOC assignment to NTC made you a shoo-in for promotion. Must say I don't think a generation of COLs and Generals in 2001-2004 benefited a wit from the system that you seem to fete and miss - the vast majority of them were/ are lousy.

The USAF had three levels of PME (probably still does) -- Squadron Officer's School, Air Command & Staff College, and the Air War College. SOS was fun back in the 70s but I'd be hard-pressed to recall any lasting value I derived from attending. ACSC is probably the right level -- O-4 & -5 -- and I agree that AWC is probably a luxury we can't afford these days. So we should bag most of the PME and above all (for the Air Force), get it out of Alabama. We just can't attract good scholarly talent down there. Carlisle and Newport are soooo much better!

Tom -

As you may or may not know, Newport is the home of both the Naval Command and Staff College and the Naval War College. The same faculty teaches both courses.

I think reform of the war college system would be more productive than obliteration. I taught for a number of years in civilian academic institutions, and have some pretty good ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of both undergraduate and graduate programs in a range of disciplines (I still teach as an adjunct at a major foreign policy-focused graduate program). The number of schools that could run a decent course in military strategy, much less a program, can be counted on two hands. The number of schools that could teach a decent course on grand strategy - which is what senior level Professional Military Education is supposed to incorporate - might get as high as twenty (although I would tend to doubt it - what passes for "grand strategy" in political science is a bit unfocused, for the most part). But at each of those institutions, there might only be one or two faculty qualified to teach such a course. And the hiring preferences of both political science/government and of history departments across the country has moved away from the study of war and military affairs.

Civilian schools lack the faculty, training, and expertise to teach strategy to the number of officers who are required to get JPME II qualifications - which, by the way, includes a large dose of operational doctrine that NO academic institution in the country could possibly deliver (and whether they would want to or not is a political question that I'll leave for others).

Dumping all the faculty and resources into staff colleges won't fix that problem. It will simply leave a gaping hole at the level of strategic education that private institutions will be utterly unable, and almost certainly unwilling, to provide in the sense of current law and regulation.

To me, that suggests that reform is a better way to go.

Tim Hoyt

You need to sit with us for National Security Seminar week. Maybe you already have and you found the program still lacking. Let me know, perhaps I can find you a seat for that last week. I can't promise any time for golf but perhaps you can be a bit more open minded.

As for me, I believe I've benefited from looking at problems from a strategic perspective (which also comes from a vast international fellow presence).

Send me a message if you want to go.

It may be that discussions like this one (off campus and out of the official realm) and the periodic revisits of the subject by ike Skelton are the closest this topic comes to actual review and judgment. The whole realm of PME and Service academies have the characteristics of a vaca sagrada, a sacred cow not to be touched or discussed by practical mortals. What deserves objective hearing may have no venue where such is possible, at least inside official circles.

This is a good noise to continue.

You'll find my rebuttal to Tom's last April Washington Post Op-Ed that originally started this entire firestorm in this month's February edition of Proceedings under the "Nobody Asked Me But" column. I wholeheartedly agree with Tim Hoyt (who was one of my instructors at Newport...) -- a reformation of the War College / PME system is in order, not wholesale destruction. And I also concur with MG Scales that the respective service personnel systems are much to blame for putting priorities in the wrong place regarding war colleges. But remember that the personnel systems reflect the service priorities for their officers -- which in turn is driven by Title X U.S.C. requirements, which frankly comes down to timing before statutory retirement gates coupled with meeting career milestones for upwardly mobile officers. Start with reforming the Title X requirements (which provided more time in an officer's career pre-Goldwater-Nichlols), and you'll get more flexibility and better officer quality in the war colleges, but you'll also have the ability to send more officers to advanced degrees. Hopefully that will happen this next year under the DoD Pay and Personnel Review. Absent that, it has to happen at the local level. As a CO, I sent all my best officers to Newport. If it isn't forced or made a priority, it will never happen.

1) JPWREL: What is SQT?

2) Tom: To what extent do specialized staff schools at the 0-6 level fulfill their function? I'm thinking specifically about the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, which I'm assuming is different than more generalist schools.

Thanks

Good on you for recognizing the Royal Marines. I thought they got overlooked with a training program as long as theirs. I saw a documentary on them, and while I know all military documentaries on elite units emphasize the toughness of the training, I was struck nonetheless (in particular by the youth of the candidates).

the 3 weeks in Alaska are at the end of the 15 weeks of tactics and training, as in they start in Alaska after the 12th week. I really miss the edit button. :)

Having worked at a few PME over the years I have been shocked (but not surprised) by serious plagerism. Only when leadership takes it seriously is it addressed and that's more rare than common in my direct personal observation.

There are many retirement guys staffing them, both on the civilian AND military side. That's not all bad if the syllabi are up to date. With notable exceptions, uniformed staff are soft on developing cutting edge classes. Many civilian instructors are publishing and keeping up to date with developments but their mil colleagues are not trained for that or building classes. In the fields of strategy and culture the mil guys do warfighting courses very well but tend, tend, to not see the grand strategy piece. The reason for the war colleges generally.

About 1/2 my war college students are engaged in higher level work that required PME preparation. About 1/2 retired. Better screening is called for. Perhaps a middle ground should be to abolish the duplication of non resident PME as a prerequirement for resident.

We could probably do away with war colleges and concentrate on staff colleges if we can get students to focus the first time they do the material instead of making it breathtakingly easy for them to cheat. But they do sometimes act, for example when the CIA student ( who was due to the go on faculty after taking the class) was caught cheating and kicked out. If they were any good they should Not have been caught!

BTW civilians are employees of the services not KBR etc their tentacles have not reached that far, yet! Give it time. ;-)

Unless much stricter standards are applied and people failed for not meeting the standard, staff or war college won't matter as much as what either produces.

Oh and BTW, typically the services take an obstacle course at OCS much more seriously than PME. Both professionally and morally. Think about that. In a war of ideas intellectual dishonesty is a sure path to failure.

I agree with MG Scales that the US officer corps must take the core of its professon seriously -- i.e., expertise in the use of organized violence to achieve political outcomes -- and tailor its professional education programs to knowledge (as opposed to information) appropriate for officers to practice their profession at their rank.

But I was dismayed at his (I am sure accidental) implication that civilian employees of the Department of Defense who possess terminal degrees (read: Ph.D.) in an approporaite field (military or diplomatic history, strategic or security studies, appropriate subfields of anthropology, sociology, and economics) should not be employed as faculty. Those civilian Ph.D.s are the professionals in this field and I found it ironic than in his call to value letters over action MG Scales ignored these men of letters.

As FrustratedInDC recognized, these civilian employees embody the institution. They remain employed year in and year out as uniformed faculty and leadership come and go. They write the curriculum. They spend a good deal of time engaging in the "professional development" of their uniformed colleagues on the faculty who have operational, leadership, and technical experience but whose only exposure to education has been on the other side of the desk. And they hold the line as best they can against the tendency to socially promote officers whose work would not be acceptable on a staff, in the field, or in an operational traning setting. We fight that fight constantly and, at least of late, my leadership has backed us. As FrustratedInDC stated, we have ended some careers over plaigerism.

In 1949, Bernard Brodie wrote a similar article in World Politics. Change is slow. Enjoy the suck.

General Scales LAMENTS a military culture that UNDERVALUES institutions like services academies and the War College!

He WARNS AGAINST encouraging officers to disregard periods of reflection among peers.

The old Ricks article regarding the service academy closure idea - and thus Ricks himself - was so thoroughly discredited that he must still be struggling to comprehend new articles through the self-loathing tears flowing from his eyes. Perhaps reading slower would help him improve his reading comprehension.

With luck, the next Ricks article will be an EPIC RETRACTION!