Tom: Let me get my biases out front. I'm a military officer who's had the privilege of teaching or studying at 3 of our War Colleges, and while I share your low opinion of the Air War College (everything Dr Johnson-Freese says about it is accurate, based on my experience), I must concur with her, and dissent from you: though the problems of our War Colleges are deep, and none more than Montgomery, this is a "mend it, don't end it" situation (to wax Clintonian).

Civilian unversities, for all their good points - and I've done grad work there too - ought to be required for high-flying officers, real programs too (though the semi-shake-and-bake doctorates given to Petraeus and others don't have real cred among bona fide academics) but they cannot replace the War Colleges. What they do is unique and civilian universities simply don't offer the kind of hybrid academic-cum-professional school environment found at the War Colleges; moroever, even if they did, there is no way civilian universities could accommodate the numbers the services need as through-puts.

So, let's make the War Colleges more rigorous, end the student-coddling Dr Johnson-Freese writes about with great accuracy, and make standards higher across the board. I am hoping she, or someone with similar PME experience, will now write something about HOW exactly to fix the War Colleges.

I agree with you that Naval War College is the best of the bunch, and I'm not just saying that because I went there and taught there. But I have to say that your Strategy & Policy fetish is a bit weird, Tom. I taught in S&P, and I love the Department, but it's gone downhill since the "good old days" - your estimation of it is very 1990s. The world-class scholars I taught with in S&P have almost entirely retired or moved on (morale problems in S&P have not exactly helped - heard of Karl Walling?) and the next generation is a lot weaker. There's a lot of good stuff happening at NWC, in several Departments, you should pay a visit and update your view.

Now you're just doing spoofs. There's no way any 'college' would operate like that. Next thing you'll say they have multiple-choice tests in a graduate program.

I've never understood why people get so upset about it. Are constructive criticisms in blue ink less harsh? If someone writes in the margins or a paper, "Badly ungrammatical, underdeveloped thesis, conclusions drawn are not supported by evidence presented," does the color of the ink make the paper less of a piece of shit? Also, direct criticism is insulting?

Those teaching instructions...LOL. I couldn't help recall Fight Club:

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile." ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 17

In objective reality there is a right and wrong answer. No one learns anything if they can't accept that fact. Ms. Johnson-Freese's view of this place reminds me more of a coffee klatsch were any viewpoint is excepted no matter how wrong (The View?). Ah, and then there is the golf reference. Golf for chrissakes...Twain called it "a good walk ruined."

Once again, we get some anecdote about the place that is about as current as an 8-track tape deck. The self-proclaimed military-intellectual titans that come here to pile on always seem to have some sort of first-hand knowledge but stop short of writing anything that they can be pinned down on. To Hoosier Daddy--you studied or taught at 3 of the war colleges, including, I assume, the Air War College? When? For how long? Maybe you should take your own advice and get back down to Maxwell, then let us know what color ink they use to grade or if they're still throwing liberals out of the building. (Ricks won't go because facts might get in the way of opinions, I guess.) Finally, I note that this passage from Johnson-Freese's piece was left out of this post: "But acknowledging the problem today would be helpful -- and more productive than simply torching academics as pointy-heads, or issuing cavalier calls for shuttering the War Colleges." Here I agree with H-Daddy. Civilian academia is hardly, in many cases, worth emulating these days for all the reasons--and more--that Johnson-Freese cites and there is much value in the war colleges. But please, we made it beyond Y2K, so let's consider the facts as they are today not based on someone's tales from a decade-and-a-half ago.

Hi, Tom:

Thanks for the H/T. I have to agree with the poster who suggests the overall impression of the War Colleges is a bit out of date, however. I am intimately familiar with the two major academic departments at NWC: I first came to Newport 20 years ago as a Secretary of the Navy Fellow; later, I chaired the Strategy Department, and now head the subcourse in Security Strategies (which Joan Johnson-Freese instituted, and with whom I worked as a fellow chairman for three years) in the newly-renamed Department of National Security Affairs.

Things are going better at Newport than in our sister schools, but sure, it’s been a struggle to get there in the face of demands from various quarters that we make the curriculum fun, easy, and fast. (And by fast, I mean -- to take on example -- a demand that we do a full graduate education in 90 days. We beat back that proposal about five years ago.) We still worry excessively about what the students *want* and *like*, but again, the constant measuring of student satisfaction has been reduced and input from the students accordingly has improved over the past years.

But the larger and much more worrisome point is that simply closing the Colleges will create a far worse problem than anyone can imagine, because then the services will just open small bricks-and-mortar headquarters operations to grade distance exams and check a box called "education" with multiple-choice flash cards. It is the fondest dream of some folks out there to close the War Colleges and turn them into Potemkin schools that do nothing that an 0-5 couldn’t grade after a two-week training course. (And the confusion between the words "education" and "training" is something we try to deal with regularly in all PME institutions.)

The War Colleges can be the world-class institutions that Congress intended them to be, but I think they all have to take the successful Newport model seriously: That is, hire accomplished academics and top military professionals, give them academic freedom, support their work, let them control the core curriculum and how it's delivered, and then let them push the students harder -- just like any of the normal, rigorous graduate programs at top universities we already have sent many officers (like GEN Petraeus) to.

If you come up to Newport and take a look at the major reforms undertaken in the past 10 years, you’ll find that you can in fact create a top-flight program to educate tomorrow's officers at a War College -- if the faculty are allowed to do it.

Regards,
Tom Nichols

Before fixing AWC is attempted, we must first fix the AF promotion system. AWC is merely a pre-selection process to Colonel and it's military education role is purely secondary. The AF promotion system churns out senior officers who are strictly clones of one another. The hoops one has to jump through to become a colonel or flag officer are pretty much set in stone (i.e. in order: USAF Weapons School, staff, squadron director of ops, squadron command, staff, group command, and so on). It doesn't leave much room or hold any importance for strategic thinkers. Nowhere on any performance report or officer of the quarter/year form is any consideration/weight given to professional reading or or self-study of military history, etc. Rather one must do well at the tactical level while holding true to a standard template of duty positions (mentioned above).

Until we have room in our promotion system to find and select officers with the aptitude for strategy, officers who often don't or can't follow the standard pathway to senior rank, there's no reason to bother with reforming AWC. The majority of the students attending will not use anything they learn and thus have no incentive to take it seriously, as they will remain focused primarily on the tactical-low operational level of airpower as they progress through the standard template of duty positions. Unfortunately we aren't growing strategists who can competently serve in the Strategy Divisions of our Air Operations Centers, in A-3/5 hq staffs, or J-35/5 joint staffs, let alone for the flag ranks. Assignment of officers to those is mostly at random and with little preparation for the personnel assigned (with the rare exception of School of Advanced Air Power Studies grads who get assigned).

Rubber Ducky, you need to update your information and your approach to understanding military thought and practice today. First, Air Force PME, just like all the other services, has to fulfill Joint PME parameters. Second, we teach military theory, national security studies, leadership, the Joint Planning Process, and airpower at all the schools at Maxwell. We do not push Douhet's theory of strategic bombing as superior to all else. Moreover, if you actually read Douhet carefully, what you might notice is that he really advocates attaining air superiority. After all, the book is entitled "The Command of the Air" not "The Unmatched Value of Strategic Bombing." His thesis is quite simple, with command of the air, you can more readily achieve dominance over your opponent on land and sea and then have the ability to strike when and where you wish. (That echoes most US military doctrine and practice today.) According to Douhet, instead of only having to strike at fielded forces, you can choose to strike at other targets that he argues have more merit. His theories are no more or less valuable than approaches to war and conflict that advocate winning hearts and minds, striking at political objectives, or controlling the sea lines of communication. They are all part of matching your desired ends with the means and methods available. Finally, there are at least three points of recent evidence that undermine your unfounded assertion. First, many AU students, near the completion of their academic year because they read books by Biddle, Clodfelter, and others with similar theses, come away with the idea that strategic bombing is "bad." Second, I would argue that many Air Force officers themselves have trouble actually articulating the rationale for an independent Air Force today because they have been steeped in jointness and have been, over the last decade, in environments where there is an absence of an air strategy and are really driven almost completely by the objecitves of ground commanders (not entirely an unreasonable position in many areas, but one that does not exercise any regular thinking in a different manner). Finally, if we look at a strategic picture that is both more traditional in the history of the Republic and one that accords with the looming economic, fiscal, geopolitical, and military realities likely in the near future, the United States will almost certainly not be able to afford large ground forces, will not be able to support large numbers of them stationed overseas, and will instead have to rely more on traditional superiority in air and naval power to both project power and augment allies in areas that they will need enhancement. Our strengths in power projection, command and control, logistics, and mobility reside primarily in our air and naval forces. A recent example that illustrates some elements of this is Odyssey Dawn. We are providing a significant amount of the components I just described in a coalition endeavor. This may be more of the direction we are likely to pursue as we reevaluate where our strategic interests really lie and how to deal with them without the benefit of overwhelming economic preponderance or resources that we have enjoyed for the last 70 years. Air and naval power, but particularly airpower, provide major methods to project strategically relevant power. Putting the Air Force back in the Army would degrade the strategic component of airpower significantly. Also, the Air Force is the only service that can field and operate a full spectrum air component. Marine and Army aviation rely on the air superiority that we will provide. They do not have the strategic airlift, tanking, and theaterwide and global command and control of air assets that we have. They are also limited in the space capability that has become so important to our tactical and operational effectiveness, and do not have the ELINT, RECCE, and deep strike capability that the Air Force fields. Finally, none of the other services can provide any component of airpower for more than a limited amount of time. The Air Force is structured and equipped to provide comabt capability and resupply virtually indefinitely. The Marines and Navy can only attack for a finite time without being replaced and only in limited ways. Army aviaition is limited by range, mission, and survivability to the areas it can fight. Only the Air Force can provide long range deep strike for an extended time and cover every other aerial mission for an extended time. That is what you get from independent airpower.

Ms Johnson-Freese spends an awful amount of time regurgitating the most turgid of generalizations about both academics and military personnel. I found it a little offensive from both sides of the aisle.

There's some good points to be sure, but it was a pretty divisive piece.

Tom: That is a great photo of an SE-5. Keep 'em coming. (So I'm a lightweight airplane enthusiast. I yam what I yam.)

Thanks for letting me know about the return key. The bottom line is that any capability for strategic attack would be marginalized by the Army owning the Air Force. You never mentioned anything about a tech service.

There is not a single airpower advocate intin the service today that claims that strategic bombing alone always wins wars. You failed to see that my argument refuted, on a number of levels your assertion regarding the teaching and implementation of Douhet's theories in our curriculum.

First and foremost, the Air Force provides the only service dedicated to the attainment of air superiority as a primary mission. There is not a single ground commander that wants to fight without it and there is no ground commander that understands or wants to resource how to get outside of their area of responsibility. Second, we provide strategic airlift and there is no entity in the other services that would be willing to fund and operate that to the level the AF does. Finally, we provide full theater and full spectrum airpower, which includes strategic attack. The Army has consistently devalued that due to its focus on chunks of territory and control near troops. The Marines are even more focused on close air. And the Navy simply does not have the staying power or the ability to project power close to shore and defend its carriers simultaneously in a highly defended area. If you have no independent Air Force, you have no strategic strike component. The focus, roles and missions, and preferences of the other services have historically shown their lack of appreciation for this type or airpower.

To paraphrase BASF commercials: We don't fight the wars the way the other services want to, we just make the way they fight them better. We will need long range strike and power projection in the future more than we do now once we really evaluate what is important to the intrests of the United States. The Army cannot and will not do that and the Navy cannot do it in as flexible, cost efficient, and sustainable way that airpower does it.

You are correct that Douhet makes a strong argument for strategic attack; really too strong. But no other service can make and sustain any argument for it as well as an independent Air Force. It is not the laws of physics that prevent the Army from having it, it is service tradition, budget pressures, and service culture. The Army had an Air Force once and neglected strategic strike and centralized command of air assets to its and the nation's detriment. We bought B-18s instead of more capable B-17s. We ceded air superiority in North Africa to the Germans because we parcelled out our air assets. We already learned this lesson. Get out of the 1920s and 1930s and join the 21st century in your reasoning.

Tom: you wrote, "NWC...which does a good job on strategy." How do you know that?

IMHO: no military institution is likely doing a sufficient job teaching military strategy and its successful application. To the extent that strategy in the military is being advanced I submit that it is occurring outside of the PME institutions. So here's a question: if we closed every PME institution tomorrow, would our militaries be worse off for it? I don't think we would skip a beat. In and out of the fight the view wold likely remain unchanged.

I am not yet a veteran of any of the WCs. But I have visited and I find that the expectations levied by the administration from the the minute you get there aren't really what one would hope for or expect.

If you tell the students before they arrive that expectations are very high and only a few will succeed - then maybe they will take it seriously. Instead there's an underlying sense that this is a much needed family break. I am sure that is the case, and I look forward to it myself. That said the mission ought to come first. I don't know what the failure rate is - they should want everyone to succeed, it costs enough - but maybe there should be one.

Point 1. As I mentioned before. You are encouraged to start your primary research paper before you get there. As we discussed here this seems misguided. The core curriculum there is designed to teach you strategy. If you don't have that foundation you can't right a legitimate Strategic Research paper. We've put the cart before the horse. Oh well, I'll conform. I have 3 ideas already. I could probably write the paper tomorrow if I had to.

Point 2. Jim Thorpe. A sports competition shouldn't be getting center stage at any academic facility. But we have already heard about how winning JT is the most important thing we can do there.Huh? Really? Full disclosure: I'm no athlete and the sports I do pursue aren't on the JT roster. So I am doubly disinterested. But why should I be? When I am going there to learn strategy? Same goes for mandatory softball....which counter-intuitively results in lots of injuries.

Point 3. Students apparently do adopt a ridiculous attitude - by the end of the year they will complain about every extra activity that cuts into their ME time. WTF? We all know these are the hard-chargers who can pull 72 hrs at a clip in a combat zone (I don't encourage that). You know why they whine like cadets? Because someone lets them. Sure they ought to be self-motivated to do what they need to but the atmosphere apparently drives that mentality.

Point 4. Big warnings are do the readings, with the caveat that you will be given more than you can read. The concept is somewhat sound, high ranking officials have to read selectively. But I still find it a little silly. Give the folks what they need rather than making them sort wheat from chaff. Spend more time on more valuable material. Enuff said.

Point 5. Despite all this I am looking forward to the experience. Why? Because I am already a voracious learner with a MS, PhD and 3 articles under my belt. I figure I can do all the things they need me to and the stuff I want to myself. And by stuff, I mean my own self-driven research. Make no mistake it is all for the military's benefit. I also look forward to the family time but it isn't my priority. Of course I may see much more of my family than my peers do given that I am in the RC.

In summation, set priorities and expectations and hold people to those expectations. Dare I say it, if the WCs were more like the Academies - demanding as hell 24, 7 - we wouldn't have this discussion.

There is no question that the Air War College of the worl'd greatest air force is due for a serious, reformational look. As I said when Mr. Ricks first leveled is jausting pole (or pen) at the school and possibly the service he seems to have little respect for, I think we need to better the institute not tear it down.

I suspect that none in this discussion line who either taught or studied at AWC have held command of airmen, flown any combat missions, or even soloed in a jet. The defense and attacks on Douhet as evidence for or against the school and separate service are absolutely farcical but indicate that no one in the stream has had to see their own air combat employment plan put to the test in the real world whether AWC's lab served them well or not.

I hope Mr. Ricks will consider the dialogue and whether his continual search for testimony to indict the AWC is leading to any valuable outcome. Sophomoric missives about carriage returns embedded with posits of what air power might be are truly surreal; maybe a more honest approach to this every other month or so quest would raise the discussion from the absurd.

perhaps someone at DOD is reading...

We should expect nothing less from the branch that in the last 10 years has come to view it's nearest peer competitor as other branches in the US armed services!

To echo a few of the postings here, as a long standing member of the AU faculty at a more than one school here who has interacted with other PME institutions from the other services regularly, the constanct sniping at the AU schools, and in particular AWC, without actually doing real visits or research on them recently is unfair and unwarranted. The writing by Dan Hughes that started a lot of this detailed both systematic issues and temporal matters that impacted AWC while he was on the faculty. Many of the temporal issues have been rectified as Ghosts posted earlier. Most of the systemic issues have not.

You can hire great faculty, you can give them control over the curriculum, you can even give them more incentives and time to publish articles and books regularly, but if you don't mandate student performance and don't make admission competitive on a certain level, you will only get so far (as others have posted). And, in fact, if you downplay performance by telling the students that it is a year off, you can really hinder any meaningful advancement from the bulk of the students. So, like all the PME institutions, we are at the mercy of the Service priorities and expectations, which seem to be roughly similar for the Army, Marines, and Air Force. You are selected based on your record and unless you do something immoral or illegal, you will graduate and get promoted. The Navy does not mandate as much PME and does not value it as much in their line officers, but similar tenets hold for them as well.

American military PME is not now, and has not been historically, like the Kriegsacademie. We do not really demand exceptional performance from our students to find out who are the very best minds and reward accordingly with plum assignments. So many of the anecdotes and opinions regarding the value or merit of each school are somewhat ridiculous. How are you measuring? Is it by faculty reputation? What are the components of that? Is it by student performance? What are the factors you account and control for in that? Is it by student/graduate testimony about their experience? For most of them, to what are they comparing their experience: undergraduate time? on line programs? extension shcools on or near their base? Finally, are we looking at senior officers and where they were schooled as an indicator of advancement in rank or vice versa? The schools pretty much accomplish what the services want of them regardless of service. So the issue really lies, at many levels, outside of the control of the institutions.

In general, if you hire the best civilians you can get, assign the best officers to the faculty and reward them professionally for taking those assignments, and have a curriculum that stretches the students intellectually, you are most of the way toward making the schools as good as you can. The next step is to demand performance from the students and reward that also. If you do that, you should have a good reputation and good products in terms of graduates, publications, and ideas. Unless any poster can tell us how they are really gauging this and offer better solutions than Representative Ike Skelton tried for about two decades to mandate, I would submit that most of the discussion is really about hearsay and opinion more than anything else.

My bet is that in 10 years, the Air War College and several other institutions will be closed, as part of the federal government's post-crash restructuring. You heard it here first.

But then I wouldn't be surprised if the Marines were out of fixed-wing aviation by that point, either.
Best,
Tom

Was that the A-1 Skyraider was a great aircraft for CAS, and probably is what the Marines should be using. The argument for the F-35B may boil down to the advantages of being able to have a few flying off amphibs for small-scale ops, say a NEO in Yemen or quick raid in Somalia.
Best,
Tom

The use of such a platform for CAS by the Marines would dovetail nicely with an expansion of the Air Force light attack/FID mission. We could use some of tht capability as part of leveraging many of our current and projected strengths to help allies across the world.

I'm a retired college prof. Refraining from using red ink in grading papers is a popular approach - it simply makes criticism more palatable to students and there's nothing wrong with that as long as the point is made and the grade sticks.

But no cold calling? No real participation by profs?

That's not teaching. That's babysitting.

On past form, in the year 2021, Tom Ricks will have found something someone else wrote about AWC as it existed in 2005 and written that that justifies closing the school.

The mix of civilian and military instructors at the AWC is actually a very good mix -- at the least it prevents the sort of echo-chamber, self-reinforcing group think that Lion_Heart's posts would appear to encourage. The commitment of the AWC to actual teaching as its primary mission is very strong and that is the core of the institution.

The fact that the staff have a solid publishing record of top of the external engagement of the civilian professors that ensures they aren't divorced from what goes on outside Maxwell. However, it should be stressed that unlike civilian institutions, teaching doesn't take a back seat to research/publication. Given the "publish or perish" nature of civilian universities with their emphasis on armies of teaching fellows to teach undergraduate and Masters' classes, it is hard to see how that would be superior way of educating senior officers.

It's also hard to see how outsourcing this job for 200+ students a year is feasible or in any way cost-effective. And that number would rise to 1000+ if you ax the other service War Colleges and National, too. For the cost of a single F-35B you could keep the Air, Army, Navy, Marine and National War Colleges open for years.

The education of senior leaders is of much greater importance than dated and ill-informed anecdotes about the color of the ink used grading papers. By all means let's have a debate about the role of the War Colleges and the best way to cost-effectively educate future strategists and critical thinkers, but let's have it based around what is important to their mandated goals and missions, not tangential trivia.

If babysitting it what it is, it should be called that. I think they can handle the truth.
Best,
Tom

I’m proud to say I’m an alumnus of the Naval War College. The elective and Joint Maritime Ops courses were outstanding. The Strategy & Warfare course was the singularly best course I’ve had in four years of college and five years of graduate study. I’m sad to say that the National Security Decision Making course was the worst course I had in my entire academic career. NSDM was “moderated,” rather than “taught,” by instructors who seemed more interested in any old follow-on tour at NWC (after their year as students) than in actually instructing. The quality of academic work displayed by the NSDM moderators was far worse than what was expected from – and, for the most part, delivered by – the students. I’m glad NWC revamped NSDM. Perhaps all the war colleges can rehabilitate those portions of their programs that most need it – and leave the gems untouched.

I always get a kick out of how sure some of you guys are that you're right, and that a couple of paragraphs of selective, emotional diatribe should be enough to convince everybody else.

... that Tom's jihad against the War Colleges, and the Air War College in particular, is indeed, to use that 'infantile' word, silly.

And here's why. First, you rely on the hearsay of, in the case of Dan Hughes, someone who could never be pleased throughout his time at AU; and then from Joan Johnson-Freese, who I have the greatest of respect for, but who worked at AWC in the 1990s under a very different climate. Both offer opinions that are merely that, opinions. Second, your call to shut down Air War College is not based on any factual evidence that you have gathered - the hallmark of good journalism, as you well know Tom - but on hearsay (see above), inuendo, and a horribly dated impression based on a visit you made here in the mid-1990s. Third, despite an official invitation from the Commander of AWC, as well as from AU faculty such as myself, to visit AU to allow you the opportunity to judge for yourself, you instead gave us all the cold shoulder. Fourth, despite these invitations and a refusal to check out the facts as they are, you continue to reveal a petty and ignorant side of yourself that is highly unflattering.

As a result, a large number of us here in Montgomery, Alabama, think that you're a Don Quixote on a crusade against windmills on this particular issue, i.e. silly.

To use such a word obviously makes me infantile in your view. But then, I'm not the one blithely calling for the closure of an institution based on hearsay, inuendo, and an incomprehensible refusal to check out the facts on the ground for yourself when every opportunity for you to do so has been offered.

Now, tell me: who's being infantile?

Cheers,

John