EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first installment in a multi-part series that examines how professional military education should be designed. This and subsequent articles will look through the lens of the competencies required of officers as the global security environment changes once again. The collection of articles can be found in a collection here once they have been published.
With the fall of Kabul in 2021, the era of countering insurgencies, building and stabilizing states, and countering terror organizations was thought to draw to an ambivalent, unsatisfying end.
The global security environment is undergoing rapid change. For many countries, including the United States and its NATO allies, there has been both a push and a pull effect indicating the need for a new security posture. The push is a movement away from the sorts of conflicts that marked the first two decades of the twenty-first century. With the fall of Kabul in 2021, the era of countering insurgencies, building and stabilizing states, and countering terror organizations was thought to draw to an ambivalent, unsatisfying end. At the same time as militaries seem to be pushed out of low-intensity conflicts, there has been an alarming pull in the opposite direction, back to preparing for major combat operations.
With the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European countries in particular have raced to enact a wide range of reforms that support a radical change in posture toward territorial defense. Given that much of the early fighting in Ukraine took place in urban environments, it also served as an indicator that urban warfighting and the lessons learned from two decades of COIN remain still relevant. This belief was reinforced in October 2023, when Hamas launched an attack into Israel, leading to a large-scale urban warfighting operation in the Gaza Strip, while also reminding the world that the era of counter-insurgency might not be coming to an end.
Whether history repeats itself or merely “rhymes” (to borrow a phrase attributed apocryphally to Mark Twain), today’s dilemmas demand comparison with those of the late 1970s. At that time, the quagmire of Vietnam was taken by many military leaders as an object lesson in what sorts of tasks militaries must not—must never again—accept. This conviction paired with growing concerns about an aggressive Soviet force posture, especially the Soviet military’s capacity to exploit NATO’s vulnerabilities around the Fulda Gap, led to a rush to rethink conventional deterrence and prepare for future major combat operations.
This mixture of regret and fear birthed a new operating concept that seemed to offer a clever way to prepare forces to overcome the Soviet challenge. Originally conceived as Active Defense, later evolving into AirLand Battle, this new concept became the dominant logic shaping how militaries developed officer competencies for many years. Unfortunately, the push away from low-intensity conflict undermined military readiness in that competency for many decades, leading to a difficult re-learning process in the early Global War on Terror era. Likewise, many Western countries redesigned their militaries to fit into an expeditionary role. This has once again been “reversed” as the focus since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has shifted towards building conventional warfighting capabilities with the purpose of territorial defense.
As history repeats (or rhymes), so has a new “hot” topic of today’s military operations began to take shape. AirLand Battle expanded on the ideas of joint operations. Today, we see the next step of joint evolution, as the concept loosely referred to as Multi-Domain Operations (MDO), is gaining traction within Western militaries. MDO, which began life as the U.S. Army’s Multi-Domain Battle, has evolved into Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO) in the U.S. joint environment, Multi-Domain Integration in the UK, and MDO in NATO. These concepts share an orientation toward preparing militaries to operate in two new domains (space and cyber, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum), adapt existing military ways to include so-called disruptive emerging technologies (like AI and quantum computing), all while emphasizing the need for both more alignment and more flexibility in how military services, government organizations, and coalitions coordinate instruments of national power.
The fundamental problem is one of endless aggregation: more and more expectations are placed on the shoulders of officers as the concept of the officer’s role comes to encompass an ever-wider range of tasks. Before World War II, officers were expected to master their occupational specialty (e.g., infantry, surface warfare) and not much else. Following World War II, the benefits of jointness that had been so obvious during the war led to increased demands on intermediate-level officers, who were now expected to develop competencies in working with other services, in addition to mastering their own fields. Then during the Vietnam War, a whole new suite of competencies was suddenly introduced as critical for success: intermediate officers were expected to be politically savvy and culturally nuanced in ways they had never been before.
The groups of competencies continued to proliferate. Active Defense, AirLand Battle, and later concepts brought in new competencies, requiring officers to actively contemplate how their actions align with actions in other domains and, later, other instruments of national power. With the return of low-intensity conflict and irregular warfare in the 1990s and 2000s, yet more competencies were added to the list. As MDO and its sister concepts seek to encompass two new domains and an engagement with a wide array of exotic technologies as fundamental competencies, it becomes clear that unless officers are to spend all their time in the classroom, militaries must prioritize which of the many legitimate competencies should be the focus of officer education.
This article series looks at the changing global security environment from the perspective of military educators. While professional military education (PME) accomplishes many different things, at the fundamental level it must serve one specific purpose above all: PME is the primary tool available to nations to develop the competencies needed by their officers to achieve success on the battlefield. In other words, whatever else a given PME program may do, it must at least prepare its students to succeed at the next relevant level of operations. In general terms, PME at the academy or undergraduate level prepares individuals to be junior officers acting at the tactical level. PME at the staff course or intermediate level prepares junior officers to transition to the operational or joint level. PME in war colleges, CAPSTONE courses and the like prepare intermediate officers to enter the strategic level. Each program will do much more than simply prepare officers for the next level, but it must at least do that. (Those looking for a basic overview of the history of PME globally are encouraged to read Tamir Libel’s 2021 article, which argues that we are currently in the middle of the fifth phase of global PME, a period marked by accreditation and other forms of “academicization.”)
The competency development (COMPDEV) approach is a way of thinking about education that begins with the end product: what do students need to be able to do at the end of the program?
The aim of this series is to describe a more pragmatic approach to prioritizing competencies in officer education. Any given PME program will inevitably be limited by institutional factors (resource allocation between departments, availability of experts in given topics, accreditation concerns and the like). We believe these considerations, as important as they are, must only be addressed after first prioritizing the sorts of competencies any given military wants its officers to master. The competency development (COMPDEV) approach is a way of thinking about education that begins with the end product: what do students need to be able to do at the end of the program? A COMPDEV approach is exceptionally useful for PME, which (after all) prepares officers to participate in a global profession with strictly defined standards. Logically, as the security environment changes, a COMPDEV approach would demand we change what we teach to ensure that newly prioritized competencies are taught. Due to the rigid constraints imposed upon most (if not all) PME programs, new competencies come at the cost of old, deprioritized competencies.
The articles that follow will focus on six different ways that countries may reasonably choose to prioritize sets of competencies at the intermediate level of education. These six groupings are snapshots of what future warfighting trends might look like in the future and which corresponding skillsets will be needed to function in that future operational environment. These six snapshots are single-service operations; joint operations; low-intensity conflict and irregular warfare; hybrid warfare; multi-domain operations; and technological innovation. Each of these six trends will shape the future of warfighting, and therefore militaries must understand how to build and extract the necessary competencies to best prepare military officers for the future.
Which competencies are critical to develop? Which should be deleted from the curricula? Which can be reserved for only some fraction of the officer corps or, within the NATO, perhaps only for some national militaries? These are the sorts of COMPDEV questions that we will explore in the articles to come. Critically, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question “what are the right competencies that PME programs need to develop now?” There is, however, a spectrum of legitimacy, reflected in the six snapshots, offering different yet equally valid ways to prepare for the future operating environment.
The articles that follow look from the perspective of what we term “program owners,” the individual or group in charge of defining the broad aims of any given staff course. This role could appear under a variety of titles: academic dean, program director, lead instructor, special advisor, or even commandant of the college. Of course, there are many peculiarities associated with each specific program. Our focus, however, is on general trendlines that can be observed across national settings. Indeed, we are ultimately concerned with global patterns observed in democratic states, rather than individual national perspectives. For that reason, when we refer to “intermediate” PME, we are referring broadly to that middle stage of education that brings officers from the tactical to the operational level, an educational input that was traditionally known as the staff course, but which today appears under many guises, from traditional staff courses to varying types of master’s degree or other degree- or certificate-granting programs. What must military officers in democratic countries be prepared to do at the operational level? What principles should guide our prioritization of how to provide officers with these skills, given that programs will inevitably run short on time and difficult choices will have to be made? These questions animate the following articles, but our goal is not to definitely answer the questions. Rather, our goal is to spark a broader debate about how we prioritize what we teach officers.
Thomas Crosbie is an Associate Professor of Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defence College. He is the series editor of Military Politics (Berghahn Books) and has published widely on topics including the military profession, military politics, Professional Military Education. He is currently the director of the Educating Future Warfighters Project.
Holger Lindhardtsen is a researcher at the Institute for Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defence College. He is a project member of Educating Future Warfighters Project, focusing on competency development for future conflicts.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.
Photo Description: Clockwise from top left: Sculpture of the Wright Flyer at Maxwell Air Force Base, on Chennault Circle–around the curve from the Air War College; Flags lining the hallway entrance to Mahan Hall at the Naval War College; Eisenhower Hall at the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy at the National Defense University; The 600-person Bliss Auditorium at the U.S. Army War College; Lt Gen Michael T. Plehn, USAF, 17th President of National Defense University welcomes the incoming class of 2025; Center – A clock stands in front of the General Alfred M. Gray Marine Corps Research Center at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.
Photo Credit: Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of the Air War College Facebook page; Courtesy of the U.S. Naval War College About page; Courtesy of the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy Twitter page; Christopher Fincham; Courtesy of the National Defense University website; Center – U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Sean Potter.