EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the eighth and final 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.
A successful end-state approach to course design will produce an unusable first draft, one that is optimized to develop officers who are able to fight the sorts of wars that their country is preparing to fight, but which makes no concessions to the organizational realities of the teaching environment.
Over the past several weeks, War Room has featured seven articles in our series on competency development and professional military education (PME). Those articles stand on their own merits as arguments in favor of one or another approach, each of which has some degree of legitimacy in the practitioner and researcher worlds. In this final article, we aim to strengthen our case by making explicit three aspects which informed all of the previous articles. These are: 1) an “end state” approach to competency development; 2) an acknowledgement of multiple legitimate courses-of-action and centers of gravity; and 3) an implied sphere of consensus, sphere of legitimate controversy, and area of deviance. We will briefly explain each in turn before making our final case for a competency development structure.
First, let us make explicit our “end state” approach to course planning. On those rare occasions when course directors are given the responsibility to significantly revise their programs, they will typically use their existing model as a starting point and will look to more prestigious programs for inspiration. This has given rise to a “copy-paste” logic of course revision that has in turn led to Frankenstein courses that boast many sound components, but which often fit together poorly. As experienced course directors ourselves, we have struggled to find resources to guide course revision in a logical manner that connects to the deeper purpose of what we do. Lacking international guidelines and guardrails, we have instead worked backward from our local context to figure out the best end state for our nations and services. Not surprisingly, we discovered that these needs look very different from one context to another. The first lesson we gained is that we need to decouple institutional logic from competency development logics. A successful end-state approach to course design will produce an unusable first draft, one that is optimized to develop officers who are able to fight the sorts of wars that their country is preparing to fight, but which makes no concessions to the organizational realities of the teaching environment. The art of course design is then to develop a subsequent draft that is fitted to reality, with an honest assessment of how far it falls short of the ideal.
The real-ideal tension brings us to our second insight, concerning the local nature of course of action and center of gravity identification. As course directors work toward their first draft, they should keep in mind that the desired end state may be reached by various courses of action. For countries focused on fighting what Mary Kaldor called “new wars,” for example, one option may be to optimize the program in the ways described by Todd Greentree and Craig Whiteside in their article. Alternately, it may instead follow the approach described by Heather S. Gregg in her article. Likewise, a “future war” orientation may resemble the MDO approach described by Katrine Lund-Hansen and Jeff Reilly, or the technology focus described by Vicky Karyoti. Local context is everything. Planning methods can be used to help untangle these difficult judgment calls, and often an adapted center-of-gravity analysis can be particularly helpful. For example, the competency development center of gravity for one country may be the overriding requirement for its officers to be able to deploy into component commands within a joint force. In that case, a single-component approach of the sort we previously outlined may be preferred to the joint approach described by James Campbell.
The final point we want to make explicit concerns the nature of legitimacy. In civilian academic programs, course directors derive their learning objectives from the mature academic fields in which they have specialized. In PME, new and emerging focus areas are often imported from military policy arenas without the supporting academic frame.
As a result, we must derive legitimacy from a combination of the policy and practitioner worlds as well as the relatively small academic world of military studies, although this is not without its challenges. One challenge that we face is over-correction when a new and trendy concept arrives on the scene. There is also a danger that unfounded views voiced by influential figures but based on tiny samples or bureaucratic compromises may exert undue influence over a local context. To guard against these tendencies, it is helpful to visualize competency development as the outcome of a global debate about the changing character of war and the evolving body of professional military expertise, a debate that includes practitioners and researchers.
This debate can be modeled using communication scholar Daniel Hallin’s famous spheres. The inner sphere represents the sphere of consensus, where we assume we all agree on the core competencies officers need, regardless of local context. These need not be endlessly debated. All countries want officers to be effective leaders with a basic knowledge of military affairs, a basic orientation toward national strategy and global politics, and so on. Of greater interest is the sphere of legitimate controversy that surrounds the sphere of consensus. This is loosely structured, but does have structure: legitimate positions are based on compelling evidence from the world of practice, research, or both. Beyond this sphere is the large area of deviance, where heterodox views are expressed and where new ideas generally first appear.
Figure 1: The Sphere of Consensus, Sphere of Controversy, and Area of Deviance
Having made explicit the deeper logic uniting the articles in this series, we would like to conclude with two final points. First, and to repeat ourselves, NATO countries should recognize that PME is not an end in itself, but is rather the best available means to achieve competency development. It is time, in our view, for the field of PME studies to stop focusing on institutional characteristics (e.g., whether courses should be taught by civilian or military instructors), and start focusing on desired outcomes. The goal of militaries is to fight and win wars. The goal of our PME should be to develop competencies that aid nations in fighting and winning their sorts of wars.
Second, PME institutions struggle to develop appropriate competencies because we lack a Competency Development Center of Excellence or other similar structure. Such a structure could provide enormous benefits if it did just three things: clarify the sphere of consensus (what every officer needs to learn); continuously refine the contours of various courses of action within the sphere of controversy (aiding policymakers in focusing their priorities); and share best practices in developing the various competencies implied by the developed alternatives . We view this collection of articles as a call for NATO or other international organizations to develop such a structure. In the meantime, we encourage our fellow course directors to focus as much as possible on competency development, rather than the distractions that plague PME.
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 the 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: L: Grant Hall located at 415 Sherman Avenue, Fort Leavenworth, KS, home of the United States Army Combined Arms Center Headquarters; R: The Lewis and Clark Center, Fort Leavenworth, KS
Photo Credit: L: Don Middleton, U.S. Army; R: Courtesy of the U.S. Army CGSC Twitter account
