[The Joint Warfighting Program] is a crucible that challenges students to wrestle with the changing character of war by thinking and acting like the future joint force commanders they will become.
Looking around the room, the coalition force commander wondered how the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had so rapidly seized the initiative and exploited massed fires to bring the Taiwanese Defense Forces to the verge of defeat. Given the PLA’s advantages, he had planned what he thought was a suitable campaign. Still, he now faced only tough choices related to force sequencing, integration of fires, sustainment, and escalation management, with time running out. That sense of urgency, and the opportunity to wrestle with real-world operational problems, is what defines the Joint Warfighting Program (JWP) at the U.S. Army War College (USAWC). More than an academic elective, JWP is a crucible that challenges students to wrestle with the changing character of war by thinking and acting like the future joint force commanders they will become.
Why JWP Matters to the USAWC
The standing task of the U.S. Army—and the joint force—is to fight and win the nation’s wars. In his first message to the joint force, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Daniel Caine stated that the joint force’s “most basic responsibility is to be a force properly armed, globally integrated and ready to fight and win the nation’s wars now and in the future.” This is why the JWP matters—it is focused directly on the Department of Defense’s top priority.
The overall USAWC curriculum prepares our graduates to be senior leaders, strategic advisors, and warfighters. The JWP builds on that experience with a more intensive and experience-driven focus on employing military force to achieve strategic and political outcomes. This requires a grounding in strategic theory, leadership, and defense processes. Ultimately, though, it means applying operational art, doing campaign planning, and possessing a deep understanding of the evolving character of warfare—all core elements of the JWP.
The world is changing and USAWC students must prepare. The proliferation of sensors, integration of artificial intelligence and autonomy, and increased speed of decision-making are increasing the complexity of warfare and creating new operational problems. JWP empowers students to go deeper in understanding these challenges, and more importantly, to apply operational art and planning through competitive exercises to address the challenges they will face as future joint force commanders.
Overview of the Program
The JWP (formerly known as the Joint Warfighting Advanced Studies Program or JWASP) is a selective special program designed to prepare students for the challenges that joint and multinational commanders will face in current and future conflicts. While JWP addresses both the strategic and operational levels of warfare, it focuses on the operational level, where joint force commanders use military force to achieve strategic and political objectives.
The JWP does this in four primary ways. First, through engagement with thought leaders and each other, JWP graduates deepen their understanding of how the battlefield is evolving, contemporary conflict, and the changing character of war. This past year, students engaged with noted experts such as Australian Major General (Retired) Mick Ryan, whose book White Sun War addresses a fictional China-Taiwan conflict and the operational problems Western militaries face in the future. They also engaged with author and creator Peter Singer, whose book (co-authored with August Cole) Ghost Fleet offers a fictional but realistic look at how technology could impact future warfare and demonstrates the power of their concept of “Useful Fiction” on studying warfare and other complex problems. Additionally, they engaged with Russia expert Michael Kofman, who led them on a deep dive into how the Russian military is fighting in Ukraine, observations from the front lines, and a discussion about how both sides are adapting in that conflict. This focused study of contemporary conflict ingrains habits of learning from books and the analysis of conflict instead of through blood shed on the battlefield.
Second, by wrestling with specific case studies—such as the Okinawa campaign of World War II, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the second Nagorno-Karabakh war—students appreciate how and why these campaigns occurred. More importantly, students deepen their understanding of continuity and change and the role of adaptation in conflict.
Third, by diving into joint and service warfighting concepts to better understand the challenges of the contemporary and future operating environment and how the joint force intends to address them. For U.S. students, this also includes diving into the classified versions of the Joint Warfighting Concept and individual service concepts, strengthening their understanding of the specific capabilities needed to address future challenges.
Finally, through experiential learning using the Operational Wargaming System (OWS), an unclassified operational-level wargame focused on all domain warfare in the 2025-2050 timeframe. OWS forces JWP graduates to wrestle with many of the challenges commanders will face in current and future wars including: 1) how to sequence force flow with its implications for deterrence, force protection, and sustainment; 2) the integration of capabilities across domains while balancing mass, economy of force, and operational effectiveness; and 3) how to time and sequence operations to gain and maintain the initiative while dictating the tempo of operations. These are just a few examples of the operational challenges our graduates will face as they balance the trade-offs required in war. Considering these choices sharpens their minds and prepares them for a day when the stakes are real.
International Officers as a Competitive Advantage
JWP’s student composition is one of its core strengths. The program includes a mix of U.S. and international officers with diverse backgrounds and a strong interest in operational-level warfare. This means working alongside Filipino, Australian, and Japanese officers to develop an operational approach for countering a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. It can mean working with a Danish officer with deep planning experience to lead a group of officers from Europe, the Middle East, and India in developing a military response to Russian aggression in the Baltics. Or it might mean engaging with a Ukrainian officer on the topic of drone warfare and use of fires based on his experience fighting the Russians in Ukraine. This mix enriches the discussion, broadening and deepening the students’ understanding of warfighting, particularly at the operational level of war.
The international officers also bring their unique perspectives on warfighting and serve as the foundation for comparing U.S. approaches with those of their countries. Significantly, for our graduates as future senior leaders and strategic advisors, this expands their understanding of how others view the United States and how joint and combined forces can integrate capabilities across domains. Finally, this collaboration strengthens the relationships between the American students and their international partners, which could be essential in future crises or conflicts.
Mass still matters in an era of high-tech warfare.
Insights and Questions from 2025
The JWP capstone exercise involves using OWS to conduct a 30-day campaign in which a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) attempt to seize Taiwan is confronted by a U.S.-led coalition. Based on the scenario, both sides must plan for and conduct a joint forcible entry operation—one of the most complex operations in warfare. JWP students gained many insights through this year’s exercise, summarized in the following four points and three questions:
First, mass still matters in an era of high-tech warfare. A key factor shaping the evolution of the campaign was the PLA’s ability to mass forces and fires against the Taiwanese Defense Forces (TDF), thereby enabling operational maneuver and tempo. Meanwhile, coalition forces had to attrit PLA anti-access and area-denial capabilities by massing fires before they could support the TDF. In both cases, students observed the need to mass fires to overwhelm the enemy’s defensive fires or to effectively attrit ground forces—even when employing high-end munitions.
The second insight flowed from the first: magazine depth and the ability to sustain high volumes of fires requires deliberate planning and may prove decisive. Both sides rapidly depleted their stockpiles of both offensive and defensive munitions through use and adversary counter-targeting, highlighting the importance of properly postured inventories prior to a conflict. It also reinforced the manner in which logistics can drive operations, rather than the other way around. Notably, both sides faced challenges in protecting their naval forces due to limited on-board magazine depth. Faced with massed fires, naval forces routinely consumed their defensive fires quickly, forcing them to withdraw or accept increased operational risk. The Western coalition suffered most from this dynamic because its forces operated under the geographic disadvantage of being further from their bases.
A third lesson was the importance of multi-domain operations. Students repeatedly found that employing forces and capabilities across domains was essential to improving operational outcomes. Here, the OWS reflected reality by rewarding multi-domain integration with improved likelihood of success. Consequently, students saw the combat odds adjusted substantively based on the degree of integration. The multi-domain imperative forced students to wrestle with the prioritization and sequencing of capabilities, driving home the importance of phasing, prioritized target lists, and “pulsed operations” to create opportunities.
A fourth insight relates to the concept of prudent risk. The risks and costs involved in a large-scale war with a near-peer adversary differ greatly from those the United States experienced during the Global War on Terror. During the capstone exercise, both sides lost bases, ships, aircraft, and personnel in staggering amounts but were able to contain the conflict without escalation to nuclear war. In the process, students had to balance operational risk against considerations of time and tempo. For example, coalition forces chose to focus their early targeting efforts on reducing PLA anti-access area-denial capabilities, thereby allowing coalition forces increased freedom of maneuver. In doing so, they allowed the PLA to gain and exploit operational momentum, which they used to seize ground on Taiwan before the coalition could adequately support the TDF.
Additionally, throughout the course JWP students wrestled with many questions related to joint warfighting, but three stood out:
- How do AI and autonomous systems shape the employment of military force in the near (0-3 years) and mid-term (3-10 years)?
- What does the proliferation of sensors and long-range fires mean for the balance between offense and defense over the same timeframe?
- How will future commanders and senior military leaders address the growing threat of nuclear weapons strategically and operationally?
These are just a small example of the types of questions JWP students wrestled with as they prepared themselves to be strategic advisors and future joint force commanders in large-scale combat operations.
Conclusion
The Joint Warfighting Program is more than an academic exercise—it is a crucible for developing the intellectual agility, operational acumen, and strategic foresight required of tomorrow’s joint force leaders. By immersing students in realistic, high-stakes scenarios and engaging deeply with contemporary military thought and practice, the JWP ensures that graduates are prepared to advise senior leaders and lead in the most demanding operational environments. As warfare continues to evolve in complexity and lethality, the JWP stands as a cornerstone of the Army War College’s mission to prepare leaders who can think critically, act decisively, and integrate capabilities across domains to achieve strategic success.
Chase Metcalf is a colonel, an Army strategist and an instructor at the U.S. Army War College. He most recently served as Deputy Director of the Russia Strategic Initiative at the United States’ European Command. He was a U.S. Army War College Fellow with Yale University in 2019-2020. He is an instructor in the USAWC Joint Warfighting Program.
Bill Donnelly is a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps currently serving as a Faculty Instructor and as the Marine Corps Senior Service Representative at the U.S. Army War College. His last assignment was as commanding officer of Marine Aviation Training Support Group-22 in Corpus Christi, TX. He is a 2017 graduate of the U.S. Army War College resident course. He is an instructor in the USAWC Joint Warfighting Program.
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: Joint Warfighting Program students pondering their next move.
Photo Credit: Provided by Chase Metcalf
