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“No one is thinking if everyone is thinking alike.” Gen. George S. Patton’s quip shows that he not only understood the advantage of audacious combat leadership, but the necessity to develop leaders and organizations that think critically and challenge assumptions. Military education is at the forefront of this endeavor in professional militaries. Indeed, last week Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered a review of the military’s senior service/war colleges and the severing of ties between the department and 22 academic institutions in an effort to better prepare strategic leaders for the complexities of modern warfare.

In a recent opinion article, Thomas Robb Anderson — an attorney who retired from the U.S. Army almost two decades ago writing under the nom de plume Cynical Publius — offered nine recommendations to overhaul America’s senior service colleges without adequately identifying the problem. The problem is not a lack of warfighting instruction or too much focus on the diplomatic, informational, and economic instruments of national power, as he argued. The problem is Washington’s policy and resourcing decisions, which have produced a highly tactically competent joint force that struggles to link tactical actions to achievement of strategic objectives.

I am a former Army infantry officer who served in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan prior to retiring in 2021. After graduating from the National War College, I was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where I staffed, briefed, and coordinated with strategic leaders across the national security spectrum, including members of Congress, diplomats, senior military leaders, and interagency policymakers.

I am not disputing the premise that the war colleges and professional military education more broadly require a fresh look. Indeed, that has been the broad consensus for almost a decade. I seek to show why the cult of lethality approach, characterized by its focus on tactical warfighting at the expense of strategic study, will not produce senior military leaders with the necessary skills and attributes to effectively lead in today’s complex environment. Indeed, much of the cult of lethality emphasis on tactical warfighting is more suited to training than to education.

My counter-argument considers how Anderson’s recommendations align with the priorities Secretary Hegseth outlined in the new National Defense Strategy. To do so, I highlight the dynamic relationship between the military and politics, offering a brief history of why professional militaries have war colleges. Next, I examine the different levels of professional military education and how these experiences transition from training to education to prepare officers for roles on senior staffs and as senior commanders. After that, I reject the position that civilian faculty and interagency students be removed from the war colleges, as this would only exacerbate the military’s recent struggles with linking tactical actions to strategic objectives. Likewise, the removal of civilian faculty from the war colleges would result in brain drain in vital areas where military officers possess little to no experience or education. Finally, I drive home the point that the senior service college learning environment would be broken without these same civilian leaders, many of whom will go on to senior positions across the government’s departments and agencies.

The Military, Politics, and Civilian Control

Cult of lethality disciples simultaneously posit that war colleges should only focus on warfighting, the U.S. military won every battle of its two-decades long “Global War on Terror” but lost strategically, and officers should stay out of politics. Politics should not be conflated with partisan behavior. The profession demands senior leaders who understand the former, not participate in the latter.

In staking out this Huntingtonian position, the cult of lethality does a disservice to service members and the American people. The proposal is analogous to a marksmanship or gunnery range where all that counts is whether the target is hit. However, armies do not fight on a range. They fight — and are formed — in social, political, cultural, and economic contexts. The founding fathers understood this. Also writing under the name Publius, Alexander Hamilton penned Federalist No. 26, arguing for congressional oversight of the armed forces as a means to subordinate the force to civilian control. Civilian control was later codified in the Article I and Article II powers given to Congress and the president, respectively, in the Constitution.

In the American system, civilians are the ultimate decisionmakers. As one leading civil-military scholar notes, they have the right to be wrong. It is the job of the military and civilian national security professionals who staff the decisionmakers to ensure the principal is well informed of the resources, risks, and feasibility of achieving the intended objectives. Depriving senior service college education to interagency experts, while solely focusing on tactical warfighting skills, will not achieve this end. Beginning at their respective pre-commissioning source, the senior officers attending senior service college are inundated with tactical instruction. Anderson is not clear about what value the joint force receives in investing in more tactical level education for this cohort.

My National War College class did not receive instruction in globalism or Marxism. However, my transcript shows coursework on the domestic and global contexts, both of which strategic leaders must understand in today’s security environment. One need only look at the National Defense Strategy’s priorities to gain an appreciation for the breadth and complexity of activities and operations the U.S. military is charged with being prepared for: defend the homeland, deter China, increase the burden-sharing of allies and partners, and rebuilding the defense industrial base. These four lines of effort cannot be advanced via military power alone. They require an understanding of diplomacy, domestic and global politics — including the aims of America’s adversaries and allies, how malign actors may attempt to counter the approach, and domestic and international trade. This is why senior service college curriculums focus more on the strategic and less on the tactical — war college graduates will soon lead in environments where they must not only know tactics, but also understand the operating environment and how these tactical actions link to broader strategic goals.

War Colleges. What Are They Good For?

The need for senior military leader education is not a new nor uniquely American idea. Suffering defeat at the hands of Napoleon at Jena-Auerstedt, the Prussians spent decades reforming their force under the tutelage of Maj. Gen. Gerhard von Scharnhorst. Scharnhorst placed military education at its fore, developing a tiered system of military education, with the Kriegsakademie (War Academy) — the world’s first war college — its crown jewel. Not unlike America’s contemporary senior service colleges, the Kriegsakademie focused on strategic and critical thinking via a curriculum emphasizing military art and science (warfighting), history, politics, and economics to mold leaders capable of solving the problems presented by modern war — thus undergirding the formation of the Prussian General Staff, the “brains and nerve center of the army.”

Fewer than 70 years after its defeat at Sedan, then-Gen. Helmuth von Moltke led the strategically-minded Prussian force to victory against Napoleon III at Jena, unifying the German state. Others took note of Prussia’s strategic success and mimicked Scharnhorst’s model. I will use the National War College, from which I graduated from in 2018, as an example.

The National War College

Emerging from the Spanish-American War, American leaders saw the need for improved military education, establishing the Army War College at Fort McNair in 1901. The National War College was established on this site in 1946 with the purpose of producing graduates with the skills and acumen to heavily influence national and foreign policy in peace and war. To realize this goal, the school opened its doors to military and civilian professionals from throughout the national security ecosystem, with George F. Kennan, who laid the intellectual framework for the American containment strategy during the Cold War, serving as the State Department’s first senior representative to the school. If Anderson were to have his way, Kennan’s successor civilian leaders would no longer be welcome in the war colleges as they are now.

Senior military officers cannot afford to solely master the military instrument of national power. Senior officers who attend the nation’s senior service colleges must understand the  responsibilities of their future bosses — the secretary of defense, chairman and service chiefs, and combatant commanders. America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are illustrative. The U.S. Army’s official history of the Iraq war highlights the failure of army leaders to understand the strategic environment — Iraqi politics, society, and government — as the force’s most significant failure in invasion planning. Likewise, an examination of U.S. military effectiveness in Afghanistan identified three main variables to explain America’s lack of success, two of which — failure to integrate political considerations with military activity and the poor integration of tactical, operational, and strategic efforts — are the war colleges’ raison dêtre.

The Chairman’s Role

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s guidance charges military education institutions with producing graduates who can operate across the competition continuum — conflict, competition, cooperation. As such, war college graduates must understand the interrelated nature of the instruments of national power.

The Army’s transition to multi-domain operations has led some scholars with Global War on Terror combat experience to challenge the belief that the wars of the future will look like the conventional wars of the past. Specifically, they detail adversary employment of political-economic warfare to avoid American military might, with Russia, China, and Iran the main actors employing these hybrid strategies. Countering this approach requires officers who better understand the operating environment. Military education that removes civilian expertise to double down on the cult of lethality will not enhance understanding of this complex and dynamic environment and is more likely to continue America’s strategic drift.

Discussion of senior service college reform is best done when placed in the broader context of leader development. One cannot grapple with the question of how to develop leaders with the right balance of tactical acumen and strategic skill by eliding the career progression paths of war college students in the 16 to 20 years preceding their attendance. The chairman and service chiefs have this responsibility, with the chairman possessing authority codified in federal law to formulate military education policy. The Officer Professional Military Education Policy articulates the chairman’s vision as:

a fully aligned [professional military education]/Talent Management system that develops leaders who are skilled in the art of war and the practical and ethical application of lethal military power. The intent is the development of strategically minded Joint warfighters who think critically and can creatively apply military power to inform national strategy, conduct globally integrated operations, and fight under conditions of disruptive change.

This vision recognizes that professional development occurs throughout an officer’s career. Segmented across five different military education levels — pre-commissioning, primary, intermediate, senior, and general/flag officer — military education’s ultimate purpose is ensuring officers attain the skills and attributes required to effectively lead at each respective level. War college reform discussions are incomplete absent consideration of these other education levels and how they interact with an officer’s operational assignments and experiences.

A frequent argument regarding military education centers on whether its purpose is to train or educate. I will use the Army in which I served as an illustration. At the primary level, an officer attends their requisite Basic Course and Captains Career Course, both of which focus on accrual of specialized skills and tactical knowledge. In other words, the primary level of military education is heavily slanted toward training. The transition to education generally occurs at the intermediate level with Command and General Staff College attendance. Selected officers attend the school around their tenth year in service. As most army officers will not be selected for war college attendance, this education must last for the remaining ten years of an officer’s service — hence a focus on campaign planning and joint constructs aimed at preparing them for service on senior staffs. Those selected for war colleges see the emphasis on strategic thought and national security strategy increase exponentially.

The (mis)Education of Colin Powell

War colleges produce leaders who not only understand the instruments of national power, but those capable of leading through the complexities of modern conflict. Understanding the operational environment, including the domestic and global contexts in which military operations and activities occur, is at the center of this effort. History provides an example.

James Kitfield chronicled the company grade and field grade officer Vietnam War veterans who spearheaded the institutional change that produced victory in Operation Desert Storm. Colin Powell remarked that it was in the halls and seminar rooms of the National War College where he transformed from an infantry officer well-schooled in tactics to understand the other elements of national power and their linkages to strategy.

Powell may be an anomaly in that he served as a national security advisor, chairman, and secretary of state across four administrations. However, his experience is not unique. Powell was raised in an Army that incentivized and rewarded tactical skill. Demonstrating the ability to lead soldiers and formations at this level, he was then selected to attend the War College in preparation for senior level staff and command positions. Powell’s path from tactical to strategic leader is still the model followed today.

Some may argue that the curriculum has changed since Powell’s time. No doubt it has. The tools have also changed. However, what has not changed is the school’s focus on warfighting and national security strategy more broadly. National War College students practice developing strategies throughout their ten months of coursework. Mastery requires practice. A prime example is the current class’s examination of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which consisted of determining threat courses of action and likely challenges — amphibious lift, fires, port and infrastructure capacity, and escalation dynamics. Rebalancing senior service college curriculums to favor the tactical over the strategic will not produce more Powells, or a Senate Armed Services Committee chair, a secretary of defense, five chairmen, or future ambassadors.

The National War College Learning Environment

Civilian academics and their military education counterparts face divergent incentives. Civilian academics are incentivized to publish and secure research funding for their institutions — this is their path to tenure. The military system does not place the same pressure to publish on civilian faculty, all of whom take the same oath to the Constitution as the uniformed and civilian students they teach. Furthermore, war colleges do not serve as an Ivy League farm system.

Civilian faculty at war colleges also have far less leeway in curriculum development, assignments, and assessment design and grading than their counterparts in academia. While war colleges must be accredited to reward master’s degrees, accreditation boards do not dictate curriculum.

Proposals to return warfighting and lethality to senior service colleges endorse the firing of civilian and permanent military faculty and replacing them with the military’s best senior officers. However, these suggestions do not consider the mismatch in civilian and military faculty skills and knowledge as they align with the strategic challenges the joint force has faced in our most recent wars.

A cursory review of current National War College civilian faculty areas of expertise elucidates this. Faculty possess deep knowledge and practice across various functions and geographic areas — artificial intelligence, cyber, space operations, the intelligence community, nuclear proliferation and policy, Russian foreign policy, Latin America, Chinese foreign policy and domestic politics, and the broader Indo-Pacific region. Anderson does not entertain how this loss of expertise and experience could be effectively filled by military officers serving one-year classroom tours. As an aside, it is worth noting that most war colleges do not have permanent military faculty.

The removal of the civilian interagency experts who write and implement policy across the government’s departments and agencies from the student body will not address the nation’s strategic challenges. My interagency classmates enabled learning by viewing national security issues through a different organizational culture, thus fostered discussion of divergent ways to frame and address the nation’s security challenges. Additionally, whereas many of my military peers had multiple deployments under our belts by the time we attended war colleges, our civilian counterparts possessed deep knowledge and practical experience across the diplomatic, informational, and economic instruments of power. They helped me see that the brigade combat team could solve a lot of problems, but not all of them. In turn, my military peers and I assisted in educating these policy makers and future strategic leaders on the utility and limitations of military power.

One omission in Anderson’s argument is the return on investment received via the war college attendance of military officers from allied and partner nations through the International Military Education and Training program. Many international students go on to be Chiefs and Ministers of Defense of their respective militaries, while other graduates have served distinguished careers in government. Indeed, nine of my international classmates were NATO military members and six served in the militaries of America’s Major Non-NATO Allies. Additionally, my class consisted of officers at the forefront of Europe’s security reforms driven by Russian aggression against Ukraine and leaders from America’s treaty allies in the Indo-Pacific.

Students conducted field studies in one of 20 countries, including cohorts who visited Ukraine and China, respectively. Four years prior to Putin’s “Special Military Operation,” military officers and government policy makers — including a peer who would soon play a leading role in shaping the Trump and later Biden administrations’ respective policies towards Ukraine — received a firsthand account of Russian subversive activities from defense, political, and academic leaders in Kyiv. Prior to this trip, these strategic leaders learned about Russian information operations, electronic warfare capabilities, and Russia’s integrated fires from our Ukrainian peer who arguably possessed more combat experience in conditions the joint force may face in the future than anyone in the class. I cannot speak for Anderson’s experience of climate change research in China, but a senior military officer gaining first-hand experience in an adversary state is a net positive.

Conclusion

Any discussion on senior service college reform must start by properly identifying the problem. Increasing tactical warfighting instruction and removing civilian faculty and interagency students from attendance at the nation’s senior service colleges will not fix America’s strategic struggles. It is illogical to tout America’s tactical success in battle and its dearth of strategic skill, while recommending that the leaders who serve on senior military staffs and across the departments and agencies of the U.S. government double down on lethality. This is a recipe for more strategic folly.

Militaries fight in social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Prohibiting experts in the diplomatic, informational, and economic instruments of power from instructing and attending senior service colleges will not close the strategic capability gap observed in America’s most recent wars.

Put simply, eliminating civilian faculty and students from war colleges will not rectify the mistakes of the past 25 years. Indeed, it lets civilian leaders off the hook for the nation’s strategic struggles while also depriving them of the strategic advice they deserve and need. As a former boss used to say, there are two types of plans — one that might work and one that won’t work. The cult of lethality approach will not work.

Bradford T. Duplessis is a retired Army infantry officer who commanded an armored brigade combat team cavalry squadron. He has multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan at the tactical to strategic level and built partner capacity experience in Malawi and Jordan. He is a National War College graduate who taught U.S. Army doctrine, both in and out of uniform, to mid-career officers attending the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College. The views expressed by the author are not those of his former employers, the Department of Defense and the Department of the Army.

**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense