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When war changes, schools change. New technology, the politics of mass mobilization and campaign design, and novel tactics that defined Napoleonic warfare led to Gerhard von Scharnhorst’s reforms and the idea of lifelong education as a professional obligation. The pattern repeated itself in the interwar period. In 1929, James Carson Breckinridge, a Marine officer, published “Some Thoughts on Service Schools” in the Marine Corps Gazette, calling for a new educational paradigm consistent with John Dewey’s ideas about pragmatism and experiential learning.
War is again changing. The promise of the third offset has arrived, extending the battlefield and resulting in wars waged by AI-enabled drones and fought across multiple domains in Europe, the Middle East, and looming over the Indo-Pacific. Most major militaries now see war as inherently multidomain and defined by converging effects that combine cyber, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum with land, sea, and air maneuvers. Operational art extends to coordinating a “symphony of capabilities.”
Yet, military education has not kept up with the changing character of war. Professional military education tends to reinforce stale seminars and lectures that reflect concerns about strategy and history disconnected from the technical reality of modern warfare. Students spend more time reading The History of the Peloponnesian War and admiring ground campaigns from the U.S. Civil War than they do reviewing modern war plans. Swapping pithy comments about liberal order crowds out space for discussions about pulse operations and contested logistics. While there is a role for the historical mind and deliberations on strategy, there needs to be better balance to prepare students for the wars they will fight in the next decade.
We seek to outline our attempt to strike that balance at Marine Corps University. Since becoming president of the university, one of us (Brig. Gen. Tracy) has led a series of reforms designed to increase the amount of time students spend in secure areas learning the technical dimensions of modern war. The other author has been executing that vision and developing ideas for what comes next. This approach includes shifting toward a classified, all-domain curriculum that blends practice, advanced wargaming, and experiments with AI to create a modern laboratory where officers test new ideas about military advantage. More than training, this process is about creating knowledge and insight along the lines of America’s school for war in the interwar period.
There still is a place for seminar discussions about history and international relations, but the main effort shifts back to reflections on the art of warfighting and the science of joint all-domain operations. War remains a continuation of politics by other means, but without time spent studying those other means and their application, the military profession begins to abdicate its expertise.
When confined to school, the military profession is often like the misfits in the 1985 movie “The Breakfast Club.” Officers find themselves stranded in intellectual detention. The classroom struggles to keep up with change in the world. This tension drives a continual, healthy process of rebellion and rejuvenation. Every new generation needs its “Breakfast Club” and wave of educational reforms.
Change can come from within or from above. When Commodore Stephen Luce established the Naval War College in 1884, he recognized that technological revolutions in steam and steel required a corresponding revolution in tactical thought. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 created new mandates and joint education requirements that set off a wave of debates about curriculum design, method, and course structure. Many voices saw a need to cultivate strategic genius rather than simply ensure officers understood the need for jointness. At the service level, the U.S. Marine Corps 2006 Wilhelm Report called for rebalancing “the curricula of the respective schools to place appropriate and proportionate emphasis between the art and science of warfare” out of a concern that current programs placed a “premium on art at the expense of science.”
War on the Rocks is no stranger to these debates about the balance between art and science in the study of warfare. Over the years, a mix of faculty and officers have debated everything from the promise and peril of AI to how to integrate competition, wargaming, and nuclear weapons in the curriculum. At their core, these debates often center on the balance between training and education, with training often mischaracterized as rote learning of doctrine and education as preparing future leaders to navigate uncertainty.
Once again, there are debates and initiatives to reform professional military education driven by the administration and Congress, but it’s often the case that valuable change often emerges from within. Today, officers are debating how to adapt to a coming battlefield likely to see AI, quantum computing, and hypersonic glide vehicles alongside insurgents operating drone swarms and relentless global information warfare waged with a mix of memes and malware. The question is how to embrace this intellectual awakening and balance the time spent in the classroom providing an educational foundation in politics and history with those wicked “other means” to cultivate judgment in the profession of arms.
There is currently a battle for the heart and soul of what constitutes professional military education. The debate was catalyzed by calls for a new review of education and the concept of lethality. On one side are critics who see America’s war colleges as emphasizing politics over war and creating a culture that sees strategic failure as inevitable. The other side sees the exact opposite and warns against teaching tactics without grounding in history, military theory, and politics.
Our approach falls somewhere in the middle. First, modern war puts an increasingly high premium on technical knowledge. Yes, war is still the continuation of politics by other means, but officers rarely get to consider the depth and breadth of those “other means” before joint assignments. We all wear our service masks.
Too often, this deep dive into tactics and operational art is conflated with training. First, training should never be used as a pejorative. Second, providing spaces for students to hone judgment through wargames, decision games, and debates about how to degrade an enemy kill web is as much training as it is education. Just as lawyers read cases and MBA students learn to build business models, the military professional must be conversant in their craft.
This technical requirement is driven by the challenge of breaking modern anti-access and area denial networks. The challenges Russia and Ukraine face breaking the frontline stalemate on land find corollaries at sea in Iran. China presents an order of magnitude larger challenge with deeper space, cyber, and long-strike capabilities. From long-range kill webs to bastion complexes, modern battle networks require careful study and deliberation. The fact that after months of bombing and intermittent clashes, Iran retains the ability to launch drone, missile, and cyber attacks, should be a clarion call.
The new operational reality demands majors and lieutenant colonels who are entirely comfortable coordinating complex actions across land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Achieving this level of proficiency requires access to appropriate materials that often reside at higher levels of classification. As a result, expecting officers to master modern warfare using exclusively unclassified materials resembles teaching surgery to medical students restricted from cutting on cadavers. Large segments of military education must occur in secure spaces where students can grapple with actual capabilities, real-world adversary threats, and current joint warfighting concepts to bridge the gap between abstract theory and operational reality. That doesn’t mean denying entry to foreign students, but it does mean rebalancing time in the curriculum to complement unclassified debates about historical campaigns with classified deep dives into modern operations.
To answer this call, Marine Corps University implemented significant structural and academic changes. We started by building a pilot curriculum for Joint All-Domain Operations at the top-secret and sensitive compartmented information level. The heart of the program was the Command and Staff College, where the entire faculty, led by Nathan Packard and Joseph McAlarnen, reoriented a curriculum that had only moderately changed over the last 10 years. A Marine infantry officer learns to call upon space-based assets to facilitate littoral maneuver. An Air Force pilot understands how cyber operations can blind an enemy air defense network before a strike. Modern operational art is inherently multidomain.
By graduation from Intermediate Level School, a major must possess the capability to coordinate distinct advantages across enough domains to execute maneuver, fires, and logistics pulses. Simultaneously, they must present clear plans and concepts for defending their assets against sophisticated adversary attacks. Ultimately, the Intermediate Level School graduate must possess the skills to effectively fight a single Joint Task Force at the echelon II level (e.g., Pacific Fleet, Marine Forces Pacific).
The expectations increase significantly for senior officers. By graduation from Top Level School, a lieutenant colonel should possess the capability to coordinate multiple Joint Task Forces to achieve theater objectives. The classroom should see debates about how nuclear weapons cast a long shadow over modern great-power competition. Students don’t just read Thomas Schelling (i.e., education) — they learn about nuclear effects, delivery systems, and the complex interplay between strategic and conventional weapons across the spectrum of competition, crisis, and conflict (i.e., training).
Transforming the curriculum also required a new approach to faculty development. Our historians now attend space camp to understand orbital mechanics. Political scientists study command and control and joint fires. Faculty development now prioritizes sending academics and military instructors to key joint certifying courses, if not directly to fleet exercises and joint staffs, to support planning. Instructors must ground their academic expertise in current operational realities, balancing, for example, classical history with contemporary doctrine. An instructor writing a historical chapter on the 1864 Overland Campaign should also attend the Combined Forces Land Component Commander course to understand contemporary ground combat. A faculty member presenting a conference paper on the Russo-Japanese War participates in the Combined Force Maritime Component Commander course to learn exactly how a Maritime Operations Center fights today.
The challenge is assessment. Given that the reforms are preliminary, it is too early to say if they have met the challenge of the moment. Preliminary data points are encouraging. Students in the pilot program were able to support Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wargames and real-world fleet problems. They also participated in a pilot program to explore how to evaluate joint warfare education and students’ ability to write a commander’s estimate in a time-compressed setting with high levels of uncertainty.
Scaling is the next challenge. The majority of students learn at distance education locations at the major bases. But here opportunities knock, as SCIFs are already present along with the students who practice modern war by day and broaden their joint understanding by night. Marine Corps Distance Education and Training has introduced a blended seminar program that teaches all domain war at the classified level. Marine Corps University is bringing relevant education right to the consumer.
In each instance, we saw a new cadre of officers who were better able to describe how to link effects to tasks, objectives, and end states in modern joint campaigns than previous cohorts. They could talk about joint warfare using doctrinal terms and core concepts like the elements of operational design (i.e., training), but were able to apply it to new scenarios and debate alternative approaches (i.e., education). The real measure of effectiveness will come from fleet feedback and hearing from commanding officers whether this new approach produced officers better equipped to plan and fight modern operations.
To further lock in the changes, the university will next adopt how it delivers curriculum, shifting from a singular focus on lecturers and seminars to a more applied focus indicative of active learning. It is not enough to have students who know the material. We also need them to generate new ideas and apply them in novel ways.
Battle Labs
First, the university will return to an old idea: battle labs. Military education is professional education more than classical education. Like an MBA or law degree, it requires learning how to analyze a distinct domain of problems and should provide opportunities for students to work on real-world cases.
There has been a growing push to build battle labs into Marine Corps University over the last 10 years. Much of it started with the Gray Scholars program at the Command and Staff College. This program saw students support efforts ranging from thinking about the future of urban warfare to force design and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s mosaic warfare. Students participated in classified wargames and developed individual research projects that directly supported these initiatives.
It has evolved at the School of Advanced Warfighting, where students worked alongside the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to explore how AI can augment military planning. More recently, the school has carved out time to dispatch students to support major planning exercises overseas and support the National Commission on the Future of the Navy. In the coming academic years, these efforts will expand and become an integrated part of the curriculum across all degree-granting schools. Students will directly support operational commands and hone their craft.
Wargaming
Since the formation of the Brute Krulak Center in 2016, the university has embraced wargaming as a method for honing creativity and instinct, referring to the methods as fight club. Starting in 2018, the program used an annual competition, Sea Dragon, to pit students in head-to-head fights in modern scenarios. It evolved over the years to integrate more joint effects and even non-strategic nuclear weapons. This model was replicated by larger initiatives like the international Fight Club Society and the former Training and Education Command Warfighting Society. Under the current commitment reforms, students will engage in both classified and unclassified wargames.
Artificial Intelligence
Marine Corps University has been at the forefront of exploring how to integrate AI over the last eight years. It started in 2018 with Project Athena and using wargame tournaments to generate human data that could be turned into machine courses of action. This approach continued through a collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and working with STORM models to see if genetic algorithms could help develop course-of-action advisers.
The effort evolved as large language models and generative pre-trained transformers altered how we thought about AI. This led to new initiatives in the School of Advanced Warfighting and the Command and Staff College. The approach has been to embrace mission command and allow each school to experiment with how to integrate the technology in the classroom, but with an eye towards practical application.
The university will continue this approach. While the Department of Defense has mandated broad adoption of generative AI and the U.S. Marine Corps has built new online training requirements, integrating AI into joint all-domain operations will require more deliberate classroom integration and spaces for critique and reflection. The fact is, AI is a general-purpose technology that must be adapted to the fog and friction inherent in warfare. Just like hope, stochastic parroting is not a method. The university will create classroom environments where students learn to understand how models work and what problems they can and cannot solve in modern campaigns.
Technology changes the character of war, yet the fundamental nature of human conflict remains constant. Amidst the introduction of classified curriculums, battle labs, and AI, certain foundational elements of military education endure.
First, officers must learn tactics and military theory, and this is more than training. They should be able to debate how to adapt tactics and principles of war to new scenarios. Enduring concepts like penetration and turning movements apply directly to new domains. A cyber operator executing a network intrusion uses the same fundamental logic of a penetration attack that a mechanized infantry commander uses on a physical battlefield. Classroom debates about battlefield geometry, how to mass effects against decisive points, and the exploitation of enemy vulnerabilities remain absolutely central to military education.
Second, studying civil-military relations and the profession of arms remains essential. Officers must deeply understand their ethical obligations, their role within a democratic society, and the constitutional framework that governs their actions. Increasing combat speed and complexity demand corresponding moral and ethical leadership. Technical proficiency must be matched by an unwavering commitment to professional ethics.
Third, officers should explore military history, strategy, and international relations. History provides a massive catalog of human experience under the extreme stress of combat. This historical perspective inoculates officers against the hubris of the present, reminding them that the fundamental nature of war remains a chaotic clash of human wills. By reading about past commanders, students learn how humans react to fear, friction, and uncertainty. Counterfactual historical cases and critical analysis help officers situate and evaluate modern key operational problems. Officers learn international relations to understand the bounds of the operational environment, recognizing that every tactical action carries strategic implications in modern competition.
Preparing officers for the realities of multidomain combat against peer adversaries requires reforming but not fundamentally breaking or replacing professional military education. Education must reflect the fundamental changes in how the joint force fights. That means classroom debates and practical exercises should increasingly migrate to classified settings and integrate new approaches to faculty development, battle labs, and wargaming that balance technical training and education.
To sustain and expand this evolution, the military must provide robust support. Schools will need funds for expanding classified infrastructure and building the custom analytical tools our students need. Instead of firing civilian faculty, schools need to expand their training so academics can work alongside seasoned warfighters to cultivate the type of rich dialogue and debate officers need to assess the changing character of war.
Brig. Gen. Matthew Tracy is president of Marine Corps University.
Benjamin Jensen is the Frank E. Petersen Chair of Emerging and Disruptive Technology at Marine Corps University and a professor in the School of Advanced Warfighting. Outside the university, he is director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Future Lab and a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.
The views here are those of the authors and not those of Training and Education Command, the Marine Corps, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.
**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: Lance Cpl. Ethan Miller via DVIDS
