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Major General Thomas D. Crimmins, ANG, is Commandant of the Joint Forces Staff College (JFSC). Colonel Eric S. Fowler, USA, is Director of the Joint Advanced Warfighting School at JFSC. Colonel Daryl A. Chamberlain, USA, is Director of the Joint and Combined Warfighting School at JFSC.
In “Balancing Nonresident Joint Professional Military Education With Military Life,” Commander Doug Morea makes the salient point that the current joint professional military education (JPME) process fails the individual joint warfighter in preparing for the challenges of serving in combatant commands and other joint forces.1 As joint educators, we agree with Commander Morea’s premise and offer that the current JPME model not only fails the individual joint warfighter but is also wholly inadequate for what the joint force requires both today and in an uncertain future. From the start, the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense (DOD) Reorganization Act of 1986 enshrined JPME and the joint qualification process as a forcing function to reduce unhelpful parochialism and achieve unified action. Even today, a compromised system still exists, lacking standardization across the enterprise and persistently delivering educated officers too late and short in supply at all echelons of the joint force.
In Victory on the Potomac, James Locher chronicles the parochialism and Service cultural intransigence that characterized DOD in the late 1970s and early 1980s.2 Locher specifically notes both the failed rescue attempt of 52 diplomats held hostage in Iran in 1980 and the interoperability challenges Army and Marine forces encountered in Grenada in 1983. These breakdowns highlighted to U.S. lawmakers that serious deficiencies existed in the U.S. military regarding the conduct of joint operations. They further stressed that DOD was proving incapable or unwilling to correct those deficiencies.3 This institutional resistance ultimately led Congress to legislate reforms that the military Services proved unwilling to make on their own. Nearly 40 years since the implementation of Goldwater-Nichols, a certain degree of institutional resistance remains, which keeps DOD from best serving the joint warfighter and its joint warfighting elements.
Commander Morea recognizes a latent shortfall and contends that distance-learning JPME fails to produce the quality acculturation experience that a rising field-grade officer must have before serving in higher echelons of service, including joint warfighting commands. His observations are consistent with those of late Representative Ike Skelton (D-MO), who espoused a conviction that the JPME learning experience must be one in which officers of different Services are “rubbing elbows” with one another until they perceive jointness as a “state of mind.”4
By its construction, such inter-Service elbow-rubbing does not exist in any serious measure in JPME-I schoolhouses. In fact, JPME-I schools are Service schools and have always introduced jointness predominantly from a Service perspective. Perhaps more important than the less-than-joint composition of various JPME-I programs, we contend that the JPME-I confederation of staff officer schools fails to adopt a consistent approach to joint warfighting education beyond the basic contours of the joint planning process. As a 2023 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report notes, the JPME enterprise lacks a common framework to ensure consistency in learning outcomes and collectively assess student performance across its various and disparate programs.5 The report further noted that the decentralized execution of JPME curricula proves especially challenging in implementing Secretary of Defense–or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS)-directed initiatives such as instruction on the security challenges now posed by the People’s Republic of China.
While the GAO report did not distinguish between JPME I and JPME II in its findings, the lack of a common framework is particularly punctuated in JPME I, where it is entirely decentralized in its execution, whereas most JPME-II graduates receive their education from one entity, the National Defense University (NDU), which reports directly to the Chairman. This is not to suggest a sense of primacy of NDU programs over other JPME-II accredited institutions but does illustrate that the current Service-centric approach to joint learning complicates unity of effort. In part due to this shortfall, we contend that the JPME enterprise does not achieve its mark in preparing officers for the joint assignments and experiences that follow current JPME-attendance career targets.
The clarion call for JPME reform is not a new or lightly trammeled area of research. As early as the turn of the millennium, authors such as John Driscoll as well as Dayton Pickett, David Smith, and Elizabeth Dial were noting the shortfalls in JPME in terms of both consistency of curriculum and ability to educate the total force.6 Driscoll catalogs several initiatives that the Joint Staff proposed in 2000 to include a centralized cadre of total force, joint warfighting educators. Additionally, Charles Mark Davis exhaustively compared the efficacy of joint acculturation outcomes across resident, satellite, and nonresident settings.7 Other researchers have considered interschool collaboration to improve JPME efforts and novel approaches that would educate officers on joint matters sooner in their careers.8
The research works of Paul Mayberry et al. and Lorry Fenner et al. both arrive at the conclusion that the disordering of joint education and joint duty has been counterproductive to the principal aims of such instruction.9 Additionally, Vincent Bowhers highlights how tensions between perspectives on JPME—with Services seeing it as an officer management tool and the joint force seeing it as a key mission enabler—create a disjointed sense of purpose for JPME and officer preparation for joint duty.10 These works represent only a small part of the cottage industry of military and academic researchers highlighting critical but fixable shortfalls the JPME enterprise has experienced throughout its life cycle.
First, the JPME-I educational experiences currently available appear insufficient to meet the growing demand for joint warfighters and joint task force (JTF)- capable formations. Considering the bulk of Service component commands and other organizations, thus JTF-capable headquarters, are comprised mostly of O4s, we contend that a portion of the JPME-I experience should focus on outcomes that meet JTF and Service component commanders’ requirements, which include a demonstrative competency of joint warfighting doctrine and a capability to operate as a staff officer at the JTF level.
The challenge of properly preparing O4s for JTF formations, however, is punctuated by the Services’ corporate inability to educate their officers in advance of serving in joint warfighting formations. There are no universal and authoritative JPME-I or -II curricula throughout the JPME enterprise, and the JPME topics prescribed in law provide only a veneer of consistency across the curricula of respective, accredited programs.
While decisions in 2007 and 2016 to grant resident senior Service colleges and certain distance-learning programs JPME-II certification effectively increased the enterprise’s graduate production capacity, these same decisions also increased the disparity in what constitutes a JPME-II education.11 In short, DOD adopted a quantitative easing rather than a qualitative improving approach to producing joint-qualified officers. While the Chairman’s policy (CJCS Instruction 1800.01F, Officer Professional Military Education Policy) advances the statutory requirements of JPME programs, these topics are broad in scope, differ across programs, and the interval of joint staff review is not frequent enough to maintain the speed of relevance throughout the enterprise.12
Furthermore, the expansion of JPME-II throughput via senior Service colleges not only created problematic heterogeneity but also pushed many officers and their military schooling departments to defer JPME-II education until these officers were senior O5s or O6s when they would be eligible to complete both senior Service college and JPME II in one sitting. In effect, the expansion makes this critical phase of joint education too late, as more than two-thirds of these officers have already completed their initial joint assignment. This late-to-need phenomenon also ensures that the inventory of joint-qualified officers fit to instruct JPME is limited to only a modest complement of O5s and slightly larger pool of O6s.
When surveyed, combatant command senior leaders broadly agreed that joint education programs produced better joint officers and widely affirmed that such education was necessary prior to assuming Joint Duty Assignment List (JDAL) positions (see appendix). These senior leader sentiments echo the substantial research of Laura Fenty back in 2008.13 Despite this broad and enduring consensus on the value of joint education, only 2,825 of the 9,472 (29.8 percent) currently assigned officers in JDAL positions have completed the requisite JPME course.14 Herein lies a painful reality: if the current system fails to prepare joint officers for combatant command assignment requirements, developing joint-minded warfighters at the lower echelons of joint warfighting is likely out of reach for current approaches.
The lack of common JPME standards is evident across several JTF experiences. As former Commander in Chief of U.S. Central Command General Anthony Zinni notes, each Service focuses on certain echelons to certify as the headquarters of a JTF, such as an Army corps, a Marine expeditionary force, a numbered fleet, or numbered air force, and even then, each of these formations relies on Service-provided augmentation to function.15 The Joint Enabling Capabilities Command, with its legacy as the former U.S. Joint Forces Command Standing Joint Force Headquarters, is an alternative method of rapidly establishing joint force headquarters, but even this elite organization requires Service-provided augmentation to function. General Zinni notes that the lack of joint education routinely compounds the challenges these formations face when readying a joint warfighting force in support of a combatant commander. We suggest the Joint Staff should establish standardized learning outcomes for JPME I that prepare rising field-grade officers to serve as the joint planners and operators in these organizations. Doing so would better prepare intermediate-level staff officers to support higher joint headquarters’ missions and corporately raise the effectiveness of these joint war-fighting formations.
General Zinni is not alone in his assessment. A recent RAND study evaluated the ability of one numbered Air Force organization to transition into a joint task force for response to domestic threats. The study noted the observed organization—and the Air Force, in general—lacked a sufficient cadre of junior field-grade officers who understood the planning and direction of joint operations across domains and echelons.16 The study observed that only those handful of officers having attended the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS) possessed any of the requisite joint planning knowledge required to be effective in a JTF headquarters.
While special strategic study programs such as SAASS and its counterparts in the other Services may well produce effective joint warfighters via appropriately timed Service education platforms, the long length and limited throughput of these schools cannot produce such joint warfighters at the scale required. Consequently, RAND concluded that the Air Force’s current approach to Service-centric PME was ill-fitted for developing JTF headquarters readiness. Similarly, the Army’s seminal document on forming joint task forces specifically notes that the “lack of Joint Professional Military Education II field grades inhibits joint planning” and that “staffs are challenged to plan for or understand transitions between echelons.”17 While we concur with this observation, we contend that it is not necessarily the lack of JPME-II education at the O5 level that inhibits joint planning within JTFs but rather the lack of joint planning capability exhibited at the O4 level where JTF staff officer heft is greatest. Both studies illustrate the insufficiency of current JPME-I educational models to prepare officers to operate jointly at the echelons where they are most needed to do so.
Actions to Consider
At a minimum, the Chairman must standardize JPME-I and -II curricula with a focus on delivering joint force stakeholder outcomes (preparatory for JTF requirements at JPME I and preparatory for combatant command requirements at JPME II). The advent of the Joint Staff J7’s Outcomes Based Military Education (OBME) accreditation process holds promise in aligning the various programs’ core JPME-II curricula.18 Though the joint acculturation experiences of JPME-I students will remain heavily influenced by the size and compositional balance decisions each Service makes for its respective program, addressing this blind spot will add coherence across the enterprise and create a common expectation throughout the joint force for what it means to have a joint-educated warfighter.
Ideally, the Joint Staff J7 needs to centralize a total force cadre of joint professional military educators under one center of excellence capable of delivering standardized, multimodal JPME-I and JPME-II education programs at the various JPME-granting institutions. This hub-and-spoke approach would alleviate Service PME institutions from having to integrate statutory JPME instruction into their Service-focused curricula without necessarily needing the requisite experienced faculty to achieve such ends. Aligned with OBME efforts, the joint center of excellence would be able to design JPME-I curriculum to focus on preparing joint officers to serve in JTF formations, while the JPME-II curriculum remains focused on preparing joint officers to serve in combatant command and Joint Staff assignments.
In consideration of the joint force’s history, however, it is likely that the Services would require a mandate for change to accompany any actions designed to improve valence and instrumentality.19 The general/flag officer Joint Qualified Officer requirement set in law created such a mandate. However, as operational conditions have changed for the Services, this mandate resulted in an education model that lags the joint assignment cycle of the Services’ officer corps.
We propose that Congress could improve Service involvement in ensuring the right officer receives the right joint education in preparation for the right joint assignment. We recommend:
- updating provisions of Title 10 to ensure that JPME I is a requirement for Active-component O5 selection and JPME II a requirement for Active-component O6 selection
- mandating an operationally relevant percentage of JDAL billets to be filled by officers with JPME II and/ or requiring specific JDAL billets to only be filled by officers possessing JPME II.
Under current operational conditions, this approach would likely align joint learning with best zone-of-proximal-development methodologies.20 This structural change would also accomplish something that the military human capital enterprise often fails to accomplish on its own: shifting the time-cost of educating joint warfighters to officers serving in positions of lesser responsibility.
In 2023, a full 12 percent of the Joint and Combined Warfighting School (JCWS) student body was comprised of O6s, despite the organization’s principal charter to serve as a preparatory institution prior to an officer’s initial joint assignment.21 When queried, these officers generally conveyed that they were not attending JCWS because the pace of their career had finally permitted attendance, but rather the forcing function of pending promotion opportunity to general or flag officer had turned JPME-II attendance into the Services’ tyranny-of-the-immediate need. Considering that the remaining stock of JPME-II graduates each year are senior Service college graduates, the current model produces late-to-need joint educated officers. We suggest that the Services and the joint force would be better served by O4s stepping away from their formations to attend JPME II as opposed to perpetually delaying their education until they become O6s.
Coupled with this Service inducement, the Joint Staff needs to work with the combatant commands to determine a JPME-II readiness level for its field-grade JDAL assignments and make this a reportable metric in the Defense Readiness Reporting System (DRRS). Our survey of combatant command general and flag leaders indicated that they needed 80 percent of their field-grade officers to be JPME-II qualified to effectively fulfill their missions. As indicated previously, this aspirational aim sits in stark contrast to the 30-percent threshold that currently characterizes the joint force.22 While this desired state may require calibration to reflect a more achievable target, a reportable DRRS metric would baseline the joint force’s expectation and increase the value proposition to the joint human capital enterprise, which currently accepts officers who are educationally unprepared for joint service as opposed to investing in fully qualified personnel within their formations.23
If current Officer Professional Military Education Policy student-to-faculty requirements were to remain fixed, even a targeted threshold of 50 percent of JDAL positions filled with JPME-II officers would require either creating substantially more student throughput (that is, more JPME faculty) or forcing the Services to make important, difficult tradeoffs between those who are in promotion peril versus those whose learning would align to their proximal zone of development. Consequently, this baseline would also drive joint force and Service PME requirements in terms of student throughput, course offerings, and faculty authorizations, as none of these factors is currently aligned to the needs of the joint force.
Conclusion
Too many officers arrive at joint commands without the proper educational experience required to make them successful in such assignments. As Commander Morea illustrated, this is a significant source of both personal and professional frustration for the aspiring joint warfighter. Moreover, this institutional shortcoming fails to meet the true intent of Goldwater-Nichols. Between the conflicting interests of the Services and the combatant commands, DOD is both late and short in producing fully qualified joint warfighters. Currently, the Services are negatively incentivized to delay JPME-II instruction until the last possible moment, and combatant commands, when forced to choose, are placed in the untenable position of accepting an unqualified officer instead of gapping the position. Therefore, incentives need to be adjusted for both stakeholders to increase the value of joint education.
The earliest nexus between the Services and joint community exists at the Service component command level. Preparing Service staffs at the component command level should improve the joint warfighting competencies of joint task forces. Moreover, readiness reporting and policy requirements linked to JDAL assignment—coupled with the linkage of JPME completion to officer promotions—would improve both the timing and the ordering of JPME attendance. At a minimum, we recommend that the highly competitive and tightly regulated JDAL assignment process include a requirement to be JPME-II complete prior to beginning the assignment.
Last, we offer that a center of excellence approach that unifies the JPME outcomes-based curricula and learning experiences across the JPME enterprise would best marshal instructional expertise resources and better serve joint task force and combatant command staff officer requirements. Ultimately, it is in DOD’s best interest to solve this dilemma internally and independently rather than await another congressional initiative such as Goldwater-Nichols. JFQ
Notes
1 Douglas M. Morea, “Checking the Box but Missing the Mark: The Problems With Nonresident Joint Professional Military Education,” Modern War Institute, February 12, 2024, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/ checking-the-box-but-missing-the-mark-the-problems-with-nonresident-joint-professional-military-education/.
2 James R. Locher III, Victory on the Potomac: The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the Pentagon (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002).
3 John J. Hamre, “Reflections: Looking Back at the Need for Goldwater-Nichols,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 27, 2016, https://www.csis.org/analysis/reflections-looking-back-need-goldwater-nichols.
4 Report of the Panel on Military Education of the One Hundredth Congress, House Armed Services Committee, 101st Cong., 1st sess., April 21, 1989.
5 Government Accountability Office (GAO), Military Officers: DOD Can Enhance Promotion and Education Guidance for Addressing Indo-Pacific Region Needs, GAO-23-106070 (Washington, DC: GAO, June 2023).
6 John B. Driscoll, “Developing Joint Education for the Total Force,” Joint Force Quarterly 24 (Spring 2000), 87–91; Dayton S. Pickett, David A. Smith, and Elizabeth B. Dial, Joint Professional Military Education for Reserve Component Officers: A Review of the Need for JPME for RC Officers Assigned to Joint Organizations, RA501R1 (McLean, VA: Logistics Management Institute, November 1998).
7 Charles Mark Davis, “Jointness, Culture, and Inter-Service Prejudice: Assessing the Impact of Resident, Satellite, and Hybrid Joint Professional Military Education II Course Delivery Methods on Military Officer Attitudes” (Ph.D. diss., Old Dominion University, 2017).
8 Bert L. Frandsen, “Improving JPME Through Interschool Collaboration,” Joint Force Quarterly 51 (4th Quarter 2008), 161–163; David K. Richardson, “The Case for JPME Phase Zero: Building a Joint Culture in the U.S. Navy,” Joint Force Quarterly 50 (3rd Quarter 2008).
9 Paul W. Mayberry et al., Making the Grade: Integration of Joint Professional Military Education and Talent Management in Developing Joint Officers (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2021); Another Crossroads? Professional Military Education Two Decades After the Goldwater-Nichols Act and the Skelton Panel, House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, 111th Cong., 1st sess., May 20, 2009.
10 Vincent C. Bowhers, “Manage or Educate: Fulfilling the Purpose of Joint Professional Military Education,” Joint Force Quarterly 67 (4th Quarter 2012), 26–29, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/ Documents/jfq/jfq-67/JFQ-67_26-29_Bowhers.pdf.
11 Paul W. Mayberry, William H. Waggy II, and Anthony Lawrence, Producing Joint Qualified Officers: FY 2008 to FY 2017 Trends (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2019).
12 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction 1800.01F, Officer Professional Military Education Policy (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, 2020), https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Library/Instructions/CJCSI%201800.01F.pdf.
13 Linda Fenty, Joint Staff Officer Project: Phases I and 2 Final Report (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, April 2008).
14 Email from Joint Staff J1 to authors, February 2, 2024.
15 Anthony Zinni, in discussion with authors, October 2023.
16 Caitlin Lee et al., Running the Joint: Air Force Efforts to Build a Joint Task Force Headquarters (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2021).
17 Transition to a Joint Force Headquarters: Planning Insights for Echelons Above Brigade Formations (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Center for Army Lessons Learned, July 2018).
18 Kevin P. Kelley and Joan Johnson-Freese, “Getting to the Goal in Professional Military Education,” Orbis 58, no. 1 (Winter 2014), 119–131.
19 Kristy N. Kamarck, Goldwater-Nichols and the Evolution of Officer Joint Professional Military Education (JPME), R44340 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2016), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44340.
20 Kimberly S. Peer and Ronald C. McClendon, “Sociocultural Learning Theory in Practice: Implications for Athletic Training Educators,” Journal of Athletic Training 37, no. 4 (December 2002), S136–S140, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12937534.
21 Jeffrey Holdsworth, Joint and Combined Warfighting School operations officer, in discussion with authors, November 2023.
22 Email from Joint Staff J1, February 2, 2024.
23 R. Derek Trunkey, Implications of the Department of Defense Readiness Reporting System, Working Paper 2013-03 (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, May 2013), https://www.cbo.gov/sites/ default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44127_DefenseReadiness.pdf.