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Christopher M. Marcell is an Assistant Professor of Warfare Studies in the Global College of Professional Military Education (GCPME) at Air University. Gaylon L. McAlpine is an Assistant Professor of Warfare Studies at GCPME. Reagan E. Schaupp is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at GCPME. Joseph L. Varuolo is an Assistant Professor of Warfare Studies at GCPME.
When Secretary of Defense General James Mattis published the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), one statement in the summary companion document garnered great attention—and reaction—among the professional military education (PME) community: “PME has stagnated, focused more on the accomplishment of mandatory credit at the expense of lethality and ingenuity.”1 Mattis’s remedy: “We will emphasize intellectual leadership and military professionalism in the art and science of warfighting, deepening our knowledge of history while embracing new technology and techniques to counter competitors.”2 Two crucial phrases in this prescription, art and science of warfighting and to counter competitors, certainly reflected rapidly growing U.S. awareness of the accelerating rise of the People’s Republic of China and the accompanying “return to Great Power competition.”3 Mattis’s “calling out” of PME ignited passionate debate at all levels, as institutions (with accompanying opinion pieces) evaluated curriculum, faculty, and purpose. These topics eventually became the focus of House Armed Services Committee testimony in 2022,4 and of four RAND reports.5
Five years into the debate, a great deal of current, relevant curriculum regarding China (and Russia) has been plowed into most PME programs, driven by a 2022 Secretary of Defense memorandum stipulating China-related outcomes for intermediate- and senior-level PME.6 But such topical updates do not address the initial, fundamental concern—PME’s dearth of lethality and ingenuity. The 2022 National Security Strategy is clear: “Amid intensifying competition, the military’s role is to maintain and gain warfighting advantages while limiting those of our competitors.”7 Service and joint PME institutions must meaningfully change what they are doing in the classroom (both brick and mortar and virtual) to focus more deeply and rigorously on the art and science of warfighting, which will come at the expense of other subject areas. Anticipating PME schools’ difficulty (or reluctance) in adapting in this way, the Joint Chiefs of Staff doubled down in 2020: “To achieve deeper education on critical thinking, strategy, and warfighting, PME programs will have to ruthlessly reduce coverage of less important topics.”8 They categorically ruled out business as usual through repeated phrasing such as, “Our first task is to reorient the PME enterprise” and “we must shift our PME curricula.”9
Yet against this backdrop, it is not clear that fundamental change in PME programs has actually occurred to accomplish these aims.10 A September 2023 task order from the Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations pointedly stated, “Existing USAF education and training in [operational warfare areas] falls short in providing the necessary foundational knowledge required to ensure success in future conflicts and in current strategic competition.”11 A recent RAND report stated, “The effectiveness of officer [PME] has been questioned for the past 30 years. Concerns include the inadequacy of accountability, jointness, and responsiveness to ever-evolving DOD priorities.”12 (As to priorities, all Department of Defense leadership messaging clearly indicates that warfighting is by far the top priority for every Service.) Given these considerations, this article offers five clarifying principles regarding the PME enterprise to inform institutions’ efforts to “move the needle” and align with leadership’s clear, urgent guidance.
Principle 1. PME must be about warfighting. Following General Mattis’s pointed statement in the 2018 NDS, the chorus of senior leadership emphasis on warfighting has crescendoed. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS)’s centerpiece guidance document for officer PME states in its vision paragraph that PME
develops leaders who are skilled in the art of war and the practical and ethical application of lethal military power. The intentis 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.13
The Joint Chiefs put their own marker down: “The driving mindset behind our [PME] reforms must be that we are preparing for war.”14 If that were not enough, global developments in recent years dramatically underscore this, not least the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the military component of intensifying U.S.- China strategic competition, and events in Israel and Gaza.
Significantly, three military Services published education strategies for PME in 2023, and all were clear on this point. The opening sentence of the Navy’s strategy declares it will “prioritize programs that are critical for a competitive warfighting advantage.”15 The Marine Corps’ strategy states that training and education will “continue preparing individual units and Marines to fight and win.”16 In its mission statement, Army University’s entire “in order to” clause points straight to warfighting: “in order to execute the requirements of large-scale combat operations and multidomain operations capable force which is ready to compete and win against peer threats in a contested environment by 2030.”17 Notably, Air University’s mission statement generically references Servicemembers as “warfighters” but otherwise includes no mission or vision language pointing to the art and science of war.18
PME students themselves intuit this primacy of purpose, but they apparently do not believe PME is upholding it. When a 2021 RAND study surveyed Air Force graduates of intermediate developmental education programs about PME’s purpose, “Educate members in the operational and strategic art of war” was more often in graduates’ top 3 responses than any of the other 14 options (it was second in senior developmental education graduates’ responses).19 However, that was not matched by actual perceived benefits of the programs: on that question, the “art of war” response came in fourth place, behind “foster networking,” “develop critical thinking,” and “create more well-rounded officers.”20 Thus, students sensed what PME’s main purpose should be, but (for at least one Service) it was not primarily what they felt they were getting. At least some other Services’ commanders are affirming this: “when [six Navy O-6 supervisors of PME graduates were] asked if they thought [Naval Command and Staff College] was preparing their officers for the requirements of high-end warfighting, all six said it was not.”21
More important, focusing on warfighting does not mean studying it exclusively or monomaniacally. Several areas of study are adjacent to warfighting and, we argue, clearly merit treatment in a PME curriculum. Obvious examples include leadership, elements of national security, and the varied intellectual “tool kit” that will underpin the work of shrewd planners and practitioners (the “ingenuity” mentioned by Mattis). As far as these subjects underpin the art and science of war, PME schools must integrate them into curricula. But curricula’s tight alignment with warfighting in accordance with leadership’s guidance is currently at risk, as principle 2 will illustrate.
Recommendation: PME institutions must integrate warfighting-adjacent studies into curricula in ways that preserve the clear overall program emphasis on the art and science of war, rather than succumbing to the view that they are something like degree-granting liberal arts colleges with an extra dash of military topical seasoning. Highlighting one Service’s approach to this, the Secretary of the Air Force insisted, “We must be ready for a fight unlike anything all of us serving today have ever seen, and that requires both unity of effort and change.”22 The next day, the Air Force published a tasking order requiring its educational institutions to “institutionalize a Service-wide culture of operationally-minded and able Airmen,” stipulating that every member, regardless of career field or rank, be equipped with appropriate knowledge of the joint planning process, joint all-domain operations, and key operating concepts such that he or she can “advocate for the application of air power across the spectrum of conflict.”23 This kind of clear guidance, contextualized for land, sea, and space, can maintain PME schools’ program focus on warfighting.
Principle 2. How warfighting is defined for PME matters tremendously. The term itself causes consternation, since a vast range of expected military operations might feature neither fighting nor a war in the usual sense. A 2019 Joint Doctrine Note is helpful here, parsing the “Competition Continuum” into armed conflict, competition below armed conflict, and cooperation—and pointing out that operations in all three constitute military campaigning.24 Thus, warfighting, in the context of PME curricula, need not always include lethality. That stated, recall that it was precisely a lack of lethality in PME that General Mattis bemoaned, using the term 17 times in the NDS’s 14 pages of text.25
Not all forms of warfighting merit equal treatment in PME curricula. One observer cautioned that a factor driving Russia’s colossal ineptitude in Ukraine in 2022 was that Russian PME had long since “ceased taking the study of [traditional] war seriously” in favor of toying with hybrid warfare, cyber, and information operations.26 Others have pointed out that this slide away from the art and science of war is already in progress in U.S. war colleges, exemplified by outcomes in Afghanistan.27 In light of this, we would do well to think through the definition, scope, and prioritization of “warfighting studies.”
Problematically, a variety of external stakeholders constantly levy myriad additional subjects on PME programs. Some topics purport to be about enhancing warfighting capability, but the cognitive “chain of custody” is at best long and tortured rather than clear and tight. This “requirements proliferation” significantly dilutes the focus of PME away from the art and science of war and toward areas of behavioral studies, whole-person development, Service-specific regulations, or topics important to a specific military specialty or community. Worse, most of these external stakeholders have no practical means of coordination or deconfliction to understand what others are already levying, so redundancy and disconnects are common. A 2023 RAND study noted:
In recent years, there has been an increasing set of demands placed on the PME system. For one, the U.S. military is facing a growing number of threats, including from China, Russia, Iran, and nonstate actors. Furthermore, the military is confronting these threats on land, at sea, and in the air, as well as in cyberspace and space. This has been compounded by a growing network of requirements from a variety of PME constituents who seek to build an adaptive program for future warfighting challenges.28
While RAND’s summary is substantially accurate, it is debatable whether some of the originators of this “growing network of requirements” really have “future warfighting challenges” in mind. At Air University in 2022–2023, schools received a stream of “data call” taskings to determine what they taught in their curricula related to the following topics:
- deterrence strategy
- mission command/service before self
- climate change/climate security
- racial disparity and disciplinary actions
- cyber mission analysis
- the joint planning process/military decisionmaking process
- comprehensive Airman fitness (a rubric that includes 16 distinct whole-person categories)
- resiliency and suicide prevention
- irregular warfare
- women, peace, and security
- conventional nuclear integration
- alcohol and drug abuse prevention and treatment
- diversity, equity, inclusion, and access
- the Arctic region
- Total Force integration
- microaggressions
- agile combat employment
- domestic violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment
- joint all-domain operations.
Most of this “meteor storm” came from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Service chiefs or headquarters, or Service major commands. Taskings did not arrive through a single channel, but by varied routes (sometimes directly), leaving Air University headquarters to sort them out and organize time-intensive response packages school by school, tasking by tasking. Historically, most data calls (“What are you teaching on this topic?”) are followed by a requirement (“You must integrate this topic into your curricula no later than [date] and then prove/ report how you are doing it”).
Clearly, a number of topics in the tasking list are directly related to warfighting. Just as clearly, several of them are not, nor are they warfighting adjacent. It is crucial not only for PME schools to be clear about a warfighting focus but also for the same focus to prevail among PME’s external stakeholders. If a higher headquarters levies a requirement for PME schools to teach climate security, it does not matter how tight the schools’ warfighting focus is; they cannot say no.
For stakeholders outside PME institutions, the attraction of levying a topic requirement on PME programs is clear. A huge majority of officer and enlisted Servicemembers complete PME at multiple points in their careers, so there is likely no better way to reach the maximum audience with topics deemed important than to require their inclusion in PME programs. Over time, PME has become viewed as a “Swiss Army knife” to address nearly every military-related challenge—“it’s seductive to assume PME can do everything.”29 (Are we having a problem with [insert issue here]? Teach it in PME.) But in many instances, this phenomenon dilutes programs’ warfighting focus, not to mention eroding instructional quality.30
Recommendation: Direction and, if possible, definition regarding warfighting from as high a vantage point as possible— that is, the CJCS, Secretary of Defense, Congress—would be helpful to preserve clarity and prevent a crushing weight of requirements proliferation for PME. Furthermore, it is important to identify a central authority through which all proposed new PME requirements flow—one that can vet them and state, “No, this topic is best taught at the unit or mission level and is not appropriate for PME.” This would help prevent the topical requirements proliferation that threatens to further dilute the clear intent of PME programs. Guidelines such as percentage proportions of warfighting studies, warfighting-adjacent studies, and whole-of-officer (or enlisted member) studies should also help.
Principle 3. Since PME is for members of the profession of arms, degrees conferred are professional degrees. There remains little debate that the military is a profession, meeting the classic criteria outlaid in Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State (expertise, responsibility, and corporateness) as well as more recently emergent criteria of ethics and leadership.31 In much the same way as degrees obtained by practitioners of law or medicine are, PME degrees (in programs that confer them) should be considered professional degrees. They clearly meet the criteria: They prepare graduates to work in a field requiring specific knowledge, and they emphasize application and practice.32
This is not without confusion and debate. One reason is the lingering view by some (emerging in the late 1960s in the context of the Vietnam War and the Cold War) that “American military professionals must be diplomats, economists, scientists, historians, and lawyers . . . not to be better at fighting wars but so that the United States would not have to fight wars at all.”33 Some current leadership guidance seems to echo this in pointing toward broader studies—including the 2022 National Defense Strategy, in which the only mention of PME is to assert that “by refocusing the curricula of Professional Military Education institutions, we will foster critical thinking and analytical skills, fluency in critical languages, and integration of insights from the social and behavioral sciences” in the DOD workforce.34
Another factor is the view in some quarters that PME programs “are developing these individuals not just for the active-duty service but for positions after service,”35 which would seem to invite immediate confusion about a program’s focus. Finally, PME schools have invested great effort over the years to achieve accreditation by civilian higher education agencies for the master’s degrees they now confer (although there is no legal or policy requirement to offer these).36 Rebranding those degrees as professional degrees entails a level of bureaucratic scrutiny and rework for which, understandably, few signal any appetite. (One who did was the former faculty dean of the National War College, who asserted if a return to the “core business” of staff colleges “comes at the expense of accreditation from the higher education sector, so be it.”37) Despite these factors clouding the issue, PME courses of study are plainly professional by intent, and it should be acknowledged that degrees conferred are functionally so.
It is worth reemphasizing that this does not—must not—exclude nonwarfighting subject matter from a valuable place in PME curricula. Graduates benefit from understanding how the interagency community works, how to research and write effectively, which theories of leadership are particularly applicable, and the strategic context of conflicts around the globe (to give just a few examples). These supporting subjects provide “the wisdom and judgment to be applied in a broad range of situations across domains, theaters, and in both joint and combined operations with allies and partners.”38 But the danger of the moment is not that these supporting topics could vanish from programs. Rather, it is that “except for scattered small pockets of specialized classes, the war colleges have deemphasized teaching the art and science of war in favor of delving deep into the realms of policy, grand strategy, sociocultural studies, and a host of other topics that are irrelevant to the actual conduct of war at the theater or multi-theater level.”39 We must avert a future in which graduates’ bosses will echo the lament of a former Army War College commandant that “[PME] curriculum was aimed at turning soldiers into diplomats, economists, scientists, historians, and lawyers at the expense of turning out officers.”40 Ultimately, PME institutions are not awarding history, political science, or economics degrees, but professional degrees to members whose unique profession is the business of winning America’s military conflicts.
Recommendation: Top-down direction should come for PME institutions to assess the effort required to, and the impact of, recasting their awarded degrees as professional degrees. This would drive several shifts in the PME landscape such as clarity of purpose, curriculum composition/structure, regional accreditation, and faculty considerations (see principle 5).
Principle 4. The “customers” for PME are joint and Service leadership. When the Joint Chiefs of Staff state, “Put plainly, we require leaders at all levels who can achieve intellectual overmatch against adversaries,”41 we should recognize (to use a business analogy) that put plainly, we require is “customer language”—the true primary customers are spelling out what they want programs to produce. In the officer and enlisted PME policy documents, which together run to 100 pages,42 the Joint Chiefs follow up in extensive detail with what they need from graduates (outcomes, joint learning areas, desired leader attributes)—and top it off with a biennial memorandum stipulating CJCS special areas of emphasis for PME.43 This “true customer identification” is important due to the tendency of PME institutions to treat students as their primary customers. PME students are not the schools’ customers; they are the product. Students do not pay for PME; their Services do.44 (This alone would make the Services the customers in a business analogy.) Moreover, as a RAND study explained, “Civilian institutions operate in wide-ranging markets with students coming to them from many sources and taking jobs across a large range of employers. The military institutions, by contrast, operate within the specific personnel development system of DOD and its services.”45 Thus, PME schools do not engage in marketing to attract students; instead, Service selection boards place students in schools with an eye on talent management (a separate but crucial issue).46 Viewing students properly as the product delivered to the true primary customers helps ensure PME programs uphold several key fundamentals.
First, this view would preserve rigor and seriousness in the student experience. It is common knowledge that the failure rate of PME students is minuscule—far below that in broader academia. In House Armed Services Committee testimony in 2022, a Naval War College instructor acknowledged that “we bend over backwards to make things comfortable for the students” and that “rigor can become overly balanced with accommodation.”47 (The context was that retired military faculty tend toward this due to empathy for students they see as “younger versions of themselves.”48) The students do not miss this obvious fact, either. A faculty member in the same testimony related, “I had a student say, ‘So I did all the reading, all the work, and I’m going to get an A-, and the man next to me who didn’t spill his coffee every day is going to get a B+.’”49 There is an unspoken (usually) understanding that “many officers, mentally and physically exhausted from years of combat deployments, understandably chose to use their time at PME to reconnect with family and ‘take a knee’ from operational requirements.”50 It is tough not to sympathize with this phenomenon, but it is also difficult to ignore the urgency of the hour in wringing every drop out of time invested in PME to equip students for the Nation’s future wars. Our graduates must avoid the assessment one observer leveled regarding master of business administration graduates: “The ‘student as customer’ philosophy has created an underworked and overindulged group of future national leaders.”51
Second, keeping the true customers’ needs foremost will align programs’ focus toward those needs, without excessive forays into areas that the consumers (students) may find intriguing but that may not underpin the art and science of war. Put another way, the subjects many PME students enjoy, and would opt for exclusively if they could, do not cor- relate with the subjects necessary for the product to meet the customers’ needs. (Most bluntly of all, a student told one of the authors, “I hate the joint stuff, so I skip it.” Another variant goes, “I’m a [insert noncombat-arms specialty here], so I’ll never use this.”) Fast-forward to the day the graduate is tapped to participate in a joint planning group (it does happen; operation plans include annexes specific to almost every occupational specialty), and “the joint stuff” turns out to be the only means for him or her to make a meaningful contribution at the planning table. Notice carefully that no senior leader is stating, “We need PME to produce warfighters—except for doctors, chaplains, contracting officers, or personnel specialists. They can all sit back or skip it.” Like eating our vegetables, an educational diet rich in warfighting study may not bring delight, but it will help to “enable all Airmen [and Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Guardians] to meet the challenges of the future fight.”52
Viewing students as the product rather than as customers does not turn them into “widgets” nor dehumanize them in the slightest. The same paradigm holds for military training recruits or for selectees to specialty schools such as the U.S. Air Force Weapons School or the Army University’s School of Advanced Military Studies. The value proposition is “Our institution will make you into a [insert output here].” Together with that (not despite it), students-as-product merits careful consideration, for example, of learning methodologies. Programs must meet students where they are intellectually (often in wildly different places when walking in the door), bring them to a sufficiently shared baseline to learn together, and graduate them as value-added leaders and contributors to joint operations. That is exceedingly challenging in 10-month resident programs, to say nothing of their distance education counterparts (which, in the cases of the Navy and the Air Force, will see the vast majority of student throughput). PME programs do well to shape their methodology around academic best practices and to balance structure and choice in their programs in ways that engage the various types of learner perspectives.53 Students are investing copious hours in the program with a goal in mind. If they perceive value in the program beyond simply “knocking it out,” their level of engagement should deepen to the extent of that perceived value. Yet none of these points, while crucial, should obscure who the true PME customers are.
Finally, we should not overlook student responsibility in maximizing gains from PME. Some PME students resist the institutionalization of a Service-wide operational culture, preferring to focus solely on their specific career fields. But a “my career field” focus, while perhaps tactically pragmatic, undermines the intent of PME and presents a barrier to learning for the student body. It forces a dumbing down of the warfighting curriculum to the detriment of the entire force. Such stovepiped attitudes run counter to every urgent signal from joint and Service leadership.
Recommendation: From joint and Service headquarters to PME stakeholders and schools, there must be consensus that joint and Service commanders and leadership are PME’s true customers. Notably, this would affect how institutions assess PME’s efficacy. PME institutions must shift their primary program assessment measures from the student to joint and Service leadership. Student feedback can be valuable, but the oft neglected (and difficult to collect) feedback from graduates’ supervisors, commanders at the tactical and operational levels of war, and joint and Service leadership is the premium feedback stream to accurately assess whether PME programs are meeting those customers’ needs. This assessment shift would require intentionality, standardization, persistence, and resources from joint and Service leadership.
Principle 5. A warfighting focus in PME means faculty selection matters tremendously. The team that revises a PME program—or generates inertia to keep it as is—is an institution’s faculty. To borrow a common adage: “Show me the educational credentials and backgrounds of your PME faculty, and I’ll show you what your program is teaching.” With sufficient time now elapsed since the 2018 NDS’s call to action, several observers have noted curriculum development processes are not a key obstacle to renewing programs’ warfighting focus; institutional inertia is. A Marine Corps University faculty member framed the issue pointedly:
the greatest resistance to the Joint Chiefs’ vision will come from those for whom maintaining the status quo is always the preferred option. Of course, any deanor professor worthy of their title can easily demonstrate how every class on their respective schedules is essential for the development of future strategic leaders. As such, many will claim that there is simply nothing that can be safely cut to make space for military history, warfighting-based case studies, and multiple “sets and repetitions” of wargaming events.54
There is a tendency toward the status quo at PME schools whose faculty expertise spans a wide range of disciplines—in other words, at all officer PME schools. Since both in-resident and especially distance education PME programs have a finite number of hours available, the opportunity costs for devoting more capacity to the study of warfighting can be understandably excruciating—but the guidance is clear.
A healthy step toward mitigating this inertia is to hire and develop faculty members whose backgrounds reflect the proportion of desired topical focus in the program. The CJCS Officer PME Policy (OPMEP) underscores this: “The selection, development, and management of PME faculty, and military faculty in particular, is at the core of successful programs. Military officers bring to the JPME faculty an invaluable operational currency and expertise.”55 If the art and science of war is primary, as our leadership repeatedly insists, it is important to acquire and sustain a plurality of faculty whose background involves the art and science of war. Unhelpfully, the OPMEP does not specify what proportion of PME faculty should have warfighting experience, nor what specifically constitutes warfighting experience. It states simply, “A significant portion of each program/military education institution will be military officers.”56 Thus, it makes sense that a school’s topical focus or domain focus related to a Service (land, sea, air, space) should drive this proportion. Sustaining this plurality of warfighting practitioners would create a natural “gravity” aligned with leadership’s guidance to focus on those topics.
That said, uniformed faculty as a group should not carry the entire freight of the art and science of war in PME programs. Their characteristic inexperience with academic instruction and short assignment dwell time on PME faculty (high turnover) signal further needs for both teaching acumen and institutional continuity. To meet this need, many schools rely on career warfighting practitioners, retired or separated from Active service. Provided such faculty members have “proven records of excellence and. . . a specific area expertise” as stipulated in the 1989 Skelton Report, along with demonstrated instructional competence, they are at a premium in this endeavor.57 They provide crucial continuity for the art and science of war for as long as their expertise remains applicable and relevant, usually through the vehicle of renewable appointment terms.58 Furthermore, their typical experience in military leadership positions may make them effective as faculty mentors, department chairs, or deans. The caution, of course, is ensuring expertise grounded in past operations does not result in program fixation on “fighting the last war.”
There is a counterpoint to this approach for assembling an optimal PME faculty. On the logic that the operating environment for joint forces is increasingly complex, some argue that more studies not directly related to warfighting are appropriate in PME, not less, and faculty with academic backgrounds are the right choice to teach these:
Military officers need to be equipped to deal with uncertainty—particularly as they ascend the career ladder to positions of strategic decisionmaking responsibility. There is no better way of inculcating and fostering this crucial capacity than through the arts, humanities, and social sciences—in other words, through a liberal education [aided by civilian faculty].59
Certainly, a mix of civilian faculty can provide rich instruction on the warfighting-adjacent subjects discussed herein. But this argument replicates the one put forth in 1967 (we need “diplomats, economists, scientists, historians, and lawyers”), while updating the rationale from in order to avoid war to in order to fight complex wars. PME must inculcate the broader skill sets ancillary to fighting complex wars without mortgaging the specific core warfighting intellectual tool-kit. It must do “both/and.”
Recommendation: Balancing faculty expertise while tightening a faculty’s warfighting focus is not as complex as it might appear. Adopting the assumption that PME teaches a professional curriculum, completion of the program by faculty is as sensible a requirement as in the fields of medicine or law. (Medical school faculty, for example, have all completed medical school.) Moreover, at least two viable options present themselves for sustaining and growing a faculty’s warfighting mindset: recurring development sessions conducted by warfighting practitioners, or rotating nonpractitioners into teaching core warfighting courses. The latter requires more intentionality and mentoring but could pay significant dividends as nonwarfighting professors gain perspective on the art and science of war (and vice versa). Finally, incentivizing a faculty tour at a member’s Service PME institution is crucial, as this is currently an undervalued assignment.60
As tension around U.S. national security interests escalates and world events underscore the need for focusing on the art and science of war, many PME institutions seem stuck at a crossroads. Careful review of the five principles outlined here should help policy and educational decisionmakers prioritize and frame their lines of effort going forward to comply with a “turned up to 11” demand signal from our joint and Service leaders concerning warfighting’s place in PME. JFQ