WASHINGTON – To handle the increasingly complex challenges of operations like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is sending its next generation of strategic thinkers to rigorous graduate programs. But critics say officers often struggle to fit these advanced education requirements into already full military careers.
Three Army officers who faced that challenge recently graduated with a class of master’s students: Maj. Jose Laguna will deploy to Afghanistan this summer to join the international forces planning staff. Maj. Randall Wenner is heading for his fourth tour with Special Forces. Maj. Dennis McGee will be stationed in Seoul, planning for future U.S. strategy in the Korea.
While the three officers are headed in different directions, their starting point is the same: the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Their class of 154, which graduated May 20, is the biggest yet to have gone through the school.
Col. Stefan Banach, director of the school from June 2007 until his retirement in May, said officers now face different challenges in a constantly changing environment and require different skills to fight unpredictable, adaptable insurgents and terrorists.
“We teach officers how to think about an environment that has no right answer,” he said.
SAMS has expanded by more than half since 2007, Banach said, adding faculty and increasing the number of students. The shift came after Army leaders recognized that the fighting in Iraq was different from what they had experienced in the past. He called the higher number of SAMS graduates heading into combat an “intellectual surge.”
But a recent congressional report cautioned that the military needs to improve how it educates its strategic thinkers.
“We think the military would be well served … by trying to find those people and probably assisting them with some more opportunities,” said Rep. Vic Snyder, D-Ark., chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations, which issued the report. He suggested sending more officers to top private schools to create a foundation in strategic thinking and analysis.
Cynthia Watson, former associate dean at the National War College who now teaches at the National Defense University, said awareness has increased.
“I think there is a perception that maybe in the last 30 years, since the end of the Vietnam War, we haven’t made the strides in strategic thinking that we would want to,” she said.
Fitting education into a career
Among the issues raised in the report: Officers can have difficulty fitting the required educational programs into their already demanding career schedules. Since officers also have to fulfill deployment and training requirements to advance their careers, they’re under pressure — even more so with the high operational tempo in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Laguna said he finished his intermediate education early to be able to join his unit, which was deploying to Iraq. Wenner, the Special Forces officer, faced a choice between a required deployment and graduate school at SAMS. He wrote to his commander, asking for advice. After the commander assured him he would be able to rejoin his group after graduation, Wenner enrolled at SAMS.
The school’s former director understands these tensions. “There’s an issue with the operational tempo right now,” Banach said. The school has room for 160 students, but hasn’t been able to fill all spots because of the tight schedules.
Representatives who worked on the report highlighted these problems.
“Dwell times are so short the people are back on deployment without having a chance” to go through military education, said Rep. Robert Wittman of Virginia, the highest-ranking Republican on the subcommittee that issued the report.
At the Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, commander Col. Timothy Schultz said his school has not experienced that issue. “We haven’t felt any impact,” Schultz said. “It still seems we’re getting a robust number of applicants.” His school accepts about 45 active and 15 non-active-duty officers each year.
Snyder pointed out that officers occasionally are assigned to jobs for which they lack the proper education.
McGee’s experience proves that point. “I worked previously in [Army Pacific] headquarters staff and I found it somewhat challenging,” he said, “because I didn’t have the right training or skills to do that.”
Conversely, officers may end up spending time in classrooms to fulfill requirements for a promotion despite already knowing much of the material, Snyder said.
Start early, experts argue
Under the current system, capstones that include strategic planning are often reserved for mid- to high-level officers. With more than 10 years of experience, they are often well into their 30s. That’s too late to begin developing strategic thinking, experts say.
“I think the data suggests that the younger you start, the better off you are,” said James Carafano, director of the Center for Foreign Policy Studies with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington. He thinks that grooming strategic leadership skills should start when officers are in their mid-20s.
The report says as much, recommending that “cultivation of a broad strategic understanding … [should] begin early in an officer’s military education and continue throughout his or her professional development.”
On the other hand, introducing strategic concepts earlier in a career may have its own drawbacks, according to Watson of the National Defense University. Officers need to be experts in their specialties before starting to think about broader operational and strategic issues, she said.
Instead of pushing the military to introduce strategic concepts sooner, Snyder said, “we need to look at lengthening time in service.” That would ensure officers don’t leave the service a few years after receiving a graduate education paid for by taxpayers.
Watson agrees: “It is somewhat mind-boggling that we retire people from the service — unless they make flag or general officer — when they are in their early 50s.”
Preparing for future challenges
The military’s slate of missions has changed dramatically in recent years. It now includes fighting insurgents and conducting stability operations and “nation-building” efforts. Officers like McGee are at the forefront of these efforts, with reconstruction a part of the U.S. mission in both Iraq and Afghanistan. His company helped build the power grid in Baghdad during his 2003-04 deployment with the Army Corps of Engineers. With that new focus comes new demands for the institutions that educate officers.
Anticipating future challenges isn’t easy. “Who would have thought that we [would need] people who understand something about the Pashtun mix in Afghanistan?” Watson said, “Who has the ability to help these countries set up educational systems, set up banking systems, set up institutions of governance? Nobody thought that that’s what the military did, but that’s in fact what they are doing now.”
Targeting an education to a specific setting also has disadvantages. An example, Watson said, is teaching officers Arabic, Urdu or Pashto, the languages spoken in Iraq and Afghanistan. Learning to speak those languages well enough takes more time than is available. And should the next conflict be on, say, the Korean peninsula, those skills wouldn’t be useful.
“Would we want to spend the amount of time to put someone through a Korean program after they have already been through Arabic or Urdu?” Watson asked.
From the classroom to world
McGee will be stationed in Seoul at 8th Army headquarters. His job will include drawing up possible U.S. strategies in response to given scenarios, from a natural disaster to a North Korean missile strike. McGee has previously deployed and already has a master’s in engineering, but he said his new degree will be valuable for his next assignment.
“Using the things I learned here. I’ll be able to take a [new] look because the environment has definitely changed from when I was there 13 years ago,” McGee said. “Now I have a larger perspective and a larger view.”