For years, joint professional military education (JPME) has been an easy punching bag. In 2018, Secretary of Defense James Mattis famously claimed professional military education had stagnated. His statement drew a great deal of attention, with some JPME programs responding in frustration that the ever-evolving nature of their curricula was being ignored. Others who have criticized JPME misunderstand its purpose and miss the real adaptations JPME has continually made for the joint force and the nation. It is time to put an end to the notion that JPME is stagnant. We aim to set the record straight.
Opinions on how JPME should change come from both inside and outside the schools, often because critics misunderstand its purpose.1 Some students dislike writing academic papers and reading academic publications, arguing they will not do this in their next assignment. Others think going to school is a year off from the military and a chance to pursue a hobby or focus on transitioning from the military. Some blame JPME for the military’s failure to manage procurement, prevent ethical missteps, or translate tactical and operational successes into strategic victory.
Others complain war colleges do not focus enough on war, recalling the 1930s, when wargaming at the Naval War College (NWC) was critical to preparing the Navy for war and developing plans such as War Plan Orange.2 Today, such plans are developed by combatant commands with significant direction from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Joint Staff, none of which existed in the years leading up to World War II. Given these changes, war colleges have less influence in planning wars and instead educate leaders who do the planning at OSD, the Joint Staff, and the combatant commands. In other words, the shift away from war planning was driven by changes in law and organization, not college-level decisions.
Panelists discuss the People’s Liberation Army Navy at the U.S. Naval War College’s 14th biennial China Maritime Studies Institute Conference. In 2017, the Naval War College integrated China studies across the ten-month resident JPME curriculum. All students now receive the functional equivalent of an additional course on China. U.S. Navy (Kristopher Burris) In the past several years, criticism of JPME has sometimes been more pronounced, given that the 2018 National Defense Strategy included Mattis’s widely cited statement that “PME has stagnated, focused more on the accomplishment of mandatory credit at the expense of lethality and ingenuity.”3 This provoked strong reactions.
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