Compass Points - Decision Time

Marine Corps Compass Points  |  Paul K. Van Riper

Marine Corps University leadership faces intense criticism over proposed curriculum changes that reduce military history instruction in favor of emerging technological subjects like artificial intelligence, war games, and Joint All Domain Operations. Former University President Paul K. Van Riper warns that deemphasizing historical case studies, battlefield staff rides, and strategic classics like Thucydides mirrors post-WWII educational mistakes made between 1950 and 1970.

Those previous institutional shifts toward corporate management techniques and quantitative systems analysis contributed directly to strategic operational failures during the Vietnam War. Restoring historical analysis to service education in the late 1970s and late 1980s equipped commanders with critical insights into human friction, grand strategy, and command decision-making under intense pressure. Sidelining history during peacetime undermines foundational officer development, raising significant risks that future military commanders will repeat historical errors when confronting complex, high-friction battlefields across future conflict zones.

Comment

Replacing deep historical analysis with technical domain instruction fundamentally shifts professional military education from cognitive judgment to procedural compliance. When the Naval War College established its core curriculum under Admiral Stansfield Turner in 1972, the objective was cultivating critical reasoning for fluid command environments rather than mastering fleeting technology. The current emphasis at Quantico on Joint All Domain Operations and synthetic war-gaming risks conditioning staff officers to view combat as a deterministic system.

This technocratic drift mirrors the institutional breakdown observed during the 1960s, when Robert McNamara introduced the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System into the Pentagon. By prioritising quantitative metrics over historical friction, officer education eroded the conceptual foundations required for non-linear battlefields. Substituting algorithmic simulation for historical case studies leaves Marine Expeditionary Force commanders unprepared for command-and-control degradation when tactical networks collapse under high-intensity jamming.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If Marine Expeditionary Force commanders are trained predominantly through Joint All Domain Operations simulations rather than historical friction models, how will staff officers adapt when primary C4ISR networks are disabled in contested maritime environments?

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