The Army's Advanced Strategic Art Program

Abstract

In academic year 1999-2000, the Army War College initiated a significant departure in professional military education with the introduction of its Advanced Strategic Art Program. This innovation aims at educating a select group of officers to handle the complexities of strategic planning and thinking at the CING level in a world increasingly dominated by the joint community. Before looking at this new program in some depth, it may be useful to trace the history of professional military education as a means of setting the stage. Since the beginning of the 19th century with the creation of the Prussian Kiregsakademie, professional military education has represented a crucial part of the preparation of military organizations for war. [1] In a profession where the practitioners cannot realistically practice for much of the time in their careers (in peacetime) what they are paid to do (wage war), education has provided a crucial bridge to clarify the emerging concepts, doctrine, and military thinking--in other words to prepare the minds of future wartime military leaders and planners for the terrifying and uncertain world in which their decisions will directly affect the lives of their soldiers and may determine the fate of their nation. [2] It took much of the 19th century to persuade military institutions that professional military education represented the best means to create a true profession of arms. [3] In the 1920s and 1930s professional military education represented the means by which the Germans separated the exceptional officers from the average. [4] On the basis of a deep intellectual effort to learn from World War I, the Germans built an army that came all too close to winning the next conflict. [5] Similarly, American military institutions placed great emphasis on professional military education in the interwar years. The US Army's Command and Staff College kept its students for a full two-year course of instruction, while George C. Marshall turned the infantry school at Fort Benning into a preparatory course, from whose teachers and students the generals and planners would emerge to lead the US Army to victory in World War II. It was not only career-enhancing to attend school, but it was career-enhancing to be on the faculty of the schools of professional military education. The schools themselves would play a direct part not only in the educational processes, but in the development of the doctrine and concepts that made US military forces such formidable instruments of military power. [6] Admiral Raymond Spruance, one of the great admirals of the war in the Pacific, served not just one but two tours on the faculty of the Naval War College. The Army placed similar emphasis on its educational system in this period. The Army War College numbered among its seven-member faculty for the 1939-1940 academic year W. H. Simpson and J. Lawton Collins; the former would command Ninth Army in 1944 in Europe, while the latter would become a successful corps commander in World War II and eventually Chief of Staff of the Army in the early 1950s. Significantly, Collins had also served as an instructor at Leavenworth. In a real sense America's military leaders prepared themselves intellectually and professionally at their service's institutions of professional military education for the trials that were to confront them in America's greatest war. As Admiral Nimitz suggested upon his return from the Pacific in 1946, the Naval War College had prepared a whole generation of naval leaders for the war they had to fight. [7] In the period immediately after the US victory in World War II, returning senior officers like Dwight Eisenhower continued to believe that professional military education was of the greatest importance. Eisenhower established the National War College as a means to further joint cooperation, with a faculty which would contain, among others, George Kennan. Similarly, on his return from the Pacific, Spruance assumed the presidency of the Naval War College--by choice. …