Complementing PME with Bottom-Up Learning
Today's military officers need a breadth of knowledge and skills well beyond employing violence. Cross-cultural skills, foreign language, and in-depth cultural understanding of particular regions are vital in most modern conflicts. Knowledge of history, economics, sociology, political philosophy, negotiation, business management, and economic development can be just as important as traditional combat skills--maybe even more important. And of course, understanding strategy is essential in complex, ill-defined conflicts where actions by individual soldiers can have strategic consequences. That's a lot to pile on an officer's plate, especially on top of more traditional warfighting skills, leadership development, physical conditioning, and office work.
Where do we squeeze in this broader knowledge and training? Professional Military Education (PME) is the primary avenue for sharpening an officer's mind, but PME can't do everything. Officers spend relatively little time in the PME environment, especially early in their careers. It is a scarce resource. Some fortunate officers can broaden their educations in civilian graduate schools, teaching assignments, or foreign immersion programs, but these programs are limited in number. Because of the intense demands on our military and the jam-packed career progression ladder, I often hear that there is little room to expand education opportunities. Are there any alternatives?
I propose that we can improve the overall intellectual environment in the US military by integrating continuing learning into daily life. Rather than focus on squeezing new schools into an officer's career or adding more modules to PME syllabi, we should look for ways to seamlessly add broader education into daily life at the installation and unit level. Here are some examples I've been brainstorming. These are rooted in my beliefs about the value of bottom-up, self-organized, network-based learning in contrast to the top-down model of PME.
Create local discussion groups and book clubs. Create voluntary local groups, or a national organization with local chapters, designed to facilitate dialog about strategic concepts and ideas. Hold lunches once a month on base--during the normal workday--where hot topics or current books are discussed. Bring in guest speakers. Lead discussion and debates. Wherever bases of different services are co-located, conduct these jointly.
Wherever bases are co-located, organize informal joint activities and training at the local level. I spent four years at McChord AFB in Washington, a ten-minute drive from Ft. Lewis, but the only time I interacted with Army soldiers was when they jumped out the back of my C-17. Looking back, I wish I'd sought out opportunities to learn more about the Army. Instead of waiting for officers to get joint assignments midway through their careers, why not create a local exchange program between neighboring bases? Nearby installations like Ft Lewis, McChord AFB, and Bremerton Naval Station could conduct a limited one or two-day exchange. Every month, give five Air Force officers the chance to spend a typical day in a Stryker Brigade, let five Army officers spend a day with the Navy, and let five sailors spend a day mission planning and flying with the Air Force. Such exchanges might not be immediately relevant to an officer's career field, but they would give some familiarity with the other services and their cultures early in an officer's career. They would also create a network of relationships between services.
Use AFN commercial time to educate troops. Anyone who has spent times at an overseas military base knows how awful AFN "public service announcements" are. Commercials are replaced with badly-acted Orwellian announcements explaining why we should fill out a power of attorney, stop chewing tobacco, not sexually assault each other, and view every foreigner as a potential terrorist. All this wasted airtime is a golden opportunity for military leadership to reach every military member stationed overseas. Imagine the possibilities: a series of brief messages about the history and basics of Islam, commentary on counterinsurgency principles, geography lessons on the local theater, brief interviews with officers who succeeded in stabilizing violent regions of Iraq or Afghanistan. I would take this kind of programming any day over current AFN PSAs. You won't make military geniuses with sound bytes, but you could provide a solid foundation--as well as take the edge off the resentment toward AFN PSAs.
Create a quality reading list for each regional command, and stock and promote the books. Based on my experience flying all over the CENTCOM AOR, quality reading material is hard to find; quality foreign affairs reading is even rarer. BX's/PX's sell magazines about bodybuilding and cars, and an incomprehensible selection of trashy romance novels, midlist science fiction and mystery novels, and isolated volumes of fantasy plucked out of long series. The military is missing an opportunity here; they have a captive audience. Troops deployed to military bases typically make daily trips to the BX out of sheer boredom. Each regional command should maintain an up-to-date reading list of quality, thought-provoking books relevant to that region. These books should be made available at every base in the AOR. They should be prominently displayed in every BX.
Put Defense Language Institute curriculum online for free. I've been harping on this one for a while. Instead of spending $246M annually and employing almost 1,700 native speakers to educate 3000 students a year in a foreign language, DLI should expand its horizons by becoming a public provider of language resources. It should follow the example of the MIT OpenCourseware project and put everything online for free. Millions of language students would benefit, improving the overall competence of the US in foreign languages. This would also help motivated US military members who wish to independently study a language.
I'm sure we could brainstorm other ideas. All these ideas rest on one assumption: that at least some US military members are willing to go the extra mile in becoming more educated. The goal of these programs is to create a context for self-study; to put good resources into officers' hands and create local communities where they can interact and learn together. Several such communities already exist online, like Small Wars Journal and CompanyCommand. I would love to see a physical network of these communities grow as well.
Is my assumption valid? Would such initiatives generate enough interest to sustain themselves? I welcome your thoughts.
Where do we squeeze in this broader knowledge and training? Professional Military Education (PME) is the primary avenue for sharpening an officer's mind, but PME can't do everything. Officers spend relatively little time in the PME environment, especially early in their careers. It is a scarce resource. Some fortunate officers can broaden their educations in civilian graduate schools, teaching assignments, or foreign immersion programs, but these programs are limited in number. Because of the intense demands on our military and the jam-packed career progression ladder, I often hear that there is little room to expand education opportunities. Are there any alternatives?
I propose that we can improve the overall intellectual environment in the US military by integrating continuing learning into daily life. Rather than focus on squeezing new schools into an officer's career or adding more modules to PME syllabi, we should look for ways to seamlessly add broader education into daily life at the installation and unit level. Here are some examples I've been brainstorming. These are rooted in my beliefs about the value of bottom-up, self-organized, network-based learning in contrast to the top-down model of PME.
Create local discussion groups and book clubs. Create voluntary local groups, or a national organization with local chapters, designed to facilitate dialog about strategic concepts and ideas. Hold lunches once a month on base--during the normal workday--where hot topics or current books are discussed. Bring in guest speakers. Lead discussion and debates. Wherever bases of different services are co-located, conduct these jointly.
Wherever bases are co-located, organize informal joint activities and training at the local level. I spent four years at McChord AFB in Washington, a ten-minute drive from Ft. Lewis, but the only time I interacted with Army soldiers was when they jumped out the back of my C-17. Looking back, I wish I'd sought out opportunities to learn more about the Army. Instead of waiting for officers to get joint assignments midway through their careers, why not create a local exchange program between neighboring bases? Nearby installations like Ft Lewis, McChord AFB, and Bremerton Naval Station could conduct a limited one or two-day exchange. Every month, give five Air Force officers the chance to spend a typical day in a Stryker Brigade, let five Army officers spend a day with the Navy, and let five sailors spend a day mission planning and flying with the Air Force. Such exchanges might not be immediately relevant to an officer's career field, but they would give some familiarity with the other services and their cultures early in an officer's career. They would also create a network of relationships between services.
Use AFN commercial time to educate troops. Anyone who has spent times at an overseas military base knows how awful AFN "public service announcements" are. Commercials are replaced with badly-acted Orwellian announcements explaining why we should fill out a power of attorney, stop chewing tobacco, not sexually assault each other, and view every foreigner as a potential terrorist. All this wasted airtime is a golden opportunity for military leadership to reach every military member stationed overseas. Imagine the possibilities: a series of brief messages about the history and basics of Islam, commentary on counterinsurgency principles, geography lessons on the local theater, brief interviews with officers who succeeded in stabilizing violent regions of Iraq or Afghanistan. I would take this kind of programming any day over current AFN PSAs. You won't make military geniuses with sound bytes, but you could provide a solid foundation--as well as take the edge off the resentment toward AFN PSAs.
Create a quality reading list for each regional command, and stock and promote the books. Based on my experience flying all over the CENTCOM AOR, quality reading material is hard to find; quality foreign affairs reading is even rarer. BX's/PX's sell magazines about bodybuilding and cars, and an incomprehensible selection of trashy romance novels, midlist science fiction and mystery novels, and isolated volumes of fantasy plucked out of long series. The military is missing an opportunity here; they have a captive audience. Troops deployed to military bases typically make daily trips to the BX out of sheer boredom. Each regional command should maintain an up-to-date reading list of quality, thought-provoking books relevant to that region. These books should be made available at every base in the AOR. They should be prominently displayed in every BX.
Put Defense Language Institute curriculum online for free. I've been harping on this one for a while. Instead of spending $246M annually and employing almost 1,700 native speakers to educate 3000 students a year in a foreign language, DLI should expand its horizons by becoming a public provider of language resources. It should follow the example of the MIT OpenCourseware project and put everything online for free. Millions of language students would benefit, improving the overall competence of the US in foreign languages. This would also help motivated US military members who wish to independently study a language.
I'm sure we could brainstorm other ideas. All these ideas rest on one assumption: that at least some US military members are willing to go the extra mile in becoming more educated. The goal of these programs is to create a context for self-study; to put good resources into officers' hands and create local communities where they can interact and learn together. Several such communities already exist online, like Small Wars Journal and CompanyCommand. I would love to see a physical network of these communities grow as well.
Is my assumption valid? Would such initiatives generate enough interest to sustain themselves? I welcome your thoughts.
posted by Reach 364 at
9:20 AM
2 Comments:
I am a Coast Guard officer currently assigned to the Leadership and Professional Development office at HQ (a tiny office in HR) and I'm living this everyday. I completed a CG-funded grad degree in leadership at the University of Pennsylvania about a year ago and eagerly looked forward to my assignment. I am also a pilot (helos) flying operationally for 6 years before getting grad school and getting my followup desk job in DC. My father (a former AF officer) told me about your blog and I've enjoyed reading it very much. You're ideas are good and are some of the things I've thought about a lot too. I was a little niave coming into my job thinking the problem was our lack of funding as a small service, but I soon discovered the problem was even more severe...it wasn't lack of funding, it was that they didn't think we had a problem. We've got junior officers screaming for PME, professional development, or anything beyond "sink or swim" on-the-job training, but the leadership response is "show me where its broken. show me where we're not succeeding." I can't quantify frustration, i can't quantify broken hearts, I can't quantify losing "best and brightest". I've come to conclude, as it seems you have, that it's up to us. We have to grow out the old by starting our own "insurgency" in the bottom ranks. It will take dedicated JOs who will do these things in spite of lack of support from the top. It will be on our own time mostly and the only reward will be learning and getting better. I've also come to conclude that the only way our voices are heard is through writing and getting published. After reading your blog and talking with my father and some mentors, I've decided that I need to make writing a discipline and start a blog to record all my ideas and thoughts that I have written on scraps of paper in books and in drawers all over my apartment. Also we need to start getting JOs to publish in professional journals. Maybe we should start writing clubs in addition to reading clubs. I'm also looking at a project to capture stories. As an aviator I learn more from others stories and mistakes than I do from any proficiency course or flight manual...I think that can be translated for leadership. Keep writing your thoughts and ideas...we're reading, and it's always good to know we're not alone in our thinking. One final thought...we need to find a way to start teaching JOs how to teach...leaders are teachers.
I like the idea of the bottom-up approach and the informal networking. It seems to me the blogosphere is helping in this regard and your blog is a perfect example. A couple of challenges come to mind.
1) Many officers will not engage in such learning as they are not as interested unfortunately. It seems to me many of our peers are interested in making the dough-nuts but are less inclined to think on the "intellectual" level that you and I know is needed to win today's wars.
2) Making the dough-nuts is a real full time job in and of itself. It's hard to fault somebody who has little time for family life.
3) Attempts to formalize education runs the risk of being counterproductive (I'm thinking CBTs). But I think if PME style online forum participation, reading assignments, and discussion was part of everyday work life (maybe a small reading assignment once a month) that would be very useful as long as academic freedom was enforced and the myriad of experiences and views were not only tolerated but encouraged.
Good thoughts.
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