    [House Hearing, 117 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                            [H.A.S.C. No. 117-94]

                        PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION
                        AND THE NATIONAL DEFENSE STRATEGY

                                   __________

                                    HEARING

                                   BEFORE THE

                       SUBCOMMITTEE ON MILITARY PERSONNEL

                                     OF THE

                          COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

                            HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                        ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                                 SECOND SESSION

                                   __________

                                  HEARING HELD

                                  MAY 18, 2022

    [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
                                   __________

                        U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
    48-475                      WASHINGTON : 2023

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                       SUBCOMMITTEE ON MILITARY PERSONNEL

                     JACKIE SPEIER, California, Chairwoman

    ANDY KIM, New Jersey                 MIKE GALLAGHER, Wisconsin
    CHRISSY HOULAHAN, Pennsylvania       STEPHANIE I. BICE, Oklahoma
    VERONICA ESCOBAR, Texas, Vice Chair  LISA C. McCLAIN, Michigan
    SARA JACOBS, California              RONNY JACKSON, Texas
    MARILYN STRICKLAND, Washington       JERRY L. CARL, Alabama
    MARC A. VEASEY, Texas                PAT FALLON, Texas

                   Dave Giachetti, Professional Staff Member
                     Glen Diehl, Professional Staff Member
                               Sidney Faix, Clerk

                                C O N T E N T S

                                  ----------
                                                                       Page

                  STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

    Gallagher, Hon. Mike, a Representative from Wisconsin, Ranking
      Member, Subcommittee on Military Personnel.....................     2
    Speier, Hon. Jackie, a Representative from California,
      Chairwoman, Subcommittee on Military Personnel.................     1

                                   WITNESSES

    Munsch, VADM Stuart B., USN, Director for Joint Force
      Development, Joint Staff, J7...................................    22
    Johnson-Freese, Joan, Professor, National Security Affairs, U.S.
      Naval War College..............................................     5
    Schmidle, LtGen Robert E., Jr., USMC (Ret.), Professor of
      Practice, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State
      University.....................................................     3
    Skelly, Hon. Shawn G., Assistant Secretary of Defense for
      Readiness, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for
      Personnel and Readiness........................................    20

                                    APPENDIX

    Prepared Statements:

        Johnson-Freese, Joan.........................................    54
        Munsch, VADM Stuart B........................................    83
        Schmidle, LtGen Robert E., Jr................................    40
        Skelly, Hon. Shawn G.........................................    76
        Speier, Hon. Jackie..........................................    39

    Documents Submitted for the Record:

        [There were no Documents submitted.]

    Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:

        [There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.]

    Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:

        Dr. Jackson..................................................    93
        Ms. Jacobs...................................................    91

    .
       PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION AND THE NATIONAL DEFENSE STRATEGY

                                  ----------

                      House of Representatives,
                           Committee on Armed Services,
                            Subcommittee on Military Personnel,
                               Washington, DC, Wednesday, May 18, 2022.
        The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:02 p.m., in
    room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Jackie Speier
    (chairwoman of the subcommittee). presiding.

    OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JACKIE SPEIER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
       CALIFORNIA, CHAIRWOMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON MILITARY PERSONNEL

        Ms. Speier. Good afternoon.
        The Committee on Military Personnel will come to order. I
    want to welcome the hearing presentations today. We're going to
    hear from those who have an interest in or are connected with
    professional military education and the National Defense
    Strategy.
        This is the second committee hearing that we have had on
    this topic, and I commend the ranking member for making this a
    priority.
        We are here to discuss with the Office of the Secretary of
    Defense [OSD] and the Joint Staff the Department's processes
    for developing and deploying professional education to service
    members that is relevant, flexible, and delivers value to the
    Armed Forces, given the investment in time and taxpayer
    dollars.
        This content prepares officers charged to advance and
    execute our future national military strategy and ultimately
    become the senior leaders responsible for the defense of the
    Nation.
        We will also hear from our panel of outside witnesses on
    their thoughts on the Department's professional military
    education enterprise and their recommendations for change.
        From our OSD and Joint Staff panel, I want to hear not only
    about the need for this ongoing education but what is intended
    and the actual return on the significant investment of both
    time and resources, estimated at over $8 billion a year, and
    how that return is measured.
        I'm also concerned about these programs becoming very
    insular and not taking into consideration educational experts
    outside of the Department of Defense [DOD] to consider their
    insights in the development and execution of relevant
    educational content as well as maintenance of accreditation.
        We must make sure that our leaders remain on the cutting
    edge of intellectual, technological, and educational
    development necessary for the changing character and conduct of
    operations.
        The Office of the Secretary of Defense has been in charge
    of professional military education for 30 years, but it appears
    to have operated on autopilot and with little oversight by DOD
    or Congress.
        The need for swift change in this arena must match the
    evolving strategy in a rapidly changing world. I'm convinced
    that the professional military education system is flexible
    enough to--I'm not convinced that the professional military
    education system is flexible enough to modify and adapt the
    curriculum promptly to keep pace with changing defense needs.
        It needs attention of leadership and follow-through. I want
    to ensure that these educational opportunities are not used for
    career box checking but are used to enhance the warfighters'
    intellectual rigor or, as Chairman Milley states, the, quote,
    ``intellectual overmatch,'' unquote, that is necessary to
    increase critical strategic thinking, leading to increased
    competence and effectiveness of our fighting force.
        I'm also very interested to hear from our civilian
    witnesses their opinions of robustness and effectiveness of the
    current system of professional military education, and any and
    all recommendations they have for the improvement of the
    education continuum.
        Before hearing from our witnesses, let me offer Ranking
    Member Gallagher an opportunity to make his opening remarks.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Speier can be found in the
    Appendix on page 39.]

        STATEMENT OF HON. MIKE GALLAGHER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM
     WISCONSIN, RANKING MEMBER, SUBCOMMITTEE ON MILITARY PERSONNEL

        Mr. Gallagher. Well, I thank you, Chairwoman Speier, for
    your interest in this topic. I want to thank both of our panels
    for being with us today.
        I will start with a quote that is sometimes attributed to
    Thucydides, other times attributed to Sir Francis Butler--it
    depends on what you reference--but I'm sure you've heard it
    before, which is that a nation that makes a great distinction
    between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made
    by cowards and its wars fought by fools.
        The stakes with professional military education [PME] and
    its intersection with the National Defense Strategy is
    absolutely critical to the defense of our Nation. The threats
    to America include an increasingly aggressive China, a
    revanchist Russia. The threat of Salafi jihadism has not gone
    away.
        Cyber criminals attack us every single day and, of course,
    unique challenges we have all faced in the last 2 years related
    to the pandemic. The list goes on and on. The bottom line is we
    have to ensure our readiness through an unyielding commitment
    to outthinking our opponents, whether they are state actors or
    cyber criminals or nonstate terrorist groups. We have to get
    this right.
        This past December, we had a subcommittee briefing and I
    started with a statement from the 2018 National Defense
    Strategy which said, quote, ``PME has stagnated, focused more
    on the accomplishment of mandatory credit at the expense of
    lethality and ingenuity,'' unquote.
        I also mentioned the need to harness the power of war-
    gaming, which I think we're not doing enough of. In today's
    hearing I would like to get into these issues. I would like to
    understand what's changed in our approach since we have had
    that initial briefing, how we can ensure that we have the right
    system for PME and, by extension, that our military leaders are
    prepared to fight and win in any conflict and as well as just
    understand the future of warfare.
        The challenge here is whether we have the institutions and
    organizational wherewithal within our military to do this, or
    does the current system of PME need a fresh look and a
    transformational change.
        We need to hear the thoughts of both panels on this and we
    also need to know what your constraints are and how we can get
    after this and support you in the right way.
        In my mind, PME should be something that inspires
    intellectual curiosity and the critical thinking of our service
    members. It should be the result of a meritocratic culture that
    assures the best and brightest are afforded the opportunity to
    lead and to hone their craft as thinkers and as warriors.
        And so I'm very much looking forward to this discussion. I
    thank you, and I yield back.
        Ms. Speier. I thank the ranking member and would now like
    to welcome our first witnesses in our first panel. First is
    retired General U.S. Marine Corps, Robert Schmidle--did I say
    that right?--Junior, Professor of Practice at the School of
    Politics and Global Studies at the Arizona State University,
    and Professor Joan Johnson-Freese, National Security Affairs,
    Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.
        Mr. Schmidle, you may begin with your opening statement.

       STATEMENT OF LTGEN ROBERT E. SCHMIDLE, JR., USMC (RET.),
     PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE, SCHOOL OF POLITICS AND GLOBAL STUDIES,
                        ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

        General Schmidle. Thank you, Chairwoman Speier and Ranking
    Member Gallagher, and the other members of the subcommittee.
        I first want to thank you for the opportunity to appear
    before you today to address the issue of professional military
    education and the National Defense Strategy.
        Although this subject has been investigated before, it
    seems to me that what makes this such a pressing issue today is
    the rise of China. China is the first true peer adversary we
    have had to deal with in many years. China has the economic,
    technical, and manpower resources that make it perhaps the most
    severe threat that we have faced.
        Because of this, it is a matter of great consequence that
    the professional military education system produces the very
    finest officers who are both thinkers and doers. In examining
    the state of military education, the first thing that I think
    we should consider is answering the following question.
        What do we want our senior military and civilian leaders to
    be able to do, what are the characteristics and attributes we
    want them to have? We want them to be creative, to be
    innovative, to be critical thinkers. Answering this question is
    fundamental to identifying areas of concern and opportunity,
    and seems to me that this, in fact, is a question for the
    Congress.
        It is important to remember that while we, the U.S.
    military, are unmatched on the battlefield, the many tactical
    victories we have achieved have not always been relevant to
    enabling strategic success.
        Ensuring a coherent relationship between tactics and
    strategy is part of a long-term--as part of a long-term
    campaign model is critical to maintaining America's place in
    the world order. The most effective and enduring methods, in my
    experience, for achieving this relationship is through
    realistic and rigorous war-gaming, especially at the classified
    level.
        The example of War Plan Orange is very instructive. War
    Plan Orange was the plan for the defeat of Japan in the Second
    World War. War Plan Orange was created initially out of
    seminars at the national--the Naval War College in Newport,
    Rhode Island, and for many, many years, they would war-game a
    rising Japan in the South Pacific.
        And when we finally went to war with Japan, the senior
    leaders actually had in their minds an operational design for
    what that conflict was going to look like and what that plan
    would look like, and that came from the war-gaming that was
    done for many years at Newport.
        Previous efforts at reforming professional military
    education have only been successful because of congressional
    leadership. As I suggested in my written testimony, a
    congressional commission similar to the Cyberspace Solarium
    Commission, I think, would be a great first step.
        I was fortunate to be on the red team for that commission
    and I was very impressed with the level and the depth of
    knowledge and understanding of the nuances of cyber operations
    among the commissioners.
        I had just come from being the first deputy commander of
    Cyber Command and I was relatively familiar with those things.
    So I was very impressed with the methodology and the leadership
    of that commission, and I think that that would be a great way
    for us to begin to understand the issues, their potential
    solutions, and to start crafting legislation to put them in
    place.
        Two things that I think we should keep in mind as we
    consider the implications of professional military education.
    First, investing in human capital has a much bigger payoff than
    investing in technology alone.
        As some on this committee know personally, technology by
    itself doesn't fight wars. It doesn't win wars. People using
    technology fight wars and people, ultimately, make decisions
    that win or lose wars.
        The Department of Defense budgets should, in fact, reflect
    the outsized importance of applying appropriate resources to
    professional military education and most of all to war-gaming.
        Second, I think we need to take a holistic approach to
    military education, understanding the inescapable linkages to
    service personnel and promotion policies. The example of
    Goldwater-Nichols and the effect that it had on joint duty is,
    again, instructive.
        Prior to Goldwater-Nichols, there was--officers were not in
    a hurry to go to joint duty. It was considered a pariah. But
    after Goldwater-Nichols, when it became apparent that the
    Congress had run out of patience with giving waivers to the
    Department of Defense for promotion to general officer, it
    suddenly became the cause celebre and the best and the
    brightest of the O-6s we had--the colonels and Navy captains--
    were trying to get into joint positions so that we could, in
    fact--they would be eligible for promotion. And I think that we
    are all the better for it--our joint forces, obviously, the
    better for that.
        So I think that that is a good example of how we could
    actually legislate and start to move the needle on this. The
    most important contribution that professional military
    education makes to National Defense Strategy is preparing
    senior officers and civilians for all that we can confidently
    know about the future and that is that it will be uncertain.
        And with that, I look forward to your questions.
        [The prepared statement of General Schmidle can be found in
    the Appendix on page 40.]
        Ms. Speier. Thank you, sir. We'll now hear from Dr.
    Johnson-Freese.

    STATEMENT OF JOAN JOHNSON-FREESE, PROFESSOR, NATIONAL SECURITY
                    AFFAIRS, U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Representative--thank you.
        Representative Speier, Representative Gallagher, and
    members of the subcommittee, at is an honor and a pleasure to
    have the opportunity to speak with you today about professional
    military education, a field I've worked in since 1993.
        The focus of my remarks will be on the degree-granting
    institutions, specifically, command and staff and war colleges,
    as that is where my experience lies.
        And while I'm currently a faculty member at the Naval War
    College, the views I'm expressing today are strictly my own.
        There is much that has improved in PME during my nearly 30-
    year career. Adherence to the principles of academic freedom,
    the foundation for quality teaching, and recruiting top
    teachers is now embedded in most PME programs.
        There has also been a slow and steadily growing recognition
    that it is not the purpose of either the intermediate or senior
    level courses to better prepare each individual attendee for
    their next billet, a mistake that long dominated PME.
        Military officers need to be educated for the arc of the
    rest of their careers rather than the next assignment.
        Another improvement is that we see far fewer moments when
    senior officers take to the stage to welcome students with
    statements like, it's only a lot of reading if you do it.
    Clearly, however, some services and some military branches
    still encourage, respect, and appreciate education more than
    others.
        The hybrid nature of PME institutions creates three general
    types of stresses and challenges that remain particularly
    problematic: first, establishing clarity on the goal of the
    academic program; second, defining the institution's
    expectations of the students and what those students should
    expect to get out of the program; and third, having the most
    effective mix of civilian academics, Active Duty and retired
    military professionals, and national security practitioners to
    best implement the academic program.
        I suggest beginning with consideration of three
    recommendations. First, accentuate that Congress' goal for PME
    is education, not training. PME should produce leaders who are
    intellectually agile, questioning, critical and strategic
    thinkers who can broadly anticipate future challenges, and,
    consequently, most effectively be ready to employ U.S. forces
    for maximum effect and lethality.
        Second, institutionalize a two-track PME pathway for
    students, one for students who seek only to complete
    requirements and one for those who want to pursue a graduate
    degree.
        This is important because we have found that most students
    do, in fact, want to complete a master's level program. Indeed,
    that was the reason for accrediting the program in the first
    place.
        But some students chafe at degree program requirements and
    that minority should be allowed to pursue a smaller and more
    circumcised program.
        And third, address issues consistently identified as
    problems on command climate surveys. In my experience, these
    problems consistently include transparency in decision-making,
    hiring and promotions, narrow communications within
    institutions, and long-standing problems of inclusion and
    diversity.
        To that end, DOD should collect data on faculty and
    administration towards increased diversity through
    demographics, backgrounds, and expertise. These statistics are
    often very closely held within institution.
        But in my experience, I would estimate that PME college
    level administration, which has grown significantly in past
    years, is overwhelmingly composed of retired military. This
    lopsidedness persists because of inertia in hiring practices.
    As one of my students explained to me, ducks pick ducks.
        Few or none of this group of administrators have experience
    in academic life or higher education before coming to PME.
        More data on which groups are hired more often, have been
    hired at higher or lower pay, and are promoted more often into
    more senior positions would go a long way at getting a more
    accurate picture of faculty at PME institutions.
        Clarity here would help dispel faculty perceptions of
    unfairness if such perceptions are erroneous. If such
    perceptions are accurate, however, and I suspect many of them
    are, more data would allow for more accurate course corrections
    and institutional improvement.
        Until this problem is addressed, inertia and status quo
    within the institutions will prevail. I elaborate on each of
    these areas in my written testimony and would be happy to
    answer questions from that elaboration.
        Thank you for the opportunity to share my views.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson-Freese can be found
    in the Appendix on page 54.]
        Ms. Speier. Thank you both.
        Let me start with you, Mr. Schmidle. This congressional
    commission that you have conceived was intriguing to me. Who
    would you recommend be put on that kind of a commission?
        General Schmidle. Well, I think that, again, I go back to
    the Solarium Commission, and the members that were on--the
    commissioners that were on and many of whom I knew. But I would
    suggest that you need a mix of people that are on the civilian
    side that are experts as well as on the military side.
        I mean, I think what I would be most inclined to do would
    be to pick a chairman and a co-chair, and then have them begin
    to cogitate on who they wanted in there.
        You know, my experience, I'm also on the faculty at Arizona
    State University so I've had a chance to see this from both
    sides. I'm a student of the PME process. I went to command and
    staff college as a major.
        I went to the war college--the Marine Corps War College--as
    a lieutenant colonel, and then I taught at the Marine Corps
    University after that because that--in those days in the mid to
    late 1990s that was part of the payback. They sent us to the
    war college and then we went and were on the faculty.
        So I think a diverse group of people--to pick up on
    something that Joan just mentioned a minute ago about retired
    military, as I mentioned in my opening statement, I think that
    we could legislate career paths that would encourage the best
    and the brightest officers to be faculty in those--in our
    universities and that their career paths--that they wouldn't
    have to make a decision between a career path that would lead
    to promotion and one that would not.
        Recognizing that I have really not answered your question,
    I just think that it would require--I mean, there are some
    things that I've seen in the civilian academic world that I
    think would be very useful for us to import.
        But I think there's also some rigor that is called for in
    the military schools, especially when we get into things like
    war-gaming, that really need to be and can best be taught by
    people with an operational background.
        Ms. Speier. All right. Thank you. What percentage of the
    faculty, Dr. Johnson-Freese, would you recommend be civilian?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Not just the faculty but
    administration? A third.
        Ms. Speier. A third. And how about war-gaming? What
    percentage of the curriculum should be war-gaming?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. What percentage of the curriculum?
    Again, I can speak only to my experience--that it usually is
    part of the military operations course, whatever it's called,
    And it is the kind of culminating exercise.
        So I would estimate it's probably somewhere between 10 and
    20 percent of the overall curriculum. But I would suggest that,
    for example, in my department, we have an exercise that is not
    war-gaming, per se, but it is an exercise which puts students
    in the position of have to think about force planning and
    having to think about how you match force planning with
    strategy. So there are elements of war-gaming practices that
    are throughout the curriculum.
        Ms. Speier. What percentage of the curriculum at the war
    college that you have been part of for all these years is
    Socratic versus seminar engagement?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Well, as I pointed out in my testimony,
    we aim for Socratic method teaching. But it's very difficult to
    go into a classroom where the vast majority of the students are
    coming from a STEM [science, technology, engineering, and
    mathematics] background. Most of them are engineers.
        They've come from the military academies. And when you try
    and have a discussion that starts off with something like what
    are the pros and cons of alliances for the United States, and
    the students in the room have absolutely no background in that
    field, there's a certain amount of teaching that has to go on
    before you can get into the Socratic method.
        There's a lot more teaching that has to be done on the
    basics of social sciences to prepare them for that Socratic
    method that is very effective.
        Ms. Speier. In one of your articles you wrote that we
    should limit the number of retirees hired on war college
    faculties. Would you like to expand on that?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. The retired faculty play a very
    important role. Some of them leave the military and become--
    take on a civilian role and develop their own fields. I have a
    colleague who has become an expert strategist. I have another
    colleague who is a marvel at international engagement. They do
    this.
        But there are also a pretty strong percentage who use their
    position or see their position as a faculty member to teach
    what they have done, and that gets us into teaching the last
    war. Their currency becomes dated rather quickly.
        So I would suggest, too, the second part of that is they
    see the students as a younger version of themselves and what
    that means is they understand their stresses, their
    limitations, and they become as focused on getting the students
    through comfortably as getting them educated, and we bend over
    backwards to make things comfortable for the students.
        I'm sure you remember in college finals week, even in high
    school, where you might have two finals in 1 day or three
    finals in 2 days. That will never happen at war college. It's
    spaced out to make it comfortable.
        When I first got to the Naval War College, we didn't have
    students read an article. We had a faculty member read it and
    then do a Cliff Note to give to the students to make it easier
    for them.
        So, again, I think the retired military, seeing these young
    officers as versions of themselves, rigor can become overly
    balanced with accommodation.
        Ms. Speier. Mr. Schmidle, would you like to comment on any
    of those questions? War-gaming--what percentage should it be?
        General Schmidle. So I think if we--war-gaming, to me, is
    something that we can do as part of every piece of the
    syllabus. War-gaming is, ultimately, theory applied
    practically.
        It's a way for us to take sort of the big ideas in life and
    to say how would this apply in this case. I think war-gaming
    does something else for us. I think it gives us an opportunity
    to evaluate officers, and I hear exactly what Joan is saying.
        My experience in the war college was very different. The
    Marine Corps--when we stood up the Marine Corps War College, we
    did it like we did everything else.
        We went as far overboard as we could and it was like
    academic boot camp and--but it was an extraordinary year, and I
    thoroughly enjoyed it. There were 12 people in a seminar and if
    you didn't--hadn't read what was going the night before, you
    were going to get embarrassed in front of everybody.
        And the faculty at the time sort of relished that and I
    thought that was okay because--holding people to that standard.
    The evaluation of students--one of the things that I think we
    miss an opportunity in the war colleges is being able to do
    just that, to look at some of these students and begin to pick
    out the best and the brightest that are in these war colleges
    that are not just there to get the X in the block but are
    genuinely the kinds of people that you and Ranking Member
    Gallagher were talking about, the intellectually curious, the
    folks that really want to know more about how this big system
    of ours operates.
        So I would be inclined to do more war-gaming more often and
    to hold the students accountable for trying to understand the,
    quote, ``big ideas'' that are driving a lot of this.
        Ms. Speier. Thank you. My time has expired.
        Ranking Member Gallagher.
        Mr. Gallagher. Well, thank you. I apologize. I keep running
    out. We have a T&I [Transportation and Infrastructure
    Committee] vote series going on right now. So trust me, there's
    a TV and I'm listening to what you're saying as I also vote
    simultaneously so--and I very much appreciated both of your
    thoughtful testimony.
        General Schmidle, in your testimony, you mention a China
    Hands program. Could you tell us a little bit more about that
    and what benefit you think it would provide to the Defense
    Department?
        General Schmidle. You know, we tried to--there we go. Okay.
    The Defense Department tried the Afghan Hands program a number
    of years ago. You may have heard of that. And, actually, it
    was--it was actually pretty popular. I knew a number of
    officers that wanted to know how to get involved in it.
        We didn't quite take it to conclusion. It didn't get
    embedded institutionally. But I think the idea of starting, for
    instance, a China Hands program--so if you were a young major
    and you said, hey, I want to get into that program, you would
    select into it--you wouldn't just decide you wanted to do it--
    and then you would go to school.
        You would probably go to a master's degree program in
    Chinese politics, Chinese geography, Chinese economics. You
    would learn the language, at least some--enough of the language
    to be able to be passively--if not fluent to be able to read,
    and you would spend your career in jobs that were continually
    focused on China.
        So you might spend a couple years in the Pentagon. Then you
    might go to the INDOPACOM [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] staff,
    continuing to get promoted--and this is something that we would
    have to ensure was happening--and then come back to the
    Pentagon so that the Secretary of Defense had a group of folks
    that he could go to outside of OSD Policy, which, as you know,
    has a large turnover of folks in there, but a core group of
    people that truly understood China and the Chinese issues and
    the Chinese culture.
        We had a de facto experience like this in the 1960s and
    1970s with the Sovietologists, right. We had a lot of people in
    the Department of Defense that just knew the Soviet Union and
    that knew the Russian people and the issues that were there
    that we never really thought about it because that was the peer
    threat.
        And this was just a suggestion that I had that as a way to
    kick start and to generate interest in furthering the education
    and giving these young officers access to the Secretary with
    their suggestions.
        Mr. Gallagher. Can I--so you mentioned War Plan Orange--
    phenomenal book, very eye opening. As I understand it, or if
    memory serves, the key was that you had students, Active Duty--
    in this case at the Naval War College--whose work was then
    being fed into the actual war plan.
        General Schmidle. Absolutely.
        Mr. Gallagher. And it evolved over time.
        General Schmidle. Absolutely.
        Mr. Gallagher. I mean, they--what's remarkable is they got
    the basic idea kind of right but made significant adjustments
    throughout. Is there any such connectivity going on right now
    between the war-gaming happening at our national war colleges
    and the actual OPLANS [operation plans] such as they exist?
        General Schmidle. I really don't know. I suspect that it
    may not be as tight of a loop but----
        Mr. Gallagher. And I'll allow Dr. Freese to--you seem like
    you had a thought on--yeah.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Yeah. One of the things that's happened
    over the past 10 years is there's been an increasing
    recognition within the war colleges that there's a lot of
    external experts that you can bring in to work with.
        The war colleges used to be very insular. There is now a
    recognition that the way you get expertise and the way you
    develop expertise is to work with outside institutions. At one
    time, faculty were discouraged from doing that, but that is
    slowly changing.
        So you've got this breadth of expertise not just on China,
    but on China, on the Middle East, on--name the area of the
    world--that you can work with. And, again, recently, Russian
    studies has come back into vogue, which was very much in vogue
    during the Cold War.
        But we don't need to develop them all within the war
    colleges because, again, languages--Chinese--my son took
    Chinese for 6 years and I think he would say he speaks Chinese
    like a first grader.
        So it's a long process to develop expertise. We can't
    develop them in a 10-month program, but we can make them aware
    of the questions they need to ask to find the experts who are
    there. And I think that's an important thing to do.
        Mr. Gallagher. Well, the other thing that I'm concerned
    about is we invest this money and time into some of our best
    and brightest, although there's a dispute as to whether we're
    selecting our best and brightest, depending on the institution.
        Are we then putting them in operational assignments that
    reflects the year or 2 years they just spent working on a
    particular intellectual problem?
        I only have 14 seconds. Yeah, I got to--yeah.
        General Schmidle. I think we would find out that it's
    probably episodic.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. I can only say, based on what my
    students tell me, rarely.
        Mr. Gallagher. Okay. I'm listening. Again, I swear.
        [Laughter.]
        Ms. Speier. Dr. Johnson-Freese, I believe in your testimony
    you recommended that it not be focused on the next position
    that officer is going to have but their totality of the arc of
    their term in the military.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Yeah. When I started in PME that was
    the idea that we were supposed to [be] preparing them for their
    next job. Well, when your seminar is 12 students and one is a
    pilot and one is a nurse and one is a ship driver and one is in
    cyber--you can't prepare them. We are not--that is training.
    That is training.
        What we are preparing them to do is to recognize long-term
    threats, to think strategically. Getting away from that idea of
    preparing them for their next job has been incremental, but I
    think we have made a great deal of progress in that area.
        Ms. Speier. Thank you. Next is the gentlewoman from
    Pennsylvania, Ms. Houlahan. You are recognized for 5 minutes.
        Ms. Houlahan. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our
    panel for speaking. I served in the military and was a
    Russian--I took a bunch of Russian as well back in the day, and
    my dad actually was a Navy guy and went to Naval War College,
    amongst other terrific professional education opportunities.
        So I'm really excited to kind of learn your perspective,
    and I had a specific question for Ms.--it must be Dr. Johnson-
    Freese or Ms. Johnson-Freese--you suggested in your testimony
    that the Department should utilize a two-track PME pathway for
    students for those who were pursuing master's degrees and those
    who sought only to complete their PME.
        We have often heard that noncommissioned officers [NCOs]
    and petty officers are the backbone of the Armed Forces and
    about 82 percent of the forces are enlisted, and so my question
    to you is, given how strongly that we rely on the enlisted
    folks and ongoing efforts to recruit and retain these qualified
    folks, would you also recommend, similarly, that pathways apply
    to enlisted for PME?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. I'm not familiar--I'm not as familiar
    with the education system that deals with NCOs. But I know we
    have included--on a very selective basis included them into our
    programs and I think--again, many students come to us and say,
    I've got two master's, I don't need another master's.
        I would rather spend that time doing something else. And,
    frankly, there are just students who aren't interested for
    whatever reason and they don't add much to the seminar. I had a
    student say, so I did all the reading, did all the work, and
    I'm going to get an A- and the man next to me who didn't spill
    his coffee every day is going to get a B+.
        Let him take a more condensed version and get him out of
    the classroom and add more interagency people. Add more
    international. Add some of the NCOs. That creates a more
    interesting and useful mix.
        Ms. Houlahan. So you're saying that you could increase
    capacity if you changed the mix of what people's aspirations
    were in terms of the end result of the program?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Absolutely.
        Ms. Houlahan. And that's interesting. My other question--
    you also did a lot--spoke a lot about sort of diversity of the
    staff and faculty and you spoke a little bit about--I think
    what you were saying is measuring what mattered and being able
    to have the data in front of us as to what that diversity looks
    like, where people are coming from, so that you can see what
    sort of efficacy results from that diversity.
        Is that, indeed, what you were indicating a need for is an
    understanding of what the faculty looks like at these various
    institutions?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. What the faculty looks like and
    equally, if not more important, what the administration looks
    like. I would argue that the administration in PME throughout
    the institutions is overwhelmingly retired military, and that's
    rather like having a hospital--if everybody running the
    hospital is a surgeon, they're going to have the same answer to
    pretty much every medical question.
        When you have a war college where everybody is retired
    military, you don't get much diversity of thought. So my
    argument is that since it is Active Duty, retired military,
    professional academics, and practitioners, there ought to be
    some kind of mix in there to get diversity of viewpoint, and it
    is not a matter of Ph.D. and non-Ph.D.
        It's a matter of where did you come from? What is your
    background? Did you have experience in education? Are you aware
    of what it takes to succeed as an academic as opposed to--many
    of the retired military will go on to get a Ph.D. at a night
    school program maybe in the field they're working in, maybe
    not.
        So it's not Ph.D./non-Ph.D. It is what was your background
    when you came in to give you what--diversity of thought and I
    think that will get--that will remove a lot of the inertia and
    status quo that has prevailed.
        Ms. Houlahan. And with my remaining seconds would love to
    understand from Mr. Schmidle--General Schmidle, you mentioned
    the fact that--I'm trying to remember what the angle was.
        I'm sorry. I've lost the train of thought. It was really
    important, but I'm sure it'll come to me.
        And with that, I guess I'll yield back because I've
    forgotten what I wanted to ask you about.
        General Schmidle. So if I could comment on the question you
    asked about accreditation. So the question we might ask
    ourselves is if we were not concerned with accreditation for
    master's programs, what would that free up in terms of
    bandwidth at the war colleges to potentially teach things that
    we're not teaching today, and the extent to which that
    accreditation actually impacts us at that level might be
    something to think about.
        The other thing is with regard to the administration, the
    question we should be asking ourselves is how do we incentivize
    civilian faculty to join the administration of a war college,
    and Joan has brought up some great points.
        If everybody there is a surgeon, then their answer is going
    to be, well, let's do some exploratory cutting and figure out
    what the problem is.
        So I just think if we could consider those two things that
    might be useful.
        Ms. Houlahan. No, I appreciate it. I know my time is up. I
    did remember what I was going to ask----
        Ms. Speier. All right. Go ahead and ask question.
        Ms. Houlahan. Thank you, which was when you talk--both of
    you have talked about the balance between rigor and, you know,
    making sure you don't alienate the population--your student
    population--I also was a chemistry teacher for a time so I do
    understand that as well.
        But my challenge is you also mentioned that it made a huge
    difference when it was part of a person's career path to
    require that they take a stop at this sort of professional
    development and education.
        If we make it so that we're lowering the accreditation
    standards or that there isn't accreditation, will it still be
    that desirable path or is there--how do you reconcile that, I
    guess, is my question.
        General Schmidle. I don't think that the accreditation
    path--when I was teaching at the Marine Corps University at the
    command and general staff level--I had just finished the war
    college--we did not have--we were not given a master or we
    didn't earn a master's degree at that program. It was not
    accredited.
        Yet, I was entering students in command and staff college
    that--for master's degrees when I did not have one myself. So I
    think that that the--that is just not really an issue.
        The point that I think I was trying to make was if you say
    to the best and brightest of our young officers a tour on the
    faculty of the university of one of the schools and one of our
    services is good for your career as opposed to being something
    to be avoided, then I think that you will, just like joint duty
    was, all of a sudden overnight it became the thing that
    everybody wanted, and 2 weeks before that you couldn't get
    anybody to sign up for a joint job. So that does happen.
        Ms. Speier. Thank you.
        Ms. Houlahan. I get it. I get it. I appreciate it. Thank
    you, sir. Thank you, Madam----
        Ms. Speier. The gentlelady yields back.
        Ms. Houlahan. Thank you, Madam Chair.
        Ms. Speier. Mrs. McClain is next but she's not here. So
    we'll move to Mr. Jackson of Texas for 5 minutes.
        Dr. Jackson. Thank you, Chairwoman, and thank you, Ranking
    Member Gallagher, for holding this hearing today. I share
    Ranking Member Gallagher's passion for providing oversight, for
    reforming the future of professional military education.
        So I'm glad we had this hearing take place today. I believe
    this is one of the most important topics that we can discuss
    here in this subcommittee.
        As a retired flag officer, I believe that we need to
    continue to invest in our people by providing adequate
    opportunities for development and growth.
        Yesterday, our committee received a briefing from Deputy
    Secretary Hicks on National Defense Strategy. During the
    briefing, she emphasized investment and modernization in our
    cyber and space capabilities.
        General, you helped stand up the CYBERCOM [U.S. Cyber
    Command] as the first deputy commander so your expertise is a
    real asset to this committee. China's cyber capabilities are
    advancing rapidly each day.
        So I think it's important that we continue to educate our
    force about cyber in particular because we will--it will be
    such a critical component of the conflict in the Indo-Pacific
    should that happen.
        So, General, where do you see the largest gaps in knowledge
    in the Department when looking at cyber and, further, what
    aspects of cyber should we implement in the curriculum at our
    PME institutions to ensure our forces are ready for the Chinese
    adversary?
        General Schmidle. Well, that's a great question,
    Representative Jackson. Thanks for asking it. So, in my time at
    Cyber Command and my time since then dealing with this issue
    when I was on Active Duty and today where I'm on the advisory
    board at NSA [National Security Agency], it seems to me that
    what we really need in our senior officers and our senior
    leadership, we don't want to turn them into computer scientists
    but they do need to have an understanding--enough of an
    understanding of the technology to be able to think through the
    implications of using that technology as a tool of national
    security because what we are seeing and what we have seen over
    the course of the last 15 years is that cyber capabilities can,
    in fact, have an effect--a big effect, in some cases--on what
    you might think about for national security strategy.
        So I think that it's important that we have some level of
    technical education and the example from my own experience is
    being a pilot, right--I'm not an aeronautical engineer. I
    couldn't build an airplane.
        But I do know why if I push the stick forward the trees get
    bigger. If I pull it back, they get smaller. I understand who
    Bernoulli was and I got all that. And I think we need people
    like that that understand the world of cyber and especially to
    realize that there's two different things we're talking about
    here.
        There's the pathways, if you will, of cyber, the way that
    we push bits and data through, and then there is what we can
    potentially do with cyber technologies that would be--have some
    other effect on what we're doing. So it's a great and very
    timely question and, as you well know, the Chinese are active
    and so----
        Dr. Jackson. Yes, sir. No, I appreciate that. Thank you.
    And I had another question that was related. You answered most
    of that, actually.
        But I think it's really important too because I think
    what--the other thing it does is it gives us--you know, if we
    include this in the curriculum it makes people much more
    competitive across the board for jobs when they get out of the
    military because cyber is so important.
        Just, you know, no matter what you choose to do when you
    leave the military, I think having a little bit of background
    in this and having this part as your professional military
    education is going to make life after the military a lot more
    competitive and a lot better for folks when they get out.
        So thank you. I appreciate both of you for being here and
    for your time. And with that, I yield back. Thank you.
        Ms. Speier. He wants to--do you want to yield to the
    ranking member?
        Dr. Jackson. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I yield back, Madam.
        Ms. Speier. All right. The gentleman is recognized.
        Mr. Gallagher. Can I ask a blunt question. How--okay, so
    when we talk about, like, our top level war colleges, right--
    National War College, Naval War College--I'm not trying to get
    you to pick sides here--how do you think they stack up against
    top-level civilian master's degree programs, right? Think SAIS
    [Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies],
    Georgetown. I don't know what the latest ranking is. Do we have
    a way of assessing that?
        General Schmidle. So after I went through the Marine Corps
    War College, I decided that I wanted to get a master's degree
    because they were not issuing master's degrees and I wanted to
    continue. So I applied and got accepted at American University
    and I got a degree in philosophy.
        So here I am in a civilian university. I'm a 50-year-old or
    a 47-year-old colonel wandering around, going to night school
    trying to do this. Academically, I can tell you that it was the
    first 6 months of the Marine Corps War College at that time,
    1996, when we were doing strategy was as in depth as what I did
    in that master's program.
        The second 6 months of the war college, which were more of
    the joint force applied stuff, was not--it was more in people's
    comfort zones. So but that was just my one snapshot experience
    into what that was.
        Joan.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. I would argue that the PME can declare
    success when an officer is offered a chance to go to Harvard,
    Yale, SAIS, or a war college and they pick the war college.
        Mr. Gallagher. I like the way you put that.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Because, right now, there is the
    perception that the degree from one of those civilian academic
    institutions is worth more, and part of that is, again, because
    they--these--Harvard, Yale, SAIS--they have very selective
    admissions, they're very rigorous, and the faculty at those
    institutions are not there to make the students comfortable.
        They are there to challenge them. General Petraeus going to
    Princeton was the first C he ever got and it made him a better
    student. So I think it's really--the war colleges--the
    advantages that the war college brings is it has faculty with
    in-depth security experience who understands that they are
    teaching to practitioners, and they don't go in--when I teach
    theory I do it knowing that my students don't even like the
    word theory and I put it out there in a way that would be
    acceptable and they will learn from.
        I have to add to that, too, a different view on
    accreditation. When the Naval War College was the first to
    accredit its program, it was not--we did not gold-plate it. It
    was accredited the way it was. There is this myth that we can
    strip things away and have all this extra time, which is simply
    not true, and the reason it was accredited was because the
    students would come to Newport knowing they were going to pass
    PME.
        It was going to--they were going to pass. Everybody passes.
    So they would go to the local university to get a master's and
    come to class, and when you asked about readings they were very
    sorry, but they didn't get to it because they had homework to
    do for their master's program.
        Mr. Gallagher. Wow.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. So accrediting those war college
    programs is to get their attention, at least in part, and if we
    don't have them accredited we're going to go back to that idea
    that their attention is going to be split because they do want
    post-career master's programs.
        Mr. Gallagher. That's right. I thank the chairwoman for
    indulging me with that extra time.
        Ms. Speier. So, on the one hand, it would suggest that--
    first of all, in looking at the accreditation of the various
    war colleges they're supposed to be accredited every 6 years
    and some of them have not been accredited in a 6-year period of
    time. So I don't know how rigorous that accreditation process
    is. Are you familiar with it relative to the Naval [War)
    College?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Yeah. They are accredited--the war
    colleges are accredited by the same bodies that accredit
    Harvard, Yale, wherever, at Stanford--wherever it happens to
    be.
        What very often happens--these are academics. Academics
    come into a military environment and they are dazzled by the
    efficiency and the stacks of books, and they are just--they're
    dazzled. That's the only word I can give you. And they are
    impressed by what they see and rarely do they see problems.
    But, again----
        Ms. Speier. So, for instance, the College of Naval Warfare,
    which is, I presume, under your--hasn't been accredited since
    May of 2015 and it's supposed to be accredited every 6 years.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. I think a lot of that has to do with
    COVID. They would have been accredited. I'm not familiar
    specifically, but I would suggest it would have been last year.
        Ms. Speier. All right. Other questions? I don't believe
    we--everyone else is off. Okay. Well, we really very much
    appreciate your participation today. It's been very valuable.
        Let me just ask one last question to each of you. If you
    could change anything in the war colleges today, what would it
    be?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Makeup of the administration.
        Ms. Speier. I'm sorry?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. The makeup of the administration.
        Ms. Speier. Okay.
        General Schmidle. I would actually--would tend to try to
    make them more academically rigorous. I think that challenge is
    something that we need to come to grips with and I think that
    we need to think about the war colleges as a potential place
    for evaluation of senior officers as opposed to a place where
    we simply educate them. I think we have the opportunity to do
    both.
        Ms. Speier. So do you think we should change this idea that
    no one gets a C and no one gets an A?
        General Schmidle. I think we could. My experience at grad
    school, the first semester I got a B-. I thought my life was
    over. At American, I couldn't believe it. What, a B-? You got
    to be kidding me. I get As in everything I do. But it's just a
    different standard, and it was the last B that I ever got. But
    that was--it was there.
        And so I think that that is--look, we're talking about Type
    A people that are really competitive and those are the folks
    that you want to come out of the war colleges and to continue
    to serve this country and to bring that disciplined focus to
    bear on all the problems we have, specifically the Chinese
    problem.
        Ms. Speier. All right. Again, thank you both very--yes?
        Ms. Jacobs, have you joined us?
        [No response.]
        Ms. Speier. I don't believe so. All right. Again, thank you
    very much for your participation.
        Ms. Jacobs. I'm here. Sorry.
        Ms. Speier. Oh, wait a minute. Okay. All right. Ms. Jacobs,
    you're recognized for 5 minutes.
        Ms. Jacobs. Well, thank you so much, Madam Chair, and thank
    you so much to our panelists. So I would love to ask Dr.
    Johnson-Freese, the 2018 National Defense Strategy notes that
    PME across the board has stagnated and a recent RAND study on
    Air Force PME found that, in practice, the officers ranked most
    highly do not tend to attend PME at Air University and officers
    do not give the quality of Air University school [inaudible] as
    a high ranking.
        What are the benefits values of service level PME programs?
    What's special about the war college programs that sets them
    apart and what is the current philosophy for officers assigned
    to PME programs like war college, Navy Postgraduate School, Air
    University, et cetera?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. If I understand the question correctly,
    it's, basically, what they can get out of it. Is that the
    question?
        Ms. Jacobs. I think the question is, you know, we have
    heard a lot that they don't--you know, at Air University they
    don't feel like they're getting high quality relative to other
    programs.
        So if you could just talk through some of the benefits and
    value of the programs and what sets them apart from other
    programs.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Well, I think, again, in order to have
    a quality program you have to have a top quality faculty, and
    that gets into what I said repeatedly about having a more
    diverse faculty and more appreciation for the hybrid nature of
    the faculty.
        It also--in order to attack the question you have to get to
    the previous question that was asked about grades. If I were to
    give--at one point in my career I gave an officer a C, and I
    was called down to the front office and said, so, Joan, the
    U.S. Government has spent millions training this officer as a
    pilot and now you want to ruin his career by giving him a C.
        And I said, what is the expectation? And the response was,
    the expectation is that you need to do a better job at getting
    this student to the level he needs to be at. And all faculty at
    war colleges know that, that it is not the responsibility of
    the student to do better. It's for the student to do good
    enough that we can get them through.
        So to go to the general's point, how do we get past that?
    How do we add the rigor without ruining a pilot's career
    because that person can't put two sentences together in a
    paragraph--in a written paragraph?
        Ms. Jacobs. Yeah. And what role and relationship do you see
    the JPME system having with the civilian academic education
    system, especially in getting civilian help and support for
    providing research, educational resources, such as courses,
    being a talent pipeline to train and supply future generations
    of cutting-edge scholars to work in the JPME system? Is there
    room for greater integration between the JPME and civilian
    university systems?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. I think there should be. I think that's
    a great question. But, again, they have been very insular
    because there is this difference of instilling rigor and
    challenging students or getting students through.
        But recently there has been a recognition that working with
    other institution brings in specialties on China, on the Middle
    East, bringing in the expertise that you don't necessarily
    have. But it needs to be made clear to administrators that this
    is a good thing and faculty should be rewarded, not punished,
    for their external associations.
        Ms. Jacobs. Great. And with my last minute, are top
    performers being assigned to the system or how are you doing
    officer assignments?
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. The services assign the students to PME
    on different systems. Some have to compete. Some are assigned.
    Some services feel that education is important and they will
    send their officers to education two or three times throughout
    their career--the Air Force.
        Others feel that any day you're not operational is a wasted
    day. So it's--I think, as the general pointed out, if going
    to--PME is seen as a career enhancer rather than a career
    inhibitor, it could change dramatically.
        Ms. Jacobs. All right. Well, thank you very much for your
    work. Madam Chair, I yield back.
        Ms. Speier. The gentlelady yields back. The ranking member
    has one more question.
        Mr. Gallagher. Well, I'm quite attracted to this idea of
    increasing the rigor and I would argue if someone can't write a
    coherent sentence or paragraph in simple and direct prose,
    perhaps that's an indication that that person should not be
    promoted, particularly to a general or flag officer rank,
    right.
        A lot of our frustration here is we get these documents
    from the Pentagon and it--yeah, the Pentagon--they're, like,
    filled with acronyms and, you know, passive voice and it
    suggests muddled thinking. Muddled prose suggests muddled
    thinking.
        I quite like this idea of raising the stakes, right, and
    that puts the pressure on a unit to make sure that before they
    send someone to a top level school or an intermediate level
    school they're ready to go, right.
        Before, you know, the Army sent Dwight Eisenhower to
    Leavenworth they made sure he was ready and when he graduated
    number one it was a big deal, right. A big deal. And that gets
    to the type of prestige, I think, you're talking about, Dr.
    Freese.
        So I don't know if there's a question in there so much as a
    comment. But I do think--I wonder, do you think we could do a
    better job of tracking graduates throughout the rest of their
    career?
        I mean, I've asked for some basic data on what happens to
    graduates from top level schools or how long are they staying
    in, what does it mean for their career. Thus far, I have not
    gotten the data. I just wanted your opinion on it.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. The problem is at schools like Harvard,
    Yale, Stanford, they boast about how many of their graduates
    have become President, won Pulitzers, won Nobel Prizes.
        Well, those are very much later in their career events.
    It's not right--immediate after graduation. And that's the
    problem with education.
        Education is a long-term payoff, and because it's so
    difficult to measure, it sometimes pushes the military to
    training because training--you know, when Johnny came into the
    program he could screw in 13 widgets in a minute and when he
    left he could do 35. He was trained. Education is very, very
    difficult to measure return on investment.
        General Schmidle. Yeah. To your to your point, though,
    Ranking Member Gallagher, grades at the war college--so having
    sat on a number of promotion boards, in my experience, the only
    grade that really mattered is if you were the honor graduate in
    your class that that would welcome a line in a brief about who
    you were and it made a difference. The rest of the crew, it
    didn't matter.
        The fact is you graduated from the war college. So whether
    you graduated with a C+ or a B-, at least in my experience at
    the promotion level, that was not necessarily a factor.
        The other interesting point you mentioned about muddled
    thinking and muddled writing, after I became a general officer,
    whenever I would go to a new job and I was looking for people
    that I could work with, literally, one of the first questions I
    would ask is do we have an English major on this staff
    somewhere because I just get tired of editing.
        And I used to have a stack of Strunk & White Style Manuals
    on my desk, and when people would come in, when they'd hand me
    something to read and I would make a comment on it and I'd clip
    this book to it and send it back to this action officer and
    say, I know you're not familiar with this book because I just
    read this paper. So it might help you.
        I, personally, think that rigor would be--the competitors
    that you want, the meat eaters, the carnivores, are going to
    chew on that and they're going to want to be there, and I think
    that's a good thing.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. May I add one thing? I teach at Harvard
    Extension School and some of the classes I teach are called
    writing intensive and that means with the subject matter I
    teach, I also teach writing. We could do that in PME but it
    requires teachers who are good writers as well as [inaudible].
        Mr. Gallagher. Well, again, I thank the chairwoman for
    indulging me. And for this concern about ruining people's
    careers, heck, we used to relieve people, I mean, routinely,
    and it was not necessarily a career ender. So part of that is
    we need a process for changing that as well. So, again, I'm
    sorry. Thank you for----
        Ms. Speier. All right. Well, you've been very helpful and
    this is an area that, obviously, we want to spend more time. I
    actually think Congress has really not done a great job of the
    oversight it needs to do on PME and I think the ranking member
    has brought it to our attention in a way that we will continue
    to do so.
        So we really appreciate you, General, and you, Doctor, for
    your participation today.
        Ms. Johnson-Freese. Thank you very much.
        Ms. Speier. We'll now make the room right for our next
    panel. So we will recess for 5 minutes.
        [Recess.]
        Ms. Speier. We now welcome our second panel, and our first
    panelist is the Honorable Shawn Skelly, Assistant Secretary of
    Defense for Readiness in the Office of the Under Secretary of
    Defense for Personnel and Readiness.
        Please proceed.

       STATEMENT OF HON. SHAWN G. SKELLY, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF
    DEFENSE FOR READINESS, OFFICE OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
                      FOR PERSONNEL AND READINESS

        Ms. Skelly. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Good afternoon,
    Chairwoman Speier, Ranking Member Gallagher, and distinguished
    members of the subcommittee. I appreciate the opportunity to
    appear before you today to discuss matters related to
    professional military education and the National Defense
    Strategy [NDS].
        I thank the subcommittee for its part in sustaining a
    dialogue to discuss congressional ideas and concerns as well as
    DOD initiatives.
        Last December, our staff briefed the subcommittee on how
    the Department has addressed shortcomings in PME and JPME as
    identified in the NDS. We plan to provide a follow-up report
    addressing your questions by June 15th. As you have my written
    statement, I'll briefly summarize it.
        Since the start of the Biden/Harris administration,
    Secretary Austin has made clear that DOD will invest in our
    most significant strategic advantage, our people. In the newly
    released 2022 NDS, Secretary Austin emphasized three
    overarching ways in which we'll ensure our national security:
    integrated deterrence, campaigning, and building enduring
    advantage.
        Investing in the military education of our service members
    supports all three initiatives and is particularly crucial for
    building enduring advantage for the future joint force.
        Where training prepares our service members for certainty,
    PME prepares them for uncertainty. The goal of PME is to create
    leaders who can achieve intellectual overmatch against
    adversaries. That overmatch demands a system that prepares
    service members to address all contingencies.
        Unique to our institutions, PME provides officers with the
    opportunity to learn the state of the art in military strategy
    and operational planning, which will continue to stand as
    prerequisites to an understanding of the nature and conduct of
    warfare.
        PME also provides service members with the skills and
    knowledge to make sound decisions in progressively demanding
    command and staff assignments.
        It ensures they're ready for the uncertainty they'll face
    throughout their military career by providing critical
    knowledge on the ethos, culture, and core values of their
    service, the technical and tactical skills appropriate to how
    that service wages war, and most importantly, the wisdom and
    judgment to be applied in a broad range of situations across
    domains, theaters, and in both joint and combined operations
    with allies and partners.
        But military education policy is more than staff and war
    colleges. It's about continuous learning across all points of
    service such as strengthening the ability of the services and
    future leaders to lead rapid adaptation and innovation, and to
    understand the potential use of all types of disruptive
    technologies.
        In a significant advance reflecting DOD's increased
    emphasis on PME, last month the Under Secretary of Defense for
    Personnel and Readiness approved the first ever departmentwide
    policy for military education.
        The policy details the structure for providing guidance to
    the services about curriculum and outcomes that graduates of
    military education programs should achieve while preserving the
    impact and agility of our PME system that comes from empowering
    our institutions.
        This includes service-governed PME, Chairman-guided joint
    PME [JPME], the service academies, and professional development
    opportunities such as graduate education, fellowships, and
    training with industry.
        The policy establishes an oversight governance structure to
    assess PME effectiveness and evaluate the Department's return
    on investment in military education by adopting an outcomes-
    based approach.
        Developing authentic assessments of what our officers and
    enlisted members can do with their knowledge will change the
    requirements for graduation from ``attended and graduated'' to
    meaningful standards, providing more granular data that
    supports talent management and ensures an appropriate return on
    investment.
        The instruction also promotes the integration of war-gaming
    into the military education curriculum, advancing the
    Secretary's call for enhanced strategic thinking across the
    force by providing avenues for military personnel to practice
    their leadership, creativity, and problem-solving skills in
    scenarios closely resembling the national security challenges
    facing the Nation today.
        Finally, the Department must develop leaders that are
    responsible for taking care of our people, including tackling
    sexual assault and other harmful behaviors in the force.
        We're working to implement the training and education
    recommendations of the Independent Review Commission on Sexual
    Assault in the Military across the Department.
        PME helps forge the most professional fighting force in the
    world. Looking forward, DOD will increase the links between
    education and talent management, continuous learning, and
    professional development to enable intellectual overmatch
    against our competitors.
        Madam Chairwoman, this concludes my statement. I'm happy to
    answer any questions that you or the ranking member may have,
    and thank you for your continuing support of the women and men
    of our Armed Forces.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Skelly can be found in the
    Appendix on page 76.]
        Ms. Speier. Thank you, Honorable Skelly. We'll now hear
    from Vice Admiral Stuart Munsch, the director of Joint Force
    Development, the Joint Staff J7.

      STATEMENT OF VADM STUART B. MUNSCH, USN, DIRECTOR FOR JOINT
                   FORCE DEVELOPMENT, JOINT STAFF, J7

        Admiral Munsch. Good afternoon, Chairwoman Speier, Ranking
    Member Gallagher, and distinguished members of the
    subcommittee, including those that might be participating
    virtually.
        I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today and
    further appreciate the support that Congress has provided for
    the funding of professional military education as well as your
    oversight and your feedback.
        PME, of course, is critical, and I include in it knowledge,
    skill sets, critical thinking, and a network of like-minded
    individuals to the future success of our Armed Forces.
        Our current system largely stems from the Goldwater-Nichols
    Act of 1986, further advanced by Representative Skelton's panel
    in 1990. That's resulted in a five-phase continuum for PME.
        Of that, the subset of joint professional military
    education has three parts of that continuum and that's
    intermediate level, senior level, and then the general and flag
    officer training and education.
        We recently also have added enlisted professional military
    education, which I know was raised by the prior panel. We're
    currently undergoing a transformation in PME, driven by the
    2018 National Defense Strategy that resulted rather quickly in
    the Joint Chiefs' vision for guidance for professional military
    education and talent management.
        That vision then was codified in policy through the Officer
    Professional Military Education Policy, which we refer to
    typically as OPMEP. Recently here a few months ago also
    released the vision for enlisted PME, ``Developing Enlisted
    Leaders for Tomorrow's Wars,'' and then that further for policy
    was ensconced in the Enlisted Professional Military Education
    Policy, or EPMEP.
        PME is focused on achieving the intellectual overmatch in
    order to have the warfighting advantage that we need against
    the adversary. Paired with that needs to be talent management
    so that the right students are attending and the right faculty
    are teaching.
        It also requires that we have a rigorous cycle of planning,
    executing, assessing, and then applying the feedback from what
    we have learned in that assessment to the subsequent planning
    cycle.
        That has not always been present in past PME, and with the
    effort on outcomes-based military education, we are now getting
    at that where the objectives are more rigorous, the education,
    the--excuse me, the execution is being tracked closely. We have
    established metrics in order to be able to do assessments and
    then, of course, applying that to make it better as we go on.
        In conclusion, I'd like to reiterate my thanks and also
    state that education is a force multiplier, and by way of a
    maritime analogy, it's like a rising tide that raises all
    ships.
        So thanks again for your continued support and we look
    forward to your feedback and your questions.
        Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Admiral Munsch can be found in
    the Appendix on page 83.]
        Ms. Speier. Thank you both. Admiral, does the Department
    survey PME graduates about their experience with the program
    and whether it prepares them for future jobs?
        Admiral Munsch. Yes. Students are surveyed----
        Ms. Speier. Is it anonymous?
        Admiral Munsch. In some cases, yes. In some cases, they can
    volunteer their own identity if they would like.
        Ms. Speier. How about the supervisors' views of whether
    PMEs sufficiently prepare their direct reports?
        Admiral Munsch. Yes, the war colleges do surveys. As was
    discussed in the prior panel, sometimes it's difficult to
    distinguish between the intellectual attainment due to
    attending a war college versus learning on their own--self-
    educating versus their life experiences. But we do do the
    surveys and we try to make those distinguishing characteristics
    identifiable.
        Ms. Speier. Would you share some of those surveys with the
    committee, please?
        Admiral Munsch. At a later time? Is that what you're
    asking?
        Ms. Speier. Yes.
        Admiral Munsch. Yes. Okay.
        Ms. Speier. All right. Thank you.
        Assistant Secretary, based on what you heard from the first
    panel, what do you believe we should be doing relative to the
    mix in administration and the faculty?
        Ms. Skelly. Madam Chairwoman, that's a great question as to
    faculty makeup is one that I don't have much experience in with
    regard to the execution of my responsibilities as selection of
    faculty and the mix in there is with regard to the owning
    institution, the governing institution of that school, whether
    that be a war college or a staff college.
        What we do is we do set the policies in there but we don't
    actually get involved with the selection of the actual
    professors.
        Ms. Speier. No, I understand that. But you could,
    certainly, recommend that a third of the faculty or a third of
    the administration be persons who are not retired military or
    military?
        Ms. Skelly. With regard to the balances, ma'am, we could
    and we'd have to examine that to see where we would think we'd
    do an evaluation. We might include that in our next--in a
    future upcoming study to see what a proper mix could be.
        Ms. Speier. So the widespread perception that it's hard to
    earn an A at JPME but even harder to get a C, feeding the
    notion that somehow you go there, you don't necessarily have to
    read the material, you've got to show up and you'll be
    successful--how do we deal with that? That may be an older
    perception. Maybe there's already been enough changes so that
    that's not going on.
        But to hear the previous testimony from Dr. Freese, this--
    someone was actually going to another college to get a master's
    and also coming to the war college for, I guess, a program that
    was not going to represent a master's, was kind of surprising
    to me.
        Ms. Skelly. It is to me as well, Madam Chair, and I wonder
    about the implications that having a dual-track process within
    our war colleges might complicate accreditation for the side
    where degrees would be conferred to have a mix of students,
    potentially, in some classes and on separate tracks in other
    classes and how that might impinge upon the academic rigor for
    all and how that might impact accreditation attainment.
        And I also wonder about creating two tracks. I know some of
    our allied partners have different tracks where folks can opt
    into a noncareer track.
        As a former aviator, I often wondered about that because
    those folks tend to stay in the cockpit for a while and would
    that be advantageous, and [if] confronted with that challenge
    would I go after that, and I wonder how we would create a
    segregation within our--our system is not really set up.
        You're either tracking towards command until you're not,
    until you might find yourself in a tour or two that, you know,
    signals that you're not going to promote to O-6 or O-7 and
    beyond. But I would wonder about how we would adopt such a
    system into our current paradigm.
        Ms. Speier. So, Admiral Munsch, what percentage of the
    curriculum is war-gaming?
        Admiral Munsch. It varies, and if I could broaden the
    definition of war-gaming to include other forms of practical
    learning, typically it's between a quarter and a third of what
    goes on.
        Ms. Speier. How do you think we can make it more attractive
    as an assignment for high-performing officers who would have
    much to impart to their junior officers?
        Admiral Munsch. There's a series of issues there, ma'am.
    One of them is depending on the particular warfare specialty of
    officers that can be very demanding in terms of the practical
    skills in operating, what they operate, for example, pilots of
    jet aircraft, submariners with their submarines. And as a
    result of that there's this tension between the time that needs
    to be devoted to developing the expertise and experience to
    operate those platforms safely and with warfighting expertise
    versus time spent doing something else while coming up in your
    career.
        And so there's the--where oftentimes you'll find people
    have to do night and weekend work in order to get the joint
    professional military education or the master's degree that was
    just discussed, because there isn't time in the career.
        So what the services other than the Navy do is that they
    make the staff and command college a screening mechanism for
    their best officers as well as the war college, which is
    typically at the post-command level.
        The Navy has not had that culture to do that and, as a
    result of that, have not had the same level of quality students
    that the others have had. So there's a policy choice to be made
    there.
        The Marine Corps made this transformation when General Gray
    was Commandant of the Marine Corps. He made it very firm he was
    shifting the policy. There were a few that didn't believe that
    he was as serious as he was and then they, essentially, lost
    their career----
        Ms. Speier. So the GAO [U.S. Government Accountability
    Office] pointed out that the Navy was the only service that was
    not participating in JPME. Has that changed?
        Admiral Munsch. Well, they do participate in PME. I think
    the GAO report was pointing out that they don't send sufficient
    number of students to the sister war colleges----
        Ms. Speier. Well, that's--okay.
        Admiral Munsch [continuing]. To be students and faculty to
    allow the acculturation that [inaudible].
        Ms. Speier. Right. So you stand out by not doing that. And
    is that going to change or is there some philosophy behind not
    participating?
        Admiral Munsch. There are efforts ongoing to do better in
    that. I can't speak for the Navy at this point because I'm--
    I've been on the Joint Staff for 2 years. But I'm aware of
    there is activity ongoing and that was also responded to in the
    OSD letter to you all.
        Ms. Speier. All right. My time has expired.
        Ranking Member.
        Mr. Gallagher. Vice Admiral Munsch, my understanding is you
    have a master's from Oxford. Is that correct?
        Admiral Munsch. I do.
        Mr. Gallagher. Can I ask you at what point in your career
    were you able to do that and how did that come about?
        Admiral Munsch. So this is unusual. I wouldn't take it as
    the normal path. It was immediately after leaving the Naval
    Academy through a scholarship.
        Mr. Gallagher. Oh, okay. So you were actually good as an
    undergraduate, unlike me, who wasted a lot of time.
        Admiral Munsch. Well, I was from a small State and had to
    work hard, sir.
        Mr. Gallagher. Absolutely. I guess--and we have a series of
    programs and the Marine Corps is actually catching up. The Navy
    has been in the lead with the Air Force of sending people to go
    get Ph.D.s at purely civilian institutions and then bringing
    them back and utilizing them. There were two--there were at
    least two Active Duty service members in my Ph.D. program at
    Georgetown, one of which went back to be a strategist in the
    Pentagon. Super smart guy. The other actually went to the Air
    War College down in Maxwell, I believe, right? Just both
    brilliant guys.
        Are you aware of these sort of programs? Do we feel like
    we're getting a good return on that investment? Because that's
    an even bigger investment, right? I mean, you're setting people
    away for, potentially, 2 years.
        Then they got to figure out how to finish their
    dissertation. That's a huge investment that we darn sure have
    to make sure we're capitalizing on on the back end.
        I'll start with you, Admiral, and then Assistant Secretary
    Skelly.
        Admiral Munsch. It's uncommon around the joint force. It's
    more common in the nonmaritime services where you'll see that.
    I think there's maybe a little bit more room in the career path
    to do something like that, as well as acceptability in
    selection boards as a desirable characteristic. There have been
    programs in the past in the maritime services that did more of
    that. It's just not very present right now.
        Ms. Skelly. Congressman, I think the new DODI, the
    [Department of Defense] Instruction 1322.35, which sets the
    conditions to create a data informed approach to drive the
    return on investment evaluation at the departmental level. So
    the services have their reasons for pursuing it historically,
    culturally, as the admiral alluded to.
        We need to understand how they're doing it differently, see
    what they think they're getting for a return, and what the
    Department believes that the Department's return on investment
    across the joint force should be there. We don't have the
    wherewithal to do that today.
        The question of Ph.D. attainment came up in our--in my
    meeting with the chairwoman yesterday and we have to go do a
    data call on that and it will take some time to bring back the
    numbers as they exist right now from the service military
    manpower systems.
        Mr. Gallagher. And on that front, I very much appreciate
    you referencing my requests for information in your testimony.
    I look forward to reviewing that data. Again, the intent is
    just to assure that we're making good use of those graduates,
    right.
        I think there are two kind of related issues that we're
    trying to--well, I guess maybe three that are coming out here.
    One is whether we are selecting the best and the brightest to
    go to these institutions.
        The second is whether the institutions themselves are on
    par with the--their civilian counterparts who have a much
    fancier name or credential, right. Like, let's just be honest.
    We had the previous panel talking about what it means to have a
    Harvard degree versus National War College. No offense to the
    National War College, although Princeton is better than
    Harvard. I'm just going to throw that out there.
        And then the third and perhaps most important is whether
    when we--how we're tracking our utilization of graduates, and
    it seems like right now you don't have the ability to pull up
    the numbers very quickly.
        Ms. Skelly. We certainly do not.
        Mr. Gallagher. Okay. I just would argue, in 2022--
    technologically, there's no barrier to it. We should be able to
    interrogate the data routinely in order to assess, okay, how
    are the services doing?
        Or reach down and say, okay, what are the report cards
    telling us about how our people are performing, not in real
    time, but near real time?
        Ms. Skelly. Congressman, I'm sure you're aware of the
    emphasis that the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary have put
    on data across the Department that all data is available for
    the Department's use.
        Recently, the Deputy Secretary directed that all models
    that include that data are also available for the Department's
    use. We have to go there, we are making our way there.
        We're imparting that lesson, that expectation, across the
    Department, and I'm looking--personally looking forward to
    taking the military education enterprise in that direction
    because we're learning lessons as to how to drive
    accountability to make data available to bring it together,
    because it's not just one service's data and displaying that.
    It's how you do the relationships, how you--and then create
    that power in there.
        I know from my own experience, sort of the three questions
    that you raise, I saw all of them. I asked to go to Naval War
    College, to College of Naval Command and Staff, and the only
    reason it was entertained because I had time is what the
    detailer thought. And I had it--in my shop in the Pacific
    Command I had a Hindi speaker who went to the Indian War
    College, and his counterpart in Central Command had gone to the
    Pakistani War College.
        But it was back and forth. I had a--excuse me, I had an
    Urdu speaker for India, and they had a Hindi speaker for
    Pakistan because they didn't get assigned to where their
    imparted government-provided skills and training had taken them
    to.
        We have a history of not making the most out of that and be
    able to account for it beyond their payback tour. You get your
    education, you owe several years. But what do we do after that?
        Because we'll send you to someplace to try and squeeze that
    out of you. But how do we know what we're getting as to who
    makes three stars, who makes more, who goes to particular
    commands that suit their training or if they just happen to
    wind up someplace, especially with regard to cyber, AI
    [artificial intelligence], and other technologies that are
    emerging.
        We can only impart exquisite knowledge to so many. We have
    to ensure that they're put in places to utilize that.
        Mr. Gallagher. Well, I appreciate that. I'm out of time.
    Before I forget, however, one of those classmates I mentioned,
    my understanding is he's retiring soon. His name is Jeff
    Donnithorne.
        So wherever you are, Jeff, you are one of the most
    brilliant scholars I have--I've ever met and a patriot and
    you've served your country very admirably. So I'm going to miss
    your retirement ceremony, but maybe this will get to you
    through the ether.
        Ms. Speier. All right. Mrs. Bice, you're recognized for 5
    minutes.
        Mrs. Bice. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman and Ranking Member,
    and I appreciate the witnesses for their time this afternoon.
        Let me start with--you know, it was mentioned actually in
    the previous panel but I want to kind of circle back around and
    get your perspective. One of the key tasks of our Nation's war
    colleges is to develop senior joint leaders who can
    successfully master across domains of ground, air, space, and,
    importantly, cyber operations.
        While we have made some positive strides, I feel strongly
    that our Nation's warfighters need greater opportunities to
    expand their familiarity with cyber operations.
        So my question to the panel, does our Nation's JPME
    curriculum do enough to prepare future senior military leaders
    to oversee operations in cyberspace or that have a cyberspace
    component to them?
        Ms. Skelly. Thank you, Congresswoman. We know we have to do
    better because of the increasing importance, near dominance of
    cyberspace. Every operation we have relies upon the cyber
    environment.
        Every potential conflict or interaction that we might have
    with a peer adversary will certainly involve cyber in some way,
    shape, or form. Presently, we are studying, which is not
    action, but we are studying to learn where we have to do better
    on cyber education and we are responding to the--I believe it's
    the committee's desire to learn more about with NDU [National
    Defense University] and cyber, and we have an in-depth study
    going on on that right now.
        I would say from my personal experience in my 9 months in
    the Department as sitting on the Department's cyber council
    it's a confluence of the career civilian professionals who have
    the information operations, the information systems, the cyber
    knowledge, along with the senior operators and the cyber-smart
    people, but we have to create a combined departmental effect to
    be able to operate in these environments.
        I have behind me my Deputy Assistant Secretary for Force
    Education and Training, and one of her key tasks is learning
    how to create literacy on a range of topics across the force
    and how we understand what individual service members need--
    based on whatever their specialty may be, what do they need to
    know about cyber and what do they need to know about a changing
    climate, data analytics, and also take that to the--in a
    continual way across their increasing rank and responsibilities
    in there.
        We think it's key and we are pursuing our ability to create
    that capability within our professional military education
    enterprise.
        Mrs. Bice. Thank you very much. To follow up on that, what
    can Congress do to further expand the opportunities for
    military personnel in this area of study?
        My colleague, Mr. Gallagher, and I have a focus on cyber
    and so this is something I think that we haven't put enough
    emphasis on but can now. So what can Congress be doing to help
    in this realm?
        Ms. Skelly. First, ma'am, I think we have a decent revisit
    rate on our curriculum between the services with the curriculum
    that they're responsible for where the Joint Staff informs
    joint professional military education--those requirements.
        I believe our previous expert panel referenced cyber
    education. And it's the demands the Department of Defense, the
    Office of the Secretary of Defense, places upon the system to
    be responsive to that and we certainly rate cyber as an area of
    the highest importance for our force to understand and to be
    able to operate in that realm.
        Mrs. Bice. Vice Admiral, do you have anything that you want
    to add to that?
        Admiral Munsch. Yes. I would offer there are a couple of
    challenges in cyber that make it a bit different from the
    traditional domains.
        One is that it is a very rapidly changing field at all
    times, and so at any point you might think you have a grasp of
    what is in the realm of the possible with cyber and very
    quickly it changes.
        So it requires, as individuals, a revisit rate that's very
    high relative to the other domains to really understand what it
    is capable of doing. With that high visit rate there also is
    then a shortage of personnel who know how to do this that are
    in uniform.
        It's typically not a core specialty like it would be to be
    a pilot or a ship driver. But it's a secondary specialty, and
    we just don't have enough of those people. And when you don't
    have a critical mass then you're not spreading the wealth of
    the knowledge through interaction throughout the joint force.
        So in terms of what Congress could do, I think it's--a bit
    of it is just the nature of the beast and that it's a very fast
    moving field. But we're trying to make cyber more robust in all
    aspects of PME in order to grow that mass of people who really
    understand it. Thank you.
        Mrs. Bice. Thank you. And let me just quickly follow up
    with I think it's crucial that we find the service members that
    have this background and develop them and keep them in the
    service because every day that goes by the cyber component of
    operations becomes more and more critical and without this
    individuals will continue to fall behind.
        Madam Chair, thank you for the time. I yield back.
        Ms. Speier. The gentlewoman yields back. I have just a
    couple of more questions. We'll allow for a second round.
        Assistant Secretary, we have required, I believe, in the
    NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] of 2 years ago that
    women, peace, and security be included in the curriculum and
    there's, you know, growing recognition that that is a key
    component to successful national security. What are you doing
    at your level to make sure that this is, in fact, not lost in
    the process?
        Ms. Skelly. Excuse me, ma'am. The mic is winning.
        Women, peace, and security is a curriculum area. If I could
    ask the admiral to weigh in. I know the Joint Staff has a
    priority on it or it has it in its rank of priorities for
    curricula across the joint force.
        But we agree it is NDS--the former NDS directed and I
    believe it's within my colleagues in OSD Policy that have
    responsibility to ensure that the joint force is meeting the
    requirements of the demands of women, peace, and security
    [WPS].
        Ms. Speier. But let's say it doesn't happen. Let's say it
    just falls off. Who then is accountable to make sure that that
    is included in the curricula?
        Ms. Skelly. Ma'am, that's where governance would come into
    play, that we have--it wouldn't just be me as the Assistant
    Secretary of Defense for Readiness who has responsibility for
    the lead for our education programs.
        It's to ensure that the entirety of the Office of the
    Secretary brings all of its equities to bear or it would be the
    principal cyber advisor to the Secretary. It would be the Under
    Secretary for Policy's folks who have space responsibilities as
    well as cyber, as well as those that have WPS, as an example,
    to ensure that those that they have subject lead on are being
    accounted for within the education enterprise, which is where--
    I don't mean to beat the dead horse--of the new instruction
    providing a data foundation that we can then take into a
    governance model and where we can use the authority of the
    Under Secretary for Personnel who can order much of what needs
    to be done responsibly through the Department.
        And if we can't reach resolution, we already have a
    standing forum to reach the Deputy Secretary of Defense on
    workforce matters, which is what education would fall under and
    that way--but it would be my responsibility as the lead for the
    education enterprise to ensure that all those equity
    stakeholders bring their issues to the fore and ensure that
    they're being held to account through our wherewithal within
    P&R [Personnel and Readiness].
        Ms. Speier. Admiral, do you have anything that you'd like
    to add?
        Admiral Munsch. Yes, ma'am. So the service war colleges
    would be accountable through the services. National Defense
    University would be accountable through us on the Joint Staff.
    And through the outcomes-based military education effort, we do
    a regular assessment on the curriculum to make sure that it
    includes the requirements and it is relevant and current.
        And, additionally, just for our JPME there is an
    accreditation process. It's separate from the accreditation
    that go to the other war colleges for their--that are done by
    civilian accreditors. And so that's another item we look at for
    the JPME accreditation.
        Ms. Speier. So the 2018 NDS recognized that professional
    military education had come to be valued more for the
    institutional requirement of having attended a program and
    received credit than for the knowledge, skills, and abilities
    fostered and developed. What are we doing to change that?
        Assistant Secretary.
        Ms. Skelly. Chairwoman, that is what the new DOD
    Instruction is all about, is the direction that all programs
    will be objectives-based military education that will then
    result in data, which we then have to--it's mentioned--I
    mentioned in my opening statement, it's talent management. It's
    not just the data itself and governing through that data is not
    the whole solution.
        We have to have a personnel management, talent management
    system, that can understand the attributes that all our service
    members bring when they access whether through their high
    school graduation or their bachelor's degree.
        What we impart to them through the education programs they
    go through either at the tactical level when they're more
    junior, then when they go to staff colleges and war colleges
    what we intend to impart to them, what they take away, what
    they demonstrate through their competencies in there, that's
    the way we have to get after it.
        It's the data, it's the objectives of the education,
    understanding the impact of it, and then attributes to the
    individuals to create an appreciation of the force and whether
    we have the sufficient knowledge and wherewithal for the
    positions that need it. It has to be a continual cycle.
        Ms. Speier. The first panel talked about creating greater
    rigor in the actual curriculum. From your vantage point, how do
    you make sure that in each of these war colleges there is the
    requisite rigor in terms of the program?
        Ms. Skelly. Ma'am, I think it would be through the
    objectives that are set and how they're measured and what the
    services believe they need out of them, what the Joint Staff
    believes we need from JPME, and OSD assessment and revisiting
    those based on--you raised the point about the surveys from
    those receiving commands, the senior service staffs, the
    combatant commands.
        Are they feeling satisfied, and through any place where we
    have oversight is is the force performing to meet the demands
    of the mission and the environment in the world at that time?
    We can never stand still. It's about continuous process
    improvement.
        Ms. Speier. So my last question. The previous panel talked
    about how if you bring in a lot of retired military officers
    they are teaching from their experience. So they're providing
    an educational experience that relies on yesterday's war and
    not the future. How are we going to make sure that we keep the
    curriculum looking at the future of war and not what's happened
    before?
        I'll start with you, Admiral.
        Admiral Munsch. Yes, ma'am. So there's really a broader
    issue in the Federal employment in that there is a strong
    benefit for veterans in hiring practices and that does occur
    also then in the war colleges that results in veterans having a
    larger preponderance than maybe they would otherwise because of
    the point scoring scheme in hiring Federal workers and the
    benefits that veterans get.
        So it's a bit of a broader issue than just PME. But how do
    we ensure that they're focused on the future? Well,
    traditionally, in academia, publishing is a key metric for
    promotions within the academic institution. There could be more
    rigor that is added there.
        And then, I mean it's not been in my experience that
    they're all backward looking. There is some value in history
    and in experience. But the--and to tie to some of your earlier
    questions here about the value of the war college and the
    rigor, we did go through a period of a couple decades where we
    did not have an adversary that was especially strong or
    existential against us, and there's nothing like a threat to
    focus an institution.
        And so along with this transformation that we have
    described there's a deep-seated transformation ongoing because
    of the students' interest in getting--being ready for their
    responsibilities to fight China, if that comes, or Russia.
        Ms. Speier. So that does that mean there's a China Hands in
    the future?
        Admiral Munsch. I don't know about that. Anytime we create
    a sidetrack like that it tends to only last for a while and
    then the larger needs of the service eventually overcome that
    and it chokes it off. So I'd be concerned about losing quality
    people to----
        Ms. Speier. Well, I guess I would disagree with you because
    I think, as we are seeing in many of our other entities,
    building a Russia and China focus is critical to building the
    kind of talent we want and the leadership we want.
        Assistant Secretary, your final words, and I've really
    exceeded mine and then I'll give you the opportunity.
        Ms. Skelly. Thank you, Chairwoman. I share the admiral's
    concerns with regard to a Hands program that could unduly silo
    off folks.
        I believe wholeheartedly we have to raise the rigor with
    regard to our competitors and the specifics, and we have to
    focus, I think, in three parts, strategic competition writ
    large, though I don't think any new strategic competitors are
    probably coming out of left field anytime soon. But it's the
    basic demands of strategic competition.
        What's particular to the China problem set, China's unique
    attributes in their military, what their military presents as
    well as likewise Russia--Russia is likely not to leave the
    stage anytime soon.
        We certainly need folks who can speak the language and who
    understand the tactics and what are appropriate to the
    positions that require a level of increased understanding and
    specific knowledge, whether it be intelligence, operations
    planning, and the like. I believe that's appropriate.
        Personally, I would like to see, and I will look after this
    to understand what the lessons learned and evaluation of the
    success of the AFPAK [Afghanistan-Pakistan] Hands program was
    because, as the admiral said, it was a large effort--that just
    about the time it gained real momentum and mass it got
    sidelined and stovepiped, and I have acquaintances that I
    served with, squadron mates, who wound up adrift with the
    language and the expertise, and they had done one tour and they
    still had a career--a good chunk of a career in front of them.
        In that way, I'll always be wary of how we can impinge upon
    the services' ability to make use of the talent available to it
    if we put it off in a direction that loses favor with
    leadership.
        Ms. Speier. All right. Ranking Member, a final question?
        Mr. Gallagher. Thank you. Well, [inaudible]--to pick up
    where you left off, I thought we were making changes to JPME to
    reflect China as the so-called pacing threat. Many quibble with
    that language.
        Admiral Munsch. Absolutely.
        Mr. Gallagher. Yeah. The idea being that, you know, go back
    to Rooster's [Lieutenant General Schmidle's] days and every
    naval officer could tell you everything about the Soviet navy.
    We need a similar level of expertise for the PLA [People's
    Liberation Army] Navy, right. Are you hamstrung by Goldwater-
    Nichols in making those changes?
        Ms. Skelly. Sir, I don't believe so. I was just down on the
    Norfolk waterfront with a soon-to-deploy destroyer crew and
    captain and they were talking about Russian and Chinese assets
    in the same ways that--as you mentioned, as we Cold Warriors
    once did.
        The Soviet ships became Russian ships. The same for the
    aircraft. But they had that focus on the high-end adversary as
    I remember having myself.
        Mr. Gallagher. And then I want to--shifting gears, I want
    to highlight what I think is one pocket of excellence that I
    found interesting. SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command] has
    partnered with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and
    created this course where they're sending O-6s to a short-term
    tailored course. Doesn't--not a master's degree granting
    course. It could be a micro masters, if that's now a thing,
    where the idea is not to turn them into technologists but give
    them basic fluency in AI, ML [machine learning], quantum,
    cyber. That's intriguing to me. Are you aware of this effort?
        Ms. Skelly. I am not. I will become so after this meeting.
        Mr. Gallagher. I'm sure if you--MIT will answer your call,
    Assistant Secretary Skelly. I was very impressed by the idea.
    Again, we're not creating a separate thing. MIT was eager to
    partner with SOCOM in this regard and it just seemed like a
    great symbiosis between DOD and--to civilian higher ed.
        Ms. Skelly. And Congressman, I certainly applaud it,
    because it goes back to the point I made about literacy--what
    do you need to know for the position you're going to and how
    can we impart that right amount for the job to you in that time
    and see it coming--to make you available if you're in a
    particular field or a particular staff or service-level
    position, that we know what you need to know, especially with
    AI, cyber, machine learning and the like because it's coming
    into play, the how we do everything.
        Our service members are doing it themselves in the course
    of their jobs where they can get the permissions to bring those
    capabilities to bear. It's much like we were when we were all
    coding--I wasn't, but much younger folks were all coding, 15,
    20 years ago. They're doing data analytics now on their own
    work and trying to bring that to bear in the performance of
    their duties.
        Mr. Gallagher. And what would be the--in light of the
    previous discussion we had about academic rigor, what would be
    the barriers to posting class rankings? Making that publicly
    available?
        Are there some concerns that would be--beyond embarrassing
    people that don't perform well, would there be some legal
    barrier or regulatory barrier I'm unaware of?
        Admiral Munsch. So there's some Privacy Act issues with
    displaying grades and rankings like that.
        Mr. Gallagher. Interesting. I'll follow up on that.
        Admiral Munsch [continuing]. Legislation. Yeah.
        Mr. Gallagher. You may be right. I'm not willing to just
    accept that necessarily. I don't think it would be a bad idea
    to be--to sort of post that information publicly. I don't know.
        Admiral Munsch. The other way to get at the issue, I think,
    that you're after here is to do actual fitness reports for
    students based on their performance.
        Mr. Gallagher. Or use a carrot instead of a stick, right.
    Give the top 10 percent or 25 percent graduates preferential
    treatment in terms of their follow-on assignment, right. That
    could be a powerful incentive.
        Since I have a minute and 36 seconds left, I've already
    crossed the threshold of half-baked ideas, and we may have to
    wait another 5 years before we have a PME hearing, then I will
    sort of lay out a series of more provocative statements. My
    emerging view is that if we're going to try and give someone a
    highly technical skill set, we should probably just send them
    to a civilian institution rather than recreating something on
    our own, we would probably get more bang for our buck, and
    might create interesting friendships and relationships with
    civilian experts in AI, quantum, or advanced engineering.
        As we look towards what the military can do uniquely well,
    I don't know, I mean ask yourself if our current programs would
    be better or worse than a year, half of which involved a
    writing boot camp with a sort of near religious reverence for
    Strunk & White and teaching field grade officers and potential
    general grade officers how to write clearly and well, and
    another half year of intense war-gaming tied directly to
    testing our war plans. I don't know.
        Obviously, I'm not asking you to answer that question. But
    the fact that part of you is even questioning it right now in
    your minds, as I know you are, means we got some work to do.
        Ms. Skelly. Writing boot camp or something akin to was in
    my feedback to the Naval War College when I was in the middle
    of my combatant command tour. I was not prepared to be a staff
    writer, staff officer in that way. There's a there there, sir.
        Admiral Munsch. Sir, I'd go one more than that. I would
    offer a three-part process. One is to institute a tutorial
    process where it's one professor on one student or one on two.
        That is expensive but that's how you really grow critical
    thinking with that kind of contact. That can be, say, once a
    week, twice a week. And then I would do classroom work in the
    mornings with rigor and then I would do practical application
    of the learning in the afternoon with war-gaming.
        And then to broaden that cycle, what is learned then, much
    like the interwar period that was done at the Naval War
    College, send that learning out to the fleet, to the operating
    forces, to open it up to the joint force and do a large
    exercise in the off academic period in the summer to test out
    those ideas in order to advance war plans. Send that feedback
    back to the war colleges and then begin the cycle again.
        Mr. Gallagher. If we do all these things and then outlaw
    the use of acronyms, the Chinese cannot beat us. I guarantee
    you. So----
        Ms. Speier. All right. Mrs. Bice, do you have any follow-on
    questions? You do?
        Mrs. Bice. Madam Chair, I do not.
        Ms. Speier. Okay. All right. Well, you've given us a lot of
    food for thought. As you can tell, we both have a great
    interest in wanting to pursue PME and JPME to get the biggest
    bang for our buck.
        This is not a, you know, year in which you can relax and
    enjoy your family. It shouldn't be that. Now, hopefully, that
    has changed. But I do think there's more work that needs to be
    done and I think the ranking member's suggestions are ones that
    we should pursue.
        The other thing we should also look at, we do have the
    military academies that are filled with fine academic teachers,
    professors, and maybe we need to rely on them somewhat more in
    terms of evaluating what we need to do differently.
        But we really appreciate your participation today. Thank
    you, Assistant Secretary Skelly. Thank you, Vice Admiral
    Munsch.
        And we will stand adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 3:48 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]

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                               A P P E N D I X

                                  May 18, 2022

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                  PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD

                                  May 18, 2022

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                  QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING

                                  May 18, 2022

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                       QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MS. JACOBS

        Ms. Jacobs. How are you studying and measuring the impact of
    Professional Military Education on service members' war-fighting
    capability? How has the PME curriculum evolved to incorporate tangible
    and intangible factors of war, such as the will to fight?
        Ms. Skelly. The Department does not yet systematically capture or
    report metrics of return on investment from PME that would specifically
    capture ``the impact of PME on service members' war-fighting
    capability,'' but does have some measures available. First, retention
    of an officer in service after their developmental opportunity is a
    quantitative measure of return on investment; however, it does not
    capture the increased quality of their contribution to the force during
    that period. Second, PME institutions survey their alumni with regard
    to how well the program prepared them for subsequent assignments.
    Alumni report they are better able to consider a broad, whole of
    government, and multinational context when making decisions and
    providing advice due to completing in-residence PME. Furthermore, they
    report being more adept and comfortable with joint matters. Third, the
    schools solicit senior leader (GO/FO/SES) feedback on the degree to
    which graduates demonstrate proficiency in a program's learning
    outcomes. Finally, they also solicit feedback from Combatant Commands
    on the skills and abilities of PME graduates. These latter two sources
    of feedback depend upon contextual knowledge that the respondents may
    not have readily available in a systematic manner--i.e., to enable
    comparisons between officers that have attended PME and those who have
    not, controlling for other factors that may affect their performance.
    Still, these surveys do provide general feedback as to the perceived
    value of these experiences to the former student and those who manage
    them.
        Regarding the evolution of PME curricula, the PME enterprise
    encompasses a wide array of programs and courses, and high-level
    concepts like the tangible and intangible factors of war form part of
    the foundation for intermediate- and senior-level PME. How this is
    expressed, and how it has evolved over time, is dependent upon the
    expert judgment of the faculty of the various PME programs.
        Ms. Jacobs. Do you believe PME should be tailored to the service
    member and not an overarching requirement? Why do Navy physiologists
    need to attend the Navy War College to be considered for promotion?
        Ms. Skelly. Professional military education (PME) constitutes the
    core of professional development for officers and enlisted personnel.
    PME develops the professional knowledge and traits of Service members,
    inculcates the habits of mind essential to the profession, and
    certifies officers and enlisted personnel at key points in their career
    as professionals entrusted to practice their profession effectively and
    ethically. Promotion to specific ranks is dependent upon more than
    competence in a specific specialty, such as those of Navy
    physiologists, but rather is indicative of their competencies in the
    broader profession of arms.
        While PME focuses on the rank appropriate core competencies of the
    Department's uniformed professionals, the PME system is heterogeneous
    in its delivery. Each Service is responsible for educating officers and
    their enlisted members in their core competencies according to Service
    needs. Air Force schools, for example, primarily teach air and space
    warfare. Similarly, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps schools focus on land,
    maritime, amphibious and expeditionary warfare, respectively. The
    Department depends on the Services' PME to develop its professionals
    with Service-specific proficiencies.
        Specific technical competencies are developed in the broader system
    of military education, including those that develop the technical
    competencies of personnel such as Navy physiologists. It is in these
    programs where military education is customized to specific communities
    and its members.
        Ms. Jacobs. The focus of JPME is increasingly focused on the
    kinetic dimensions of warfighting, but as conflict in today's world
    demonstrates, the economic, geo-economic, and technological domains
    matter greatly as well. For example, munition stockpiles, economic
    warfare, and a state's mobilizational capacity are critical in
    assessing warfighting ability and sustainability. Should the JPME
    system pay attention and devote space to the research and teaching of
    these issues?
        Ms. Skelly. JPME is a subset of PME and reflects a concentration on
    Joint matters, frequently offered in tandem with the delivery of
    Service-focused PME. JPME is defined in Federal law (per Title 10, U.S.
    Code, chapter 107, ``Professional Military Education'') as ``. . .
    consisting of the rigorous and thorough instruction of officers in an
    environment designed to promote a theoretical and practical in-depth
    understanding of joint matters and specifically, of the subject matter
    covered.''
        Federal law directs the six specific subject matter topics for all
    JPME: (1) National military strategy; (2) Joint planning at all levels
    of war; (3) Joint doctrine; (4) Joint command and control; (5) Joint
    force and joint requirements development; and (6) Operational contract
    support. Four additional items supplement this list to round out JPME
    II: (1) National security strategy; (2) Theater strategy and
    campaigning; (3) Joint planning processes and systems; and (4) Joint,
    interagency, and multinational capabilities and the integration of
    those capabilities.
        JPME programs are distributed across the schools of the National
    Defense University and the Military Services. The Services' JPME
    programs develop joint officers that understand the required topics of
    joint matters through curricula that provide appreciation of the
    domain, capabilities, employment considerations, and general
    limitations of the host Service. The programs at National Defense
    University address joint matters through a whole-of-government focus.
    In particular, the Eisenhower School was founded in 1924 as the Army
    Industrial College to better prepare the U.S. government to mobilize
    the resources of the nation for the purposes of grand strategy and
    warfare if necessary. Its stated mission today is: ``The Eisenhower
    School prepares select military officers and civilians for strategic
    leadership and success in developing national security strategy and in
    evaluating, marshaling, and managing resources in the execution of that
    strategy.'' While all JPME programs have adapted their curricula to
    address the non-military and non-kinetic dimensions of strategic
    competition, it is the Eisenhower School where ``economic, geo-
    economic, and technological domains'' receive the greatest emphasis.
        Ms. Jacobs. How are you studying and measuring the impact of
    Professional Military Education on service members' war-fighting
    capability? How has the PME curriculum evolved to incorporate tangible
    and intangible factors of war, such as the will to fight?
        Admiral Munsch. Our recent shift to Outcomes-Based Military
    Education (OBME) helps to assess PME's efficacy and to align curricula
    with Combatant Commands' needs. Through OBME, we work with Combatant
    Commands to assess how PME graduates perform in their operational
    assignments and better understand what specific educational outcomes
    are required to prepare an officer for joint war-fighting. This is an
    iterative process; PME curricula will continue to adapt to the
    strategic environment. The Joint Staff directs JPME programs adjust
    curriculum to align with the current Chairman's Education Policy, which
    is updated (at a minimum) every five years. Recent modifications to PME
    curriculum include both tangible factors, such as countering weapons of
    mass destruction, and intangible factors, such as updated instruction
    on officer ethics. JPME curricula will continue to evolve to reflect
    the changing character or war and will incorporate lessons learned from
    contemporary conflicts.
        Ms. Jacobs. Do you believe PME should be tailored to the service
    member and not an overarching requirement? Why do Navy physiologists
    need to attend the Navy War College to be considered for promotion?
        Admiral Munsch. PME is uniformly required to ensure all officers
    possess the common knowledge, skills, and attributes that form the
    basis of the profession of arms. However, officers do have a variety of
    options to meet this requirement, including choice of timing (within a
    given window) and distance learning. Non-line officers, such as
    physiologists, are not usually required to meet the same career gates
    as line officers. They often have different commissioning pathways and
    promotion timelines. Still, as commissioned officers, they have the
    same need for professional development as line officers.
        Ms. Jacobs. The focus of JPME is increasingly focused on the
    kinetic dimensions of warfighting, but as conflict in today's world
    demonstrates, the economic, geo-economic, and technological domains
    matter greatly as well. For example, munition stockpiles, economic
    warfare, and a state's mobilizational capacity are critical in
    assessing warfighting ability and sustainability. Should the JPME
    system pay attention and devote space to the research and teaching of
    these issues?
        Admiral Munsch. The time officers have to devote to JPME is finite,
    as is the content of the curriculum. As such, different PME programs
    focus on different learning outcomes. For example, the Eisenhower
    School extensively examines supply chain issues and mobilization;
    whereas the National War College focuses on grand strategy and its
    connection to national defense. Allowing schools to focus on these
    unique emphasis areas builds an academically diverse officer corps,
    capable of addressing diverse economic, political, and technological
    factors influencing today's security environment.
                                     ______

                       QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY DR. JACKSON
        Dr. Jackson. In response to the guidance of the 2018 National
    Defense Strategy (NDS), the Department of Defense looked at how to
    modernize PME to meet the current fight.
        This subcommittee held a briefing late last year to hear about some
    of these developments, however we left the room that day with many
    questions about the current efforts.
        One thing that I support is framing the curriculum at PME
    institutions to be shifted to have a focus on strategic competition
    with China.
        Secretary Skelly, how are the reforms going that were originally
    directed to be in line with the 2018 NDS? Further, do you anticipate
    additional reforms needed to match the new NDS, and if so, what would
    those new initiatives look like?
        Ms. Skelly. Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia
    are the principal priorities for the Department of Defense. The NDS
    recognized that PME would play a key role in shifting the focus of the
    Department. Therefore, in 2020 the then-Secretary of Defense directed
    the National Defense University to refocus its curriculum by dedicating
    50 percent of the coursework to the PRC, and tasked the Military
    Departments and Services to make China the pacing threat in all of our
    schools, programs, and training. This direction is being implemented at
    each of National Defense University's six JPME programs, as well as at
    each of the Services' war and command and staff colleges. At each
    institution, curriculum content is being reframed and adjusted so that
    50 percent is focused on strategic competitors to the United States.
    These adjustments include enhancing understanding non-military aspects
    of the strategic competition, such as the diplomatic, economic,
    information, intelligence, and cultural opportunities and challenges
    inherent in grand strategy as well as how these apply to domains such
    as space and cyberspace, as well as how they may be affected by the
    development and proliferation of disruptive technologies, such as
    artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics,
    hypersonic propulsion, and synthetic biology.
        Implementation of these changes have not been particularly
    disruptive as the faculty at each school regularly review and refresh
    the curriculum of their programs on a regular basis to maintain
    relevance. OSD and the Joint Staff have practiced active oversight of
    these adaptations to ensure implementation will be complete by the
    beginning of the 2024 academic year.
        The 2022 NDS has not yet been promulgated in an unclassified form.
    However, we expect that PME faculty will adapt the curriculum of their
    respective programs appropriately and OSD and/or the CJCS may provide
    additional guidance.
        Dr. Jackson. Throughout the Department of Defense, we look at
    industry and the private sector as partners for our military and
    frequently lean on them to provide critical resources and capabilities.
        Without a doubt, our service members should have the latest and
    greatest technology, however often times our military is lagging behind
    the civilian world when looking at implementing the latest
    technologies.
        I want to help make sure that anything being provided to top
    academic institutions around the country is also being provided to our
    PME institutions.
        Admiral Munsch, could you speak to some of the best practices
    learned from civilian academic institutions that are being implemented
    by DOD? Additionally, what are some areas where our PME institutions
    might lag behind civilian universities in terms of technology or
    capabilities?
        Admiral Munsch. JPME institutions, such as the National Defense
    University (NDU) work closely with their military and civilian partner
    institutions. Some of the recent best practices learned from or
    developed in cooperation with civilian academic institutions are:
        --Hybrid learning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, JPME institutions
    built robust hybrid programs that leveraged the best technical and
    educational practices of our civilian counterparts.
        --Immersive learning. Like many of the best civilian institutions,
    NDU augments classroom instruction with concentrated immersive
    learning. For example, NDU's Eisenhower School conducts a semester-long
    study across 18 key industries relevant to national defense. The study
    includes site visits, in-depth economic analysis, and collaboration
    with senior executives from national and international corporations.
        --Agile curriculum. Top academic institutions' courses of
    instruction are not static; they evolve in real-time to incorporate
    lessons learned from the current environment. NDU successfully applied
    this approach this Spring and rapidly adapted lesson plans based on the
    ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
        Dr. Jackson. Additionally, what are some areas where our PME
    institutions might lag behind civilian universities in terms of
    technology or capabilities?
        Admiral Munsch. In terms of technology and capabilities, three
    areas where JPME institutions lag behind our civilian counterparts are
    our facilities, modeling and wargaming, and cyber warfare resources.
        --Modeling and Wargaming. To reach parity with the best
    universities and think tanks, PME institutions require more wargaming,
    exercise, modeling, and simulation capacity. For example, NDU's Center
    for Applied Strategic Learning supports 70-80 wargaming events per year
    with 15 authorized billets. This is almost double the number of events
    with less than half the personnel of premier wargaming centers.
        --Cyber warfare resources. NDU's College of Information and
    Cyberspace (CIC) leads DOD and civilian institutions in educating
    students on cyber warfare policy and strategy. However, PME colleges
    like CIC lack dedicated, modern cyber laboratories to create virtual
    environments in which to test policy and strategy. These immersive labs
    are essential prepare defense leaders for contemporary all-domain
    warfare.
        --Facilities. NDU's facilities are aging and lag well behind those
    of many peer civilian institutions. NDU and DOD appreciate the
    additional $50M appropriation to repair Eisenhower Hall, one of our
    main academic facilities. However, Congress' continued support is
    necessary to upgrade our facilities to the standards of our civilian
    counterparts.

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