[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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[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
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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.
[all]