Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 73

RIGOROUS EDUCATION

enabling education, which, in Brown’s words, “is the
most reliable strategic hedge in investment that the
Army can make in the face of an uncertain future.”2
The Army’s brigade commanders of 2025 are entering the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
(CGSC) this year. Increasing the rigor in professional
military education (PME), one of the goals of the newly
created Army University, offers a method for building
the Army’s strategic hedge.3 One element of the hedge
is a rigorous intermediate-level education (ILE) that
selects, educates, and places officers in a way that maximizes the intellectual capability in the force, beyond
tactical training and experience. Doing so requires
challenging two tacit assumptions in the traditional
system: that all officers can complete ILE, and that
board selection is more important than education for
assessing promotion potential. As units at lower levels
are thrust into circumstances that tactical training and
experience cannot answer, a more rigorous ILE would
provide those units an insurance policy against the
unknowns they will face.

The State of Intermediate-Level
Education
The Army has tried various approaches over time
to provide high-quality ILE that meets the needs of the
force. From 1946 to 2004, attendance at resident ILE
was determined by a command and staff college (CSC)
board, which selected approximately the top 50 percent
of a year group for resident attendance at CGSC,
another service college, or a foreign staff college.4 The
officers who did not get the benefits of that education
perceived their nonselection as a negative discriminator, and in turn did not perceive that they had a reasonable expectation of future service.5
To address that training disparity and its cultural
perceptions, consistent with the recommendations in
the 2003 Army Training and Leader Development Panel
Officer Study Report to the Army, the Army instituted universal resident ILE common core attendance
from 2004 to 2012 at Fort Leavenworth and at several
satellite campuses.6 Officers in their basic branches
then completed ILE through the Advanced Operations
Warfighting Course, later the Advanced Operations
Course (AOC) at Fort Leavenworth or via distance
learning, while officers in functional areas completed
ILE through their qualification courses. This approach,
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

combined with the Army’s operational requirements,
created several challenges to effectiveness.
As the Army started growing in 2004 to meet wartime requirements, increasing demand from the force
for field-grade officers resulted in shorter promotion
timelines and less-selective promotion boards. Officers
had fewer opportunities to pursue broadening assignments. Over time, the constant rotation of forces in
and out of combat, while building a solid basis in smallunit tactics and leadership, left little time for most
officers to gain doctrinal and theoretical foundations in
combined arms warfare beyond the small-unit level.7
The separation of the common core and the AOC
pushed most of the functional area and special branch
officers out to the satellite campuses, and it closed off
their access to the additional skill identifier elective
programs such as the strategic studies, joint firepower,
historian, homeland security, and space operations
tracks.8 The cross-pollination that formerly came from
having varied student populations, with a range of
experiences among basic branch, functional area, and
special branch officers, was diminished.
Another challenge facing ILE is that it must serve as
“a course for the next ten years.” Given punishing selection rates for senior service colleges, only a handful of
ILE students will attend a war college, making ILE the
only strategic education provided to most officers. The
Army’s true requirements for strategic education, especially in joint task forces and combatant commands, far
outstrip the Army’s investment to deliver that instruction.9 If officers have limited experience above the
tactical level before ILE, and then study a curriculum
with little or no strategic-level instruction, they will be
hard pressed to gain substantive proficiency in military
operations beyond tactics. Unfortunately, ILE graduates incapable of grasping the conduct of war above the
tactical level are a liability to their future commands.
As of 2015, academic performance in ILE had
little bearing on officer placement after graduation.
Before 2011, about the time the Army reached its peak
wartime end strength, CGSC did not use the “exceeded
course standards” rating on academic evaluation reports. Those circumstances contributed to a Gresham’s
law-like trend of skyrocketing demand for relatively scarce and more valuable graduates of advanced
military studies programs (AMSPs) such as the School
of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). Unlike their
71