Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 75

RIGOROUS EDUCATION

(Photo courtesy of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College)

Col. Douglas C. Cardinale, director of the Command and General Staff School, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, speaks to the
Class of 2016 for the first time on 6 August 2015 in Eisenhower Auditorium, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

satellite campuses, who are teaching baseline skills to
students ill qualified for graduate-level work. As part of
this change, completion of a master of military art and
science (MMAS) degree would be mandatory for all
at Leavenworth. By passing the entrance examination
and meeting the GRE screening criteria, each student
would demonstrate the aptitude for a graduate thesis
program, a step toward addressing Brown’s observation
of a prestige gap between Army and civilian academic
institutions. Such a requirement would also provide
a greater source of original scholarship to address research in topics of special interest to the Army because
more officers would be conducting research.14
Requiring all students attending Leavenworth to
pass an entrance examination and meet a minimum
GRE score for admission, and to complete an MMAS
degree for graduation, would likely cause some officers
to apply to ILE satellite campuses. This would benefit
all groups because the resulting distribution of students
would encourage cross-pollination among officers from
all branches across all campuses, rather than reserving
Leavenworth attendance almost exclusively for command-track officers. In addition, the satellites would
better accommodate individual scheduling needs if a
prospective student could not attend during a given
year or start that summer.
MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

Change 2: A More Selective
CSC Board
The second change would be to make the CSC
board, which was reinstated in 2012, more selective.
Rather than current practice, in which a board selects
the top 60 percent of a single year group, the Army
should select for an elite of capability.15 The percentage of the eligible population who would attend
Leavenworth might be as low as 30 percent, factoring
in the two opt-in screenings of an entrance examination and a GRE.
Officers desiring attendance at Leavenworth would
be eligible for consideration only after achieving the required scores on the entrance examination and the GRE,
with no waivers allowed. The CSC board would then
select those officers best qualified for attendance. Such a
process would account for academic aptitude as well as
performance and potential, as expressed through officer
evaluation reports and academic evaluation reports.
Such selection is particularly important for career fields
such as functional area 48 (foreign area officer), functional area 49 (operations research and systems analysis), functional area 50 (force management), f unctional
area 52 (nuclear research and operations), and functional
area 59 (strategist), where even stellar company command is no guarantor of future success.
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