Purpose and Objectives
The purpose of Course 5605 is to teach future senior leaders the art and science of developing national military strategies that, in concert with other elements of national power, secure the objectives of national policy in peace, crisis and war. To achieve this purpose, the course allows students to accomplish the following learning objectives:
- Analyze national security strategy and design fiscally constrained alternative military strategies, plans and force structures that support it (PJE)
- Comprehend the dynamic relationships among national security strategy, national and theater military strategy and operational art. (PJE)
- Analyze the factors that shape and constrain the design and execution of national military strategy (PJE)
- Synthesize feasible, achievable and acceptable military courses of action that attain national security objectives in crisis and war (PJE)
- Evaluate current and future military threats, requirements, capabilities, vulnerabilities, opportunities, and risks (PJE)
- Evaluate the current national military strategy and develop recommendations for its refinement and revision
- Evaluate the fundamental tenets of selected joint doctrine in relation to national military strategy (PJE)
Philosophy
This is a graduate course in military strategy, "The art and science of employing the armed forces of a nation to secure the objectives of national policy by the application of force or the threat of force," during peace, times of crisis and war. (Emphasis added)
Military strategy, especially as practiced in democracies, is an incredibly complex and serious discipline. Perhaps never before in our history have the variables that affect it been in such flux. It is therefore appropriate that the last core course prior to graduation from the National War College asks you to turn your attention to this discipline. The faculty looks upon this course as a shared (and exciting!) enterprise, where we will think independently, critically and creatively about the military issues likely to dominate the national and international security agenda for the remainder of your careers. Several qualities thus characterize this course.
First, the principal learning vehicle is current US military strategy and joint doctrine...one cannot have a critical and creative perspective of our strategy and doctrine without knowing what it is! For US military officers, we aim to build a genuinely joint and strategic perspective on the foundation of your service core competence and operational experience. For our civilian colleagues, we aim to make you familiar with how the US Armed Forces think and plan so that you and your military colleagues are better able to interact throughout your careers. For our international fellows, we aim to provide you with a comprehensive appreciation of US military strategy, thought and doctrine that you can compare to the situations of your own countries and forces. You will note that many of your reading assignments include official materials; the criticism or commentary of academia, the press and the private sector; and foreign commentary. This is because our learning objectives are not to know the strategy and doctrine by rote, but to evaluate it in light of all that you have learned, and to create and devise better strategic alternatives if you can.
Second, we accept that the "objectives of national policy" for purposes of this course have been established in the President's National Security Strategy for a New Century (or NSS). We assume that students are thoroughly familiar with that strategy as a consequence of Course 5601 and other exposure. The NSS establishes for analytical purposes the "ends" in the ends-ways-means-risk calculus that is at the center of the military strategic art. This is not to say that we accept the NSS uncritically, but only that our criticism for the purposes of this course must rest on military considerations.
Third, we deal mainly with military matters at the national and theater strategic levels, which are joint by definition. Because the employment of forces is inherent to military strategy, the course also deals with the joint operational art and joint doctrine. It dips down into service doctrine and operational and tactical issues only enough to show their relevance and relationship to strategy.
Fourth, this course provides you with the military strategic perspective essential to a national security strategist. It does not attempt to survey all of the military issues facing the United States. Instead, we have chosen topics, readings and speakers that are illustrative of broader issues and trends in military affairs. We are more interested in helping you develop the habits useful to you for the rest of your career, than we are in presenting to you all the details of any particular issue. Likewise, we will introduce you to important defense processes. This is not to make you expert in the processes themselves, but to show you the complexity of translating political and strategic guidance into operational plans and orders, so you can better judge the quality of both processes and products.
Finally, this course builds on and integrates, but does not repeat, the material presented in all four preceding core courses. You should enter Course 5605 with a solid historical perspective on the nature, conduct and character of war; the relationship of theories of war to practice; and at least the beginnings of a personal theory of warfare. You should have begun to form a personal analytical framework for military strategic thinking that helps you judge ends, ways, means and risk. We want you to bring these and the "informed, healthy skepticism" you developed in Course 5602 to bear on the problems of today and tomorrow. From Course 5612, you should be familiar with the cultures, capabilities and limitations of the US Armed Forces, the intelligence community, and the Department of State. You should appreciate how the US government works with regard to national strategic issues, as a consequence of Course 5603. And, from Courses 5601and 5604, you should be well versed in the social, political, economic, cultural, ideological, legal and diplomatic dimensions of national security strategy.
We will not repeat this material and we encourage you to refresh yourselves on the main points as necessary. Our task is two-fold: first, to help you examine and appreciate the specifically military dimensions of national security problems; and, second, to place them in the critical context of statecraft, and theory, and politics, and the real world. This will help you develop your own well-informed opinion of what must be done to address them, comprehensively and in conjunction with all the instruments of national power.
Design
The Course is organized into eight consecutive parts. You will be well served to read this overview and then to review the entire syllabus, in order to appreciate the course as a whole and to place each topic in its context. The quotations at the beginning of each lesson are intended to link the theoretical and historical perspective you gained in earlier core courses to the contemporary military issues addressed in this course.
Part I, Foundations. The first four lessons will provide you an overview of the course, placing its purpose and objectives clearly in the mission of the National War College and your future as a national security strategist. We will also define some key terms and address the linkages between national security strategy, military strategy at the national and theater levels, and the joint operational art. We will study the National Military Strategy, or NMS, a document we want you to critique throughout the course. Military strategy involves force and the threat of force, almost always in the form of violence. Therefore, ethical considerations are an important continuing theme in the course, and will be reviewed in this part.
Part II, Current and Future Military Threats. The next four lessons will give you an overview of some of the military threats and trends that concern military strategists today and likely will for the remainder of your careers. Based solidly on the foundation of potential future conflict that you developed in Course 5604, this section should give you a deeper appreciation not for the root causes of conflict, but for the specifically military problems such conflicts pose. We cannot possibly cover the full range of world military trends, but we will present salient issues that will help you understand how to assess the military implications of strategic change. An important secondary objective of this part of the course is to show you how intelligence, threat perception and "net assessments" influence military strategy.
Part III, Current and Future Missions. The purpose of this part is to comprehend current and emerging missions inherent to US strategy, evaluate whether they adequately reflect the national security strategy and projected threat environment, and analyze their implications. You could think of these as "ways" in the ends, ways, means, risk calculus, if you like. The first three missions are deterrence, major theater warfare and military operations other than war. The emerging mission is homeland defense. We want you to analyze these concepts in view of your assessment of the global security environment, determine their military implications, and judge the role or prominence (if any) that each should play in our national strategy.
Part IV, Components of US Military Power. Having analyzed the global security environment and the missions inherent to the NMS, this part causes you to consider the "means" of US military strategy: the forces and capabilities that constitute this country's "military instrument." We will examine five such components: conventional forces; nuclear forces; space forces; information power; and conventional power projection. We want you to analyze the strategic purposes served by these components individually and collectively, and evaluate their strategic utility in the projected threat environment. We want you to have a basis for judging the prominence that each should enjoy in our national strategy and the relative priority that should be accorded to its claim on a limited defense budget. This should stimulate your thinking in at least two directions: what new strategic purposes can be fulfilled by the forces on hand, and what alternative forces might be more appropriate.
Part V, Military Strategic Planning. The purpose of this part is to evaluate current US joint doctrine for systematically linking the national security strategy and national policy to military strategy and operations in peace, crisis and war. We will look at the Joint Strategic Planning System as a means of aiding the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, in reconciling the disparate views of a diverse military establishment in order to give useful military advice to the National Command Authority. We will also look at how the combatant commands plan to carry out the national military strategy and how their views influence the national military strategy. Especially important in this part is for the student to critically evaluate the logic of deliberate and crisis action planning in view of his or her own maturing framework for military strategy.
Part VI, Fighting and Winning. The purpose of this part is to apply learning from Courses 5602 and 5605 to current and projected real world situations in order to acquire experience in all course learning objectives. Ultimately, theory, strategy, doctrine and processes are applied in the real world, where brave young Americans go in harm's way in the national interest. We will draw our own conclusions about the adequacy of our strategy and forces for winning future conflicts in two ways. First, we will critically analyze the recently completed campaign in Kosovo for its military implications, trying to discern the degree to which it is (or is not) a harbinger of future war. Second, we will conduct the annual "Archer" exercise in which each of you will help decide, under the press of limited time and incomplete information about multiple crises, whether, when, where and how to fight. The Archer scenario is issued to you at the beginning of the course with your syllabus and you should begin immediately to familiarize yourself with it. Throughout the course, we have integrated issues for consideration, marked by a box, that are derived from the Archer scenario. These ask you to consider how the topic at hand might manifest itself in an actual war or near-war situation and what you should do, or not do, about it. This technique helps us remember that the issues we are studying are not merely academic; they are dimensions of a discipline that causes real military actions to take place in a very real world.
Part VII, Strategy and Budgets. The purpose of this part is to evaluate the forecasted US defense budget in light of current and future military requirements and create and devise fiscally constrained alternative military strategies, plans and forces. This part of the course is not designed to have you master the intricacies of moving the budget through the defense bureaucracy. Instead, it seeks to help you appreciate the defense budget as an important expression of national military strategy that is subject to the buffeting forces of bureaucratic and formal politics, as you learned in 5603. Your task will be to evaluate the product of those processes from a purely military point of view, and to render your best professional advice on whether the nation's treasure is wisely spent.
Part VIII, Conclusion. The purpose of this part is to synthesize all learning in 5602 and 5605; comprehend the relationship of military strategy to national security strategy; and comprehend the relationship of these disciplines to military leadership at the theater and national levels.
Themes
Course 5605 is organized around the single central theme of military strategy as defined above. Listed below are ten propositions derived by the faculty from their study of military strategy over the years. They are intended to help focus your study during the course; you will encounter them periodically in our learning objectives and issues for consideration. These propositions are not offered as great principles or "truths," but as hypotheses which we believe will help you better understand the military strategic art. You should test and challenge them, and improve upon them.
1. Strategy is both art and science. It entails constant adaptation of ends, ways and means to shifting conditions, in an environment where uncertainty and ambiguity dominate. Its effective practice requires both creativity and sound logic.
2. The contours of the future battlefield are changing dramatically in response to technology, new operational concepts, and emerging global and transnational trends.
3. Any use of force is ultimately an act of policy. Therefore, the military instrument must be considered in tandem with-and evaluated in relation to-the other tools of statecraft.
4. The boundaries between peace, war and other military operations are not always clear and the linkages between force and diplomacy are intricate. This places a premium on both the quality and integrity of military advice. It requires mutual understanding between civilian and military leaders.
5. Successful strategies seek to synchronize joint, interagency and multinational means to achieve political ends within acceptable risks; the military instrument employed by itself, let alone the individual services, can rarely attain lasting strategic effects.
6. Strategy deals with the relationship of the present to the future, while balancing and constantly reassessing short- and long-term considerations.
7. Fog and friction dominate all levels of military planning and execution. Uncertainty and unpredictability combine with danger, stress, human fallibility, and the actions/reactions of the opponent to make seemingly simple operations exceedingly difficult.
8. The use of force and violence is a high-risk proposition because it has profound, unpredictable psychological and political consequences.
9. No strategy is stronger than its moral foundation. In a democracy, success or failure will ultimately be defined in moral and ethical terms.
10. Even the most perfect execution at the tactical and operational levels cannot make up for fundamental flaws in political-military judgment or the identification of strategic objectives.
Participation
We need the active participation of every student in every class. As in all courses, your faculty seminar leader will evaluate your participation in seminars, at lectures and in exercises. Participation helps you internalize the learning objectives of the course by submitting your views to critical peer review, sharpening your judgment, and letting you influence the thinking of others. We want you to contribute to your classmates' education consistently, enthusiastically, and creatively. Our guest lecturers are seasoned practitioners of military strategy. We strongly encourage you to engage them during the question and answer periods and learn (or challenge!) their views firsthand. We especially want to emphasize your active participation in our exercises. These are opportunities for "experiential learning," that is, learning through actual practice in strategic problem-solving and leadership in a closed environment that can also be quite fun. We want you to participate vigorously.
Essay
The essay is your best opportunity to explore an issue in some depth. As important, we see the essay requirement as a rich opportunity to stimulate student contributions to American military strategic thought. We hope you will write on a salient topic and we will eagerly support those student's seeking publication of their work. Your essay must be on military strategy (as defined above), joint doctrine or the joint operational art in the present or future and it must demonstrate your proficiency in one or more of the Course objectives. We want you to think and write about one or more of the military issues with which you will deal as a future national security strategist and senior leader, military or civilian. There are literally hundreds of possible topics -- missile defense, homeland defense, transformation of the armed forces, peacekeeping, counter-terrorism, two major wars or not, revising the unified command plan, and so on -- none of which we will treat in depth during the course. The Course lesson topics themselves, and the respective learning objectives and issues for consideration, are excellent starting points for a compelling paper. Develop a thesis and outline early and solicit the criticism and advice of your faculty seminar leader and other faculty and student colleagues. Your paper should be approximately 8-10 pages of critical analysis. It will be graded according to the criteria found at ______. Submit your topic selection and proposed approach to your faculty seminar leader by Monday, 27 March. The paper is due on Wednesday, 19 April. Your faculty seminar leader will meet with you to discuss the topic, give you further guidance, and answer any questions you may have.
This course should be challenging, fun and exciting. It is designed to give you insights into the profound challenges of military security at a time of peace, but when change is occurring at an impressive pace and war has by no means been excluded. The material we present will be useful to you immediately upon graduation. However, our more important goal is to inspire and encourage you to a lifelong habit of critical reflection upon the profession of arms in our time. That, we believe, is imperative to your effectiveness as a senior strategic leader.
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