The Center for the Defense Leadership and Management Program (CDLAMP) provides a compact, intense, fast-track version of senior professional military education (PME). CDLAMP satisfies the DLAMP senior PME requirement without a long absence from the DLAMP participant’s job. The CDLAMP diploma has the same status as diplomas from the Senior Service Schools. CDLAMP is designed for defense civilians who cannot afford to be away for a ten-month period.

The CDLAMP curriculum is comprised of a core program, specialized directive courses, and structured leadership and decision making exercises. The core program is required of all students and provides grounding in :

- concepts of grand strategy and international security,
- international relations: assessing the geo-strategic context,
- national security policies and processes,
- defense economics, and
- leadership, military strategy, and war fighting.

Specialized directive courses complement the core with focused, intensive consideration of key topics including: DoD Joint Capabilities and Organization; Defense Ethics, Civil-Military Relations; and Information and National Security Policy. High-level guest lecturers, including Ambassadors, Military Attaches and Congresspeople, complement classroom teaching. Field trips include the White House, Capital Hill, CIA, State Department, Pentagon, Gettysburg, Norfolk (ACOM, SACLANT, TRADOC), FBI, Quantico, and Military Sea Lift Command.

A series of highly structured national defense leadership and decision making exercises supplement and integrate the faculty-led core courses and specialized directives. These exercises build upon the skills necessary to conceive, resource, develop, write, implement, and negotiate the interagency aspects of a National Security Council or DoD action plan. The Capstones of the CDLAMP curriculum are the end-of-course National Security Strategy Exercise (NSSE) and the Crisis Decision Exercise (CDE). The NSSE and CDE are practical exercises that emphasize active learning and provide an opportunity to put theory into practice. Students work in small groups under their own direction (observed, but not directed, by CDLAMP faculty) to develop a national security strategy oriented ten years into the future or resolve a crisis critical to the national security of the United States. The objective of the all leadership and decision exercises, including the end-of-course NSSE and the CDE, is to motivate the students to synthesize and apply all that they have learned in the CDLAMP about strategy, leadership, management, and decision making.

CDLAMP -- “COMPACT, INTENSE, FAST-TRACK”