About the NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
NWC's mission is to prepare future leaders of the Armed Forces, State Department, and other civilian agencies for high-level policy, command, and staff responsibilities by conducting a senior-level course of study in national security strategy and national security policy process.
The National War College conducts a senior-level course of study in national security policy and strategy to prepare selected military officers and federal officials for high-level policy, command and staff responsibilities. The National War College focuses on national security policy and strategy, and emphasizes the joint and interagency perspective. Reflecting this emphasis, 75 percent of the student body is composed of equal representation from the land, sea (including Marine and Coast Guard), and air Services, with the remaining 25 percent drawn from the Department of State and other federal departments and agencies. In addition, international fellows from a number of countries join the student body. The Commandant, a military officer of two-star rank, occupies a nominative position that rotates among the Army, Navy, and Air Force. As joint sponsor of the National War College, the Department of State nominates a foreign service officer with Ambassadorial rank to serve as the Commandant's International Affairs Adviser. The Dean of Faculty and Academic programs is responsible for all matters related to faculty, teaching, professional development, curriculum planning and scheduling, as well as for faculty and student research.
27 PROPOSITIONS THAT DEFINE THE CORE CURRICULUM
An Address from the Dean before the Alumni Association, 6 June 1997. The mission of the National War College is to "prepare future leaders of the Armed Forces, State Department, and other civilian agencies for high-level policy, command, and staff responsibilities by conducting a senior level course of study in national security strategy." The critical parts of that mission statement are, first, the charge to prepare future leaders, which the College interprets to mean not training our graduates for their next assignments but rather educating them to think critically and creatively about the national security problems they will confront in their ultimate assignments.
Second, the mission charges the College to prepare students from all the Armed Forces, the State Department, and other civilian agencies, which means the Colleges program must be thoroughly joint and interagency. Finally, the College is charged with conducting a senior level course of study in national security strategy, which entails orchestrating all the instruments of national power to achieve national objectives.
Given this mission, the College has developed a sequenced, focused core curriculum that leads students through a critical analysis of the essential issues in both the theory and practice of national security strategy. That core curriculum takes a building block approach, with each block building on its predecessor and then adding to the foundation for its successor, and with the entire core moving from the theoretical to the practical and from the general to the specific. The five courses that make up the core address the fundamentals of statecraft, the nature and conduct of war, the national security policy process, the geostrategic context, and the development and implementation of national military strategy.
Below are twenty-seven propositions, extracted in paraphrase from the five core course syllabi, that capture the fundamental essence of that core curriculum. While not all-inclusive, they indicate the principal themes and concepts that characterize a National War College education.
1. What is national security; what is the overarching aim of our efforts? In the words of Arnold Wolfers, "Security, in an objective sense, measures the absence of threats to acquired values; in a subjective sense, [it measures] the absence of fear that such values will be attacked." National security also is multi-dimensional; it has not only a military dimension, but also economic, political, diplomatic, and social dimensions.
2. Achieving security requires a plan, a strategy. And with respect to formulating strategy, we promote the views of Henry Kissinger: "The most difficult challenge for a policymaker in foreign affairs is to establish priorities. A conceptual framework -- which links events -- is an essential tool." In keeping with that sentiment, we offer students a conceptual framework for analyzing strategic problems. That framework is depicted in the accompanying schematic.
3. A key element in strategic analysis at the national level is ordering your ideas about the shape and operation of the international system. American strategists have generally fallen into two more or less distinct schools. The realism/realpolitik school emphasizes geopolitics, which looks at the distribution of power among the world's nation states, and the balance of power among those nation states. The idealism/moralism school emphasizes broad, transnational interactions and relationships among both state and non-state actors, and a vision of a more peaceful, more moral world order rooted in collective security. Neither of these schools is wholly sufficient in and of itself, but together they offer two useful, fundamental perspectives.
4. As Nietszhe observed, the most common form of human stupidity is becoming so involved in doing something that you forget what you're trying to do. In foreign affairs this equates to defining national interests and objectives, but this is no simple task. Bernard Brodie pointed out that "The perennial problem for the leaders of a superpower like the United States is to determine the outer boundaries of what is truly vital." At the same time, the strategist must respect Cordell Hull's assertion that "Since the time when Thomas Jefferson insisted upon a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, public opinion has controlled foreign policy in all democracies." Defining interests, and objectives for advancing those interests, is an extraordinarily difficult and complex task.
5. According to Walter Lippmann, "a foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power" -- in other words, matching ends to means. Invariably this brings us around to economics, for while we talk of multiple elements of national power, all are inextricably entwined with economics. As President Clinton has stated, "America must regain its economic strength to play our proper role as leader of the world. An anemic, debt-ridden economy undermines our diplomacy, makes it harder for us to secure favorable trade agreements, and compromises our ability to finance essential military actions."
6. Given a clear vision of national interests and objectives, and the ability to mobilize the necessary power, statecraft boils down to devising ways (strategies) to use available and appropriate means (instruments of policy) to achieve you ends (national interests and objectives). With respect to ways and means, we can create a rough spectrum of generic strategic approaches.
Fundamentals of Military Theory
7. The ultimate instrument of the state's power is war. It also is the most double-edged, for in the words of Sun Tzu, "War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin." Thus it is crucial that we understand the nature, purpose, and conduct of war thoroughly.
8. No one has provided more insight on these issues than Carl von Clausewitz, who bequeathed us four priceless concepts. First, war is an act of violence. The use of force to compel an enemy to do your will, and the passion that engenders, are the fundamental characteristics shaping war's nature and conduct. Second, war is a clash of opposing wills. Human rather than material factors predominate in war, which is waged not against an inanimate or static object, but against a living, calculating enemy who often acts or reacts unexpectedly. Third, "fog" and "friction" dominate war. Uncertainty and unpredictability combine with danger, physical stress, and human fallibility to make apparently simple operations unexpectedly, and sometimes even insurmountably, difficult. Fourth, war is an instrument of policy. Military objectives and strategies must remain subordinate to national policy.
9. Developing military strategy for the conduct of war requires reconciling contending approaches, all of which have worked at some point in time and space, and in some distinct set of circumstances: offense versus defense; direct versus indirect; annihilation versus attrition versus disruption; concentration versus dispersion; protraction versus expedition. Just consider these various statements.
Napoleon Bonaparte: "I see only one thing, namely the enemy's main body. I try to crush it, confident that secondary matters will then settle themselves."
V.I. Lenin: "The soundest strategy is to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of the mortal blow both possible and easy."
Basil H. Liddell Hart: "Dislocation is the aim of strategy; its sequel may be either the enemy's dissolution or his easier disruption in battle."
Giulio Douhet: "It is possible to go far behind the fortified lines of defense without first breaking through them. It is air power which makes this possible."
Mao Tse-tung: "Withdraw when he advances, harass him when he stops; strike him when he is weary; pursue him when he withdraws."
Bernard Brodie: "Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose."
10. Successful military strategies exploit the synergies of combined arms and joint operations. As Hap Arnold declared after World War 11, "The greatest lesson of this war has been the extent to which air, land, and sea operations can and must be coordinated by joint planning and unified command." That conviction has been echoed with steadily increasing frequency and intensity right down to today, when Colin Powell had written into Joint Pub I the simple, unambiguous statement, "The nature of modern warfare demands that we fight as a team. The resulting team provides joint force commanders the ability to apply overwhelming force from different dimensions and directions to shock, disrupt, and defeat opponents. Joint warfare is essential to victory."
11. In military strategy as in national security strategy, the complexities of war and its strategic problems militate for a conceptual, analytical, framework to help military strategists think through their problems. The framework for military strategy we offer our students is shown in the accompanying schematic.
12. The U.S. Constitution, a product of political trade-offs, personality clashes, and institutional competition, establishes a system of separated institutions sharing powers that purposely fosters a constant tension between the executive and legislative branches of government and among the various departments. This invitation to struggle was the framers solution to defining a path between a Confederation handicapped by a weak central government and the tyranny of an unrestrained executive, and it has provided a framework for stability and continuity of government almost without parallel in the world. But this benefit has been at the price of delay, divisiveness, political posturing, factionalism, and public dismay over the perceived paralysis of government, all outcomes anticipated and accepted by the Framers as the cost of restraining both the executive and the anarchy of decentralization.
13. Congress is not a monolithic entity, nor are all its members paragons of virtue and probity. Some are beyond reproach while others have questionable personal habits. Some have rock solid integrity; others have more fluid ethics. All are subject to substantial personal pressures from campaign financing, frequent travel, separation from family, constant contact with constituents, a killer daily schedule, and special interests, and ambitions. Moreover, all are served, and in some cases largely controlled, by personal and professional staffers with their own interests, ambitions, and agendas. All of this powerfully affects the way members analyze and act on issues in the national security arena.
14. The President does not run the government; in truth, given our system of separated institutions sharing powers, nobody is in charge. The White House is simply one among multiple power centers. The President is powerful and important, but he is neither prime minister nor king; he is fettered by many constraints. At the same time, in the national security arena, the President generally can predominate, although it often involves a struggle, on the basis of four sources of power: the Constitution; historical precedent; executive authority over the machinery of state; and public expectation.
15. In 1947, Congress established the National Security Council to "advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to national security." Comprised of the President, Vice President, and Secretaries of State and Defense, the NSC was intended to make Presidents pay more attention to those secretaries. In reality, the opposite has happened. The NSC staff, also created by the 1947 law, which operates under the direction of the President's National Security Advisor, has become a major player in formulating, and even sometimes executing, foreign and defense policy, frequently rivaling and sometimes overshadowing the State and Defense departments.
16. In addition to the tensions between the executive and legislative branches and among the various departments of government, the national security policy process is also subject to tremendous pressures from outside players, principally lobbyists and the press. Both lobbyists and the press represent, in different ways, special interests, and James Madison warned against the dangers of special interests, or factions, in a democratic government. Today, interest groups permeate the government: they influence every bill in Congress; executive branch officials come from and return to interest groups; interest groups reach into the executive agencies and even the White House itself, policymakers use interest groups to mobilize support for their policies. In a curious way, however, while they make the policy process messy, the very proliferation and diversity of interest groups ensures that they serve as checks and balances on each other and on the various branches and departments of government, adding to the resiliency of the system.
17. We are living in a unique period in U.S. history, one in which a series of circumstances have combined to exert powerful new pressures on our system of civil-military relations. We are maintaining for the first time a huge standing military in peacetime. We have transitioned to an all-volunteer military. The principal security threat that defined our foreign policy for 45 years has dissipated. We've enacted legislative reforms in the Goldwater-Nichols Act that imposed jointness on the Services and greatly strengthened the position of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We are subjected to vast social changes that are redefining the nature of our society. We are experiencing dramatic, perhaps even revolutionary, technological changes. All these circumstances combine to call into question the very nature and purpose of our military establishment.
18. The international system has changed dramatically since the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of the most important aspects of that change has been the growing number and influence of non-state actors and the growing prevalence and importance of transnational challenges -- challenges that cut across national boundaries and sovereignties. Some of the most significant of these include environmental degradation, resource scarcity, population growth and migration, ethnic conflict, organized crime, terrorism, and arms proliferation, particularly of weapons of mass destruction. These are not traditional national security challenges, and they most likely will require non-traditional strategic approaches.
19. As with both national security strategy and military strategy, effective analysis of regional issues and the formulationof coherent policies require a conceptual framework. Here, too, we offer the students a notional analytical approach to use, as detailed below.
20. Three major regions continue to absorb the bulk of U.S. attention -- East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe -- regions where we have key interests, have fought major wars in this century, have long-standing security commitments, and have large contingents of our military forces deployed. East Asia features stunning economic vibrancy and potential, dramatic transformation and growth in the world's largest and most populous nation, and the volatility of the Korean peninsula. Europe features a wounded former superpower with a huge nuclear arsenal, enormous political and social ferment in the east and southeast, staggering economic challenges in the same area, and our most important security partnership. The Middle East features a crucial resource for the U.S. economy, a stunningly difficult cultural conflict, and the volatility of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
21. While the other regions of the world don't absorb U.S. attention and resources to the same extent that East Asia,Europe, and the Middle East do, there too there are thorny problems with which we must deal. Nuclear proliferation in South Asia; drugs and social instabilities in Latin America; ethnic conflict and failing states in Africa. The challenges throughout the world are enormous, and it will take all our skill and inventiveness to keep our national security policy on an even keel and safe course.
Military Strategy And Operations
22. Joint Pub 1-02 defines military strategy as "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." We believe, in truth, it is much more art than science, a notion captured best by our old friend, Clausewitz, who said. "Circumstances vary so enormously in war, and are so indefinable, that a vast array of factors has to be appreciated -- mostly in the light of probabilities alone. The man responsible for evaluating the whole must bring to his task the quality of intuition that perceives the truth at every point."
23. The contours of the future battlefield are changing, perhaps dramatically, in response to developments like stealth, precision munitions, overhead surveillance and reconnaissance, digitized information, stand-off weapons, robotics, non-lethal force, and so on. We must understand, and to the extent we can, anticipate the changing contours of the battlefield if we're going to be able to conceive how to employ military effectively in the service of national objectives.
24. The boundaries among peace, war, and other military operations are becoming increasingly blurred, and the linkages between force and diplomacy are growing more intricate. Military strategy is not developed in a vacuum; any use of force is, ultimately, a political act. Therefore, the military instrument must be considered in tandem with, and evaluated in relation to, the other instruments of statecraft, so as to enhance the synergies that can accrue from an integrated approach. As our new University president, Lieutenant General Richard Chilcoat, has said, "The strategic practitioner develops a deep understanding of all levels of war and strategy and their interrelationships, develops and executes strategic plans derived from interagency and joint guidance, employs force and other dimensions of military power, and unifies military and nonmilitary activities through command and peer leadership skills."
25. General Shalikashvili has stated that our "National Military Strategy of flexible and selective engagement addresses the challenges and opportunities of the next century." It also commits us to operating against a broad spectrum of threats and in wide variety of environments.
Deterrence of nuclear attack against the U.S. and its allies remains the highest priority task of our military strategy.
Space represents the ultimate high ground, a
unique operating medium, and possibly a theater of war; space
operations are an increasingly indispensable
component of our military power.
Emerging information technologies and innovative concepts for information operations are reshaping the character, and perhaps the nature, of war, prompting Admiral Owens to declare, "Information technology is America's gift to warfare."
The possibility of chemical or biological attack
was a nightmare to U.S. planners and soldiers, sailors, and airmen
during the Gulf War, and that nightmare is only
worsening.
Special Operations offer a unique range of capabilities
across the strategic to tactical continuum and provide a wide
array of flexible options in peace, crisis, and
war.
Uprisings, insurrections, armed rebellions,
and terrorism have been an integral part of international conflict since
at
least the creation of organized political communities
and they will remain so.
26. Military operations other than war represent perhaps the most likely employment of U.S. military forces today and in the near future. The emphasis in our current national strategy on engagement and enlargement, human rights, and U.S. leadership in an unstable world make our involvement in nation building, disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, refugee control, and peacekeeping more not less likely. As our current Secretary of State has said, why do we have a huge military establishment if we're not going to use it.
27. At the end of the day, whether any particular
military strategy is successful depends on how well those who execute it
can practice operational art. The theater commander is charged with linking
strategy and military operations in the field. He is responsible for designing
the campaigns that will ensure the sequence of military operations undertaken
is coherent and leads to achievement of strategic objectives. Without skilled
operational artists, campaign planners, even the most brilliant military
strategy is doomed to failure.