Creating a new path for joint education - joint professional military education

Joint Force Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Robert M. Antis, Claudia H. Clark

The integrated JFSC curriculum combines a unique teaching environment with a full range of assessment strategies linking the educational experience to critical needs of the combatant commands and JTF staffs. Students are evenly distributed into 17-19 seminars, usually including an international officer and often an interagency representative. Seminars serve as representatives of a CINC staff or of a joint task force, thereby emphasizing the skills Shelton highlighted. Serving in a notional body, Africa Command (AFCOM), supports the learning environment. The realism of complex contingencies confronting U.S. interests daily in the region provides a rigorous underpinning to the education process.

A total environment supports this realistic framework. As with combatant commands, the Africa Command homepage serves as a daily focal point for staff actions and information within its area of responsibility (AOR). Each day of the twelve-week course represents 10-12 days. The homepage keeps students serving on the AFCOM staff current on issues and hotspots not only in their AOR but around the world. Their command's plans and standard operating procedures are available both within the seminar rooms and on the homepage. These documents are not shells or outlines as are often found in military institutions but in most cases are actual plans, modified and kept unclassified to fit the learning environment.

As students work with the AFCOM materials, they not only ponder the type of documents routinely produced in joint staff actions but also see an example of what looks right in many types of plans and procedures. Thus officers learn the processes and decisionmaking skills so critical to a joint staff while gaining experience with related products.

Campaigning

According to the Skelton Report, "Armed Forces Staff College should concentrate on case studies and wargames on the combat employment of joint forces." This intent is seen throughout a curriculum that provides learning in an increasingly complex and integrated environment. As new lessons are introduced, students examine historical or practical experiences to add depth, then demonstrate their understanding. They explore the strategic environment and issues relating to national and regional security early in the curricular program. At the same time, their AFCOM duties require them to address a variety of staff actions and procedures. They gain understanding of the relationship between regional and national issues and how the Chairman and unified commanders act within that environment by studying the joint strategic planning system and joint strategy review. After they work the issues involved in reviewing a draft joint strategic capabilities plan, students explore the role of service contributions to CINCs as well as the challenges of componency for the combatant command structure. Case studies place the issues of strategy, resourcing, and command and control in historical perspective.

Students next explore tools for joint planning through a campaigning block. They examine operational art as well as the campaign and its application in historical and contemporary venues. They also survey broad topics such as battle-space management, multinational issues, peacekeeping, and joint force command. They are introduced to processes such as mission analysis, security cooperation, and the theater strategy formulation as they confront the challenges of ways, means, and ends on the combatant command level. Amidst this instruction, practical exercises and simulated crises drive students to use material and procedures already covered to reinforce and demonstrate their understanding.