Wartime, professional military education, and politics
| Author | Kathryn Marie Fisher |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221122968 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221122968
International Relations
2022, Vol. 36(4) 658 –681
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178221122968
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Wartime, professional military
education, and politics
Kathryn Marie Fisher
King’s College London
Abstract
The 2018 United States (US) National Military Strategy claimed that professional military
education (PME) in the US had ‘stagnated’. Since then the 2020 US Joint Chiefs of Staff publication
Developing Today’s Joint Officer’s for Tomorrow’s Ways of War can be seen as a direct response to
such stagnation. The associated temporal positionings of war from stagnation, to today’s officers,
to tomorrow’s ways of war, reinforce the significance of wartime in how professional military
education is framed. In this paper I ask: To what extent do professional military education mission
statements rely on frames of wartime for a construction of purpose, what are the implications
of such framings for goals of minimizing violence and suffering, and how may such potential
limitations be addressed in the classroom? A focus on wartime can help us draw out significant
strategic and ethical challenges of conflict termination alongside ‘forever wars’, the normalization
of exceptional security practices and violence, and the way in which prioritizations of either
doing war ‘better’ or minimizing the likelihood of war are in seemingly direct epistemological
competition. Given a goal of less insecurity, in an era in which fewer and fewer wars actually
‘end’ or ‘end’ with a sense of victory, I assess the extent to which engaging critical approaches in
PME may help or hinder the need to challenge self-propagating dynamics of wartime that may be
limiting efforts at lessening violence.
Keywords
critical security studies, discourse, education, insecurity, Wartime
‘Our vision is for a fully aligned PME [professional military education] and talent management
system that identifies, develops, and utilizes strategically minded, critically thinking, and
creative joint warfighters skilled in the art of war and the practical and ethical application of
lethal military power.’ United States Joint Chiefs of Staff 20201
Corresponding author:
Kathryn Marie Fisher, King’s College London, Strand Ln, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: kathryn.fisher@kcl.ac.uk
1122968IRE0010.1177/00471178221122968International RelationsFisher
research-article2022
Article
Fisher 659
‘The driving mindset behind our [PME] reforms must be that we are preparing for war. In
future wars we envision all-domain operations to generate effective joint command and control,
globally integrate effects, and conduct cross-domain fires and maneuver. . .Globally integrated
and all-domain operations present challenges for tomorrow’s warfighters that our educational
system must adapt to today.’ United States Joint Chiefs of Staff 20202
In 2020, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) responded to the 2018 National
Defense Strategy’s declaration that professional military education (PME) had ‘stag-
nated’ with their report Developing Today’s Joint Officer’s for Tomorrow’s Ways of War.
While this does signal that ‘the services are “all in” on the need to reform professional
military education’,3 the shape of these reforms remains to be seen, and requires contin-
ued scrutiny given the relational dynamics connecting security and insecurity. For exam-
ple, despite 20 years of security practices and warfighting in the name of providing
greater security, insecurity has been increased for many: From lives lost on all sides and
the pain and suffering for survivors both soldier and civilian across multiple fronts, to
decreased rights for women and girls in specific fronts such as Afghanistan. The JCS
quotation’s reference to applying lethal military power, temporal positionings of future
wars as inevitable, and the effort to acquire and ‘sustain an intellectual overmatch’4 is
claimed to necessitate shifting ‘PME curricula from a predominately topic-based model
to an outcomes-based approach. . .in the art and science of warfighting’.5 This links with
an overarching goal to ‘apply the art and science of war to the generation of both creative
applications of military force and asymmetric warfighting’, which in order to do, they
argue, ‘PME programs will have to ruthlessly reduce coverage of less important topics’.6
In a context whereby warfighting does not seem to be bringing strategic success and
instead increases insecurity for many, why is the response in the educational domain one
that perpetuates wartime insofar as it encourages warfighting through a continuous
preparation for imminent war?
None of this is particularly surprising given that PME is a military institution of the
state tasked with the option of employing violence and using war as a means to some
kind of end. However, when we think about the distinction between military education
and military training even as they at times overlap, it is no less consequential or problem-
atic. While both have roles to play, in short, ‘Training is the act of teaching a person a
particular skill or type of behavior. . .Thus, the primary difference between training and
education is that training teaches a person what do, whereas education teaches a person
how [notably “how” not “what”] to think’.7 In this sense, while training would under-
standably focus on how to ‘do’ war, education would arguably provide space to think
about war, including how to minimize the likelihood and degree of war. This is particu-
larly important given the use of military force as last resort, attending to long term stra-
tegic goals demanding more than military power to achieve, and the need to counter how,
despite at times with the best of intentions, security practices that can actually increase
insecurity. Thus an emphasis on warfighting and preparing today for inevitable future
war in an educational context would seem to reinforce normalized wartime 20 years fol-
lowing 21st century ‘forever wars’.
Wartime in this article refers to what O’Driscoll and Hom describe (with reference to
Dudziak, 2021)8 as the common view of ‘a period of existential crisis during which
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