Educating American Generals: Does Strategic Education Increase Military Power?

• In Event: Poster Session: Aid and International Organizations in IPE & Contemporary Issues in Political Science Education
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Contemporary Issues in Political Science Education

Abstract

A robust body of research has identified various factors that impact states’ ability to generate military power, but the literature is missing an important factor: senior leader strategic education. The $350 million annual investment that the United States makes into strategic education suggests that, at least implicitly, the US agrees. That is, the US military appears to believe that strategic education raises the professional competence of its highest-ranking officers, resulting in improved performance both on and off the battlefield. However, despite overwhelming conventional military capacity and the most-educated commanders in the world, America has lost its most recent wars. This puzzling outcome begs the question: does strategic education make a difference in battlefield performance, as theory and policymakers suggest? I will use the US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan to test the strategic education theory empirically.
If strategic education does make a difference, does military effectiveness derive from specific curricula? More specifically, are particular bodies of theory more useful in preparing senior leaders than others? Does the tailored curriculum that war colleges develop produce better outcomes than a fellowship at a civilian university?
To answer these questions, I will compare the combat performance for a set of generals to the strategic education they received prior to assuming high command. During the period in which the American military took responsibility for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a total of 40 army and marine commanding generals were responsible for a part of the war in discrete geographic regions within each country. These individuals each attended a 1-year Masters program in strategic studies – either at one of five war colleges operated by the Department of Defense or at a civilian university – in the period 1993-2005. I will take advantage of variation in the curriculum to which they were exposed to understand if certain education resulted in better combat performance.
Measuring the impact of education is notoriously difficult. However, the distinctive industry of war college graduates presents an opportunity to measure the impact of strategic education in a uniquely objective context: combat. National security involves far more than winning wars, but it is undergirded by the threat of military power, and the test of military power is combat. Iraq and Afghanistan therefore provide an opportunity to investigate if education impacted the decision-making of graduates, including how exposure to particular bodies of knowledge during formal education periods affected their thinking with respect to the complex environment that they faced. My paper will present preliminary evidence from the archives of the five war colleges and the Center for Military History records from the headquarters of the military commands from Iraq and Afghanistan.
This research contributes to knowledge in several ways. It proposes and tests strategic education as a variable with a causal effect on military power, generating implications for the field of military power and for our understanding of wartime outcomes. It analyzes previously unresearched archival data from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, making them more accessible to scholars. In addition, it develops a novel approach to studying the impact of graduate-level political science education on the performance of graduates that does not rely on employment outcomes or subjective satisfaction surveys, and it assesses the mechanism by which education should influence practice.
Finally, and significantly, it reaches across the divide between security studies scholars and national security practitioners, providing evidence relating to what bodies of knowledge have the most relevance for practitioners and suggesting where different or better theory can contribute to the problems of national security.

Author

• Jonathan Shine, US Army War College