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Fireside Friday, May 30, 2025 (On Professional Military Education)
May. 30th, 2025 05:11 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
acoup_feedHey all, we’re doing a Fireside this week!
For this week’s musing, I thought it might be worthwhile – this being a frequent space for military history – to offer a brief outline of professional military education (PME) in the United States, which is to say the various stages by which US officers are academically prepared for their jobs. There’s a bit of a necessary caveat here at the outset: I am a lifelong civilian who hasn’t taught at a PME institution, so this is a schematic ‘view from outside,’ and I am sure I will miss some things. Nevertheless, a lot of my colleagues in military history teach in PME and it is a significant part of the military history job market, such that I had to familiarize myself with the ‘lay of the land.’ Particularly I’m focusing here on the staff and war colleges, but the term PME is sometimes applied a lot more broadly to any sort of career-related education for military personnel.
And I also think it is useful to discuss from that outside perspective, because while most Americans are at least vaguely aware of the service academies, most know little, if anything, about the rest of the system. So I thought it might be worth outlining the stages, when in a military career they happen, and the institutions responsible for them. Naturally, I should also note, this is a description of the United States’ system; other countries have different systems.
PME is technically split into three(-ish) levels – primary, intermediate and advanced – but in my experience in a lot of cases when folks say ‘PME’ they are referring specifically to the intermediate and advanced levels and their institutions. We’ll cover all three stages, but with that focus on the latter two. A final note before we get started: PME expectations cut across service branches (they are ‘joint’ and thus JPME), which do not all have the same names for ranks, but they do share a set of pay-grades, which correspond to the PM-relevant career stages, so I’ll be using those below. Officer pay-grades are expressed as O-# (O-1, O-2, etc) and enlisted pay-grades as E-# (E-1, E-2, etc). I’ll include the relevant rank titles in the footnotes.
The first step in the system is pre-comissioning training consists primarily of education designed to prepare a prospective officer to commission as an O-1;1 it technically also encompasses any continuing education through O-4.2 This is thus the jump either from cadet or midshipmen3 or for senior enlisted NCOs (E-7 through E-9)4 making the jump from officer to enlisted. For the public, when they think of this stage, they mostly think of the service academies – the US Military Academy (West Point), Naval Academy, Air Force Academy, along with the two not run by the Department of Defense (the Coast Guard Academy, run by DHS and the Merchant Marine Academy, run by the DOT).
But of course that’s not the whole of this system, or even most of it. Instead by far the largest component of pre-comissioning training are the nation’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs, offered through civilian universities, which provide around 35% of the US military’s commissioned officers at any given time. The next largest chunk is actually still not the service academies, but rather the programs for senior NCOs or civilians (typically with some college education) to become officers (OCS/PLC/OTS) at around 22% and only then the service academies at around 19% (with the remainder mostly being directly commissioned officers). Note that those are the ‘steady state’ figures at any given time (calculated out of the figures for 2019), but because officers commissioned through ROTC often leave the military earlier in their careers, the comparison actually understates the number of newly commissioned officers who have gone through ROTC.
Then most officers are going to spend about a decade moving from O-1 to O-4.5 Additional education in this period – before reaching O-4 – is referred to as Primary PME, though I’ve also seen that term used for programs preparing senior NCOs for OCS/PLC/OTS and as far as I can tell different reports sometimes group pre-commissioning and primary PME together as a single category and others break them out as separate (neither are part of JPME). But the next major step is at O-4, preparing for O-5, which is JPME-I.
The key institutions for JPME-1 (and thus intermediate PME) are the Air Command and Staff College (at Air University, for the Air Force), the Army Command and General Staff College (at Army University, for the Army), the Marine Corps Command and Staff College (at Marine Corps University, for the Marines) and the College of Naval Command and Staff (at the Naval War College, for the Navy); collectively these institutions are often referred to as the ‘staff colleges,’ as distinct from the ‘war colleges.’6 Now, while each of these programs is associated with a specific service branch, that doesn’t mean that everyone in an incoming PME class is an O-4 of that specific service branch. Instead, my sense from colleagues that teach in PME is an incoming class is likely to be mostly officers from the relevant service branch, with a few officers from the other service branches, a small number of civilians either working for the government or for American defense industry and some foreign officers attending American PME as a way for the US to build links between our militaries and for their countries to build their own leadership capabilities.
In structure, intermediate PME is effectively an accelerated master’s program (where primary PME is, in most cases, just straight-up an undergraduate program), though whereas your typical master’s program might consist mostly of folks in their early-20s coming more or less fresh from undergraduate, generally O-4s looking to advance to O-5 are 10-15 years into their military careers (so mid-30s). And accelerated means accelerated: the in-person version generally runs one academic year (there are distance and hybrid versions). Curricula differ based on institution, but generally focus on staff planning and operational art, basic strategic theory and leadership, the idea being that this is preparing officers to handle larger units in more complex operations where they need to be able to see the big picture a bit more clearly.
The last step is advanced PME (JPME-II), which is attended by officers at the O-5 and O-6 pay-grades7 moving upwards towards the general officer ranks (O-7 and up).8 There are five-ish institutions for this stage (in the same way I have five-part-ish posts): the Air War College (part of Air University), the Army War College, the Marine Corps War College (part of Marine Corps University), the College of Naval Warfare (part of the Naval War College) and finally National Defense University (NDU). Except NDU has a half-dozen different sub-units doing advanced PME, which I suppose we needn’t get into here. Collectively, these programs and institutions are often called ‘the war colleges,’ to distinguish them from the staff colleges and their larger parent ‘universities.’
Advanced PME is also generally structured as an accelerated (in-residence 10 months) master’s programs. Once again, curricula differ and the NDU’s half-dozen programs all specialize in different aspects of security policy, but the focus in advanced PME is strategic, ideally preparing already very experienced, senior officers progressing into the upper levels of the military to understand how their large areas of responsibility fit into the national strategic ‘biggest’ picture. The ‘students,’ as mentioned, for advanced PME are O-5s and O-6s, so these are often officers with around two decades of experience.
Finally, for newly promoted O-7s,9 there is also the National Defense University’s CAPSTONE program (mandatory since the mid-1980s). I confess, I don’t have as clear a sense of the curriculum for the CAPSTONE program (which compared to the rest of the system is very small and quite focused); I’ve mostly gotten to know the curricula for various JMPE-I and II programs as preparation for job interviews there and CAPSTONE features guest speakers, discussions and exercises rather than instructor-led coursework, as far as I know.
All of this ecosystem is fairly important for the United States defense establishment. The fact is, initial officer training and early experience is understandably focused on small group leadership and the required technical skills, meaning that the two levels of JPME are often the first time rising officers are engaging in a serious, sustained way with strategic theory and the pantheon of great strategic thinkers. That training structure, the historian in me must note, is a product of the 19th century and efforts to institutionalize senior officer training beginning in Prussia with the kriegsakademie (‘war academy’). So while the public is not particularly aware of the staff and war colleges, they’re quite important in producing the military leadership the United States needs.
At the same time, the PME ecosystem is very important for military history as a discipline. Most of the PME institutions above have teaching roles split more or less evenly between civilian academics and military officers. The result is that a significant proportion of historians (and political scientists, I might add) working on war and conflict are employed by these institutions, pairing research into warfare with leading seminars of officers whose lessons will inform future commands. As the academic job market in history has collapsed, for historians focused on conflict, the Department of Defense has become an increasingly important employer, because demand for PME (and service academy) faculty remains relatively constant.
At the same time, as I write this, the future direction of this ecosystem seems uncertain. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – whose career capped out at O-4 and who thus never attended any of the intermediate or advanced JPME institutions – has been aggressive in announcing cuts to DoD programs, the number of general officers, etc., but plans for JPME remain unclear. I know there is a fair bit of concern that an administration generally hostile to civilian academics, realizing that the DoD employs large numbers of civilian academics in officer training, might seek to cut or remove those positions. Under Hegseth’s leadership, the DoD is moving quite aggressively to cut large numbers of civilian positions in the department, so the concern is not entirely empty.
I think this would be a significant mistake. The presence of civilian academics (many, but by no means all, of whom are veterans themselves) in PME and the service academies plays an important role in introducing an ‘outside’ perspective and linking those institutions closely with current and developing scholarship. It is also the most significant way – arguably really the only significant way – that Uncle Sam provides for the sustained, academic study of war and conflict, which is particularly important given how hot-and-cold military history can run in civilian universities.10 And of course the infrastructure of academic work – things like journals, professional associations, conferences and reviews – can only survive when there is a critical mass of scholars to support them both by doing work but also by paying dues or keeping libraries subscribed to new issues; a sudden sharp drop in the number of employed military historians would potentially permanently destroy many of these academic structures, as they’d be unable to meet operating costs. Hard cuts to this ecosystem would thus threaten to significantly undermine the study of war and conflict in the United States, potentially for decades.
On to recommendations!
First off, my second episode on Tides of History with Patrick Wyman, this one covering the Carthaginian military and political systems and why Carthage was so much better able to oppose Rome than other potential opponents, is out. We’re going to be going into Carthage in a lot more depth later this summer in a blog series I have planned, but you can get a bit of a preview here.
We also have a new Pasts Imperfect this week, with a keynote essay by Lexie Henning on the place of the humanities in the ever expanding gaming space. Also via Pasts Imperfect, Gregory Aldrete explains quite a bit about Daily Life in Ancient Rome in a neat illustrated video that goes into a fair bit of detail, including a short discussion of one of my favorite things to note about ancient Rome, which is Monte Testaccio – the hill in Rome made up almost entirely of discarded Roman ceramics, the remains of the industrial-scale trade in wine and olive oil entering Rome.
Meanwhile on YouTube, Drachinifel has a fascinating video from about a month ago going through the ‘Great Ships’ – the royal warships that formed the core of English fleets – in the Tudor navy. And indeed, as I went to grab a link to this video for this post, I see that he’s just uploaded the second part, focusing on some of the smaller ships, which I haven’t watched yet but still feel pretty confident in recommending. The great virtue of the first video is how tightly linked it is to the source material and how carefully Drach walks you through some of the difficulties in decoding a difficult primary source, a good example of the challenges historians face when dealing with documents that were not, after all, produced for us.
For this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend A.S. Burns, Infantry in Battle: 1733-1783 (2025). The book is focused on exactly what the title implies: how infantry fought on the battlefields of the (short) 18th century. The book covers the whole period, opening with a vignette of combat in 1734 at Parma and Guastalla in Northern Italy (as part of the oft-neglected War of Polish Succession, a ‘general’ European war pitting France, Spain, Parma and Savoy against Russia, Saxony, Prussia and Austria, with Polish factions on both sides) all the way to fighting in North America during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). This is one of those books that successfully strikes the difficult balance between making a scholarly intervention and at the same time providing a useful entry-point for the new reader into the topic.
Burns’ core argument is that we ought to understand infantry tactics in this period (and presumably, many other periods) as a ‘negotiation’ between officers and their soldiers. I should note here, this is ‘negotiation’ in its academic sense: these fellow aren’t sitting down and drawing up terms in the middle of battle. Instead, what Burns is focused on is that conduct in battle was a two-way street: officers might want their soldiers to produce the ideal of the ‘clockwork’ or ‘mechanical’ soldier, but soldiers were not automatons and had their own ideas about what tactics would be best (for victory or survival). Officers could, in turn, try to motivate their soldiers, persuading them with words or acts of conspicuous gallantry, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But the key here is the two-way ‘negotiation.’ That negotiation means that, as Burns argues, the complex tactical systems we see in elite writing (like military manuals) wasn’t useless but it was often aspirational, achieved only incompletely in a process of negotiation.
Instead, Burns presents a model of combat that builds on recent movements in the field such as Spring, With Zeal and With Bayonets Only (2008), which older readers may remember being a recommendation back in 2022. Burns notes that, while the popular image of warfare in this period continues to be shoulder-to-shoulder close-order musket formations, often quite a few ranks deep, on the continent armies were already experimenting with thinner formations and ‘open order’ formations even before the American Revolution; in this sense Infantry in Battle works really well as a sort of developmental history explaining how one gets the tactics of With Zeal and With Bayonets Only. Moreover, Burns notes, even as officers and military manuals extolled the value of bayonet charges in this period, soldiers often preferred to exchange fire instead and utilized cover, firing from behind fences, ditches or buildings where such cover was available. Thus the tension of negotiation emerges between officers trying to get soldiers to engage in decisive bayonet charges and soldiers who might prefer to position in the relative safety of cover. Thus actual battlefield behavior and tactics were as much a product of enlisted soldiers – often quite experienced men – as they were the ideals of officers and tactical manuals.
At the same time, this book is just really handy as an introduction to infantry combat in this period and as a corrective for the ‘Hollywood’ vision that still dominates popular culture, which tends to view the tactics of this period as foolish and counter-productive (which is an odd thing to say about a military system that was globally dominant to an almost absurd degree in the 18th century!). Burns writes clearly and with a gift for making the complex understandable by drilling down to, say, the action in a single field or with a single unit, to follow how they respond to combat conditions. Now I should note, the book is not written to treat entire battles and does very little with cavalry and artillery, save for how infantry responded to them: this is a book about infantry in battle, not about any one battle or armies generally. Likewise, there’s some discussion of what campaigning life and the conditions of these soldiers would be like – actually rather more complete and well done than I expected, given the title – but this is not a ‘face of battle’ or ‘face of campaign’ approach. This is a book fundamentally about tactics and the men who executed those tactics and it succeeds remarkably well at that, while still being a solid entry-point into the topic.
The book itself, in hardcover comes in a compact, nice little volume and features a number of very good battle maps and a few graphs. What I did feel was a bit missing were images, showing the reader a bit of what these soldiers looked like and perhaps diagrams showing exactly how certain tactical maneuvers discussed would be executed (although I didn’t find Burns’ written descriptions at all hard to follow). Of course, the realities of publishing being what they were, I can imagine that lots of nice pictures were never in the budget for this volume; the author can hardly be faulted for that. But for someone looking to get a sense of the tactics of this period – or to come up to date on the debates about them – this is the book to read and is going to be my standard recommendation for students looking to grasp infantry tactics in the ‘Age of Reason.’
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