Lend-Lease neither forestalled American entry into World War II nor delivered victory on its own. Whole-of-government approaches in wartime can supplement, but not replace, military action. Victory depended upon this intelligent and overwhelming application of force. This instruction produced wartime leaders who could marshal vast fleets, air forces, and armies of well-equipped fighting troops into coherent campaigns. They put themselves into the roles of leaders like Washington, Scott, Grant, Sherman, Pershing, Nimitz-planning and executing their campaigns. Preparing not to fight wars has neither averted nor won America’s wars.īy contrast, earlier students at senior military schools studied past wars and military campaigns.
#The long war journal professional
The system is broken because the theory at its heart-that wars can always be avoided, and that it is the responsibility of professional soldiers to do the avoiding-was wrong. If such approaches were viable, civilians in authority would already have employed them and wouldn’t have needed the military in the first place. Instead, these strategies rely on “whole of government” approaches: help from politicians and civilian agencies. No wonder that graduates of such a system produce weak strategies that fail to explain how our armed forces will fight and win through the intelligent application of force. Professional military education prepared graduates to avoid armed conflict, not prevail in it. Political and military leaders sought to make war impossible, and military educators embraced Sun Tzu’s widely misunderstood aphorism, “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” American military professionals must be diplomats, economists, scientists, historians, and lawyers, the thinking went-not to be better at fighting wars but so that the United States would not have to fight wars at all. This view evolved from the belief that modern conventional and nuclear wars were so devastating that they were no longer worth waging. Army War College wrote that developments since World War II made the old, warfare-focused curriculum “outdated.” As the American military flailed away aimlessly in Vietnam, he argued that “today’s military professional, while first and always a soldier, must also be a diplomat, an economist, a scientist, a historian, and a lawyer.” As recent events in Afghanistan have demonstrated, we don’t meet that standard. Here is what we know: the only standard that matters is whether our military officers can prevail in war. Educational standards take the form of vague word salads: “Senior leaders who lead complex organizations and think strategically and skillfully as adaptive and collaborative problem solvers to develop strategies to achieve national security outcomes.” Such “standards” are neither measurable nor focused on winning wars, yet educators congratulate themselves for meeting them, while graduates leave not even knowing what they don’t know. The Joint Chiefs issued their guidance because our senior-officer education system does not prepare its students for joint warfighting, which is enormously complicated.Īt the war colleges, this cry for help has gone missing in a maze of bureaucracy and jargon. The various services are specialized to fight and win battles on land, at sea, and in the air, but campaigns and wars require building, supporting, and commanding formations that fight in all three environments simultaneously, often far from the United States.
#The long war journal how to
In May 2020, the Joint Chiefs of Staff published guidance for the education of future senior military leaders that repeatedly emphasized the need for all senior officers to learn how to fight wars and campaigns as a joint force. This may sound incredible-even unbelievable-but it is true. The plain fact is that these schools no longer teach warfighting. Nowhere is this truer than in America’s war colleges-the schools our nation established to teach officers how to fight and win wars. This wasn’t because our military professionals lack will or effort but because they have forgotten the real purpose for which militaries exist. Though errors made by policymakers certainly played a part, our military lost in Afghanistan because it no longer knows how to fight and win wars. We must reckon with the hard truth that the United States has lost another war.