A New Approach to Military professional education

There are thousands of outstanding books, articles, documentaries, websites and courses that are relevant to military professional education. Military service members, intelligence analysts or any other national security professionals who are trying to increase their knowledge and get better at their jobs will have no trouble finding plenty of useful learning materials. One might think that aside from studying cutting edge battlefield technologies, or coming up with groundbreaking new insights on past conflicts, there is not a great deal of unconquered territory in the realm of military/security studies. With such a huge volume of existing scholarship and information, what can the Warfare Mastery Institute hope to bring to the table that someone else has not already thought of? Is it possible to create a “new approach” to military professional education?

While there are indeed countless outstanding learning materials and resources available to the military/security professional, there are also a surprising number of unexplained gaps when it comes to what professionals really need to focus on in order to improve their performance. While any well-researched book on warfare is useful to the professional, few are specifically designed with the professional in mind. Books about warfare generally fall into several categories. Some books are designed to provide engrossing accounts of historical events at various levels of warfare from the tactical to the strategic. However, since these books are often designed to be understandable and interesting to neophytes as well as professionals, it is frequently difficult for them to go into the kind of depth that is most useful for professional development. Then there are academic books that are not intended for the general audience and include much more detailed analysis. However, the aim of this analysis is often to prove a specific thesis and therefore most of the discussions and battlefield accounts revolve around a single, narrow topic. While these books might be interesting and make convincing arguments, they often do not provide a broad enough picture for professionals to be able to draw relevant lessons for real-world application.

There are many other categories of books and learning resources but few seem to provide the professional with what he/she really needs to improve. So, what do dedicated professionals do to get around this problem? They read and study many different sources, extracting the useful lessons and points from each one. Almost any book or article on warfare has at least a few useful lessons to share. However the key question is how many pages does a professional have to read, or how many hours does it take to collect enough useful lessons and insights to see a marked improvement in real-world combat performance? When a professional finishes reading a book for professional development, he/she might ask, “how much more likely am I to win a fight now after reading this book, than I was before I read it? What advantage does reading this book give me over adversaries that have not read this book?” There is no way to definitively answer such questions, but there is a way to design learning materials in a way that directly aims at improving real-world performance.

The mission of the Warfare Mastery Institute is to develop courses and books with precisely this goal in mind. Our mission is to help military/security professionals become better at their jobs, make better decisions and ultimately win battles, campaigns and wars. However, while professionals are our primary audience, we believe that a wide range of military scholars and enthusiasts will find this new approach interesting and stimulating. So, how does one develop a course or a book that is focused on professional performance enhancement? There are no simple answers to that question but there are some general principles and guidelines that form the basis for the Warfare Mastery Approach.

USE WHAT IS THERE

Drawing from the Green Beret approach of working “by, with and through” host-nation or indigenous partners, Warfare Mastery does not aim to replace or provide alternatives for existing books, resources and teachers. Instead, it makes much more sense to leverage what is there in its existing form. Consider that to write a new military history book, authors need to go to the trouble of reading all or most of the existing work on a subject, extracting what is relevant, rewording it and then citing it. The conventions of academe make such exertions unavoidable but for the more expedient needs of the professional, it makes sense to just point the learner directly to the source. How many authors substitute an entire chapter in their books with a line that might read something like, “for the overall objective of this book it is now critical to write a chapter on the early evolution of armored warfare but Bruce Gudmundsson already provides one in Chapter 3 of his book On Armor. Go read that chapter and then come back and continue reading this book.”

While directing readers to bounce between several books might be impractical and uneconomical in the book/publishing industry, it may be the most practical and expedient approach for professional education. This is the accepted model for most university courses where professors assign readings from various books as needed to achieve a learning objective. The Warfare Mastery institute employs this same approach but applies it to all of our various courses and publications. In order to get the most out of our books, articles and multimedia resources, the professional learner will need to reference other books and consult the work of other experts that are outside our immediate circle. Our materials will compare and analyze these existing resources, agree or disagree with their ideas and offer opinions about which arguments or sections are most useful etc. In short, besides providing our own insights and analysis, we also offer a “guided reading list” of the different perspectives on a given topic. We then help learners work through the process of digesting and synthesizing multiple sources of information into distilled wisdom. Most existing learning resources do not take this approach.

Every Book and Course is Alive

One problem with books is that once a book is published, it is fairly difficult to update or improve. Publishing multiple editions of the same book is common, but it requires readers to purchase these new editions. In the existing model, it is not possible for authors to update their books frequently. However, taking advantage of modern digital technology, there is nothing to say that an author could not publish a book and then continue to publish new editions monthly or even weekly. Digital publishing resources such as Amazon Kindle would allow authors to do this but there is no established way to keep track of improvements and notify readers when new sections or ideas are added. The courses and even the books published by Warfare Mastery Institute will remain “alive” and constantly evolving. Learners who are subscribed to the content will be able to see when and how various learning materials change and improve.

The social interaction capabilities offered by an online platform also means that learners themselves can contribute to the evolution of learning materials in real time. In the current publishing industry, an author might be hesitant to write a book with a critical chapter simply left out. Who would want to buy a book with a missing chapter? However, from the perspective of the military/security professional, a missing chapter presents no problem whatsoever. The rest of the book might contain critical insights and the missing chapter might be on a topic that few people understand clearly, a topic with many open questions. The Warfare Mastery institute has no problem publishing a book or course and leaving such questions unanswered. Leaving gaps and drawing attention to them gets the entire online learning community to think more deeply and seek answers. Perhaps a reader will provide a critical insight or suggestion in a discussion thread that will help the author to fill in the missing pieces. In short, what if an author was able to write a book not for but rather with his/her readers in real time. Such an experience would likely be more educational for both the author and readers alike. While such an approach is less practical for someone who simply wants to sit down and read a book, it makes much more sense for the dedicated professional student who wants to master the subject matter and develop new insights.

Curated Collaborative AUTHORING

By allowing multiple authors and contributors to collaborate on a single platform, Wikipedia has quickly grown to become the largest encyclopedia in history. The idea behind Wikipedia has many merits but the Wiki model would be less useful for us at Warfare Mastery Institute in its existing form. Therefore, Warfare Mastery modifies the Wiki model in several key ways to capitalize on the benefits of collaborative learning/authorship but offer a product that is more useful for the professional audience. First, WMI will review every comment, contribution and submission and curate the overall presentation to the user community. There will of course be some entirely open discussion forums but the majority of the collaborative content will be carefully tailored so that it is both verified for accuracy and easy to understand.

Another problem with the Wiki model is not necessarily even that people publish things that are inaccurate, but rather that so many topics (especially historical or military topics) do not have definitive “correct answers.” Why was Operation Typhoon (the German drive on Moscow in 1941-42) a failure? Several highly-respected scholars will offer completely different answers to this question. However, by necessity, if one looks up Operation Typhoon on Wikipedia they expect to see a single article that provides a single answer or explanation. While some Wikipedia articles might attempt to capture differing perspectives, the Wiki model is not conducive to this approach and tends to amalgamate various perspectives into a single, easily-digestible explanation.

WMI takes the opposite approach, highlighting disagreements when they emerge and using them as starting points for deeper analysis and discussion. In many cases, it is within these disagreements and debates themselves that the most professional learning takes place. Therefore, a WMI book or course might not present a single thesis, but rather offer several explanations from different sources, compare them and analyze how each is useful for the professional in real-world application. In this way, WMI takes the collaborative learning/authorship concept from the Wiki model and refits it for combat learning applications.

MODULAR CONTENT

One inherent limitation of any book or course is that at some point, the author has to decide which way to “slice” the subject matter. For example, one book might cover the various campaigns fought in the South Pacific during World War II (Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Bougainville etc.) discussing the battles fought in the air on land and sea. However, what if the learner wants to focus on only the Guadalcanal campaign? In general, the reader would have to purchase a completely separate book that was specifically focused on Guadalcanal but the South Pacific book and Guadalcanal book might not integrate with each other very well. Wouldn’t it be better if the learner could essentially “zoom in” on the Guadalcanal topic while studying the larger South Pacific theater? Alternatively, what if the reader wanted to focus only on the air battles that spanned all of the various campaigns. This would also require a separate book but that book would end up rehashing much of the same material from the South Pacific book or Guadalcanal book.

Using the conventional book library model, a learner would need separate books on each campaign, separate books on air, land and sea warfare and other books dealing with specific topics such as weapons technology, logistics, or the leadership of specific commanders etc. All of these books would have a great deal of overlapping content and the overall learning experience would likely be disjointed. The digital medium allows for content to be modular and re-used as needed in different contexts. So, if a learner needs to focus on a specific time period, domain of battle or special topic, WMI can essentially “build” a custom book or course using the various modular components hosted on the digital platform and offer it at a much lower price (a recurring membership fee) than what it would cost to buy twelve books.

MULTIMEDIA LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Another common problem among military books is a lack of good maps, diagrams and pictures. While some books do a decent job of incorporating maps and graphics, it is not a simple task. In the ideal world, military history books would have a map on every page. This would alleviate the need to constantly flip back to reference the map while trying to follow the action. While this would not be possible within the constraints of most traditional books, the online learning environment makes it very easy. WMI intends to provide each learner with a rich, multimedia learning experience. A learner should be able to print out a series of maps separate from a book and reference them while reading. The digital environment also allows for animated maps that can show the movement of forces over time or digital overlays allowing the reader to customize the information displayed on the map.

In addition to easy-to-read maps and diagrams, there is a great advantage to presenting information in a variety of formats. Not only does this help users with different learning styles, but some presentation formats are more conducive to learning certain types of information. The WMI model integrates printed materials with pictures, animations, videos, live interviews, audio content, discussion forums and interactive experiences. Wargaming and simulation is also a critical component of military learning and war games will play an important part in every WMI book and course.

While WMI plans to publish its own war games and simulations, the primary focus is to “use what is there” and provide references and learner guides to incorporating other war games into the study curriculum. For example, a book or course on a certain campaign will provide reviews for all of the war games that offer a simulation of that campaign, discussion of the pros and cons of each game and suggestions for how to integrate gameplay into the wider learning experience. In many cases, it can be most beneficial to play a war game scenario before one knows what actually happened in the real battle and then replay it several times while studying the battle, focusing on specific themes or concepts gleaned from study.

SUMMARY AND The ROAD AHEAD

In summary, this article discusses WMI’s new approach to military professional education founded on the principles of leveraging existing resources, creating “living” content that is ever-evolving, curating the collaborative authoring process and delivering knowledge in a cutting-edge, modular, multimedia format built around a social/community learning platform. This new approach will prove particularly useful for military and security professionals seeking to improve their performance in real-world operations and conflicts. However, the approach will likely also prove interesting and educational for anyone who is interested in studying the history, theory and practice of warfare.

In the weeks and months to come, WMI will begin publishing new materials, many of which will be free and hosted on this site. However, those interested in deeper study/analysis and those who want to take an active role as participants in the project will be able to sign up as WMI members on our partnered site the Tactics Society for $9.99 monthly subscription fee. We will announce our first study project shortly on our STATUS UPDATES BOARD. We hope you will find the upcoming products interesting and useful and that you will join us on the journey to Warfare Mastery!