Professional military education

Professional military education is designed to develop creative, thinking leaders. A leader’s career, from the initial stages of leadership training, should be viewed as a continuous, progressive process of development. At each stage of his career, he should be preparing for the subsequent stage.

Whether he is an officer or enlisted, the early stages of a leader’s career are, in effect, his apprenticeship. While receiving a foundation in professional theory and concepts that will serve him throughout his career, the leader focuses on understanding the requirements and learning and applying the procedures and techniques associated with his field. This is when he learns his trade as an aviator, infantryman, artilleryman, or logistician. As he progresses, the leader should have mastered the requirements of his apprenticeship and should understand the interrelationship of the techniques and procedures within his field. His goal is to become an expert in the tactical level of war.

As an officer continues to develop, he should understand the interrelationship between his field and all the other fields within the Marine Corps. He should be an expert in tactics and techniques and should understand amphibious warfare and combined arms. He should be studying the operational level of war. At the senior levels he should be fully capable of articulating, applying, and integrating MAGTF warfighting capabilities in a joint and combined environment and should be an expert in the art of war at all levels.

The responsibility for implementing professional military education in the Marine Corps is three-tiered: it resides not only with the education establishment, but also with the commander and the individual.

The education establishment consists of those schools administered by the Marine Corps, subordinate commands, or outside agencies - established to provide formal education in the art and science of war. In all officer education particularly, schools should focus on developing a talent for military judgment, not on imparting knowledge through rote learning. Study conducted by the education establishment can neither provide complete career training for an individual nor reach all individuals. Rather, it builds upon the base provided by commanders and by individual study.

All commanders should consider the professional development of their subordinates a principal responsibility of command. Commanders should foster a personal teacher-student relationship with their subordinates. Commanders are expected to conduct a continuing professional education program for their subordinates which includes developing military judgment and decision making and teaches general professional subjects and specific technical subjects pertinent to occupational specialties. Useful tools for general professional development include supervised reading programs, map exercises, war games, battle studies, and terrain studies. Commanders should see the development of their subordinates as a direct reflection on themselves.

Finally, every Marine has a basic responsibility to study the profession of arms on his own. A leader without either interest in or knowledge of the history and theory of warfare the intellectual content of his profession is a leader in appearance only. Selfstudy in the art and science of war is at least equal in importance and should receive at least equal time to maintaining physical condition. This is particularly true among officers; after all, an officer’s principal weapon is his mind.

EQUIPPING

Equipment should be easy to operate and maintain, reliable, and interoperable with other equipment. It should require minimal specialized operator training. Further, equipment should be designed so that its usage is consistent with established doctrine and tactics. Primary considerations are strategic and tactical lift the Marine Corps’ reliance on Navy shipping for strategic mobility and on helicopters and vertical/short takeoff and landing aircraft for tactical mobility from ship to shore and during operations ashore.

Equipment that permits overcontrol of units in battle is in conflict with the Marine Corps’ philosophy of command and is not justifiable.

In order to minimize research and development costs and fielding time, the Marine Corps will exploit existing capabilities - “off-the-shelf” technology to the greatest extent possible.

Acquisition should be a complementary, two-way process. Especially for the long term, the process must identify combat requirements and develop equipment to satisfy these requirements. We should base these requirements on an analysis of critical enemy vulnerabilities and develop equipment specifically to exploit those vulnerabilities. At the same time, the process should not overlook existing equipment of obvious usefulness.

Equipment is useful only if it increases combat effectiveness. Any piece of equipment requires support: operator training, maintenance, power sources or fuel, and transport. The anticipated enhancement of capabilities must justify these support requirements and the employment of the equipment must take these requirements into account.

As much as possible, employment techniques and procedures should be developed concurrently with equipment to minimize delays between the fielding of the equipment and its usefulness to the operating forces. For the same reason, initial operator training should also precede equipment fielding.

We must guard against overreliance on technology. Technology can enhance the ways and means of war by improving man’s ability to wage it, but technology cannot and should not attempt to eliminate man from the process of waging war. Better equipment is not the cure for all ills; doctrinal and tactical solutions to combat deficiencies must also be sought. Any advantages gained by technological advancement are only temporary, for man will always find a countermeasure, tactical or itself technological, which will lessen the impact of the technology. Additionally, we must not become so dependent on equipment that we can no longer function effectively when the equipment becomes inoperable.

CONCLUSION

There are two basic military functions: waging war and preparing for war. Any military activities that do not contribute to the conduct of a present war are justifiable only if they contribute to preparedness for a possible future one. But, clearly, we cannot afford to separate conduct and preparation. They must be intimately related because failure in preparation leads to disaster on the battlefield.