Evolving DoD professional development
Professional Military Education has enabled military toxic leadership
Ethan Brown
The need to develop middle-tier leaders is paramount for every organization, and doubly so for the national defense enterprise. The United States military achieves this through the enrollment of promotable individuals into Professional Military Education (PME) curricula, iterated by rank tiers (such as Non-commissioned Officer Academy, Captains Career Course), special positions (Senior Enlisted Joint-PME, First Sergeant Academy), and strategic planning (Staff and War Colleges).
While these institutions of learning have benefited the force by developing service members to perform administrative and putative ‘leadership’ roles, the last twenty years of conflict have created a dynamic where academic development has taken precedence over warfighting prowess. Simply, those methods of professional development have produced a generation of middle-tier and senior leaders whose professional acumen hinges on careerism, resume building, and an environment of toxic leadership. Not the ingredients necessary to build a force that is ready to address the compounding threats facing the United States in today's security environment.
Force readiness hinges primarily on personnel retention — retaining the talented people entrusted and needed to fight our wars and safeguard our way of life — and no factor has been more influential in the DoD losing talented personnel than toxic leadership, all of whom ascended in rank and developed as leaders under the current PME construct. The Air Force has a well-documented endemic of toxic leadership, the Navy has no shortage of leadership failures where “networking and politics are the best means of promotion” and ditto the Marines and Army.
A flawed and misguided Professional Military Education system is not the sole cause or singular contributing factor to the proliferation of toxic leadership in the military. But academic leadership development from the past two decades is certainly one area where DoD senior leaders can make a change that refocuses the force on its primary function — national defense — and does a better job of creating leaders who junior officers and enlisted personnel can follow into combat.
Professional Military Education needs to refocus on making leaders for future warfare, pivoting away from corporatized management and process efficiency, and instead investing in human capital. And most importantly, developing curricula which focuses on leading men and women into the crucible of combat. Therein lies the single most significant facet of how PME has changed, and failed, to produce effective leaders in the military.
The Global War on Terror created two camps across the force, the ones who deployed into combat zones and saw PME as a necessary inconvenience (admittedly a smaller percentage than the force writ large), and those who relied on professional development accolades in order to advance careers. The resulting “careerism” spread, succinctly defined in a McConnell AFB blog entry by former Chief Master Sergeant Kevin Brooks as “[an] overwhelming desire to advance one's own career or social status, usually at the expense of other personal interests or social growth”. That blog entry by a senior enlisted member was written in 2007, at the early peak of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the two camps in career progression truly began to divide. The problem has scarcely improved, although the focus on professional development has certainly proliferated among the forces.
Where PME and careerism have left the military
I can think back to when I completed NCOA in 2018 at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, I was the last class to complete the curriculum at that institution before Hurricane Michael destroyed the entire facility. There, the doctrinal syllabus spent the entirety of the program focusing on writing and the psychology of being a manager — not a leader, a manager — and navigating the uncomfortable ‘what ifs’ in a manager’s day as expected of a E-6/E-7 in the Air Force.
Simulations included uncomfortable circumstances where errant junior enlisted needed help with issues like physical fitness or financial health — ‘how do you manage your airman in this case’? My efforts to constantly shift the focus of the discussion forums and written assignments back to a combat application, while patiently understood by the faculty, did not always produce the ‘book answer’ derived from the tortuous Course 15 leadership manual. That manual, which was the supposed standard for ‘how to be an NCO’, was hundreds of pages of subjective scenarios and self-discovery guided readings that had absolutely zero relevance to combat or national defense.
It may have worked perfectly well for a section manager at Google or Bank of America, but for an airman with an E-7 line number and yet another combat deployment to Afghanistan on the calendar, this school was a poorly timed career progression necessity. It was five weeks that wasn’t spent with my Joint Special Operations team in preparation for that rotation, and again, those who deploy to actual combat make up a smaller percentage of the force, but the point stands. And for those who do not see the flashes of the enemy guns, PME is potentially the only leadership development forum these future leaders might engage in.
This is no critique on the instructor cadre either, those who understood well that they curriculum was driven by institutional policy. They made their best effort to extrapolate the suppositions into reality, or at least analogous to literal leadership challenges, but they were indeed constrained by the mandatory curriculum.
Lessons learned in warfare are lessons in leadership…no environment separates ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ more ruthlessly. Retired Chief Master Sergeant Kevin Laliberte, whose 20+ year career spanned the full breadth of the special operations enterprise and senior positions in the new Space Force, fought the service's obsessive compulsive PME requirements to the very end. During a recent interview, he recounted a specific chapter in his career, one where he was deeply integrated into a highly compartmentalized special operations reconnaissance element. Administratively, he was for all intents and purposes shadowed out of Air Force purview. It was during this time when the Air Force ecosystem demanded that he attend non-commissioned officer academy. This would have taken him out of training which was utterly critical for upcoming deployments. Lalibertes squadron leadership team managed to defer his requirements to attend PME, which ultimately had no impact on his promotion to the senior enlisted ranks in later years.
Towards the end of his career, the same issue returned: “I had made Chief Master Sergeant, with an opportunity to deploy as a Command Chief. By this time, I had already completed SEJ-PME, the Sergeant Majors Academy, and had studied at the National War College for a semester — the only enlisted member at that particular cohort — but the command tabbed me to attend the Chief Leadership Course to learn how to be an E-9”. The challenge to the Air Force command leadership was what CLC would teach a senior enlisted member who had already promoted and led troops into combat. Ultimately, Laliberte would see the CLC requirement waived from his record to no adverse effect, an administrative decision that speaks for itself.
During another interview with a Senior Enlisted member in the Air Force Special Operations Command, who remains on active duty and requested anonymity due to their position, the problem of careerism and flagging professional development is endemic across the DoD and intelligence services. “Back in 2016, three Green Beret’s had been killed in Jordan who were part of the Inter-Agency Timber Sycamore program, working with the CIA to train moderate Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. I’ve spent time working with both camps, and as this article from SOFREP recalled:
“Much like the issue of tick marks and product generation, the agency has a careerist culture in which numbers have to be met in order for their officers to be eligible for promotion, therefore the mission takes second place’. It’s an issue that is not unique to the DoD, but something we should have more control over.”
It reflects the prioritization of process efficiency and numbers management over investing in people and human development.
How to refocus the PME enterprise
First, the DoD needs to revise how it values PME. and build curricula that creates proficient warfighters, which inherently requires leadership as a tangible value. A series of articles published by an Air Force officer in the Military Times a few years ago addressed this issue succinctly:
“Some people should never be in charge of another human being. The power that comes with rank and command is inherently corrupting, and we must guard against those who fall prey. We owe it to our airmen to ensure that they are better off with their leadership than without. We are finding smart officers, but we must do more to find good leaders and sideline the bad; Professional military education [for Air Force officers] is lacking in leadership”.
This writer and veteran would argue that a great deal of these problems stems from an overemphasis on corporatized PME curricula which has forgotten about the warfighting part of wearing the uniform. This critique is by no means an endorsement of the ludicrous assertions by hyper-partisan commentary on the need for “a military full of type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls”. But there is a point that the leadership development of today's military has forgotten its charge of being readying leaders to engage in the potential total war of the future. Rather, PME and leadership grooming has had little clarity on what it is supposed to produce and has bred a generation of careerists who learned how to promote while the actual warfighters were busy deploying over and over to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Revitalizing leadership development for the military does not involve better writing skills or adopting project management methodologies to increase productivity (the core of PME as it stands). Certainly, those are necessary components to administrative management, and genuine leaders will find a way to execute that necessity. The DoD’s best course for revitalizing PME involves readying soon-to-be and rising leaders for taking their fellow servicemen and women into harm's way. It must create a training environment where dynamic thinking is fostered, not dependency on ‘what the/a book says’. It needs to be a place where ideas are exchanged across operational backgrounds and assumptions are challenged to foster growth and camaraderie between diverse individuals whose only similarity might be the uniform they wear.
Ethan Brown is the founder and Editor-in-chief for the NextGenWarBlog. He also serves as a senior fellow for defense studies at the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence and Global Affairs (Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress), and a contributor to Task & Purpose, WarontheRocks, the Diplomatic Courier, and Modern War Institute (West Point). As a U.S. Air Force Special Warfare veteran, he spent 11 years as a special operations joint terminal attack controller and air advisor. He is on Twitter @LibertyStoic.
