The NWC Curriculum

Since its inception, NWC has had as its fundamental purpose providing first-rate, graduate-level education in the dynamics of force, diplomacy, economics, and information to U.S. military officers, Foreign Service Officers and international fellows from select partner countries. The National War College was officially established on 1 July 1946. According to Lieutenant General Leonard T. Gerow, USA, president of the board that recommended its formation, “The College is concerned with grand strategy and the utilization of the national resources necessary to implement that strategy. . . . Its graduates will exercise a great influence on the formulation of national and foreign policy in both peace and war.” The curriculum is designed to support this broad goal.

Background: The Basis for the Curriculum

Over the past two decades, four aspects of NWC’s mission have emerged as crucial to the shape and focus of the National War College program. First is the charge to help prepare future leaders by conducting a senior-level course of study in “national security strategy.” While the service colleges concentrate on national military strategy and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) concentrates on the resource component of national power, NWC is singularly tasked with focusing on national security strategy – the orchestration of all the instruments of national power to pursue national interests. NWC understands its purpose and mission to be to create a cadre of officers with special expertise in national security strategy that, blended with cadres of officers with special expertise in other areas of national security affairs, creates a synergy far more powerful than could be achieved by any uniform, standardized program of education for all officers. Every aspect of the National War College program is shaped by the goal of providing senior government officials a graduate-level education in evaluation, development, formulation, and implementation of national security strategy.

Second is the task to “educate.” The Officer Professional Military Education Policy (OPMEP) defines “educate” as conveying general bodies of knowledge and developing habits of mind applicable to a broad spectrum of endeavors. As directed in the OPMEP, NWC aims not at enhancing its students’ capacities to perform specific functions and tasks, but rather at fostering their breadth of view, diverse perspectives, critical analysis, abstract reasoning, comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty, and innovative thinking, particularly with respect to complex problems. The primary disciplines that comprise the NWC core curriculum include political science, international relations, history, economics, ethics, sociology, and leadership. At the National War College, we maintain focus on the fact that we are a professional school, and we emphasize education as the way to achieve program objectives rather than education as an end in itself.

Third is the charge to prepare “future” leaders for high-level policy, command, and staff responsibilities. In designing and executing its curriculum, NWC looks beyond its graduates follow-on assignments and also considers the highest, most important responsibilities they will hold during the remainder of their careers. As the OPMEP stipulates, NWC concentrates on developing the habits of mind, conceptual foundations, and critical faculties graduates will need as strategic leaders or as the key strategists, planners, and executive assistants in the Department of Defense, Joint Staff, Services, Department of State, and other government agencies.

Finally, NWC has a charge to prepare officers not only from the Armed Forces but also from a wide variety of other civilian agencies. All aspects of the National War College are thoroughly joint and interagency: its origins, its programs, its faculty, and its students. Because a joint and integrated perspective permeates and informs the entire NWC program, the experience forces students out of their intellectual and cultural comfort zone. The nature of the NWC environment ensures all NWC graduates are able to transcend their particular service, operational, or intellectual frame of reference and can operate from a truly “joint” perspective.

Desired Educational Outcomes

The NWC curriculum is designed to achieve a number of specific outcomes, goals related to the purpose and mission of the College.

The NWC Graduate
Given the National War College mission, its aim is to develop superior strategists who are expert in the dynamics of force, diplomacy, economics, and information and the orchestrated employment of those instruments in pursuit of national interests. The NWC curriculum has a two-fold goal in this respect:

1. To improve the quality of applied strategic thinking among all of its graduates, encouraging the shift in their intellectual and professional perspectives from the tactical and operational to the strategic, in order to produce graduates adept at functioning in the grey areas that characterize the complex, civil-military, multinational interactions at the national strategic level they can be expected to encounter for the remainder of their professional careers; and
2. To foster and encourage the continued development of a select cadre of bona fide strategists, strategy and policy advisors, and political-military planners who demonstrate a high degree of conceptualization and innovation in national strategy formulation and in areas such as implementation, military theory and doctrine development, and the craft of campaign design.

The NWC program is designed to expand and enhance the students’ ability to analyze national security problems and issues and develop appropriate national security strategies in response – strategies that integrate all the elements of national power. The curriculum addresses the fundamentals of thinking strategically, the elements and instruments of national power and influence, the theory and practice of war, the domestic and international context of national security strategy, and contemporary military strategy and doctrine. The program stresses the interrelationship of domestic, foreign, and defense polices, and the necessity of inclusion and coordination of Service, interagency, and multinational capabilities, perspectives, and other factors in national security strategy planning, operationalization, and execution.

Joint Educational Outcomes

Apart from these broad educational goals, the National War College program is also based on seven educational outcomes derived from the mission and fully consistent with the joint learning areas outlined in the OPMEP. These outcomes define the essential concepts our graduates must master, and they serve to integrate the entire academic program:

• Analyze the logic of strategic thinking for national security matters;
• Analyze how national, transnational and international factors shape policy and strategy;
• Evaluate how U.S. domestic factors influence the development of strategy and policy;
• Analyze war across its spectrum as a holistic phenomenon;
• Analyze the nature, purpose, capabilities, limitations, and principal concepts for use of the non-military instruments of power (e.g., diplomatic, economic, and informational) in peace, crisis, and war;
• Develop national security strategies in peace, crisis, and war; and
• Examine how strategic leaders shape and implement policy and strategy.

The National War College believes that military and civilian men and women who can meet these standards will be ideally suited to serve as future strategic leaders and policy advisors in high-level policy, command, and staff responsibilities.

The NWC program is intended to produce graduates with the following intellectual attributes:

• Analytical. Exceptionally skilled in:
  

  • Critical, logical analysis of strategic problems and joint issues;
  • Integration and synthesis of diverse and competing concepts, interests,
  • and perspectives;
  • Clear, concise, and persuasive communications

• Adaptive. Endowed with the mental flexibility and agility necessary to handle ambiguity and uncertainty; sensitive to the moral, ethical, and legal dimensions inherent in contemporary national and international security affairs.
• Innovative. Demonstrating creative, insightful, and imaginative thinking; committed to wrestling with, and adapting to, the evolving character of international relations and conflict.
• Broadly educated. Imbued with a joint, interagency, and multinational perspective and possessing a broad theoretical, strategic, and cultural awareness. This attribute provides a firm foundation for continued intellectual development throughout the course and after graduation.

Organizing and Administering the Curriculum

Each spring, the NWC leadership assigns faculty members to serve as Core Course Directors. Assignments are based on interest, experience, academic expertise and availability. The Core Course Director formulates, proposes, prepares and conducts one of seven assigned courses in the Core Curriculum. Course Directors are chosen by the Dean of Faculty, with the recommendations of the Associate Deans and Department Chairs, for a period of two to three years.

The Core Course Director is responsible for all aspects of course development and delivery, selecting readings, choosing guest speakers, determining lesson formats, distributing contact hours, and writing the course syllabus. He/she ensures that guest speakers understand where their lecture fits in the course and the audience to whom they will be speaking, are welcomed to the college, appropriately thanked for their contributions to the course and their travel and honorarium expenses are taken care of. The Core Course Director offers guidance, in the form of instructional notes or Faculty Workshops, to the Faculty Seminar Leaders involved in his/her section of the Core Curriculum. Finally, the Core Course Director serves as a FSL during his/her core course.

Contact hours

Normally, when elective courses are in session, the Core Curriculum is limited to no more than nine contact hours per week. When electives are not in session, Core Course Directors may schedule up to thirteen contact hours per week.

Reading Assignments

Students should be assigned no more than 400 pages of readings each week for any Core Course. Reading assignments can be in book, article or online form.

Writing Assignments

Each Core Course must have a writing requirement. Individual Core Course Directors can decide the form of that requirement, but assignments typically range between 8-10 pages of written work for the course. All core course writing requirements should have an associated assessment form/rubric. These rubrics should be included in the course syllabus.

Active Learning

Core courses should emphasize active learning. As a general rule, core course lectures, panel discussions, and audio-visual presentations should compromise no more than 40 percent of the course’s overall contact hours.

Faculty Workshops

Core Course Directors are expected to run periodic, mandatory Faculty Workshops for his/her cadre of FSLs. At these workshops, the Core Course Director provides FSLs with teaching notes as well as suggestions for seminar planning and a summation of the readings. The Faculty Workshop is also an allotted time for dialogue between/amongst FSLs and the Core Course Director.