Abstract
Identifying and developing officer competence is important to a nation’s security and a crucial attribute of a legitimate military establishment. Critics have claimed that the U.S. officer corps favors a narrow conception of expertise that limits the armed forces’ utility as an instrument of policy. Drawing from the dialogue between Huntington and Janowitz, as well as Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom, this article proposes a wider understanding of officer competence consisting of four distinct conceptual categories. The U.S. defense establishment favors “military skill” over other categories of competence. As a result, the officer corps is poorly prepared for 21st-century warfare. To remedy this situation, professional military education should cultivate military leaders that, in addition to military skill, have sociopolitical competence and practical wisdom. In this context, this article suggests strategies to develop such competencies that officers need to be able to achieve a diversity of national political goals.
Keywords
Introduction
This article proposes a conceptual framework to discuss a question of fundamental importance to national security: What proficiencies do U.S. military leaders need to serve the nation’s political goals? The U.S. officer corps’ conventional concept of competence is framed by Huntington’s (1964) phrase: “the peculiar skill of the officer is the management of violence” (p. 13, see Nielsen & Snider, 2009, pp. 295–298). In an era where “[w]inning in war…is an inherently civil-military task” (McMaster, 2015, p. 11), this understanding is insufficient. Still, Cohen (2002) finds that a “simplified Huntingtonian conception of military professionalism remains the dominant view with the American defense establishment” (p. 229). He argues this view has reduced U.S. military leaders’ utility as an instrument of foreign policy because it portrays their proficiency as technical expertise, independent from the particular sociopolitical context they are called on to influence (pp. 242–243).
To prepare the U.S. Armed Forces to meet 21st-century security challenges, many have taken issue with this conventional notion of officer competence (Shadlow & Lacquement, 2009; Stavridis, Rokke, & Pierce, 2016). Commandant of the U.S. Army War College, Major General Rapp (2015) maintains this notion has frequently steered the officer corps wrong in the practical tasks of making and implementing contemporary national security strategies with their civilian counterparts. He holds Huntington’s separation of the military and civilian spheres in national security policy appeals to U.S. officers, because it delimits their area of responsibility to the former sphere. According to Warren (2015), it has also cultivated a centurion-mindset in the U.S. Army, making the army “capable of winning nearly every firefight” (p. 28) but unable to achieve political objectives. A U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff related report finds that the country’s armed forces operate well in a force-on-force paradigm but that this is poorly suited to the kinds of wars that have challenged national security since September 11, 2001 (U.S. Joint and Coalition Operational Analysis, 2012, pp. 1, 7, 19–21). In the same vein, Feaver (2011) calls for a different kind of officer expertise and notes in reference to U.S. shortcomings in Iraq since 2003 that “most of the problems resulted from inaccurate judgments about how the…[w]ar would unfold” (p. 123). Such poor judgments reflect post–World War II deficiencies in U.S. military professionalism associated with an increase in anti-intellectualism and a decrease in strategic mindedness. This, Kohn (2009) argues, constitutes a daunting challenge to national security and calls for reforms in the way the U.S. trains and develops military leader competence.
However, what kind of competency the U.S. officer corps needs to succeed in the future remains unclear. For the past two decades, professional debates have brought attention to a myriad of unconventional challenges and demands being placed upon commanders at all levels during missions (Krulak, 1999; Mattis & Hoffman, 2005). U.S. military doctrines and policy documents list a host of relevant skill sets for officers, as the ability to cooperate with civilians in multiagency and multinational operations abroad (U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2013, p. i), the ability to operate beyond the physical battleground and across multiple domains, including public perception (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 2014, p. iv) and the ability to think critically and creatively (U.S. Military Academy, 2015, p. 3). Seen through the lens of the conventional notion of officer competence, the breadth and complexity of such expectations are overwhelming and their relevance contested; hence, there is a risk that a conventional-minded officer corps will fall back on the management of violence as its approach in future conflicts. To break this futile cycle, alternatives to the conventional conception should be explored. As a contribution to this end, this article proposes a simple framework to map out a wider understanding of officer competence (see Table 1).
An Analytical Framework for a Wider Conception of Officer Competence.
Table 1 consists of four conceptually distinct analytical categories produced from the Huntington–Janowitz dialogue on civil–military relations, particularly whether officers should be politically sensitive, and Aristotle’s distinction between technical skill and practical wisdom as different forms of competence. Based on the abovementioned critics and doctrinal demands, I argue that the U.S. defense establishment focuses on Category 1, omitting the three other forms of proficiency officers need to succeed in 21st-century warfare.
This article begins by theoretically clarifying notions of the military profession and of competence, respectively, before it combines them to produce the four distinct analytical concepts of officer competence. These concepts are then used to illustrate how the notions can serve as mental constructs to further understanding of professional expertise beyond the conventional concept. Finally, this article suggests methods for cultivating wider officer competence.
The Huntington–Janowitz Dialogue on the Military Profession
The conventional concept of officer competence is a function of Huntington’s (1964) main thesis in civil–military relations theory: objective civilian control. He argues that for an armed force to be both militarily efficient and under strict political control, it must operate largely autonomously from the civilian sphere, yet accept subordination to the government. The government should seek advice from the highest executive military level, set the goals for the war, and then leave it to the military executives to efficiently achieve those goals. To that end, he conceptualizes a particular understanding of the military profession defined by three main characteristics: the expertise, the responsibility, and the corporate character of officership. It is the first of these that encompasses Huntington’s seminal understanding of officer competence.
The profession’s quintessential expertise is the management of violence, he claims. Huntington (1964, pp. 9, 14) does mention the importance of a liberal arts education to broaden officers’ minds, but this is of mere auxiliary utility to the technical and instrumental abilities required in his picture of the military profession: “The function of a military force is successful armed combat…The direction, operation, and control of a human organization whose primary function is the application of violence is the peculiar skill of the officer” (Huntington, 1964, p. 11).
The military profession’s primary responsibility is the military security of society. This implies “that [officers’] skill can only be utilized for purposes approved by society through its political agent, the state” (Huntington, 1964, pp. 15–16). This idea is crucial to the profession’s ethical rationale and constitutes the foundation of its legitimacy maintained by the state’s monopoly on commissioning officers. Huntington’s (1964) final characteristic promotes the idea that officers “share a sense of…consciousness of themselves as a group apart from laymen” (p. 10). While indispensable to objective civilian control, this corporateness of the military profession is the most controversial, since it prescribes the separation of civilian and military spheres. Huntington’s (1964) ideal is an officer corps that is “immune to politics” (p. 464). He is certainly aware that military decisions at the highest level of command are often interwoven with political decisions but maintains that “[t]he essence of objective civilian control is the recognition of autonomous military professionalism” (p. 83). His overriding concern that officers do not seek political power and refrain from bipartisanship politics spurs Huntington to frame military expertise—in which officers should excel—as a distinct field apart from the political one (Cohen, 2002, pp. 241–242).
Morris Janowitz offers a different view: officers shall not take an active role in domestic politics, but they must be politically sensitive. Writing at the height of the Cold War, Janowitz (1964, pp. 34, 264) argued that nuclear weapons have changed warfare and therefore the military profession; in contrast to wars of the past, nuclear wars cannot be won and must therefore be avoided. Janowitz (1964) promotes the idea of a constabulary force, whose officers are “committed to the minimum use of force, and seek viable international relations rather than victory” (p. 418). He calls for a military professional self-conception that includes an “enlarged politico-military responsibility” (p. vii). Janowitz sees the military and civilian spheres as integrated and argues that officers should be able to operate in both. U.S. politicians and military personnel, also those at lower levels in the chain of command, should cooperate to achieve strategic deterrence, to manage crises, and to solve conflicts. This suggests the kind of officer competence called for in the Introduction above with reference to U.S. doctrines and to prominent critics of Huntington’s narrow conception.
The conventional understanding of officer competence is also more limited than the mind-set that dominated the U.S. military profession prior to the Cold War, according to Martin van Creveld. The officer corps’ considerations to sociopolitical problems in its conduct of war partly explains why the “United States’ grand strategy in World War II was superbly conceived and well executed” (Creveld, 1990, p. 67). Along a similar line of reasoning, Cohen (2002, p. 243) argues that the conventional notion’s shortcomings are demonstrated in the United States failures in Vietnam and Somalia. In such wars a host of sociopolitical dynamics largely outside the control of the military are in play and continuously change the wars’ sociopolitical contexts. To succeed, commanders at all levels must have a view that extends beyond the military sphere: one guiding them to adapt their means and ways to the new context at hand, and often in cooperation with nonmilitary actors. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Feaver (1996, p. 150) observes U.S. officers were tasked with missions in which military and civilian functions converged. Decades earlier, Janowitz (1964) had recommended: “The professional soldier must develop more and more skills and orientations common to civilian administrators” (p. 424). He continued: The prescribed career of the future is one that will sensitize the military officer to the political and social consequences of military action…Under the constabulary concept, even the most junior officer, depending on his assignment, may be acting as a political agent. (p. 426)
On this point, he can find support in the sociology of professions. Scholars in this broader field depart from the same idea: that professions, as medical doctors and lawyers, hold a “fiduciary responsibility” (Parsons, 1978, p. 40). Within domains of particular societal importance, society has granted professions a degree of autonomy in order for them to manage their respective domains in the best interests of society. Crucially, the extent to which professions enjoy such autonomy is a function of society’s trust in the professions’ capability to deliver on society’s goals. This implies that a profession must justify its actions with reference to its particular responsibility and any additional tasks its government and society have given it. From this understanding technical expertise does not suffice, an important part of officer competence is to know in which way such expertise is best used to serve society. On this point, Anders Molander and Lars Inge Terum (2008) note “As less is taken for granted, and more is being questioned, only the conviction of arguments can constitute grounds for legitimacy” (p. 15; translated from Norwegian). The relevance of this observation for the military profession is clarified by General Joulwan, then North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Supreme Allied Commander Europe: “NATO is exceptionally dependent upon positive public opinion. Political will to perform any task can never be expected unless the publics are clearly informed and sympathetic to our endeavors” (quoted in Clifford & Wilton, 2000, p. 11).
This debate in the Huntington–Janowitz dialogue constitutes one dimension of wider officer competence (Table 1). The vertical line in the analytical framework makes the distinction between notions of officer proficiencies confined to the military sphere, as Huntington advocates, and those extending to the sociopolitical sphere, which Janowitz calls for. In order to establish the framework’s horizontal line, we shall now unfold the second dimension of wider officer competence.
Aristotle’s Categories of Competence
When commanders carry out daily duties, the conventional conception of officer competence frames their expertise as skills as reflected in Huntington’s seminal definition which opened this article. The academic field sociology of professions applies a wider understanding on the matter: what characterizes professional competence is knowing what should be done to achieve a common good. This form of knowledge cannot be captured by commonly used terms, such as theory and skill. As Montgomery (2006, p. 162) points out, medicine clearly relies on scientific knowledge, but a medical doctor needs more than theory to treat a patient; moreover, “[b]asic skills do not define a profession” (Hibbert, 2012, p. 69). From this perspective, the conventional conception does not account for the most important form of officer competence, that is, knowing in which way military means can achieve political ends.
Unravelling this less appreciated form of knowledge, scholars draw on Aristotle who established this as a separate category and labeled it phronesis to distinguish it from techne and episteme—in contemporary terminology “practical wisdom,” “technical skill,” and “scientific knowledge,” respectively (Flyvbjerg, 2014, pp. 3–4, 53–54; Parson, 1968, p. 536). These three categories shall now be introduced in reversed order to further unfold the wider notion of officer competence.
Scientific knowledge was conceptualized by Plato as a category for claims proven by evidence or logic to be true. It encapsulates the forms of knowledge that have been the trademark of universities for centuries. To his student, Aristotle (2004, pp. 105–106), scientific knowledge referred to truths about the nature of things, such as laws of nature and similar claims that were universally valid and which were scientific in the sense of serving as primary principles in the construction of theorems. The original concept of this category came to shape scientific ideals, initially within the natural sciences and later within positivistic approaches to the social sciences and arguably to military theory as well (Flyvbjerg, 2014, p. 56; Schön, 1983, pp. 30–37).
Technical skill, on the other hand, refers to a practical form of knowledge which is necessary to make or do things. Aristotle (2004, pp. 106–107) uses knowing how to make a building as an example of such skill. The military profession uses this kind of knowledge, for example, when managing violence to physically destroy a target. Technical skill has an important tacit dimension gained only through practice, like knowing how hard to twist a screw (Freidson, 2007, pp. 26–27) or, in the military realm, how to maneuver troops on the ground. In a more general formulation, “[t]echne is the disposition to act in a true and reasoned way according to the rules of a craft” (Kemmis, 2012, p. 149). As practice takes place in a context, the skill of the practitioner is reflected in his ability to adapt his skill to the situation at hand. Importantly, technical skill is based on what Schön (1983, pp. 21–30) refers to as “technical rationality.” That is to say, the practitioner follows an instrumental logic to make things and to measure the efficiency by which this is done.
Aristotle adds practical wisdom as a distinct form of knowledge. It refers to knowing what is the right thing to do to achieve a common good in situations when there are several, often conflicting, objectives. “Practical wisdom is concerned with acts that are just, noble and good…” (Aristotle, 2004, p. 115). Emerging from the realm of values, such competence invites disagreement because it involves matters that can be deliberated about in the sense of weighing, valuing, and judging among competing groups existing within pluralistic societies. Crucially, such deliberations are expressed in action: “Practical wisdom gives commands, since its end is what should or should not be done…” (Aristotle, 2004, p. 114). To illustrate this form of knowledge, he points to heads of states and of households, particularly the statesman Pericles who “can see what is good for themselves and what is good for people in general…” (Aristotle, 2004, p. 107). It is this ability to know how to make and act upon prudent judgments in context that is particularly relevant for the professions (Flyvbjerg, 2014; Kinsella & Pitman, 2012; Schön, 1987, pp. 3–7). Practical wisdom captures, in Stephen Kemmis’ (2012) formulation: “…a quality of mind and character and action—the quality that consists in being open to experience and being committed to acting with wisdom and prudence for the good. The person who has virtue has become informed by experience and history and thus has a capacity to think critically about a given situation…and then to think practically about what should be done…” (p. 156; emphasis in original).
The shortcomings of the conventional concept of officer competence lie in its flawed assumption that knowledge primarily comes in the form of either technical skill or scientific knowledge. Notwithstanding the two latter concepts’ importance to the profession, they fail to account for the most important form of expertise in a human activity so profoundly influenced by chance. It is practical wisdom Clausewitz (1989) prescribes when he calls for a commander’s “sensitive and discriminating judgment” to act in war, where “three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty” (p. 101). In addition, commanders need practical wisdom because, as Cohen (2002) points out, they shall achieve political ends that—to the frustration of the conventional military mind—by nature “are often ambiguous, contradictory, and uncertain” (p. 241). Techniques and theoretical laws fall short as guiding devices in such situations. To achieve ends beyond the mere survival of their troops, commanders at all levels need to adapt plans to facts on the ground. As the context changes, they need practical wisdom to critically assess the validity of operational assumptions, to balance risks with potential gains, to seek advantageous spillover effects in other domains, and to adapt their plans to better achieve their objectives.
Hence, practical wisdom is not yet another task imposed on officers but a concept to help them distinguish between the kind of competence they use to act wisely, from the skill they use to do things correctly, and the theoretical knowledge they use to predict outcomes based on generalizations. This conceptual distinction requires clarification.
The three forms of knowledge should be appreciated for being different and mutually reinforcing. For instance, practical wisdom draws on scientific knowledge for direction and on technical skill for application. Practical wisdom differs from scientific knowledge because it is pragmatic and can only achieve its purpose in a concrete sociopolitical context, whereas the scientific kind of knowledge is universal in nature and exists independently of context. Practical wisdom differs from technical skill because the former is a kind of practice driven by value rationality and guided by critical normative reflection, as opposed to the latter's technical rationality and procedural guidance (Flyvbjerg, 2014, pp. 53–55; Schön, 1983, pp. 164–167).
In brief, scientific knowledge, technical skill, and practical wisdom, respectively, aim to know: what is right, how to do things right, and what is the right thing to do. To that end, they apply different rationalities, which in the same order is truth seeking, technical, and value based. Where the first form of knowledge is general and abstract, the latter two are context dependent and expressed in action. For this reason, the latter two are also best suited to describe the kinds of knowledge that military leaders use when they translate government policy to actions on the ground. Therefore, technical skill and practical wisdom will be used as two distinct analytical categories to make up the horizontal dimension in the analytical framework.
Wider Officer Competence—An Analytical Framework
By combining the two theoretically clarified dimensions—military profession and competence—explained above, four distinct conceptual categories of expertise come to the fore: military skill, military wisdom, sociopolitical skill, and sociopolitical wisdom. Together, they form an analytical framework unfolding a wider understanding of officer competence (Table 1). The framework visualizes that the conventional and predominant concept is confined to only one of the four categories and thus supports the critics presented in the Introduction, who argue that the U.S. defense establishment promotes officer competence that is inadequate to deal with contemporary threats to national security. Each of the four concepts shall now be explained.
Category 1: Military skill
The first category of officer competence combines the essence of Huntington’s understanding of expertise, that is, management of violence, with the kind of knowledge the military profession uses in practice related to skill. Military skill can be defined as knowing how to use military means most efficiently to achieve a given military outcome in a specific situation; it encompasses the kind of skill-based knowledge officers use to manage violence in order to defeat enemy forces.
Officers use Category 1 competence when they develop and execute military plans. This implies drawing on theoretical knowledge, often in the descriptive form of military doctrines and regulations, and carrying out operational activities along established procedures. Managing violence with military efficiency further necessitates instrumental judgment based on a technical rationality that strives to achieve maximum kinetic effect on targets. In broader terms, military skill includes the instrumental strategic mind-set commanders apply when using military means and methods in a largely procedural way to achieve objectives.
Category 2: Military wisdom
The second notion combines the expertise of managing violence with Aristotle’s analytical category practical wisdom. Military wisdom is defined as knowing in which way military skill is best used in a specific context taking into consideration several, potentially conflicting, military objectives, and concerns; that is, knowing what is the right thing to do with military means to achieve a good military outcome. Officers use Category 2 competence, for example, when they evaluate information from the theatre, consider military factors potentially affecting their ability to achieve objectives, and loop back in short- and long-term command cycles to use their updated situational awareness to guide future action. Officers also need military wisdom to assess planning assumptions and risks involved in a specific operation.
Category 2 compares with Category 1 in the sense that both are confined to the military sphere, and both involve a strategic mind-set that can unify ends, ways, and means in a coherent plan. The difference is that Category 1’s strategic mind-set is driven by a technical rationality, whereas Category 2’s is driven by value rationality. Obviously, this distinction will be blurred in practice, but the more officers focus on the destruction of physical targets, the more they use technical skill. The more that commanders are guided by broader military objectives and concerns, the more they rely on practical wisdom. Obviously, officers may choose to approach such concerns, including the tasks listed in the previous paragraph, by transforming such critical normative reflections into the arraying of objective facts. However, then they apply Category 1’s technical rationality, rather than the adequate value rationality of military wisdom.
Category 3: Sociopolitical skill
Sociopolitical skill resides exclusively in the sociopolitical sphere and is defined as knowing how to cooperate most efficiently with civilians to solve a specific task. The tag reflects Janowitz’s (1964, p. 424) abovementioned insistence that the military profession also needs civilian skills. This includes, for example, social skills, intercultural skills, and communication skills.
Officers use such skills to engage efficiently with society, political authorities, and other civilian bodies. At the highest level of command, officers employ sociopolitical skill to get their messages across to political leadership. At all other levels, officers utilize it in their cooperation with civilian counterparts, for example, in the planning and execution of interagency activities. Officers also use sociopolitical skill to communicate well with the public, for instance, through media.
Category 4: Sociopolitical wisdom
This notion refers to the kind of competence officers apply when using their military unit as a political instrument, sensitive to its political and social impact. Sociopolitical wisdom is defined as knowing in which way military forces are best used in a specific context taking into consideration several, potentially conflicting, political ends and concerns; in other words, knowing what is the right thing to do with military forces to best contribute to a good political outcome.
Officers need Category 4 proficiency to understand their task in a broader sociopolitical context and to this end draw from the two previously mentioned notions of officer competence. Like Category 3 skill, sociopolitical wisdom helps officers relate with civilians. The difference is that commanders use Category 4 expertise to choose a course of action that will maintain civilian trust, but apply Category 3 expertise to actually achieve it. In both Categories 2 and 4, officers use practical wisdom to evaluate information, to assess broader operational assumptions and risks involved, and to decide on a wise course of action. However, in contrast to Category 2, sociopolitical wisdom 4 extends into political concerns and potentially has a global reach. Communicating with designated target groups, officers also use such Category 4 competence to frame a specific military incident in the context that best conveys the intended purpose. The most senior officers use such expertise to help politicians achieve national goals, in what Cohen (2002, p. 209) refers to as the unequal dialogue. In the case of an immediate threat to national security, these may not be clear from the outset, and not all desired ends may be achievable by means of military force. Thus, executive commanders need practical wisdom to give politicians good advice for formulating policy goals and for carving out a strategy to achieve them with readily available means of national power.
Using the Analytical Framework
Having defined and explained Table 1’s four categories, they shall now be briefly applied to illustrate their utility as analytical tools to evaluate the military profession’s proficiency and to discuss what kind of expertise is required to meet security challenges in the 21st century. This will be exemplified by using the analytical framework first as a means to shed light on the U.S. officer corps’ self-conception and, secondly, to illustrate how disagreements about required officer competence reflect a deeper disagreement about what war is.
The U.S. officer corps’ self-conception remains within Category 1
It is a central argument of this article that Category 1 captures the kind of officer competence the U.S. Armed Forces favor. Table 1 visualizes that this is a narrow understanding omitting three additional forms of proficiency military leaders need to succeed in 21st-century warfare. To support this case, the introduction brought in scholars and officers arguing that Huntington’s ideal of the apolitical officer continues to influence the military profession, thus excluding Categories 3 and 4. Moreover, centrally placed members of the armed forces depict officers as having a battle-centric mind-set, thus excluding Category 2.
Clearly, the analytical framework may also be used to qualify this understanding, as references to a few U.S. doctrines illustrate. For instance, the Army Operating Concept demands both Categories 1 and 2 expertise from its officers: its title, “Win in a Complex World,” conveys the tone of the doctrine. It goes beyond a battle-centric mind-set, yet is closer to Huntington’s ideal that officers shall win wars, rather than resolve them, as Janowitz holds. The document portrays conflicts and the army’s contribution to national security primarily in military terms. A rare call for sociopolitical skill can be found in General Perkins’ preface to the doctrine, where he instructs officers to integrate their efforts with “all elements of National Power” (U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 2014, pp. iii–iv), that is, cooperate with civilians, to win. At one point without specifically mentioning competence, the same document assumes officers have sociopolitical wisdom: “Army forces are prepared to do more than fight and defeat enemies; they must possess the capability to translate military objectives into enduring political outcomes” (p. 10).
The argument that the U.S. officer corps favors Category 1 competence is more forcefully countered by pointing to a recent U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine guiding officers to exploit sociopolitical dynamics and means to achieve their mission. This is reflected in the instructions Lt. Gen. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Amos give subordinate officers in the preface to Field Manual 3–24: “A counterinsurgency campaign…requires Soldiers and Marines to employ a mix of familiar combat tasks and skill more often associated with nonmilitary agencies. The balance between them depends on the local situation. Achieving this balance is not easy. It requires leaders at all levels to adjust their approach constantly.…Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors” (U.S. Army/Marine Corps, 2006, p. xlvi).
This short outline illustrates the utility of the analytical framework as a means of structuring debates about which types of competence exist and which are desired. The discussion suggests that there is a mismatch between the kinds of officer competence critics claim is missing from the U.S. Armed Forces and the kinds that U.S. doctrines require.
Disagreement about officer competence reflects disagreement about war
Another way to demonstrate the framework’s value is by using it as a lens through which to scrutinize similarities and differences between various scholarly ideas about the military profession. Categorization of academic work is always contested, but taking part in such discussions can refine appreciation of theoretical ideas. This point shall now be illustrated.
From Antoine de Jomini’s understanding of war, only generals commanding an army need expertise beyond Category 1. All other officers should focus exclusively on military matters, since diplomatic concerns are “useless to a sub-ordinate general” (Jomini, 1971, p. 11). Accordingly, an officer with military skill will be well equipped to deal with Jominian warfare which envisions battles fought in physical domains and won by following fundamental principles (Jomini, 1971, pp. 61–64). This frame of mind is based on a technical rationality and its continued influence can be found, for instance, in Warden’s (1995) guidance for the conduct of war in Iraq 1991.
In Clausewitz’s viewpoint, military skill is necessary but not sufficient. As already explained, he stresses practical wisdom through his call for officers’ judgment in the fog of war. In a military understanding of such fine discriminations, officers will need Category 2 expertise. Moreover, they will need Category 4 competence to comply with Clausewitz’s (1989, pp. 88–89) cardinal idea that war is shaped by fluctuations within and between the sociopolitical dynamics of hatred, chance, and reason. Hence, officers need sociopolitical wisdom to fulfill Clausewitz’s (1989) requirement that “The first, supreme, and most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking…” (p. 88).
Simpson’s (2012) outline for 21st-century warfare requires all four notions of officer competence. The title of his work, which Howard (2013) considers a da capo to Clausewitz’s, inspires officers to appreciate combat as politics. Simpson recommends they lead troops to directly seek a political, rather than a military, outcome; their contribution to the war effort depends on how their firefights will be perceived by their target groups, not by the body count. Obviously, commanders will need Category 1 competence to survive combat. They will also need Category 2 to achieve broader military objectives and Category 3 to, for example, communicate efficiently in conflicts, where strategic narratives will determine success and failure. To achieve their mission’s political ends, however, military leaders at all levels cannot do without the value rationality that defines Category 4 expertise.
This brief categorization illustrates that a meaningful debate about officer competence must spring from a clarification of one’s assumptions about war. More generally, Table 1 visualizes that each notion represents a particular entry point to debates on the broader theme and inspires to explore future requirements in a wide sense.
Cultivating Wider Officer Competence
The final part of this article suggests how the military profession can gain the full spectrum of wider officer competence. An initial question is whether one should regard the four analytical categories as building blocks. Conventional views see Category 1 capabilities as the foundation of professional military careers, leaving the other categories to be added as officers are promoted. The U.S. Military Academy’s Scott Silverstone and Renee Ramsey (2016) note, “it is not hard to find Battalion Commanders who bluntly assert that they do not want their junior leaders thinking strategically; they simply want them to execute their tasks with skill and determination” (p. 10). This approach sufficed in the 1991 Gulf War, where only generals dealt with broader military judgments, interagency cooperation, and political issues requiring, respectively, Category 2, 3, and 4 competencies.
Today, captains deal with similar tasks in Iraq and Afghanistan and have learned the hard way that skill and determination are not enough to succeed. Acknowledging this, U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates (2011) referred to such operations as “the ‘captains’ wars’…where [US] officers of lower and lower rank were put in the position of making decisions of higher and higher degrees of consequence and complexity.” Officers from smaller nations share similar experiences. Since the 1990s, Norwegian officers have been contingent commanders of expeditionary missions before attending mid-grade staff college; this includes the Norwegian contingent commander in Iraq in 2016 who convinced Joint Headquarters at home to reorient the mission to better achieve political goals. In this capacity, officers need, among other proficiencies, the ability to direct troops in pursuit of military and political objectives, to decide on a course of action in dialogue with military and civilian superiors, to cooperate with civilians, and to communicate through the media. Thus, within the first 10 years of their careers, many military leaders have already found themselves in positions that require all four notions of officer competence.
Extending junior officers’ expertise beyond Category 1 is not unproblematic, however. It raises concerns about operational efficiency, for instance. Cultivating practical wisdom among junior leaders potentially opens a Pandora’s box of conflicting judgments at all levels in the military hierarchy and could undermine the very authority of the chain of command widely seen as essential to achieve unity of effort in the armed forces. At the same time, the ability to reflect on the broader implications of the way they fight will not come to officers by a magic stroke. This competence must be cultivated long before they need it, preferably during their precommission education. While a contradiction between operational efficiency and practical wisdom can occur, it can also be avoided. Here, the military profession can learn from the way other professional educations, such as medicine, cultivate medical doctors to be both efficient and reflective (Schön, 1987). The officer corps can also enhance the dimension of its own professional culture that enables its members to know when to lead and when to be led, when to follow orders and when to discuss, and when to use skills and when to use wisdom.
Professional military education has a particular responsibility in this regard (Creveld, 1990). Notwithstanding Caesar’s dictum that experience is the teacher of all things, commanders can benefit from the study of war, since their own combat experience will be limited in time and in understanding of the broader context in which they fight. Janowitz (1964, p. 426) recommends that officers’ political-military education begin at the pre-commissioned level. Murray (2009) lists a number of well-known educational methods to cultivate what is here labeled wider officer competence. For centuries, precommissioned cadets have gained Category 1 skill in tactics classes, for example, learning to combine arms on a target or to seize a hill. More recently, cadets have classes in cultural skills, media-handling skills, and other Category 3 capabilities. In addition, cadets gain Category 2 and 4 competencies from academic disciplines like politics, history, and ethics. Unlike universities concerned with their students learning relevant theoretical traditions and factual knowledge, professional military education may use academic disciplines in a way that enable officers to solve future challenges, not by providing answers, but by developing a flexibility of mind that can help them deliberate challenges. To use the ancient categories of knowledge, we may say that while university students study to gain scientific knowledge, professionals also study to gain practical wisdom.
In a seminal article, Howard (1962) argues that the utility of history for military leaders is not to make them clever for the next time but “to make them wise for ever” (p. 8). He offers three pieces of advice to advance commanders’ practical wisdom. Although Howard refers specifically to military history, his advice is relevant for most other academic disciplines in a professional military education. He encourages officers to study in width that is to study historical periods in order to better understand the discontinuities in war. Officers should consider puzzles like why the Austrian and Prussian Armies, the most professional of their time, failed to defeat a French rag-tag army at Valmy in 1792 and why Napoleonic warfare, long dominant in Europe, was hopelessly irrelevant in World War I. Second, officers without war experience should study in depth, if only one campaign, to better prepare themselves for the horror, ambiguity, and confusion they must expect to face. Finally, officers should study in context. Unlike games of chess, wars do not follow rules; the outcome of war is rarely determined on the battlefield but by sociopolitical factors. A leader should therefore develop sensitivity to how such factors may influence his tasks, by studying wars in the context of the societies involved (Howard, 1962, p. 8).
Military exercises provide a more practical setting, where experienced officers for centuries have supervised junior’s efforts to refine their expertise. Traditionally, Category 1 skill has been the main focus in such settings; increasingly, Category 3 competence is developed, for example, through tasking junior officers with conducting a meeting with local leaders during exercises on expeditionary missions. Further, Categories 2 and 4 can be fostered by adding, for instance, elements of dilemma training to the officer’s military and civilian considerations, respectively.
Related methods to develop wider officer competence are also used in the precommissioned officers’ classroom, for example, when cadets are tasked with developing a draft plan for a company operation. Here, educational staff decide which kind of officer expertise they cultivate, by choice of scenario, tasks, and didactic methods. Developing a skill primarily requires instruction, such as teaching future commanders the right way to apply established procedures and techniques. Yet this teaching method does not foster practical wisdom. It cannot possibly be known what is the right course of action in a classroom scenario any more than it can be determined, whether a plan will work before it has been put into practice and assumptions have been tested. The principal educational task is therefore to stimulate the officer’s ability to reflect on how their plan can achieve a common good in a scenario where conflicting objectives are at stake. One means to this end is through war-gaming their plan; a more rewarding method is to encourage cadets to listen to their peers’ plans, to discuss them, and to learn from the way others think, the assumptions they make, and the mental tools they use to visualize alternative courses of action.
This brief outline conveys that well-known methods of fostering wider officer competence exist. The extent to which they are used is another matter, however, and rests at the end of the day on political will to develop officer expertise beyond Category 1.
Conclusion
To prepare for 21st-century warfare, this article proposes that officer competence is understood and cultivated along the four distinct conceptual categories shown in Table 1. Huntington’s objective control paradigm eschewed the ways the U.S. managed military affairs prior to the Cold War, that is, what he called “subjective” control. In doing this, he intended to explain a new kind of military officer capable of separating political and ethical convictions from war making and the management of violent actions (Huntington, 1959; Travis, 2017). By identifying subjective control and seeking to divorce military officers from civil society, Huntington may be responsible for truncating officer competence: the popular objective civilian control paradigm restrains the U.S. military professional by separating him from Category 2, 3, and 4 attributes. Because this point is not resolved in this article, it is evident that Huntington’s popularized objective control theory may not be compatible with the assertions made here.
Table 1 provides an analytical framework that can structure and clarify conceptually different entry points to debates on officer competence. To avoid misunderstandings: the conventional notion, that is, Category 1, remains highly important. It is a condition for directing military units, for winning conventional force-on-force wars, and for creating a credible deterrent against opponents capable of initiating existential wars, but such military skill is not sufficient in itself.
In the contemporary security context, officers need all four notions of competence to succeed. Without sociopolitical skill officers will be incapable of cooperating with civilians on matters essential to achieve contemporary mission objectives. The article shows that U.S. doctrines call for such competence while critics hold it has not been sufficiently fostered. In addition, without military and sociopolitical wisdom officers are less likely to use the armed forces in a manner that, respectively, wins wars and serves society. Hence, there are strong incentives to consider how the four categories of officer competence can be cultivated in a mutually reinforcing manner.
Professional military education plays an important role in this regard. Too often, this is ignored at the executive political level, where defense debates give priority to investments in weaponry at the cost of competence in the armed forces. This is a dangerous priority. To put it bluntly, while a pilot clearly cannot fight without a plane and weapons, it is the officer, not the technology that can give weapons political utility. Finding the right balance between military hardware and officer competence is particularly relevant for many smaller allies for whom the cost of one fighter jet exceeds the annual budget of all their professional military academies. Officers have a particular responsibility in explaining to politicians why they should invest in professional military education.
The military profession’s self-conception does not primarily concern politicians and officers but the whole of society. This is rarely a theme for public debates, however, possibly because it is difficult for laymen to make sense of the ways in which the military profession conveys its field of expertise. Table 1 may serve, for laymen as well as for officers, as a visual introduction to academic debates on the topic, and as a point of departure for a civil–military dialogue about the military profession, its function in society, and the kinds of competency it needs to deliver to society’s expectations. This is an important dialogue. It concerns national security and ultimately our common survival.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly improved this manuscript and to my colleagues at the Norwegian Military Academy for years of discussions related to teaching on the topic of the military profession. For their specific comments to the present article, I wish to thank Anne Marie Hagen, Joseph Brendan MacBride, Matthew Smith, Reidar Ursin, Sigbjørn Halsne, Njål Hoem, and Phillip Matlary.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.