And another thing: Military strategic education is far worse than Tom thinks

This must be my week to be judged too positive in my assessments.

Jim Schneider is one of the grand old men of American strategic education, one of the early faculty members of the Army’s School for Advanced Military Studies, which pulled Army professional education out of a tactical slough.

Schneider also is the author of a terrific book on the strategy of Lawrence of Arabia that will come out later this year. 

Here he alleges that the teaching of strategy in the military is even worse than I think:

By James Schneider
Best Defense department of advanced military studies

Your graphic, I think, captures two issues:

First, the fact that much of strategy is “tacticized,” whereby strategy becomes expressed as smaller arrows on increasingly bigger maps. There are few genuine strategic thinkers in or out of the military — Jim Dubik remains an exception. The inverted nature of professional military advancement militates against a higher understanding of strategy, where the default mode of thinking is tactical and technological and where we see more concerns about headgear than heuristics, etc.

Second, much of strategy as it is taught today has the numbing sound of dogmatic incantations voiced loudly by the anointed high priests of doctrine. Doctrinization in teaching strategy naturally leads to a fossilization in thinking about strategy. These issues can be attributed to a number of inextricable factors. 

First, the failure to teach military theory adequately as a fundamental component in officer education ensures that strategy is intellectually inaccessible. Strategy is a higher level of abstraction that must be grasped conceptually through theory. Theory allows us to visualize what we cannot see. Theories are like maps that allow us to visualize the terrain that we cannot see. We cannot “see” abstracted strategy, we can only visualize it theoretically. Since we can still see tactical actions quite readily, this becomes the natural default mode as we struggle with strategic abstraction.

Second, where theory is taught, it is expressed in the brilliant but sadly outmoded concepts of Clausewitz. Concepts are like the basic symbols on a map; without proper symbology the map is useless; without a reliable conceptual frame, theories are meaningless. The higher elevations of strategy are absent from Clausewitz’s pre-industrial map of tactical valleys and low-lands. 

Third, the teaching of strategy is taught primarily by civilian academics using essentially the same eighteenth century methods of instruction designed for clerics. The university system, especially as it relates to the humanities, has totally overlooked the clinical method of instruction that revolutionized medicine in the nineteenth century with the invention of the teaching hospital. 

Fourth, the very idea of strategy is little understood. Strategy is the art of creating a generating logic that rationalizes violent or competitive behavior. Strategy is about creating the rules of the game, not about playing the game. Lines and arrows, Xs and Os are the tactical expression of strategy, mediated through operational art. Think of James Naismith and his invention of basketball. His set of rules — the generating logic — rationalized the competitive behavior of players to create a viable sport — a strategy. The coaches (the “operational artists”) mediate the play by enforcing — coaching — the rules played by the players — tacticians. Strategy creates the rules for the games nations play. The strategist seeks to impose new logic — new rules — in a competitive, often violent environment, while disrupting the logic of his opponent. Lincoln, the first really modern strategist, changed the “game” of the American Civil War by introducing the “rule” of Emancipation.

James Schneider taught strategy and military theory at the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies from 1984 to 2008, and is the author of a forthcoming book on the strategic thinking of Lawrence of Arabia.