Schools for Strategy: Teaching Strategy for 21st Century Conflict

Because strategic performance must involve the ability to decide, to command, and to lead, as well as the capacity to understand, there are practical limits to what is feasible and useful by way of formal education in strategy. The soldier who best comprehends what Sun-tzu, Clausewitz, and Thucydides intended to say is not necessarily the soldier best fitted to strategic high command. It is important to distinguish between intellect and character/personality. The superior strategist is ever uniquely a product of nature/biology, personality/psychology, and experience/opportunity. Nonetheless, formal education has its place. Strategic genius is rare, strategic talent is more common, though still unusual. The latter can be improved by formal education, the former most probably cannot. However, there is merit in the educational aspiration to help educate instinct for a better performance. The strategic educator seeks to assist the student in his ability to think strategically. He has to help hone performance of the strategic function which obligates a coherent meshing of ends, ways, and means. All too often it is popular to teach strategy only with empirical reference to our contemporary and anticipated near-future challenges. Because strategy and its function is eternal and universal, there is much to be said for taking students out of their contemporary comfort zone of familiar detail and instead obliging them to reason strategically for different times and places. The strategist has to devise and execute plans (theories) for military behavior that should advance and perhaps secure the goals specified by policy. But those goals can be ill chosen, and they vary with political mood and circumstance. It is the duty of the strategist to try to match purposeful military effort and its consequences with the country's political interests expressed as policy. This can be a mission of heroic difficulty, even to the point of impossibility.