[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                        [H.A.S.C. No. 117-94]

                    PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION 
                    AND THE NATIONAL DEFENSE STRATEGY

                               __________

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                   SUBCOMMITTEE ON MILITARY PERSONNEL

                                 OF THE

                      COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             SECOND SESSION

                               __________

                              HEARING HELD

                              MAY 18, 2022


                                     
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
                               __________

                                
                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
48-475                      WASHINGTON : 2023                    
          
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------     
  


                   SUBCOMMITTEE ON MILITARY PERSONNEL

                 JACKIE SPEIER, California, Chairwoman

ANDY KIM, New Jersey                 MIKE GALLAGHER, Wisconsin
CHRISSY HOULAHAN, Pennsylvania       STEPHANIE I. BICE, Oklahoma
VERONICA ESCOBAR, Texas, Vice Chair  LISA C. McCLAIN, Michigan
SARA JACOBS, California              RONNY JACKSON, Texas
MARILYN STRICKLAND, Washington       JERRY L. CARL, Alabama
MARC A. VEASEY, Texas                PAT FALLON, Texas

               Dave Giachetti, Professional Staff Member
                 Glen Diehl, Professional Staff Member
                           Sidney Faix, Clerk
                            
                            
                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              
                                                                   Page

              STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS

Gallagher, Hon. Mike, a Representative from Wisconsin, Ranking 
  Member, Subcommittee on Military Personnel.....................     2
Speier, Hon. Jackie, a Representative from California, 
  Chairwoman, Subcommittee on Military Personnel.................     1

                               WITNESSES

Munsch, VADM Stuart B., USN, Director for Joint Force 
  Development, Joint Staff, J7...................................    22
Johnson-Freese, Joan, Professor, National Security Affairs, U.S. 
  Naval War College..............................................     5
Schmidle, LtGen Robert E., Jr., USMC (Ret.), Professor of 
  Practice, School of Politics and Global Studies, Arizona State 
  University.....................................................     3
Skelly, Hon. Shawn G., Assistant Secretary of Defense for 
  Readiness, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for 
  Personnel and Readiness........................................    20

                                APPENDIX

Prepared Statements:

    Johnson-Freese, Joan.........................................    54
    Munsch, VADM Stuart B........................................    83
    Schmidle, LtGen Robert E., Jr................................    40
    Skelly, Hon. Shawn G.........................................    76
    Speier, Hon. Jackie..........................................    39

Documents Submitted for the Record:

    [There were no Documents submitted.]

Witness Responses to Questions Asked During the Hearing:

    [There were no Questions submitted during the hearing.]

Questions Submitted by Members Post Hearing:

    Dr. Jackson..................................................    93
    Ms. Jacobs...................................................    91
    
.    
   PROFESSIONAL MILITARY EDUCATION AND THE NATIONAL DEFENSE STRATEGY

                              ----------                              

                  House of Representatives,
                       Committee on Armed Services,
                        Subcommittee on Military Personnel,
                           Washington, DC, Wednesday, May 18, 2022.
    The subcommittee met, pursuant to call, at 2:02 p.m., in 
room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Jackie Speier 
(chairwoman of the subcommittee). presiding.

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JACKIE SPEIER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM 
   CALIFORNIA, CHAIRWOMAN, SUBCOMMITTEE ON MILITARY PERSONNEL

    Ms. Speier. Good afternoon.
    The Committee on Military Personnel will come to order. I 
want to welcome the hearing presentations today. We're going to 
hear from those who have an interest in or are connected with 
professional military education and the National Defense 
Strategy.
    This is the second committee hearing that we have had on 
this topic, and I commend the ranking member for making this a 
priority.
    We are here to discuss with the Office of the Secretary of 
Defense [OSD] and the Joint Staff the Department's processes 
for developing and deploying professional education to service 
members that is relevant, flexible, and delivers value to the 
Armed Forces, given the investment in time and taxpayer 
dollars.
    This content prepares officers charged to advance and 
execute our future national military strategy and ultimately 
become the senior leaders responsible for the defense of the 
Nation.
    We will also hear from our panel of outside witnesses on 
their thoughts on the Department's professional military 
education enterprise and their recommendations for change.
    From our OSD and Joint Staff panel, I want to hear not only 
about the need for this ongoing education but what is intended 
and the actual return on the significant investment of both 
time and resources, estimated at over $8 billion a year, and 
how that return is measured.
    I'm also concerned about these programs becoming very 
insular and not taking into consideration educational experts 
outside of the Department of Defense [DOD] to consider their 
insights in the development and execution of relevant 
educational content as well as maintenance of accreditation.
    We must make sure that our leaders remain on the cutting 
edge of intellectual, technological, and educational 
development necessary for the changing character and conduct of 
operations.
    The Office of the Secretary of Defense has been in charge 
of professional military education for 30 years, but it appears 
to have operated on autopilot and with little oversight by DOD 
or Congress.
    The need for swift change in this arena must match the 
evolving strategy in a rapidly changing world. I'm convinced 
that the professional military education system is flexible 
enough to--I'm not convinced that the professional military 
education system is flexible enough to modify and adapt the 
curriculum promptly to keep pace with changing defense needs.
    It needs attention of leadership and follow-through. I want 
to ensure that these educational opportunities are not used for 
career box checking but are used to enhance the warfighters' 
intellectual rigor or, as Chairman Milley states, the, quote, 
``intellectual overmatch,'' unquote, that is necessary to 
increase critical strategic thinking, leading to increased 
competence and effectiveness of our fighting force.
    I'm also very interested to hear from our civilian 
witnesses their opinions of robustness and effectiveness of the 
current system of professional military education, and any and 
all recommendations they have for the improvement of the 
education continuum.
    Before hearing from our witnesses, let me offer Ranking 
Member Gallagher an opportunity to make his opening remarks.
    [The prepared statement of Ms. Speier can be found in the 
Appendix on page 39.]

    STATEMENT OF HON. MIKE GALLAGHER, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM 
 WISCONSIN, RANKING MEMBER, SUBCOMMITTEE ON MILITARY PERSONNEL

    Mr. Gallagher. Well, I thank you, Chairwoman Speier, for 
your interest in this topic. I want to thank both of our panels 
for being with us today.
    I will start with a quote that is sometimes attributed to 
Thucydides, other times attributed to Sir Francis Butler--it 
depends on what you reference--but I'm sure you've heard it 
before, which is that a nation that makes a great distinction 
between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made 
by cowards and its wars fought by fools.
    The stakes with professional military education [PME] and 
its intersection with the National Defense Strategy is 
absolutely critical to the defense of our Nation. The threats 
to America include an increasingly aggressive China, a 
revanchist Russia. The threat of Salafi jihadism has not gone 
away.
    Cyber criminals attack us every single day and, of course, 
unique challenges we have all faced in the last 2 years related 
to the pandemic. The list goes on and on. The bottom line is we 
have to ensure our readiness through an unyielding commitment 
to outthinking our opponents, whether they are state actors or 
cyber criminals or nonstate terrorist groups. We have to get 
this right.
    This past December, we had a subcommittee briefing and I 
started with a statement from the 2018 National Defense 
Strategy which said, quote, ``PME has stagnated, focused more 
on the accomplishment of mandatory credit at the expense of 
lethality and ingenuity,'' unquote.
    I also mentioned the need to harness the power of war-
gaming, which I think we're not doing enough of. In today's 
hearing I would like to get into these issues. I would like to 
understand what's changed in our approach since we have had 
that initial briefing, how we can ensure that we have the right 
system for PME and, by extension, that our military leaders are 
prepared to fight and win in any conflict and as well as just 
understand the future of warfare.
    The challenge here is whether we have the institutions and 
organizational wherewithal within our military to do this, or 
does the current system of PME need a fresh look and a 
transformational change.
    We need to hear the thoughts of both panels on this and we 
also need to know what your constraints are and how we can get 
after this and support you in the right way.
    In my mind, PME should be something that inspires 
intellectual curiosity and the critical thinking of our service 
members. It should be the result of a meritocratic culture that 
assures the best and brightest are afforded the opportunity to 
lead and to hone their craft as thinkers and as warriors.
    And so I'm very much looking forward to this discussion. I 
thank you, and I yield back.
    Ms. Speier. I thank the ranking member and would now like 
to welcome our first witnesses in our first panel. First is 
retired General U.S. Marine Corps, Robert Schmidle--did I say 
that right?--Junior, Professor of Practice at the School of 
Politics and Global Studies at the Arizona State University, 
and Professor Joan Johnson-Freese, National Security Affairs, 
Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.
    Mr. Schmidle, you may begin with your opening statement.

   STATEMENT OF LTGEN ROBERT E. SCHMIDLE, JR., USMC (RET.), 
 PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE, SCHOOL OF POLITICS AND GLOBAL STUDIES, 
                    ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

    General Schmidle. Thank you, Chairwoman Speier and Ranking 
Member Gallagher, and the other members of the subcommittee.
    I first want to thank you for the opportunity to appear 
before you today to address the issue of professional military 
education and the National Defense Strategy.
    Although this subject has been investigated before, it 
seems to me that what makes this such a pressing issue today is 
the rise of China. China is the first true peer adversary we 
have had to deal with in many years. China has the economic, 
technical, and manpower resources that make it perhaps the most 
severe threat that we have faced.
    Because of this, it is a matter of great consequence that 
the professional military education system produces the very 
finest officers who are both thinkers and doers. In examining 
the state of military education, the first thing that I think 
we should consider is answering the following question.
    What do we want our senior military and civilian leaders to 
be able to do, what are the characteristics and attributes we 
want them to have? We want them to be creative, to be 
innovative, to be critical thinkers. Answering this question is 
fundamental to identifying areas of concern and opportunity, 
and seems to me that this, in fact, is a question for the 
Congress.
    It is important to remember that while we, the U.S. 
military, are unmatched on the battlefield, the many tactical 
victories we have achieved have not always been relevant to 
enabling strategic success.
    Ensuring a coherent relationship between tactics and 
strategy is part of a long-term--as part of a long-term 
campaign model is critical to maintaining America's place in 
the world order. The most effective and enduring methods, in my 
experience, for achieving this relationship is through 
realistic and rigorous war-gaming, especially at the classified 
level.
    The example of War Plan Orange is very instructive. War 
Plan Orange was the plan for the defeat of Japan in the Second 
World War. War Plan Orange was created initially out of 
seminars at the national--the Naval War College in Newport, 
Rhode Island, and for many, many years, they would war-game a 
rising Japan in the South Pacific.
    And when we finally went to war with Japan, the senior 
leaders actually had in their minds an operational design for 
what that conflict was going to look like and what that plan 
would look like, and that came from the war-gaming that was 
done for many years at Newport.
    Previous efforts at reforming professional military 
education have only been successful because of congressional 
leadership. As I suggested in my written testimony, a 
congressional commission similar to the Cyberspace Solarium 
Commission, I think, would be a great first step.
    I was fortunate to be on the red team for that commission 
and I was very impressed with the level and the depth of 
knowledge and understanding of the nuances of cyber operations 
among the commissioners.
    I had just come from being the first deputy commander of 
Cyber Command and I was relatively familiar with those things. 
So I was very impressed with the methodology and the leadership 
of that commission, and I think that that would be a great way 
for us to begin to understand the issues, their potential 
solutions, and to start crafting legislation to put them in 
place.
    Two things that I think we should keep in mind as we 
consider the implications of professional military education. 
First, investing in human capital has a much bigger payoff than 
investing in technology alone.
    As some on this committee know personally, technology by 
itself doesn't fight wars. It doesn't win wars. People using 
technology fight wars and people, ultimately, make decisions 
that win or lose wars.
    The Department of Defense budgets should, in fact, reflect 
the outsized importance of applying appropriate resources to 
professional military education and most of all to war-gaming.
    Second, I think we need to take a holistic approach to 
military education, understanding the inescapable linkages to 
service personnel and promotion policies. The example of 
Goldwater-Nichols and the effect that it had on joint duty is, 
again, instructive.
    Prior to Goldwater-Nichols, there was--officers were not in 
a hurry to go to joint duty. It was considered a pariah. But 
after Goldwater-Nichols, when it became apparent that the 
Congress had run out of patience with giving waivers to the 
Department of Defense for promotion to general officer, it 
suddenly became the cause celebre and the best and the 
brightest of the O-6s we had--the colonels and Navy captains--
were trying to get into joint positions so that we could, in 
fact--they would be eligible for promotion. And I think that we 
are all the better for it--our joint forces, obviously, the 
better for that.
    So I think that that is a good example of how we could 
actually legislate and start to move the needle on this. The 
most important contribution that professional military 
education makes to National Defense Strategy is preparing 
senior officers and civilians for all that we can confidently 
know about the future and that is that it will be uncertain.
    And with that, I look forward to your questions.
    [The prepared statement of General Schmidle can be found in 
the Appendix on page 40.]
    Ms. Speier. Thank you, sir. We'll now hear from Dr. 
Johnson-Freese.

STATEMENT OF JOAN JOHNSON-FREESE, PROFESSOR, NATIONAL SECURITY 
                AFFAIRS, U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Representative--thank you.
    Representative Speier, Representative Gallagher, and 
members of the subcommittee, at is an honor and a pleasure to 
have the opportunity to speak with you today about professional 
military education, a field I've worked in since 1993.
    The focus of my remarks will be on the degree-granting 
institutions, specifically, command and staff and war colleges, 
as that is where my experience lies.
    And while I'm currently a faculty member at the Naval War 
College, the views I'm expressing today are strictly my own.
    There is much that has improved in PME during my nearly 30-
year career. Adherence to the principles of academic freedom, 
the foundation for quality teaching, and recruiting top 
teachers is now embedded in most PME programs.
    There has also been a slow and steadily growing recognition 
that it is not the purpose of either the intermediate or senior 
level courses to better prepare each individual attendee for 
their next billet, a mistake that long dominated PME.
    Military officers need to be educated for the arc of the 
rest of their careers rather than the next assignment.
    Another improvement is that we see far fewer moments when 
senior officers take to the stage to welcome students with 
statements like, it's only a lot of reading if you do it. 
Clearly, however, some services and some military branches 
still encourage, respect, and appreciate education more than 
others.
    The hybrid nature of PME institutions creates three general 
types of stresses and challenges that remain particularly 
problematic: first, establishing clarity on the goal of the 
academic program; second, defining the institution's 
expectations of the students and what those students should 
expect to get out of the program; and third, having the most 
effective mix of civilian academics, Active Duty and retired 
military professionals, and national security practitioners to 
best implement the academic program.
    I suggest beginning with consideration of three 
recommendations. First, accentuate that Congress' goal for PME 
is education, not training. PME should produce leaders who are 
intellectually agile, questioning, critical and strategic 
thinkers who can broadly anticipate future challenges, and, 
consequently, most effectively be ready to employ U.S. forces 
for maximum effect and lethality.
    Second, institutionalize a two-track PME pathway for 
students, one for students who seek only to complete 
requirements and one for those who want to pursue a graduate 
degree.
    This is important because we have found that most students 
do, in fact, want to complete a master's level program. Indeed, 
that was the reason for accrediting the program in the first 
place.
    But some students chafe at degree program requirements and 
that minority should be allowed to pursue a smaller and more 
circumcised program.
    And third, address issues consistently identified as 
problems on command climate surveys. In my experience, these 
problems consistently include transparency in decision-making, 
hiring and promotions, narrow communications within 
institutions, and long-standing problems of inclusion and 
diversity.
    To that end, DOD should collect data on faculty and 
administration towards increased diversity through 
demographics, backgrounds, and expertise. These statistics are 
often very closely held within institution.
    But in my experience, I would estimate that PME college 
level administration, which has grown significantly in past 
years, is overwhelmingly composed of retired military. This 
lopsidedness persists because of inertia in hiring practices. 
As one of my students explained to me, ducks pick ducks.
    Few or none of this group of administrators have experience 
in academic life or higher education before coming to PME.
    More data on which groups are hired more often, have been 
hired at higher or lower pay, and are promoted more often into 
more senior positions would go a long way at getting a more 
accurate picture of faculty at PME institutions.
    Clarity here would help dispel faculty perceptions of 
unfairness if such perceptions are erroneous. If such 
perceptions are accurate, however, and I suspect many of them 
are, more data would allow for more accurate course corrections 
and institutional improvement.
    Until this problem is addressed, inertia and status quo 
within the institutions will prevail. I elaborate on each of 
these areas in my written testimony and would be happy to 
answer questions from that elaboration.
    Thank you for the opportunity to share my views.
    [The prepared statement of Ms. Johnson-Freese can be found 
in the Appendix on page 54.]
    Ms. Speier. Thank you both.
    Let me start with you, Mr. Schmidle. This congressional 
commission that you have conceived was intriguing to me. Who 
would you recommend be put on that kind of a commission?
    General Schmidle. Well, I think that, again, I go back to 
the Solarium Commission, and the members that were on--the 
commissioners that were on and many of whom I knew. But I would 
suggest that you need a mix of people that are on the civilian 
side that are experts as well as on the military side.
    I mean, I think what I would be most inclined to do would 
be to pick a chairman and a co-chair, and then have them begin 
to cogitate on who they wanted in there.
    You know, my experience, I'm also on the faculty at Arizona 
State University so I've had a chance to see this from both 
sides. I'm a student of the PME process. I went to command and 
staff college as a major.
    I went to the war college--the Marine Corps War College--as 
a lieutenant colonel, and then I taught at the Marine Corps 
University after that because that--in those days in the mid to 
late 1990s that was part of the payback. They sent us to the 
war college and then we went and were on the faculty.
    So I think a diverse group of people--to pick up on 
something that Joan just mentioned a minute ago about retired 
military, as I mentioned in my opening statement, I think that 
we could legislate career paths that would encourage the best 
and the brightest officers to be faculty in those--in our 
universities and that their career paths--that they wouldn't 
have to make a decision between a career path that would lead 
to promotion and one that would not.
    Recognizing that I have really not answered your question, 
I just think that it would require--I mean, there are some 
things that I've seen in the civilian academic world that I 
think would be very useful for us to import.
    But I think there's also some rigor that is called for in 
the military schools, especially when we get into things like 
war-gaming, that really need to be and can best be taught by 
people with an operational background.
    Ms. Speier. All right. Thank you. What percentage of the 
faculty, Dr. Johnson-Freese, would you recommend be civilian?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Not just the faculty but 
administration? A third.
    Ms. Speier. A third. And how about war-gaming? What 
percentage of the curriculum should be war-gaming?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. What percentage of the curriculum? 
Again, I can speak only to my experience--that it usually is 
part of the military operations course, whatever it's called, 
And it is the kind of culminating exercise.
    So I would estimate it's probably somewhere between 10 and 
20 percent of the overall curriculum. But I would suggest that, 
for example, in my department, we have an exercise that is not 
war-gaming, per se, but it is an exercise which puts students 
in the position of have to think about force planning and 
having to think about how you match force planning with 
strategy. So there are elements of war-gaming practices that 
are throughout the curriculum.
    Ms. Speier. What percentage of the curriculum at the war 
college that you have been part of for all these years is 
Socratic versus seminar engagement?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Well, as I pointed out in my testimony, 
we aim for Socratic method teaching. But it's very difficult to 
go into a classroom where the vast majority of the students are 
coming from a STEM [science, technology, engineering, and 
mathematics] background. Most of them are engineers.
    They've come from the military academies. And when you try 
and have a discussion that starts off with something like what 
are the pros and cons of alliances for the United States, and 
the students in the room have absolutely no background in that 
field, there's a certain amount of teaching that has to go on 
before you can get into the Socratic method.
    There's a lot more teaching that has to be done on the 
basics of social sciences to prepare them for that Socratic 
method that is very effective.
    Ms. Speier. In one of your articles you wrote that we 
should limit the number of retirees hired on war college 
faculties. Would you like to expand on that?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. The retired faculty play a very 
important role. Some of them leave the military and become--
take on a civilian role and develop their own fields. I have a 
colleague who has become an expert strategist. I have another 
colleague who is a marvel at international engagement. They do 
this.
    But there are also a pretty strong percentage who use their 
position or see their position as a faculty member to teach 
what they have done, and that gets us into teaching the last 
war. Their currency becomes dated rather quickly.
    So I would suggest, too, the second part of that is they 
see the students as a younger version of themselves and what 
that means is they understand their stresses, their 
limitations, and they become as focused on getting the students 
through comfortably as getting them educated, and we bend over 
backwards to make things comfortable for the students.
    I'm sure you remember in college finals week, even in high 
school, where you might have two finals in 1 day or three 
finals in 2 days. That will never happen at war college. It's 
spaced out to make it comfortable.
    When I first got to the Naval War College, we didn't have 
students read an article. We had a faculty member read it and 
then do a Cliff Note to give to the students to make it easier 
for them.
    So, again, I think the retired military, seeing these young 
officers as versions of themselves, rigor can become overly 
balanced with accommodation.
    Ms. Speier. Mr. Schmidle, would you like to comment on any 
of those questions? War-gaming--what percentage should it be?
    General Schmidle. So I think if we--war-gaming, to me, is 
something that we can do as part of every piece of the 
syllabus. War-gaming is, ultimately, theory applied 
practically.
    It's a way for us to take sort of the big ideas in life and 
to say how would this apply in this case. I think war-gaming 
does something else for us. I think it gives us an opportunity 
to evaluate officers, and I hear exactly what Joan is saying.
    My experience in the war college was very different. The 
Marine Corps--when we stood up the Marine Corps War College, we 
did it like we did everything else.
    We went as far overboard as we could and it was like 
academic boot camp and--but it was an extraordinary year, and I 
thoroughly enjoyed it. There were 12 people in a seminar and if 
you didn't--hadn't read what was going the night before, you 
were going to get embarrassed in front of everybody.
    And the faculty at the time sort of relished that and I 
thought that was okay because--holding people to that standard. 
The evaluation of students--one of the things that I think we 
miss an opportunity in the war colleges is being able to do 
just that, to look at some of these students and begin to pick 
out the best and the brightest that are in these war colleges 
that are not just there to get the X in the block but are 
genuinely the kinds of people that you and Ranking Member 
Gallagher were talking about, the intellectually curious, the 
folks that really want to know more about how this big system 
of ours operates.
    So I would be inclined to do more war-gaming more often and 
to hold the students accountable for trying to understand the, 
quote, ``big ideas'' that are driving a lot of this.
    Ms. Speier. Thank you. My time has expired.
    Ranking Member Gallagher.
    Mr. Gallagher. Well, thank you. I apologize. I keep running 
out. We have a T&I [Transportation and Infrastructure 
Committee] vote series going on right now. So trust me, there's 
a TV and I'm listening to what you're saying as I also vote 
simultaneously so--and I very much appreciated both of your 
thoughtful testimony.
    General Schmidle, in your testimony, you mention a China 
Hands program. Could you tell us a little bit more about that 
and what benefit you think it would provide to the Defense 
Department?
    General Schmidle. You know, we tried to--there we go. Okay. 
The Defense Department tried the Afghan Hands program a number 
of years ago. You may have heard of that. And, actually, it 
was--it was actually pretty popular. I knew a number of 
officers that wanted to know how to get involved in it.
    We didn't quite take it to conclusion. It didn't get 
embedded institutionally. But I think the idea of starting, for 
instance, a China Hands program--so if you were a young major 
and you said, hey, I want to get into that program, you would 
select into it--you wouldn't just decide you wanted to do it--
and then you would go to school.
    You would probably go to a master's degree program in 
Chinese politics, Chinese geography, Chinese economics. You 
would learn the language, at least some--enough of the language 
to be able to be passively--if not fluent to be able to read, 
and you would spend your career in jobs that were continually 
focused on China.
    So you might spend a couple years in the Pentagon. Then you 
might go to the INDOPACOM [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] staff, 
continuing to get promoted--and this is something that we would 
have to ensure was happening--and then come back to the 
Pentagon so that the Secretary of Defense had a group of folks 
that he could go to outside of OSD Policy, which, as you know, 
has a large turnover of folks in there, but a core group of 
people that truly understood China and the Chinese issues and 
the Chinese culture.
    We had a de facto experience like this in the 1960s and 
1970s with the Sovietologists, right. We had a lot of people in 
the Department of Defense that just knew the Soviet Union and 
that knew the Russian people and the issues that were there 
that we never really thought about it because that was the peer 
threat.
    And this was just a suggestion that I had that as a way to 
kick start and to generate interest in furthering the education 
and giving these young officers access to the Secretary with 
their suggestions.
    Mr. Gallagher. Can I--so you mentioned War Plan Orange--
phenomenal book, very eye opening. As I understand it, or if 
memory serves, the key was that you had students, Active Duty--
in this case at the Naval War College--whose work was then 
being fed into the actual war plan.
    General Schmidle. Absolutely.
    Mr. Gallagher. And it evolved over time.
    General Schmidle. Absolutely.
    Mr. Gallagher. I mean, they--what's remarkable is they got 
the basic idea kind of right but made significant adjustments 
throughout. Is there any such connectivity going on right now 
between the war-gaming happening at our national war colleges 
and the actual OPLANS [operation plans] such as they exist?
    General Schmidle. I really don't know. I suspect that it 
may not be as tight of a loop but----
    Mr. Gallagher. And I'll allow Dr. Freese to--you seem like 
you had a thought on--yeah.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Yeah. One of the things that's happened 
over the past 10 years is there's been an increasing 
recognition within the war colleges that there's a lot of 
external experts that you can bring in to work with.
    The war colleges used to be very insular. There is now a 
recognition that the way you get expertise and the way you 
develop expertise is to work with outside institutions. At one 
time, faculty were discouraged from doing that, but that is 
slowly changing.
    So you've got this breadth of expertise not just on China, 
but on China, on the Middle East, on--name the area of the 
world--that you can work with. And, again, recently, Russian 
studies has come back into vogue, which was very much in vogue 
during the Cold War.
    But we don't need to develop them all within the war 
colleges because, again, languages--Chinese--my son took 
Chinese for 6 years and I think he would say he speaks Chinese 
like a first grader.
    So it's a long process to develop expertise. We can't 
develop them in a 10-month program, but we can make them aware 
of the questions they need to ask to find the experts who are 
there. And I think that's an important thing to do.
    Mr. Gallagher. Well, the other thing that I'm concerned 
about is we invest this money and time into some of our best 
and brightest, although there's a dispute as to whether we're 
selecting our best and brightest, depending on the institution.
    Are we then putting them in operational assignments that 
reflects the year or 2 years they just spent working on a 
particular intellectual problem?
    I only have 14 seconds. Yeah, I got to--yeah.
    General Schmidle. I think we would find out that it's 
probably episodic.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. I can only say, based on what my 
students tell me, rarely.
    Mr. Gallagher. Okay. I'm listening. Again, I swear.
    [Laughter.]
    Ms. Speier. Dr. Johnson-Freese, I believe in your testimony 
you recommended that it not be focused on the next position 
that officer is going to have but their totality of the arc of 
their term in the military.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Yeah. When I started in PME that was 
the idea that we were supposed to [be] preparing them for their 
next job. Well, when your seminar is 12 students and one is a 
pilot and one is a nurse and one is a ship driver and one is in 
cyber--you can't prepare them. We are not--that is training. 
That is training.
    What we are preparing them to do is to recognize long-term 
threats, to think strategically. Getting away from that idea of 
preparing them for their next job has been incremental, but I 
think we have made a great deal of progress in that area.
    Ms. Speier. Thank you. Next is the gentlewoman from 
Pennsylvania, Ms. Houlahan. You are recognized for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Houlahan. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our 
panel for speaking. I served in the military and was a 
Russian--I took a bunch of Russian as well back in the day, and 
my dad actually was a Navy guy and went to Naval War College, 
amongst other terrific professional education opportunities.
    So I'm really excited to kind of learn your perspective, 
and I had a specific question for Ms.--it must be Dr. Johnson-
Freese or Ms. Johnson-Freese--you suggested in your testimony 
that the Department should utilize a two-track PME pathway for 
students for those who were pursuing master's degrees and those 
who sought only to complete their PME.
    We have often heard that noncommissioned officers [NCOs] 
and petty officers are the backbone of the Armed Forces and 
about 82 percent of the forces are enlisted, and so my question 
to you is, given how strongly that we rely on the enlisted 
folks and ongoing efforts to recruit and retain these qualified 
folks, would you also recommend, similarly, that pathways apply 
to enlisted for PME?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. I'm not familiar--I'm not as familiar 
with the education system that deals with NCOs. But I know we 
have included--on a very selective basis included them into our 
programs and I think--again, many students come to us and say, 
I've got two master's, I don't need another master's.
    I would rather spend that time doing something else. And, 
frankly, there are just students who aren't interested for 
whatever reason and they don't add much to the seminar. I had a 
student say, so I did all the reading, did all the work, and 
I'm going to get an A- and the man next to me who didn't spill 
his coffee every day is going to get a B+.
    Let him take a more condensed version and get him out of 
the classroom and add more interagency people. Add more 
international. Add some of the NCOs. That creates a more 
interesting and useful mix.
    Ms. Houlahan. So you're saying that you could increase 
capacity if you changed the mix of what people's aspirations 
were in terms of the end result of the program?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Absolutely.
    Ms. Houlahan. And that's interesting. My other question--
you also did a lot--spoke a lot about sort of diversity of the 
staff and faculty and you spoke a little bit about--I think 
what you were saying is measuring what mattered and being able 
to have the data in front of us as to what that diversity looks 
like, where people are coming from, so that you can see what 
sort of efficacy results from that diversity.
    Is that, indeed, what you were indicating a need for is an 
understanding of what the faculty looks like at these various 
institutions?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. What the faculty looks like and 
equally, if not more important, what the administration looks 
like. I would argue that the administration in PME throughout 
the institutions is overwhelmingly retired military, and that's 
rather like having a hospital--if everybody running the 
hospital is a surgeon, they're going to have the same answer to 
pretty much every medical question.
    When you have a war college where everybody is retired 
military, you don't get much diversity of thought. So my 
argument is that since it is Active Duty, retired military, 
professional academics, and practitioners, there ought to be 
some kind of mix in there to get diversity of viewpoint, and it 
is not a matter of Ph.D. and non-Ph.D.
    It's a matter of where did you come from? What is your 
background? Did you have experience in education? Are you aware 
of what it takes to succeed as an academic as opposed to--many 
of the retired military will go on to get a Ph.D. at a night 
school program maybe in the field they're working in, maybe 
not.
    So it's not Ph.D./non-Ph.D. It is what was your background 
when you came in to give you what--diversity of thought and I 
think that will get--that will remove a lot of the inertia and 
status quo that has prevailed.
    Ms. Houlahan. And with my remaining seconds would love to 
understand from Mr. Schmidle--General Schmidle, you mentioned 
the fact that--I'm trying to remember what the angle was.
    I'm sorry. I've lost the train of thought. It was really 
important, but I'm sure it'll come to me.
    And with that, I guess I'll yield back because I've 
forgotten what I wanted to ask you about.
    General Schmidle. So if I could comment on the question you 
asked about accreditation. So the question we might ask 
ourselves is if we were not concerned with accreditation for 
master's programs, what would that free up in terms of 
bandwidth at the war colleges to potentially teach things that 
we're not teaching today, and the extent to which that 
accreditation actually impacts us at that level might be 
something to think about.
    The other thing is with regard to the administration, the 
question we should be asking ourselves is how do we incentivize 
civilian faculty to join the administration of a war college, 
and Joan has brought up some great points.
    If everybody there is a surgeon, then their answer is going 
to be, well, let's do some exploratory cutting and figure out 
what the problem is.
    So I just think if we could consider those two things that 
might be useful.
    Ms. Houlahan. No, I appreciate it. I know my time is up. I 
did remember what I was going to ask----
    Ms. Speier. All right. Go ahead and ask question.
    Ms. Houlahan. Thank you, which was when you talk--both of 
you have talked about the balance between rigor and, you know, 
making sure you don't alienate the population--your student 
population--I also was a chemistry teacher for a time so I do 
understand that as well.
    But my challenge is you also mentioned that it made a huge 
difference when it was part of a person's career path to 
require that they take a stop at this sort of professional 
development and education.
    If we make it so that we're lowering the accreditation 
standards or that there isn't accreditation, will it still be 
that desirable path or is there--how do you reconcile that, I 
guess, is my question.
    General Schmidle. I don't think that the accreditation 
path--when I was teaching at the Marine Corps University at the 
command and general staff level--I had just finished the war 
college--we did not have--we were not given a master or we 
didn't earn a master's degree at that program. It was not 
accredited.
    Yet, I was entering students in command and staff college 
that--for master's degrees when I did not have one myself. So I 
think that that the--that is just not really an issue.
    The point that I think I was trying to make was if you say 
to the best and brightest of our young officers a tour on the 
faculty of the university of one of the schools and one of our 
services is good for your career as opposed to being something 
to be avoided, then I think that you will, just like joint duty 
was, all of a sudden overnight it became the thing that 
everybody wanted, and 2 weeks before that you couldn't get 
anybody to sign up for a joint job. So that does happen.
    Ms. Speier. Thank you.
    Ms. Houlahan. I get it. I get it. I appreciate it. Thank 
you, sir. Thank you, Madam----
    Ms. Speier. The gentlelady yields back.
    Ms. Houlahan. Thank you, Madam Chair.
    Ms. Speier. Mrs. McClain is next but she's not here. So 
we'll move to Mr. Jackson of Texas for 5 minutes.
    Dr. Jackson. Thank you, Chairwoman, and thank you, Ranking 
Member Gallagher, for holding this hearing today. I share 
Ranking Member Gallagher's passion for providing oversight, for 
reforming the future of professional military education.
    So I'm glad we had this hearing take place today. I believe 
this is one of the most important topics that we can discuss 
here in this subcommittee.
    As a retired flag officer, I believe that we need to 
continue to invest in our people by providing adequate 
opportunities for development and growth.
    Yesterday, our committee received a briefing from Deputy 
Secretary Hicks on National Defense Strategy. During the 
briefing, she emphasized investment and modernization in our 
cyber and space capabilities.
    General, you helped stand up the CYBERCOM [U.S. Cyber 
Command] as the first deputy commander so your expertise is a 
real asset to this committee. China's cyber capabilities are 
advancing rapidly each day.
    So I think it's important that we continue to educate our 
force about cyber in particular because we will--it will be 
such a critical component of the conflict in the Indo-Pacific 
should that happen.
    So, General, where do you see the largest gaps in knowledge 
in the Department when looking at cyber and, further, what 
aspects of cyber should we implement in the curriculum at our 
PME institutions to ensure our forces are ready for the Chinese 
adversary?
    General Schmidle. Well, that's a great question, 
Representative Jackson. Thanks for asking it. So, in my time at 
Cyber Command and my time since then dealing with this issue 
when I was on Active Duty and today where I'm on the advisory 
board at NSA [National Security Agency], it seems to me that 
what we really need in our senior officers and our senior 
leadership, we don't want to turn them into computer scientists 
but they do need to have an understanding--enough of an 
understanding of the technology to be able to think through the 
implications of using that technology as a tool of national 
security because what we are seeing and what we have seen over 
the course of the last 15 years is that cyber capabilities can, 
in fact, have an effect--a big effect, in some cases--on what 
you might think about for national security strategy.
    So I think that it's important that we have some level of 
technical education and the example from my own experience is 
being a pilot, right--I'm not an aeronautical engineer. I 
couldn't build an airplane.
    But I do know why if I push the stick forward the trees get 
bigger. If I pull it back, they get smaller. I understand who 
Bernoulli was and I got all that. And I think we need people 
like that that understand the world of cyber and especially to 
realize that there's two different things we're talking about 
here.
    There's the pathways, if you will, of cyber, the way that 
we push bits and data through, and then there is what we can 
potentially do with cyber technologies that would be--have some 
other effect on what we're doing. So it's a great and very 
timely question and, as you well know, the Chinese are active 
and so----
    Dr. Jackson. Yes, sir. No, I appreciate that. Thank you. 
And I had another question that was related. You answered most 
of that, actually.
    But I think it's really important too because I think 
what--the other thing it does is it gives us--you know, if we 
include this in the curriculum it makes people much more 
competitive across the board for jobs when they get out of the 
military because cyber is so important.
    Just, you know, no matter what you choose to do when you 
leave the military, I think having a little bit of background 
in this and having this part as your professional military 
education is going to make life after the military a lot more 
competitive and a lot better for folks when they get out.
    So thank you. I appreciate both of you for being here and 
for your time. And with that, I yield back. Thank you.
    Ms. Speier. He wants to--do you want to yield to the 
ranking member?
    Dr. Jackson. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I yield back, Madam.
    Ms. Speier. All right. The gentleman is recognized.
    Mr. Gallagher. Can I ask a blunt question. How--okay, so 
when we talk about, like, our top level war colleges, right--
National War College, Naval War College--I'm not trying to get 
you to pick sides here--how do you think they stack up against 
top-level civilian master's degree programs, right? Think SAIS 
[Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies], 
Georgetown. I don't know what the latest ranking is. Do we have 
a way of assessing that?
    General Schmidle. So after I went through the Marine Corps 
War College, I decided that I wanted to get a master's degree 
because they were not issuing master's degrees and I wanted to 
continue. So I applied and got accepted at American University 
and I got a degree in philosophy.
    So here I am in a civilian university. I'm a 50-year-old or 
a 47-year-old colonel wandering around, going to night school 
trying to do this. Academically, I can tell you that it was the 
first 6 months of the Marine Corps War College at that time, 
1996, when we were doing strategy was as in depth as what I did 
in that master's program.
    The second 6 months of the war college, which were more of 
the joint force applied stuff, was not--it was more in people's 
comfort zones. So but that was just my one snapshot experience 
into what that was.
    Joan.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. I would argue that the PME can declare 
success when an officer is offered a chance to go to Harvard, 
Yale, SAIS, or a war college and they pick the war college.
    Mr. Gallagher. I like the way you put that.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Because, right now, there is the 
perception that the degree from one of those civilian academic 
institutions is worth more, and part of that is, again, because 
they--these--Harvard, Yale, SAIS--they have very selective 
admissions, they're very rigorous, and the faculty at those 
institutions are not there to make the students comfortable.
    They are there to challenge them. General Petraeus going to 
Princeton was the first C he ever got and it made him a better 
student. So I think it's really--the war colleges--the 
advantages that the war college brings is it has faculty with 
in-depth security experience who understands that they are 
teaching to practitioners, and they don't go in--when I teach 
theory I do it knowing that my students don't even like the 
word theory and I put it out there in a way that would be 
acceptable and they will learn from.
    I have to add to that, too, a different view on 
accreditation. When the Naval War College was the first to 
accredit its program, it was not--we did not gold-plate it. It 
was accredited the way it was. There is this myth that we can 
strip things away and have all this extra time, which is simply 
not true, and the reason it was accredited was because the 
students would come to Newport knowing they were going to pass 
PME.
    It was going to--they were going to pass. Everybody passes. 
So they would go to the local university to get a master's and 
come to class, and when you asked about readings they were very 
sorry, but they didn't get to it because they had homework to 
do for their master's program.
    Mr. Gallagher. Wow.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. So accrediting those war college 
programs is to get their attention, at least in part, and if we 
don't have them accredited we're going to go back to that idea 
that their attention is going to be split because they do want 
post-career master's programs.
    Mr. Gallagher. That's right. I thank the chairwoman for 
indulging me with that extra time.
    Ms. Speier. So, on the one hand, it would suggest that--
first of all, in looking at the accreditation of the various 
war colleges they're supposed to be accredited every 6 years 
and some of them have not been accredited in a 6-year period of 
time. So I don't know how rigorous that accreditation process 
is. Are you familiar with it relative to the Naval [War) 
College?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Yeah. They are accredited--the war 
colleges are accredited by the same bodies that accredit 
Harvard, Yale, wherever, at Stanford--wherever it happens to 
be.
    What very often happens--these are academics. Academics 
come into a military environment and they are dazzled by the 
efficiency and the stacks of books, and they are just--they're 
dazzled. That's the only word I can give you. And they are 
impressed by what they see and rarely do they see problems. 
But, again----
    Ms. Speier. So, for instance, the College of Naval Warfare, 
which is, I presume, under your--hasn't been accredited since 
May of 2015 and it's supposed to be accredited every 6 years.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. I think a lot of that has to do with 
COVID. They would have been accredited. I'm not familiar 
specifically, but I would suggest it would have been last year.
    Ms. Speier. All right. Other questions? I don't believe 
we--everyone else is off. Okay. Well, we really very much 
appreciate your participation today. It's been very valuable.
    Let me just ask one last question to each of you. If you 
could change anything in the war colleges today, what would it 
be?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Makeup of the administration.
    Ms. Speier. I'm sorry?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. The makeup of the administration.
    Ms. Speier. Okay.
    General Schmidle. I would actually--would tend to try to 
make them more academically rigorous. I think that challenge is 
something that we need to come to grips with and I think that 
we need to think about the war colleges as a potential place 
for evaluation of senior officers as opposed to a place where 
we simply educate them. I think we have the opportunity to do 
both.
    Ms. Speier. So do you think we should change this idea that 
no one gets a C and no one gets an A?
    General Schmidle. I think we could. My experience at grad 
school, the first semester I got a B-. I thought my life was 
over. At American, I couldn't believe it. What, a B-? You got 
to be kidding me. I get As in everything I do. But it's just a 
different standard, and it was the last B that I ever got. But 
that was--it was there.
    And so I think that that is--look, we're talking about Type 
A people that are really competitive and those are the folks 
that you want to come out of the war colleges and to continue 
to serve this country and to bring that disciplined focus to 
bear on all the problems we have, specifically the Chinese 
problem.
    Ms. Speier. All right. Again, thank you both very--yes?
    Ms. Jacobs, have you joined us?
    [No response.]
    Ms. Speier. I don't believe so. All right. Again, thank you 
very much for your participation.
    Ms. Jacobs. I'm here. Sorry.
    Ms. Speier. Oh, wait a minute. Okay. All right. Ms. Jacobs, 
you're recognized for 5 minutes.
    Ms. Jacobs. Well, thank you so much, Madam Chair, and thank 
you so much to our panelists. So I would love to ask Dr. 
Johnson-Freese, the 2018 National Defense Strategy notes that 
PME across the board has stagnated and a recent RAND study on 
Air Force PME found that, in practice, the officers ranked most 
highly do not tend to attend PME at Air University and officers 
do not give the quality of Air University school [inaudible] as 
a high ranking.
    What are the benefits values of service level PME programs? 
What's special about the war college programs that sets them 
apart and what is the current philosophy for officers assigned 
to PME programs like war college, Navy Postgraduate School, Air 
University, et cetera?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. If I understand the question correctly, 
it's, basically, what they can get out of it. Is that the 
question?
    Ms. Jacobs. I think the question is, you know, we have 
heard a lot that they don't--you know, at Air University they 
don't feel like they're getting high quality relative to other 
programs.
    So if you could just talk through some of the benefits and 
value of the programs and what sets them apart from other 
programs.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Well, I think, again, in order to have 
a quality program you have to have a top quality faculty, and 
that gets into what I said repeatedly about having a more 
diverse faculty and more appreciation for the hybrid nature of 
the faculty.
    It also--in order to attack the question you have to get to 
the previous question that was asked about grades. If I were to 
give--at one point in my career I gave an officer a C, and I 
was called down to the front office and said, so, Joan, the 
U.S. Government has spent millions training this officer as a 
pilot and now you want to ruin his career by giving him a C.
    And I said, what is the expectation? And the response was, 
the expectation is that you need to do a better job at getting 
this student to the level he needs to be at. And all faculty at 
war colleges know that, that it is not the responsibility of 
the student to do better. It's for the student to do good 
enough that we can get them through.
    So to go to the general's point, how do we get past that? 
How do we add the rigor without ruining a pilot's career 
because that person can't put two sentences together in a 
paragraph--in a written paragraph?
    Ms. Jacobs. Yeah. And what role and relationship do you see 
the JPME system having with the civilian academic education 
system, especially in getting civilian help and support for 
providing research, educational resources, such as courses, 
being a talent pipeline to train and supply future generations 
of cutting-edge scholars to work in the JPME system? Is there 
room for greater integration between the JPME and civilian 
university systems?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. I think there should be. I think that's 
a great question. But, again, they have been very insular 
because there is this difference of instilling rigor and 
challenging students or getting students through.
    But recently there has been a recognition that working with 
other institution brings in specialties on China, on the Middle 
East, bringing in the expertise that you don't necessarily 
have. But it needs to be made clear to administrators that this 
is a good thing and faculty should be rewarded, not punished, 
for their external associations.
    Ms. Jacobs. Great. And with my last minute, are top 
performers being assigned to the system or how are you doing 
officer assignments?
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. The services assign the students to PME 
on different systems. Some have to compete. Some are assigned. 
Some services feel that education is important and they will 
send their officers to education two or three times throughout 
their career--the Air Force.
    Others feel that any day you're not operational is a wasted 
day. So it's--I think, as the general pointed out, if going 
to--PME is seen as a career enhancer rather than a career 
inhibitor, it could change dramatically.
    Ms. Jacobs. All right. Well, thank you very much for your 
work. Madam Chair, I yield back.
    Ms. Speier. The gentlelady yields back. The ranking member 
has one more question.
    Mr. Gallagher. Well, I'm quite attracted to this idea of 
increasing the rigor and I would argue if someone can't write a 
coherent sentence or paragraph in simple and direct prose, 
perhaps that's an indication that that person should not be 
promoted, particularly to a general or flag officer rank, 
right.
    A lot of our frustration here is we get these documents 
from the Pentagon and it--yeah, the Pentagon--they're, like, 
filled with acronyms and, you know, passive voice and it 
suggests muddled thinking. Muddled prose suggests muddled 
thinking.
    I quite like this idea of raising the stakes, right, and 
that puts the pressure on a unit to make sure that before they 
send someone to a top level school or an intermediate level 
school they're ready to go, right.
    Before, you know, the Army sent Dwight Eisenhower to 
Leavenworth they made sure he was ready and when he graduated 
number one it was a big deal, right. A big deal. And that gets 
to the type of prestige, I think, you're talking about, Dr. 
Freese.
    So I don't know if there's a question in there so much as a 
comment. But I do think--I wonder, do you think we could do a 
better job of tracking graduates throughout the rest of their 
career?
    I mean, I've asked for some basic data on what happens to 
graduates from top level schools or how long are they staying 
in, what does it mean for their career. Thus far, I have not 
gotten the data. I just wanted your opinion on it.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. The problem is at schools like Harvard, 
Yale, Stanford, they boast about how many of their graduates 
have become President, won Pulitzers, won Nobel Prizes.
    Well, those are very much later in their career events. 
It's not right--immediate after graduation. And that's the 
problem with education.
    Education is a long-term payoff, and because it's so 
difficult to measure, it sometimes pushes the military to 
training because training--you know, when Johnny came into the 
program he could screw in 13 widgets in a minute and when he 
left he could do 35. He was trained. Education is very, very 
difficult to measure return on investment.
    General Schmidle. Yeah. To your to your point, though, 
Ranking Member Gallagher, grades at the war college--so having 
sat on a number of promotion boards, in my experience, the only 
grade that really mattered is if you were the honor graduate in 
your class that that would welcome a line in a brief about who 
you were and it made a difference. The rest of the crew, it 
didn't matter.
    The fact is you graduated from the war college. So whether 
you graduated with a C+ or a B-, at least in my experience at 
the promotion level, that was not necessarily a factor.
    The other interesting point you mentioned about muddled 
thinking and muddled writing, after I became a general officer, 
whenever I would go to a new job and I was looking for people 
that I could work with, literally, one of the first questions I 
would ask is do we have an English major on this staff 
somewhere because I just get tired of editing.
    And I used to have a stack of Strunk & White Style Manuals 
on my desk, and when people would come in, when they'd hand me 
something to read and I would make a comment on it and I'd clip 
this book to it and send it back to this action officer and 
say, I know you're not familiar with this book because I just 
read this paper. So it might help you.
    I, personally, think that rigor would be--the competitors 
that you want, the meat eaters, the carnivores, are going to 
chew on that and they're going to want to be there, and I think 
that's a good thing.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. May I add one thing? I teach at Harvard 
Extension School and some of the classes I teach are called 
writing intensive and that means with the subject matter I 
teach, I also teach writing. We could do that in PME but it 
requires teachers who are good writers as well as [inaudible].
    Mr. Gallagher. Well, again, I thank the chairwoman for 
indulging me. And for this concern about ruining people's 
careers, heck, we used to relieve people, I mean, routinely, 
and it was not necessarily a career ender. So part of that is 
we need a process for changing that as well. So, again, I'm 
sorry. Thank you for----
    Ms. Speier. All right. Well, you've been very helpful and 
this is an area that, obviously, we want to spend more time. I 
actually think Congress has really not done a great job of the 
oversight it needs to do on PME and I think the ranking member 
has brought it to our attention in a way that we will continue 
to do so.
    So we really appreciate you, General, and you, Doctor, for 
your participation today.
    Ms. Johnson-Freese. Thank you very much.
    Ms. Speier. We'll now make the room right for our next 
panel. So we will recess for 5 minutes.
    [Recess.]
    Ms. Speier. We now welcome our second panel, and our first 
panelist is the Honorable Shawn Skelly, Assistant Secretary of 
Defense for Readiness in the Office of the Under Secretary of 
Defense for Personnel and Readiness.
    Please proceed.

   STATEMENT OF HON. SHAWN G. SKELLY, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF 
DEFENSE FOR READINESS, OFFICE OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE 
                  FOR PERSONNEL AND READINESS

    Ms. Skelly. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Good afternoon, 
Chairwoman Speier, Ranking Member Gallagher, and distinguished 
members of the subcommittee. I appreciate the opportunity to 
appear before you today to discuss matters related to 
professional military education and the National Defense 
Strategy [NDS].
    I thank the subcommittee for its part in sustaining a 
dialogue to discuss congressional ideas and concerns as well as 
DOD initiatives.
    Last December, our staff briefed the subcommittee on how 
the Department has addressed shortcomings in PME and JPME as 
identified in the NDS. We plan to provide a follow-up report 
addressing your questions by June 15th. As you have my written 
statement, I'll briefly summarize it.
    Since the start of the Biden/Harris administration, 
Secretary Austin has made clear that DOD will invest in our 
most significant strategic advantage, our people. In the newly 
released 2022 NDS, Secretary Austin emphasized three 
overarching ways in which we'll ensure our national security: 
integrated deterrence, campaigning, and building enduring 
advantage.
    Investing in the military education of our service members 
supports all three initiatives and is particularly crucial for 
building enduring advantage for the future joint force.
    Where training prepares our service members for certainty, 
PME prepares them for uncertainty. The goal of PME is to create 
leaders who can achieve intellectual overmatch against 
adversaries. That overmatch demands a system that prepares 
service members to address all contingencies.
    Unique to our institutions, PME provides officers with the 
opportunity to learn the state of the art in military strategy 
and operational planning, which will continue to stand as 
prerequisites to an understanding of the nature and conduct of 
warfare.
    PME also provides service members with the skills and 
knowledge to make sound decisions in progressively demanding 
command and staff assignments.
    It ensures they're ready for the uncertainty they'll face 
throughout their military career by providing critical 
knowledge on the ethos, culture, and core values of their 
service, the technical and tactical skills appropriate to how 
that service wages war, and most importantly, the wisdom and 
judgment to be applied in a broad range of situations across 
domains, theaters, and in both joint and combined operations 
with allies and partners.
    But military education policy is more than staff and war 
colleges. It's about continuous learning across all points of 
service such as strengthening the ability of the services and 
future leaders to lead rapid adaptation and innovation, and to 
understand the potential use of all types of disruptive 
technologies.
    In a significant advance reflecting DOD's increased 
emphasis on PME, last month the Under Secretary of Defense for 
Personnel and Readiness approved the first ever departmentwide 
policy for military education.
    The policy details the structure for providing guidance to 
the services about curriculum and outcomes that graduates of 
military education programs should achieve while preserving the 
impact and agility of our PME system that comes from empowering 
our institutions.
    This includes service-governed PME, Chairman-guided joint 
PME [JPME], the service academies, and professional development 
opportunities such as graduate education, fellowships, and 
training with industry.
    The policy establishes an oversight governance structure to 
assess PME effectiveness and evaluate the Department's return 
on investment in military education by adopting an outcomes-
based approach.
    Developing authentic assessments of what our officers and 
enlisted members can do with their knowledge will change the 
requirements for graduation from ``attended and graduated'' to 
meaningful standards, providing more granular data that 
supports talent management and ensures an appropriate return on 
investment.
    The instruction also promotes the integration of war-gaming 
into the military education curriculum, advancing the 
Secretary's call for enhanced strategic thinking across the 
force by providing avenues for military personnel to practice 
their leadership, creativity, and problem-solving skills in 
scenarios closely resembling the national security challenges 
facing the Nation today.
    Finally, the Department must develop leaders that are 
responsible for taking care of our people, including tackling 
sexual assault and other harmful behaviors in the force.
    We're working to implement the training and education 
recommendations of the Independent Review Commission on Sexual 
Assault in the Military across the Department.
    PME helps forge the most professional fighting force in the 
world. Looking forward, DOD will increase the links between 
education and talent management, continuous learning, and 
professional development to enable intellectual overmatch 
against our competitors.
    Madam Chairwoman, this concludes my statement. I'm happy to 
answer any questions that you or the ranking member may have, 
and thank you for your continuing support of the women and men 
of our Armed Forces.
    [The prepared statement of Ms. Skelly can be found in the 
Appendix on page 76.]
    Ms. Speier. Thank you, Honorable Skelly. We'll now hear 
from Vice Admiral Stuart Munsch, the director of Joint Force 
Development, the Joint Staff J7.

  STATEMENT OF VADM STUART B. MUNSCH, USN, DIRECTOR FOR JOINT 
               FORCE DEVELOPMENT, JOINT STAFF, J7

    Admiral Munsch. Good afternoon, Chairwoman Speier, Ranking 
Member Gallagher, and distinguished members of the 
subcommittee, including those that might be participating 
virtually.
    I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today and 
further appreciate the support that Congress has provided for 
the funding of professional military education as well as your 
oversight and your feedback.
    PME, of course, is critical, and I include in it knowledge, 
skill sets, critical thinking, and a network of like-minded 
individuals to the future success of our Armed Forces.
    Our current system largely stems from the Goldwater-Nichols 
Act of 1986, further advanced by Representative Skelton's panel 
in 1990. That's resulted in a five-phase continuum for PME.
    Of that, the subset of joint professional military 
education has three parts of that continuum and that's 
intermediate level, senior level, and then the general and flag 
officer training and education.
    We recently also have added enlisted professional military 
education, which I know was raised by the prior panel. We're 
currently undergoing a transformation in PME, driven by the 
2018 National Defense Strategy that resulted rather quickly in 
the Joint Chiefs' vision for guidance for professional military 
education and talent management.
    That vision then was codified in policy through the Officer 
Professional Military Education Policy, which we refer to 
typically as OPMEP. Recently here a few months ago also 
released the vision for enlisted PME, ``Developing Enlisted 
Leaders for Tomorrow's Wars,'' and then that further for policy 
was ensconced in the Enlisted Professional Military Education 
Policy, or EPMEP.
    PME is focused on achieving the intellectual overmatch in 
order to have the warfighting advantage that we need against 
the adversary. Paired with that needs to be talent management 
so that the right students are attending and the right faculty 
are teaching.
    It also requires that we have a rigorous cycle of planning, 
executing, assessing, and then applying the feedback from what 
we have learned in that assessment to the subsequent planning 
cycle.
    That has not always been present in past PME, and with the 
effort on outcomes-based military education, we are now getting 
at that where the objectives are more rigorous, the education, 
the--excuse me, the execution is being tracked closely. We have 
established metrics in order to be able to do assessments and 
then, of course, applying that to make it better as we go on.
    In conclusion, I'd like to reiterate my thanks and also 
state that education is a force multiplier, and by way of a 
maritime analogy, it's like a rising tide that raises all 
ships.
    So thanks again for your continued support and we look 
forward to your feedback and your questions.
    Thank you.
    [The prepared statement of Admiral Munsch can be found in 
the Appendix on page 83.]
    Ms. Speier. Thank you both. Admiral, does the Department 
survey PME graduates about their experience with the program 
and whether it prepares them for future jobs?
    Admiral Munsch. Yes. Students are surveyed----
    Ms. Speier. Is it anonymous?
    Admiral Munsch. In some cases, yes. In some cases, they can 
volunteer their own identity if they would like.
    Ms. Speier. How about the supervisors' views of whether 
PMEs sufficiently prepare their direct reports?
    Admiral Munsch. Yes, the war colleges do surveys. As was 
discussed in the prior panel, sometimes it's difficult to 
distinguish between the intellectual attainment due to 
attending a war college versus learning on their own--self-
educating versus their life experiences. But we do do the 
surveys and we try to make those distinguishing characteristics 
identifiable.
    Ms. Speier. Would you share some of those surveys with the 
committee, please?
    Admiral Munsch. At a later time? Is that what you're 
asking?
    Ms. Speier. Yes.
    Admiral Munsch. Yes. Okay.
    Ms. Speier. All right. Thank you.
    Assistant Secretary, based on what you heard from the first 
panel, what do you believe we should be doing relative to the 
mix in administration and the faculty?
    Ms. Skelly. Madam Chairwoman, that's a great question as to 
faculty makeup is one that I don't have much experience in with 
regard to the execution of my responsibilities as selection of 
faculty and the mix in there is with regard to the owning 
institution, the governing institution of that school, whether 
that be a war college or a staff college.
    What we do is we do set the policies in there but we don't 
actually get involved with the selection of the actual 
professors.
    Ms. Speier. No, I understand that. But you could, 
certainly, recommend that a third of the faculty or a third of 
the administration be persons who are not retired military or 
military?
    Ms. Skelly. With regard to the balances, ma'am, we could 
and we'd have to examine that to see where we would think we'd 
do an evaluation. We might include that in our next--in a 
future upcoming study to see what a proper mix could be.
    Ms. Speier. So the widespread perception that it's hard to 
earn an A at JPME but even harder to get a C, feeding the 
notion that somehow you go there, you don't necessarily have to 
read the material, you've got to show up and you'll be 
successful--how do we deal with that? That may be an older 
perception. Maybe there's already been enough changes so that 
that's not going on.
    But to hear the previous testimony from Dr. Freese, this--
someone was actually going to another college to get a master's 
and also coming to the war college for, I guess, a program that 
was not going to represent a master's, was kind of surprising 
to me.
    Ms. Skelly. It is to me as well, Madam Chair, and I wonder 
about the implications that having a dual-track process within 
our war colleges might complicate accreditation for the side 
where degrees would be conferred to have a mix of students, 
potentially, in some classes and on separate tracks in other 
classes and how that might impinge upon the academic rigor for 
all and how that might impact accreditation attainment.
    And I also wonder about creating two tracks. I know some of 
our allied partners have different tracks where folks can opt 
into a noncareer track.
    As a former aviator, I often wondered about that because 
those folks tend to stay in the cockpit for a while and would 
that be advantageous, and [if] confronted with that challenge 
would I go after that, and I wonder how we would create a 
segregation within our--our system is not really set up.
    You're either tracking towards command until you're not, 
until you might find yourself in a tour or two that, you know, 
signals that you're not going to promote to O-6 or O-7 and 
beyond. But I would wonder about how we would adopt such a 
system into our current paradigm.
    Ms. Speier. So, Admiral Munsch, what percentage of the 
curriculum is war-gaming?
    Admiral Munsch. It varies, and if I could broaden the 
definition of war-gaming to include other forms of practical 
learning, typically it's between a quarter and a third of what 
goes on.
    Ms. Speier. How do you think we can make it more attractive 
as an assignment for high-performing officers who would have 
much to impart to their junior officers?
    Admiral Munsch. There's a series of issues there, ma'am. 
One of them is depending on the particular warfare specialty of 
officers that can be very demanding in terms of the practical 
skills in operating, what they operate, for example, pilots of 
jet aircraft, submariners with their submarines. And as a 
result of that there's this tension between the time that needs 
to be devoted to developing the expertise and experience to 
operate those platforms safely and with warfighting expertise 
versus time spent doing something else while coming up in your 
career.
    And so there's the--where oftentimes you'll find people 
have to do night and weekend work in order to get the joint 
professional military education or the master's degree that was 
just discussed, because there isn't time in the career.
    So what the services other than the Navy do is that they 
make the staff and command college a screening mechanism for 
their best officers as well as the war college, which is 
typically at the post-command level.
    The Navy has not had that culture to do that and, as a 
result of that, have not had the same level of quality students 
that the others have had. So there's a policy choice to be made 
there.
    The Marine Corps made this transformation when General Gray 
was Commandant of the Marine Corps. He made it very firm he was 
shifting the policy. There were a few that didn't believe that 
he was as serious as he was and then they, essentially, lost 
their career----
    Ms. Speier. So the GAO [U.S. Government Accountability 
Office] pointed out that the Navy was the only service that was 
not participating in JPME. Has that changed?
    Admiral Munsch. Well, they do participate in PME. I think 
the GAO report was pointing out that they don't send sufficient 
number of students to the sister war colleges----
    Ms. Speier. Well, that's--okay.
    Admiral Munsch [continuing]. To be students and faculty to 
allow the acculturation that [inaudible].
    Ms. Speier. Right. So you stand out by not doing that. And 
is that going to change or is there some philosophy behind not 
participating?
    Admiral Munsch. There are efforts ongoing to do better in 
that. I can't speak for the Navy at this point because I'm--
I've been on the Joint Staff for 2 years. But I'm aware of 
there is activity ongoing and that was also responded to in the 
OSD letter to you all.
    Ms. Speier. All right. My time has expired.
    Ranking Member.
    Mr. Gallagher. Vice Admiral Munsch, my understanding is you 
have a master's from Oxford. Is that correct?
    Admiral Munsch. I do.
    Mr. Gallagher. Can I ask you at what point in your career 
were you able to do that and how did that come about?
    Admiral Munsch. So this is unusual. I wouldn't take it as 
the normal path. It was immediately after leaving the Naval 
Academy through a scholarship.
    Mr. Gallagher. Oh, okay. So you were actually good as an 
undergraduate, unlike me, who wasted a lot of time.
    Admiral Munsch. Well, I was from a small State and had to 
work hard, sir.
    Mr. Gallagher. Absolutely. I guess--and we have a series of 
programs and the Marine Corps is actually catching up. The Navy 
has been in the lead with the Air Force of sending people to go 
get Ph.D.s at purely civilian institutions and then bringing 
them back and utilizing them. There were two--there were at 
least two Active Duty service members in my Ph.D. program at 
Georgetown, one of which went back to be a strategist in the 
Pentagon. Super smart guy. The other actually went to the Air 
War College down in Maxwell, I believe, right? Just both 
brilliant guys.
    Are you aware of these sort of programs? Do we feel like 
we're getting a good return on that investment? Because that's 
an even bigger investment, right? I mean, you're setting people 
away for, potentially, 2 years.
    Then they got to figure out how to finish their 
dissertation. That's a huge investment that we darn sure have 
to make sure we're capitalizing on on the back end.
    I'll start with you, Admiral, and then Assistant Secretary 
Skelly.
    Admiral Munsch. It's uncommon around the joint force. It's 
more common in the nonmaritime services where you'll see that. 
I think there's maybe a little bit more room in the career path 
to do something like that, as well as acceptability in 
selection boards as a desirable characteristic. There have been 
programs in the past in the maritime services that did more of 
that. It's just not very present right now.
    Ms. Skelly. Congressman, I think the new DODI, the 
[Department of Defense] Instruction 1322.35, which sets the 
conditions to create a data informed approach to drive the 
return on investment evaluation at the departmental level. So 
the services have their reasons for pursuing it historically, 
culturally, as the admiral alluded to.
    We need to understand how they're doing it differently, see 
what they think they're getting for a return, and what the 
Department believes that the Department's return on investment 
across the joint force should be there. We don't have the 
wherewithal to do that today.
    The question of Ph.D. attainment came up in our--in my 
meeting with the chairwoman yesterday and we have to go do a 
data call on that and it will take some time to bring back the 
numbers as they exist right now from the service military 
manpower systems.
    Mr. Gallagher. And on that front, I very much appreciate 
you referencing my requests for information in your testimony. 
I look forward to reviewing that data. Again, the intent is 
just to assure that we're making good use of those graduates, 
right.
    I think there are two kind of related issues that we're 
trying to--well, I guess maybe three that are coming out here. 
One is whether we are selecting the best and the brightest to 
go to these institutions.
    The second is whether the institutions themselves are on 
par with the--their civilian counterparts who have a much 
fancier name or credential, right. Like, let's just be honest. 
We had the previous panel talking about what it means to have a 
Harvard degree versus National War College. No offense to the 
National War College, although Princeton is better than 
Harvard. I'm just going to throw that out there.
    And then the third and perhaps most important is whether 
when we--how we're tracking our utilization of graduates, and 
it seems like right now you don't have the ability to pull up 
the numbers very quickly.
    Ms. Skelly. We certainly do not.
    Mr. Gallagher. Okay. I just would argue, in 2022--
technologically, there's no barrier to it. We should be able to 
interrogate the data routinely in order to assess, okay, how 
are the services doing?
    Or reach down and say, okay, what are the report cards 
telling us about how our people are performing, not in real 
time, but near real time?
    Ms. Skelly. Congressman, I'm sure you're aware of the 
emphasis that the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary have put 
on data across the Department that all data is available for 
the Department's use.
    Recently, the Deputy Secretary directed that all models 
that include that data are also available for the Department's 
use. We have to go there, we are making our way there.
    We're imparting that lesson, that expectation, across the 
Department, and I'm looking--personally looking forward to 
taking the military education enterprise in that direction 
because we're learning lessons as to how to drive 
accountability to make data available to bring it together, 
because it's not just one service's data and displaying that. 
It's how you do the relationships, how you--and then create 
that power in there.
    I know from my own experience, sort of the three questions 
that you raise, I saw all of them. I asked to go to Naval War 
College, to College of Naval Command and Staff, and the only 
reason it was entertained because I had time is what the 
detailer thought. And I had it--in my shop in the Pacific 
Command I had a Hindi speaker who went to the Indian War 
College, and his counterpart in Central Command had gone to the 
Pakistani War College.
    But it was back and forth. I had a--excuse me, I had an 
Urdu speaker for India, and they had a Hindi speaker for 
Pakistan because they didn't get assigned to where their 
imparted government-provided skills and training had taken them 
to.
    We have a history of not making the most out of that and be 
able to account for it beyond their payback tour. You get your 
education, you owe several years. But what do we do after that?
    Because we'll send you to someplace to try and squeeze that 
out of you. But how do we know what we're getting as to who 
makes three stars, who makes more, who goes to particular 
commands that suit their training or if they just happen to 
wind up someplace, especially with regard to cyber, AI 
[artificial intelligence], and other technologies that are 
emerging.
    We can only impart exquisite knowledge to so many. We have 
to ensure that they're put in places to utilize that.
    Mr. Gallagher. Well, I appreciate that. I'm out of time. 
Before I forget, however, one of those classmates I mentioned, 
my understanding is he's retiring soon. His name is Jeff 
Donnithorne.
    So wherever you are, Jeff, you are one of the most 
brilliant scholars I have--I've ever met and a patriot and 
you've served your country very admirably. So I'm going to miss 
your retirement ceremony, but maybe this will get to you 
through the ether.
    Ms. Speier. All right. Mrs. Bice, you're recognized for 5 
minutes.
    Mrs. Bice. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman and Ranking Member, 
and I appreciate the witnesses for their time this afternoon.
    Let me start with--you know, it was mentioned actually in 
the previous panel but I want to kind of circle back around and 
get your perspective. One of the key tasks of our Nation's war 
colleges is to develop senior joint leaders who can 
successfully master across domains of ground, air, space, and, 
importantly, cyber operations.
    While we have made some positive strides, I feel strongly 
that our Nation's warfighters need greater opportunities to 
expand their familiarity with cyber operations.
    So my question to the panel, does our Nation's JPME 
curriculum do enough to prepare future senior military leaders 
to oversee operations in cyberspace or that have a cyberspace 
component to them?
    Ms. Skelly. Thank you, Congresswoman. We know we have to do 
better because of the increasing importance, near dominance of 
cyberspace. Every operation we have relies upon the cyber 
environment.
    Every potential conflict or interaction that we might have 
with a peer adversary will certainly involve cyber in some way, 
shape, or form. Presently, we are studying, which is not 
action, but we are studying to learn where we have to do better 
on cyber education and we are responding to the--I believe it's 
the committee's desire to learn more about with NDU [National 
Defense University] and cyber, and we have an in-depth study 
going on on that right now.
    I would say from my personal experience in my 9 months in 
the Department as sitting on the Department's cyber council 
it's a confluence of the career civilian professionals who have 
the information operations, the information systems, the cyber 
knowledge, along with the senior operators and the cyber-smart 
people, but we have to create a combined departmental effect to 
be able to operate in these environments.
    I have behind me my Deputy Assistant Secretary for Force 
Education and Training, and one of her key tasks is learning 
how to create literacy on a range of topics across the force 
and how we understand what individual service members need--
based on whatever their specialty may be, what do they need to 
know about cyber and what do they need to know about a changing 
climate, data analytics, and also take that to the--in a 
continual way across their increasing rank and responsibilities 
in there.
    We think it's key and we are pursuing our ability to create 
that capability within our professional military education 
enterprise.
    Mrs. Bice. Thank you very much. To follow up on that, what 
can Congress do to further expand the opportunities for 
military personnel in this area of study?
    My colleague, Mr. Gallagher, and I have a focus on cyber 
and so this is something I think that we haven't put enough 
emphasis on but can now. So what can Congress be doing to help 
in this realm?
    Ms. Skelly. First, ma'am, I think we have a decent revisit 
rate on our curriculum between the services with the curriculum 
that they're responsible for where the Joint Staff informs 
joint professional military education--those requirements.
    I believe our previous expert panel referenced cyber 
education. And it's the demands the Department of Defense, the 
Office of the Secretary of Defense, places upon the system to 
be responsive to that and we certainly rate cyber as an area of 
the highest importance for our force to understand and to be 
able to operate in that realm.
    Mrs. Bice. Vice Admiral, do you have anything that you want 
to add to that?
    Admiral Munsch. Yes. I would offer there are a couple of 
challenges in cyber that make it a bit different from the 
traditional domains.
    One is that it is a very rapidly changing field at all 
times, and so at any point you might think you have a grasp of 
what is in the realm of the possible with cyber and very 
quickly it changes.
    So it requires, as individuals, a revisit rate that's very 
high relative to the other domains to really understand what it 
is capable of doing. With that high visit rate there also is 
then a shortage of personnel who know how to do this that are 
in uniform.
    It's typically not a core specialty like it would be to be 
a pilot or a ship driver. But it's a secondary specialty, and 
we just don't have enough of those people. And when you don't 
have a critical mass then you're not spreading the wealth of 
the knowledge through interaction throughout the joint force.
    So in terms of what Congress could do, I think it's--a bit 
of it is just the nature of the beast and that it's a very fast 
moving field. But we're trying to make cyber more robust in all 
aspects of PME in order to grow that mass of people who really 
understand it. Thank you.
    Mrs. Bice. Thank you. And let me just quickly follow up 
with I think it's crucial that we find the service members that 
have this background and develop them and keep them in the 
service because every day that goes by the cyber component of 
operations becomes more and more critical and without this 
individuals will continue to fall behind.
    Madam Chair, thank you for the time. I yield back.
    Ms. Speier. The gentlewoman yields back. I have just a 
couple of more questions. We'll allow for a second round.
    Assistant Secretary, we have required, I believe, in the 
NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act] of 2 years ago that 
women, peace, and security be included in the curriculum and 
there's, you know, growing recognition that that is a key 
component to successful national security. What are you doing 
at your level to make sure that this is, in fact, not lost in 
the process?
    Ms. Skelly. Excuse me, ma'am. The mic is winning.
    Women, peace, and security is a curriculum area. If I could 
ask the admiral to weigh in. I know the Joint Staff has a 
priority on it or it has it in its rank of priorities for 
curricula across the joint force.
    But we agree it is NDS--the former NDS directed and I 
believe it's within my colleagues in OSD Policy that have 
responsibility to ensure that the joint force is meeting the 
requirements of the demands of women, peace, and security 
[WPS].
    Ms. Speier. But let's say it doesn't happen. Let's say it 
just falls off. Who then is accountable to make sure that that 
is included in the curricula?
    Ms. Skelly. Ma'am, that's where governance would come into 
play, that we have--it wouldn't just be me as the Assistant 
Secretary of Defense for Readiness who has responsibility for 
the lead for our education programs.
    It's to ensure that the entirety of the Office of the 
Secretary brings all of its equities to bear or it would be the 
principal cyber advisor to the Secretary. It would be the Under 
Secretary for Policy's folks who have space responsibilities as 
well as cyber, as well as those that have WPS, as an example, 
to ensure that those that they have subject lead on are being 
accounted for within the education enterprise, which is where--
I don't mean to beat the dead horse--of the new instruction 
providing a data foundation that we can then take into a 
governance model and where we can use the authority of the 
Under Secretary for Personnel who can order much of what needs 
to be done responsibly through the Department.
    And if we can't reach resolution, we already have a 
standing forum to reach the Deputy Secretary of Defense on 
workforce matters, which is what education would fall under and 
that way--but it would be my responsibility as the lead for the 
education enterprise to ensure that all those equity 
stakeholders bring their issues to the fore and ensure that 
they're being held to account through our wherewithal within 
P&R [Personnel and Readiness].
    Ms. Speier. Admiral, do you have anything that you'd like 
to add?
    Admiral Munsch. Yes, ma'am. So the service war colleges 
would be accountable through the services. National Defense 
University would be accountable through us on the Joint Staff. 
And through the outcomes-based military education effort, we do 
a regular assessment on the curriculum to make sure that it 
includes the requirements and it is relevant and current.
    And, additionally, just for our JPME there is an 
accreditation process. It's separate from the accreditation 
that go to the other war colleges for their--that are done by 
civilian accreditors. And so that's another item we look at for 
the JPME accreditation.
    Ms. Speier. So the 2018 NDS recognized that professional 
military education had come to be valued more for the 
institutional requirement of having attended a program and 
received credit than for the knowledge, skills, and abilities 
fostered and developed. What are we doing to change that?
    Assistant Secretary.
    Ms. Skelly. Chairwoman, that is what the new DOD 
Instruction is all about, is the direction that all programs 
will be objectives-based military education that will then 
result in data, which we then have to--it's mentioned--I 
mentioned in my opening statement, it's talent management. It's 
not just the data itself and governing through that data is not 
the whole solution.
    We have to have a personnel management, talent management 
system, that can understand the attributes that all our service 
members bring when they access whether through their high 
school graduation or their bachelor's degree.
    What we impart to them through the education programs they 
go through either at the tactical level when they're more 
junior, then when they go to staff colleges and war colleges 
what we intend to impart to them, what they take away, what 
they demonstrate through their competencies in there, that's 
the way we have to get after it.
    It's the data, it's the objectives of the education, 
understanding the impact of it, and then attributes to the 
individuals to create an appreciation of the force and whether 
we have the sufficient knowledge and wherewithal for the 
positions that need it. It has to be a continual cycle.
    Ms. Speier. The first panel talked about creating greater 
rigor in the actual curriculum. From your vantage point, how do 
you make sure that in each of these war colleges there is the 
requisite rigor in terms of the program?
    Ms. Skelly. Ma'am, I think it would be through the 
objectives that are set and how they're measured and what the 
services believe they need out of them, what the Joint Staff 
believes we need from JPME, and OSD assessment and revisiting 
those based on--you raised the point about the surveys from 
those receiving commands, the senior service staffs, the 
combatant commands.
    Are they feeling satisfied, and through any place where we 
have oversight is is the force performing to meet the demands 
of the mission and the environment in the world at that time? 
We can never stand still. It's about continuous process 
improvement.
    Ms. Speier. So my last question. The previous panel talked 
about how if you bring in a lot of retired military officers 
they are teaching from their experience. So they're providing 
an educational experience that relies on yesterday's war and 
not the future. How are we going to make sure that we keep the 
curriculum looking at the future of war and not what's happened 
before?
    I'll start with you, Admiral.
    Admiral Munsch. Yes, ma'am. So there's really a broader 
issue in the Federal employment in that there is a strong 
benefit for veterans in hiring practices and that does occur 
also then in the war colleges that results in veterans having a 
larger preponderance than maybe they would otherwise because of 
the point scoring scheme in hiring Federal workers and the 
benefits that veterans get.
    So it's a bit of a broader issue than just PME. But how do 
we ensure that they're focused on the future? Well, 
traditionally, in academia, publishing is a key metric for 
promotions within the academic institution. There could be more 
rigor that is added there.
    And then, I mean it's not been in my experience that 
they're all backward looking. There is some value in history 
and in experience. But the--and to tie to some of your earlier 
questions here about the value of the war college and the 
rigor, we did go through a period of a couple decades where we 
did not have an adversary that was especially strong or 
existential against us, and there's nothing like a threat to 
focus an institution.
    And so along with this transformation that we have 
described there's a deep-seated transformation ongoing because 
of the students' interest in getting--being ready for their 
responsibilities to fight China, if that comes, or Russia.
    Ms. Speier. So that does that mean there's a China Hands in 
the future?
    Admiral Munsch. I don't know about that. Anytime we create 
a sidetrack like that it tends to only last for a while and 
then the larger needs of the service eventually overcome that 
and it chokes it off. So I'd be concerned about losing quality 
people to----
    Ms. Speier. Well, I guess I would disagree with you because 
I think, as we are seeing in many of our other entities, 
building a Russia and China focus is critical to building the 
kind of talent we want and the leadership we want.
    Assistant Secretary, your final words, and I've really 
exceeded mine and then I'll give you the opportunity.
    Ms. Skelly. Thank you, Chairwoman. I share the admiral's 
concerns with regard to a Hands program that could unduly silo 
off folks.
    I believe wholeheartedly we have to raise the rigor with 
regard to our competitors and the specifics, and we have to 
focus, I think, in three parts, strategic competition writ 
large, though I don't think any new strategic competitors are 
probably coming out of left field anytime soon. But it's the 
basic demands of strategic competition.
    What's particular to the China problem set, China's unique 
attributes in their military, what their military presents as 
well as likewise Russia--Russia is likely not to leave the 
stage anytime soon.
    We certainly need folks who can speak the language and who 
understand the tactics and what are appropriate to the 
positions that require a level of increased understanding and 
specific knowledge, whether it be intelligence, operations 
planning, and the like. I believe that's appropriate.
    Personally, I would like to see, and I will look after this 
to understand what the lessons learned and evaluation of the 
success of the AFPAK [Afghanistan-Pakistan] Hands program was 
because, as the admiral said, it was a large effort--that just 
about the time it gained real momentum and mass it got 
sidelined and stovepiped, and I have acquaintances that I 
served with, squadron mates, who wound up adrift with the 
language and the expertise, and they had done one tour and they 
still had a career--a good chunk of a career in front of them.
    In that way, I'll always be wary of how we can impinge upon 
the services' ability to make use of the talent available to it 
if we put it off in a direction that loses favor with 
leadership.
    Ms. Speier. All right. Ranking Member, a final question?
    Mr. Gallagher. Thank you. Well, [inaudible]--to pick up 
where you left off, I thought we were making changes to JPME to 
reflect China as the so-called pacing threat. Many quibble with 
that language.
    Admiral Munsch. Absolutely.
    Mr. Gallagher. Yeah. The idea being that, you know, go back 
to Rooster's [Lieutenant General Schmidle's] days and every 
naval officer could tell you everything about the Soviet navy. 
We need a similar level of expertise for the PLA [People's 
Liberation Army] Navy, right. Are you hamstrung by Goldwater-
Nichols in making those changes?
    Ms. Skelly. Sir, I don't believe so. I was just down on the 
Norfolk waterfront with a soon-to-deploy destroyer crew and 
captain and they were talking about Russian and Chinese assets 
in the same ways that--as you mentioned, as we Cold Warriors 
once did.
    The Soviet ships became Russian ships. The same for the 
aircraft. But they had that focus on the high-end adversary as 
I remember having myself.
    Mr. Gallagher. And then I want to--shifting gears, I want 
to highlight what I think is one pocket of excellence that I 
found interesting. SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command] has 
partnered with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and 
created this course where they're sending O-6s to a short-term 
tailored course. Doesn't--not a master's degree granting 
course. It could be a micro masters, if that's now a thing, 
where the idea is not to turn them into technologists but give 
them basic fluency in AI, ML [machine learning], quantum, 
cyber. That's intriguing to me. Are you aware of this effort?
    Ms. Skelly. I am not. I will become so after this meeting.
    Mr. Gallagher. I'm sure if you--MIT will answer your call, 
Assistant Secretary Skelly. I was very impressed by the idea. 
Again, we're not creating a separate thing. MIT was eager to 
partner with SOCOM in this regard and it just seemed like a 
great symbiosis between DOD and--to civilian higher ed.
    Ms. Skelly. And Congressman, I certainly applaud it, 
because it goes back to the point I made about literacy--what 
do you need to know for the position you're going to and how 
can we impart that right amount for the job to you in that time 
and see it coming--to make you available if you're in a 
particular field or a particular staff or service-level 
position, that we know what you need to know, especially with 
AI, cyber, machine learning and the like because it's coming 
into play, the how we do everything.
    Our service members are doing it themselves in the course 
of their jobs where they can get the permissions to bring those 
capabilities to bear. It's much like we were when we were all 
coding--I wasn't, but much younger folks were all coding, 15, 
20 years ago. They're doing data analytics now on their own 
work and trying to bring that to bear in the performance of 
their duties.
    Mr. Gallagher. And what would be the--in light of the 
previous discussion we had about academic rigor, what would be 
the barriers to posting class rankings? Making that publicly 
available?
    Are there some concerns that would be--beyond embarrassing 
people that don't perform well, would there be some legal 
barrier or regulatory barrier I'm unaware of?
    Admiral Munsch. So there's some Privacy Act issues with 
displaying grades and rankings like that.
    Mr. Gallagher. Interesting. I'll follow up on that.
    Admiral Munsch [continuing]. Legislation. Yeah.
    Mr. Gallagher. You may be right. I'm not willing to just 
accept that necessarily. I don't think it would be a bad idea 
to be--to sort of post that information publicly. I don't know.
    Admiral Munsch. The other way to get at the issue, I think, 
that you're after here is to do actual fitness reports for 
students based on their performance.
    Mr. Gallagher. Or use a carrot instead of a stick, right. 
Give the top 10 percent or 25 percent graduates preferential 
treatment in terms of their follow-on assignment, right. That 
could be a powerful incentive.
    Since I have a minute and 36 seconds left, I've already 
crossed the threshold of half-baked ideas, and we may have to 
wait another 5 years before we have a PME hearing, then I will 
sort of lay out a series of more provocative statements. My 
emerging view is that if we're going to try and give someone a 
highly technical skill set, we should probably just send them 
to a civilian institution rather than recreating something on 
our own, we would probably get more bang for our buck, and 
might create interesting friendships and relationships with 
civilian experts in AI, quantum, or advanced engineering.
    As we look towards what the military can do uniquely well, 
I don't know, I mean ask yourself if our current programs would 
be better or worse than a year, half of which involved a 
writing boot camp with a sort of near religious reverence for 
Strunk & White and teaching field grade officers and potential 
general grade officers how to write clearly and well, and 
another half year of intense war-gaming tied directly to 
testing our war plans. I don't know.
    Obviously, I'm not asking you to answer that question. But 
the fact that part of you is even questioning it right now in 
your minds, as I know you are, means we got some work to do.
    Ms. Skelly. Writing boot camp or something akin to was in 
my feedback to the Naval War College when I was in the middle 
of my combatant command tour. I was not prepared to be a staff 
writer, staff officer in that way. There's a there there, sir.
    Admiral Munsch. Sir, I'd go one more than that. I would 
offer a three-part process. One is to institute a tutorial 
process where it's one professor on one student or one on two.
    That is expensive but that's how you really grow critical 
thinking with that kind of contact. That can be, say, once a 
week, twice a week. And then I would do classroom work in the 
mornings with rigor and then I would do practical application 
of the learning in the afternoon with war-gaming.
    And then to broaden that cycle, what is learned then, much 
like the interwar period that was done at the Naval War 
College, send that learning out to the fleet, to the operating 
forces, to open it up to the joint force and do a large 
exercise in the off academic period in the summer to test out 
those ideas in order to advance war plans. Send that feedback 
back to the war colleges and then begin the cycle again.
    Mr. Gallagher. If we do all these things and then outlaw 
the use of acronyms, the Chinese cannot beat us. I guarantee 
you. So----
    Ms. Speier. All right. Mrs. Bice, do you have any follow-on 
questions? You do?
    Mrs. Bice. Madam Chair, I do not.
    Ms. Speier. Okay. All right. Well, you've given us a lot of 
food for thought. As you can tell, we both have a great 
interest in wanting to pursue PME and JPME to get the biggest 
bang for our buck.
    This is not a, you know, year in which you can relax and 
enjoy your family. It shouldn't be that. Now, hopefully, that 
has changed. But I do think there's more work that needs to be 
done and I think the ranking member's suggestions are ones that 
we should pursue.
    The other thing we should also look at, we do have the 
military academies that are filled with fine academic teachers, 
professors, and maybe we need to rely on them somewhat more in 
terms of evaluating what we need to do differently.
    But we really appreciate your participation today. Thank 
you, Assistant Secretary Skelly. Thank you, Vice Admiral 
Munsch.
    And we will stand adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 3:48 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
     
=======================================================================
                           
                           A P P E N D I X

                              May 18, 2022

     
=======================================================================


              PREPARED STATEMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD

                              May 18, 2022

=======================================================================

[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
      
=======================================================================


              QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MEMBERS POST HEARING

                              May 18, 2022

=======================================================================

      

                   QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY MS. JACOBS

    Ms. Jacobs. How are you studying and measuring the impact of 
Professional Military Education on service members' war-fighting 
capability? How has the PME curriculum evolved to incorporate tangible 
and intangible factors of war, such as the will to fight?
    Ms. Skelly. The Department does not yet systematically capture or 
report metrics of return on investment from PME that would specifically 
capture ``the impact of PME on service members' war-fighting 
capability,'' but does have some measures available. First, retention 
of an officer in service after their developmental opportunity is a 
quantitative measure of return on investment; however, it does not 
capture the increased quality of their contribution to the force during 
that period. Second, PME institutions survey their alumni with regard 
to how well the program prepared them for subsequent assignments. 
Alumni report they are better able to consider a broad, whole of 
government, and multinational context when making decisions and 
providing advice due to completing in-residence PME. Furthermore, they 
report being more adept and comfortable with joint matters. Third, the 
schools solicit senior leader (GO/FO/SES) feedback on the degree to 
which graduates demonstrate proficiency in a program's learning 
outcomes. Finally, they also solicit feedback from Combatant Commands 
on the skills and abilities of PME graduates. These latter two sources 
of feedback depend upon contextual knowledge that the respondents may 
not have readily available in a systematic manner--i.e., to enable 
comparisons between officers that have attended PME and those who have 
not, controlling for other factors that may affect their performance. 
Still, these surveys do provide general feedback as to the perceived 
value of these experiences to the former student and those who manage 
them.
    Regarding the evolution of PME curricula, the PME enterprise 
encompasses a wide array of programs and courses, and high-level 
concepts like the tangible and intangible factors of war form part of 
the foundation for intermediate- and senior-level PME. How this is 
expressed, and how it has evolved over time, is dependent upon the 
expert judgment of the faculty of the various PME programs.
    Ms. Jacobs. Do you believe PME should be tailored to the service 
member and not an overarching requirement? Why do Navy physiologists 
need to attend the Navy War College to be considered for promotion?
    Ms. Skelly. Professional military education (PME) constitutes the 
core of professional development for officers and enlisted personnel. 
PME develops the professional knowledge and traits of Service members, 
inculcates the habits of mind essential to the profession, and 
certifies officers and enlisted personnel at key points in their career 
as professionals entrusted to practice their profession effectively and 
ethically. Promotion to specific ranks is dependent upon more than 
competence in a specific specialty, such as those of Navy 
physiologists, but rather is indicative of their competencies in the 
broader profession of arms.
    While PME focuses on the rank appropriate core competencies of the 
Department's uniformed professionals, the PME system is heterogeneous 
in its delivery. Each Service is responsible for educating officers and 
their enlisted members in their core competencies according to Service 
needs. Air Force schools, for example, primarily teach air and space 
warfare. Similarly, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps schools focus on land, 
maritime, amphibious and expeditionary warfare, respectively. The 
Department depends on the Services' PME to develop its professionals 
with Service-specific proficiencies.
    Specific technical competencies are developed in the broader system 
of military education, including those that develop the technical 
competencies of personnel such as Navy physiologists. It is in these 
programs where military education is customized to specific communities 
and its members.
    Ms. Jacobs. The focus of JPME is increasingly focused on the 
kinetic dimensions of warfighting, but as conflict in today's world 
demonstrates, the economic, geo-economic, and technological domains 
matter greatly as well. For example, munition stockpiles, economic 
warfare, and a state's mobilizational capacity are critical in 
assessing warfighting ability and sustainability. Should the JPME 
system pay attention and devote space to the research and teaching of 
these issues?
    Ms. Skelly. JPME is a subset of PME and reflects a concentration on 
Joint matters, frequently offered in tandem with the delivery of 
Service-focused PME. JPME is defined in Federal law (per Title 10, U.S. 
Code, chapter 107, ``Professional Military Education'') as ``. . . 
consisting of the rigorous and thorough instruction of officers in an 
environment designed to promote a theoretical and practical in-depth 
understanding of joint matters and specifically, of the subject matter 
covered.''
    Federal law directs the six specific subject matter topics for all 
JPME: (1) National military strategy; (2) Joint planning at all levels 
of war; (3) Joint doctrine; (4) Joint command and control; (5) Joint 
force and joint requirements development; and (6) Operational contract 
support. Four additional items supplement this list to round out JPME 
II: (1) National security strategy; (2) Theater strategy and 
campaigning; (3) Joint planning processes and systems; and (4) Joint, 
interagency, and multinational capabilities and the integration of 
those capabilities.
    JPME programs are distributed across the schools of the National 
Defense University and the Military Services. The Services' JPME 
programs develop joint officers that understand the required topics of 
joint matters through curricula that provide appreciation of the 
domain, capabilities, employment considerations, and general 
limitations of the host Service. The programs at National Defense 
University address joint matters through a whole-of-government focus. 
In particular, the Eisenhower School was founded in 1924 as the Army 
Industrial College to better prepare the U.S. government to mobilize 
the resources of the nation for the purposes of grand strategy and 
warfare if necessary. Its stated mission today is: ``The Eisenhower 
School prepares select military officers and civilians for strategic 
leadership and success in developing national security strategy and in 
evaluating, marshaling, and managing resources in the execution of that 
strategy.'' While all JPME programs have adapted their curricula to 
address the non-military and non-kinetic dimensions of strategic 
competition, it is the Eisenhower School where ``economic, geo-
economic, and technological domains'' receive the greatest emphasis.
    Ms. Jacobs. How are you studying and measuring the impact of 
Professional Military Education on service members' war-fighting 
capability? How has the PME curriculum evolved to incorporate tangible 
and intangible factors of war, such as the will to fight?
    Admiral Munsch. Our recent shift to Outcomes-Based Military 
Education (OBME) helps to assess PME's efficacy and to align curricula 
with Combatant Commands' needs. Through OBME, we work with Combatant 
Commands to assess how PME graduates perform in their operational 
assignments and better understand what specific educational outcomes 
are required to prepare an officer for joint war-fighting. This is an 
iterative process; PME curricula will continue to adapt to the 
strategic environment. The Joint Staff directs JPME programs adjust 
curriculum to align with the current Chairman's Education Policy, which 
is updated (at a minimum) every five years. Recent modifications to PME 
curriculum include both tangible factors, such as countering weapons of 
mass destruction, and intangible factors, such as updated instruction 
on officer ethics. JPME curricula will continue to evolve to reflect 
the changing character or war and will incorporate lessons learned from 
contemporary conflicts.
    Ms. Jacobs. Do you believe PME should be tailored to the service 
member and not an overarching requirement? Why do Navy physiologists 
need to attend the Navy War College to be considered for promotion?
    Admiral Munsch. PME is uniformly required to ensure all officers 
possess the common knowledge, skills, and attributes that form the 
basis of the profession of arms. However, officers do have a variety of 
options to meet this requirement, including choice of timing (within a 
given window) and distance learning. Non-line officers, such as 
physiologists, are not usually required to meet the same career gates 
as line officers. They often have different commissioning pathways and 
promotion timelines. Still, as commissioned officers, they have the 
same need for professional development as line officers.
    Ms. Jacobs. The focus of JPME is increasingly focused on the 
kinetic dimensions of warfighting, but as conflict in today's world 
demonstrates, the economic, geo-economic, and technological domains 
matter greatly as well. For example, munition stockpiles, economic 
warfare, and a state's mobilizational capacity are critical in 
assessing warfighting ability and sustainability. Should the JPME 
system pay attention and devote space to the research and teaching of 
these issues?
    Admiral Munsch. The time officers have to devote to JPME is finite, 
as is the content of the curriculum. As such, different PME programs 
focus on different learning outcomes. For example, the Eisenhower 
School extensively examines supply chain issues and mobilization; 
whereas the National War College focuses on grand strategy and its 
connection to national defense. Allowing schools to focus on these 
unique emphasis areas builds an academically diverse officer corps, 
capable of addressing diverse economic, political, and technological 
factors influencing today's security environment.
                                 ______
                                 
                   QUESTIONS SUBMITTED BY DR. JACKSON
    Dr. Jackson. In response to the guidance of the 2018 National 
Defense Strategy (NDS), the Department of Defense looked at how to 
modernize PME to meet the current fight.
    This subcommittee held a briefing late last year to hear about some 
of these developments, however we left the room that day with many 
questions about the current efforts.
    One thing that I support is framing the curriculum at PME 
institutions to be shifted to have a focus on strategic competition 
with China.
    Secretary Skelly, how are the reforms going that were originally 
directed to be in line with the 2018 NDS? Further, do you anticipate 
additional reforms needed to match the new NDS, and if so, what would 
those new initiatives look like?
    Ms. Skelly. Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia 
are the principal priorities for the Department of Defense. The NDS 
recognized that PME would play a key role in shifting the focus of the 
Department. Therefore, in 2020 the then-Secretary of Defense directed 
the National Defense University to refocus its curriculum by dedicating 
50 percent of the coursework to the PRC, and tasked the Military 
Departments and Services to make China the pacing threat in all of our 
schools, programs, and training. This direction is being implemented at 
each of National Defense University's six JPME programs, as well as at 
each of the Services' war and command and staff colleges. At each 
institution, curriculum content is being reframed and adjusted so that 
50 percent is focused on strategic competitors to the United States. 
These adjustments include enhancing understanding non-military aspects 
of the strategic competition, such as the diplomatic, economic, 
information, intelligence, and cultural opportunities and challenges 
inherent in grand strategy as well as how these apply to domains such 
as space and cyberspace, as well as how they may be affected by the 
development and proliferation of disruptive technologies, such as 
artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics, 
hypersonic propulsion, and synthetic biology.
    Implementation of these changes have not been particularly 
disruptive as the faculty at each school regularly review and refresh 
the curriculum of their programs on a regular basis to maintain 
relevance. OSD and the Joint Staff have practiced active oversight of 
these adaptations to ensure implementation will be complete by the 
beginning of the 2024 academic year.
    The 2022 NDS has not yet been promulgated in an unclassified form. 
However, we expect that PME faculty will adapt the curriculum of their 
respective programs appropriately and OSD and/or the CJCS may provide 
additional guidance.
    Dr. Jackson. Throughout the Department of Defense, we look at 
industry and the private sector as partners for our military and 
frequently lean on them to provide critical resources and capabilities.
    Without a doubt, our service members should have the latest and 
greatest technology, however often times our military is lagging behind 
the civilian world when looking at implementing the latest 
technologies.
    I want to help make sure that anything being provided to top 
academic institutions around the country is also being provided to our 
PME institutions.
    Admiral Munsch, could you speak to some of the best practices 
learned from civilian academic institutions that are being implemented 
by DOD? Additionally, what are some areas where our PME institutions 
might lag behind civilian universities in terms of technology or 
capabilities?
    Admiral Munsch. JPME institutions, such as the National Defense 
University (NDU) work closely with their military and civilian partner 
institutions. Some of the recent best practices learned from or 
developed in cooperation with civilian academic institutions are:
    --Hybrid learning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, JPME institutions 
built robust hybrid programs that leveraged the best technical and 
educational practices of our civilian counterparts.
    --Immersive learning. Like many of the best civilian institutions, 
NDU augments classroom instruction with concentrated immersive 
learning. For example, NDU's Eisenhower School conducts a semester-long 
study across 18 key industries relevant to national defense. The study 
includes site visits, in-depth economic analysis, and collaboration 
with senior executives from national and international corporations.
    --Agile curriculum. Top academic institutions' courses of 
instruction are not static; they evolve in real-time to incorporate 
lessons learned from the current environment. NDU successfully applied 
this approach this Spring and rapidly adapted lesson plans based on the 
ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
    Dr. Jackson. Additionally, what are some areas where our PME 
institutions might lag behind civilian universities in terms of 
technology or capabilities?
    Admiral Munsch. In terms of technology and capabilities, three 
areas where JPME institutions lag behind our civilian counterparts are 
our facilities, modeling and wargaming, and cyber warfare resources.
    --Modeling and Wargaming. To reach parity with the best 
universities and think tanks, PME institutions require more wargaming, 
exercise, modeling, and simulation capacity. For example, NDU's Center 
for Applied Strategic Learning supports 70-80 wargaming events per year 
with 15 authorized billets. This is almost double the number of events 
with less than half the personnel of premier wargaming centers.
    --Cyber warfare resources. NDU's College of Information and 
Cyberspace (CIC) leads DOD and civilian institutions in educating 
students on cyber warfare policy and strategy. However, PME colleges 
like CIC lack dedicated, modern cyber laboratories to create virtual 
environments in which to test policy and strategy. These immersive labs 
are essential prepare defense leaders for contemporary all-domain 
warfare.
    --Facilities. NDU's facilities are aging and lag well behind those 
of many peer civilian institutions. NDU and DOD appreciate the 
additional $50M appropriation to repair Eisenhower Hall, one of our 
main academic facilities. However, Congress' continued support is 
necessary to upgrade our facilities to the standards of our civilian 
counterparts.

                                  [all]