Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 92

focus is ideally on honing strategic understanding. Put
differently, this is where to apply a “crawl, walk, and run”
methodology to training and preparing strategic leaders. Captains should be “crawling” at the strategic level,
working to understand the fundamentals of strategy and
foreign policy. Majors should be “walking” through the
type of strategic material that is now most commonly
found in our war colleges. Finally, all lieutenant colonels
who attend the war college should be “running” through
the same curriculum now covered in the Advanced
Strategic Art Program, which is currently designed for a
smaller and more carefully selected subset of students. By
definition, those selected for senior service college are in
the top 10 percent of the Army at their rank and therefore
should be required to demonstrate strategic fluency before
transitioning back into the field. The Advanced Strategic
Art Program possesses all the components necessary to
cap off strategic fluency. It should no longer serve as an
introduction to strategy but instead as a sort of finishing
school for all war college students. Adopting these refinements to our professional education would obviate the
too often lamented concern that we are selecting tactical
masters for brigade command who lack a strong enough
understanding of strategic concepts. Instead, what we see
is a disproportionate amount of time spent on polishing
the stone of tactical and operational excellence.
We suggest that officers who are more broadly
educated and experienced are much more capable of

informing strategic discourse. How we manage the
educational experience from captain to colonel is worth
considering more deeply. The timing of these experiences is just right; now it is a matter of refining precisely what is taught and how that critical time is used.
Powell reiterated the importance of these well-placed
periods of research and reflection:
Command and General Staff College and
the National War College are probably at
the top of my list (of strategically developmental assignments). Both took me out of
the Army I was in and accelerated me to get
ready for the Army that was coming and I
might help lead.10
When the four distinct career paths presented here
are coupled with an institutional commitment to generate educational focus on strategy earlier in the career
and maintain that focus through the professional life of
an officer, then the conditions are set for a strong bench
of strategic leaders to emerge. Our great Army can enact
all of these reforms, bring officers to the water’s edge of
strategic thinking, and perhaps whet substantially more
appetites for the study of foreign policy and national security. Still, there must be a zest and passion to continue
those pursuits, or the end game of having a strong bench
of strategic leaders will remain elusive. As an Army, we
must aim to make the area under each promising officer’s
“career curve” full of breadth and depth.

Notes
Epigraph. Colin Powell, e-mail message to author (Fenzel), 28
December 2015.
1. Tyrell Mayfield, “In Search of Strategy,” Medium website,
accessed 23 August 2016, https://medium.com/the-bridge/
in-search-of-strategy-42290b8c5e17#.1xen4zsa3.
2. Powell, e-mail message to author (Fenzel).
3. Everett S.P. Spain, J.D. Mohundro, and Bernard B. Banks,
“Toward a Smarter Military—Intellectual Capital: A Case for Cultural
Change,” Parameters 45, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 78.
4. Ed Cray, General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and
Statesman (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990).
5. The Bonus March involved seventeen thousand U.S. World
War I veterans and their families who gathered in Washington, D.C.,
in the summer of 1932 to demand early redemption of their service
certificates from the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the midst
of the Great Depression. (The certificates were not scheduled to
reach maturity until 1945). Then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas

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MacArthur put down the three-month-long protest aggressively,
burning their camps and driving them out of the city.
6. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).
7. Project Warrior is a formal Army program designed to further
develop up-and-coming post-company-command captains by
funneling them directly into combat training centers to serve as
observer-controller-trainers and from there into a captain’s career
course to serve as small group instructors. This combination of observing and advising other units with the experience of teaching and
sharing those lessons with future company commanders is commonly understood as an effective path toward battalion-level command
and tactical mastery.
8. Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1990).
9. Colin Powell and Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey
(New York: Random House, 1995).
10. Powell, e-mail message to author (Fenzel).

November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW