DECEMBER 2009

Where Is Our Kilcullen?

Professional relevance as a result of education

by LtCol Michael D. Grice

>LtCol Grice has completed two tours to Iraq and one to Afghanistan. He is currently the CO, 1st Air/Naval Gunfire Liaison Company, Camp Pendleton. This article was LtCol Grice’s Chase Prize Essay Contest entry.

“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”
—Herbert Spencer, English philosopher

We shouldn't expect our next Pete Ellis to just happen via experience in the field. (Photo by CPO Jeffrey J. Pierce.)

War is dynamic, changing, and unpredictable. The ongoing war in Iraq is no different; it has seen a fundamental shift in how the Marine Corps fights as the doctrine of maneuver warfare and the decisive single battle concept have been supplanted by the steady state and continued operations that are counterinsurgency operations. Years of active combat in the hotly contested Al Anbar Province have been the driving force for change within the Marine Corps as al-Qaeda and others have sought to nullify American and the nascent Iraqi Government’s influence in the area. Fortunately the studied development and application of counterinsurgency doctrine has resulted in a largely stable Iraq that is well on the road to self-governance. Unfortunately, it wasn’t our idea.

The greatest single influence on our counterinsurgency doctrine isn’t a Marine. He isn’t even an American, or a colonel or a general or an admiral for that matter. He is an Australian lieutenant colonel who did the bulk of his influential work as a captain—work that has become the cornerstone of company-level counterinsurgent operations and has brought him to prominence as an advisor to the likes of GEN David Petraeus, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and to the Department of Defense during the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review. Not bad for a foreign field grade officer, but why are we, the most powerful Nation on the planet, importing talent to help solve our warfighting problems? Don’t we have Marine officers capable of doing the same?

The answer, unfortunately, is that we do not. The Marine Corps has not invested in the education and development of its officer corps to produce such an officer and, as a result, stands ready to be marginalized within the Department of Defense as a result of this shortfall. Unconventional times and unconventional wars require unconventional thought, and the ability to think brilliantly and unconventionally is a product of education. The foreigner who so significantly impacted our counterinsurgency doctrine and the planners who developed the controversial, but ultimately successful, “surge” shared a common background—the commonality of a doctoral-level education. How, though, can the Marine Corps correct the deficiency? And who is this guy, anyway?

We’ll start with the second question first. This guy is LTC David Kilcullen of the Australian Army, and he isn’t just some overeducated policy wonk; he is an intellectual warrior. As a young company grade infantry officer he became interested in the Dar’ul Islam insurgency in Indonesia and was afforded the opportunity to pursue advanced education to study it. Ultimately obtaining a doctorate in anthropology, he returned to his roots, strapped on his pack, and resumed his duties as a company commander. He wasn’t sidelined to a nonoperational job because of his education, but instead was placed back into the mainstream where he led soldiers in places like Cyprus, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor. His experiences as an operational soldier and leader served to broaden his educational experience, and his education served to broaden his professional abilities. The result of this confluence of education and experience resulted in arguably making him the single most influential counterinsurgency expert in the world today.

Military professionals pursuing advanced education at the doctoral level is not something that only exists outside of the United States. Indeed, all three of our sister Services have formal doctoral education programs, the results of which are inarguably successful. The United States Army has developed many of its own homegrown counterinsurgency experts with names like Petraeus (doctorate in international affairs from Princeton), McMasters (doctorate in American history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), and Mansoor (doctorate in military history from Ohio State University). These are officers who have obtained doctorates while in uniform and yet remained operationally relevant, serving in combat as commanders at the brigade, division, and corps levels. The U.S. Navy’s Naval Postgraduate School has doctoral programs in areas that range from the technical to the theoretical, with candidates pursuing such diverse disciplines as naval mechanical engineering, combat systems, and political strategy and intelligence. The U.S. Air Force’s Institute of Technology has a robust catalog of doctoral programs to educate its officers in areas crucial to the dominance of air and space, such as aeronautics, engineering, operations analysis, and physics, just to name a few. The Army, Navy, and Air Force have developed robust doctoral education programs to ensure success in each of their particular disciplines, and frankly, the Marine Corps has not.

That is not to say that the Marine Corps hasn’t produced brilliantly intellectual officers. Pete Ellis, the eccentric but brilliant mastermind who not only predicted war with Japan 20 years before it was fought but had the foresight to provide the operational plans to win it, is one Marine who comes to mind. Victor “Brute” Krulak, an enormously influential Marine whose book, First to Fight, is required reading by every Marine, is another. More recently, the intellectual talents of LtGen P.K. Van Riper and Gen James N. Mattis have had enormous impacts on the Marine Corps. We have brilliance within our ranks; that is inarguable. What we do not have, however, is a systemic way to develop and educate officers to a level consistent with our Army, Navy, Air Force, and coalition counterparts.

We should not sit back and wait for the next Pete Ellis or Brute Krulak to rise from the ranks. Instead the Marine Corps should set the conditions to create such Marines by expanding the breadth and depth of our current professional military educational (PME) opportunities. The Marine Corps should not be the only Service that has no institutional plan to educate officers at the doctoral level. To continue to ignore that such education is important is to put our collective intellectual relevance in peril. The efficacy of education is shown by the undeniable impact that LTC Kilcullen has made on American military policy and doctrine, as well as by the successful creation and implementation of the war-winning surge strategy of GEN Petraeus and his educated advisors. To think that advanced education has not played a role in these and other areas is to ignore the obvious. Unless the Marine Corps desires to be intellectually marginalized, it is incumbent on the institution to develop a system that enables officers capable of advanced education to pursue it while maintaining their operational relevance and career progression.

That brings us to answer the first question posed earlier in this article. How can the Marine Corps correct this deficiency? The answer lies in our PME system. We already have an undeniably and thoroughly effective PME system, but the problem with it is that it lacks the upward progression into the doctoral-level education that our sister Services enjoy. The primary programs for Marine officer education reside at three levels—career-level school, which focuses company grade officers at the tactical level; intermediate-level school (ILS), which is focused at the operational level; and top-level school (TLS), which is strategic and much more joint in nature. At the ILS level opportunities exist to obtain master’s degrees at the resident schools as well as at other institutions.1 Additionally, some graduates of the Command and Staff College continue their education in the operational art of war by attending the School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW), where they become subject matter experts in the operational level of war. Unfortunately, that is where the opportunity for advanced education tops out. There is no formalized opportunity to pursue a doctorate-level education within the Marine Corps PME structure.

Just because the opportunity does not currently exist does not mean that it cannot be created. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Marine Corps University (MCU) already manages graduate-level education and is an accredited institution of higher education capable of granting master’s degrees in conjunction with the Command and Staff College curriculum, so experience with higher education is already resident within MCU.2 Additionally, the opportunity for some select Command and Staff College graduates to attend SAW sets the precedent for a program that would select qualified and competitive students to pursue a doctorate-level education, with the pool of applicants being taken from the TLS pool. It only makes sense that doctoral education would be best associated with the TLS level of education, because TLS occurs at a point in an officer’s career where he has generally completed battalion- or squadron-level command and is arguably at the top of his game as far as his discipline (military occupational specialty) is concerned. The charter of PME at this level is to educate at the strategic level, and what better time to pursue a doctorate?

The Marine Corps could easily add a list of areas for doctoral study to the existing opportunities at the TLS level, and using the same board process could select officers who are qualified to pursue advanced studies. The areas of study should be set by the strategic requirements of the Marine Corps, areas that are important enough to provide a tangible benefit to the institution as well as to broaden the officer who pursues the degree. Kilcullen’s doctorate in anthropology has certainly borne fruit as an area of study; the benefit to the Australian Army (and the American Department of Defense) so greatly outweighs the cost of educating him that the return on the investment is incalculable. Indeed, if an army as small as Australia’s, numbering less than 30,000 active duty soldiers, can afford to educate its officers at the doctoral level, why can’t the Marine Corps as it grows to over 200,000?

Once selected for the program, these officers would spend 2 to 3 years away from the Operating Forces, obtaining their degrees and performing postdoctoral work. They would then return to the mainstream where they would remain competitive with their peers. Just as there is a payback requirement for officers who are graduates of the SAW, there should be a commensurate requirement to serve at the Headquarters Marine Corps or joint staff level, where the breadth and depth of the officers’ recently acquired education would best be put to work. These officers would be the Marine Corps counterparts to the Petraeuses, McMasters, and Mansoors, who are the best and brightest that the U.S. Army has to offer, and would stand ready to assume the Kilcullen mantle. We have brilliant officers who are only held back by the lack of education that their peers in the sister Services are encouraged to pursue. A program that allows Marines to pursue advanced studies that are central to the needs of the Marine Corps is a key to success that has too much potential to be discounted.

If we continue to ignore the impact that a doctoral-level education has in the officer corps then we are truly limiting ourselves in the profession of arms. Education is important. The Marine Corps cannot force its way to the planning table if the credentials required for a seat include a doctorate and the credibility that it provides. If we fail to set the institution up for success through education, Marines may not be invited to a place of prominence in the next council of war and indeed may be sidelined to carry out the policies set by more educated officers instead of being participants in the process that creates them. Our Department of Defense and State Department should be put in a position where they can stop borrowing from the Australian Army and instead call for the United States Marines. We have talented officers who can do it, but they must be afforded the opportunity to pursue an education while remaining professionally competitive. Not to do so not only limits the effectiveness of the Marine Corps, it also yields the floor to those members of our sister Services who have achieved such a level of education. If nothing else, the thought of allowing our sister Services to permanently assume the lead should spur us, the Marines, into action—action that is the aim of education in the first place.

Notes
1. There are also numerous other opportunities, such as the various law education programs and the Special Education Program.

2. MCU could act as the facilitator for the doctorate education program with the students attending universities that offer programs consistent with the needs of the Marine Corps.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Kilcullen's Principles in Action by Maj Matthew Tracy and Ed Darack; Marine Corps Gazette; Oct 2007

Winning in Iraq by Elford and Reda; Marine Corps Gazette; October 2007