The Classroom Is a Battle Lab
By: Dr. Benjamin JensenPosted on August 14,2026
Article Date 01/09/2026
Connecting the schoolhouse to the fleet
A Marine Corps classroom should be an intellectual crucible and a proving ground. Students should leave seminars with more than a few pithy reflections and historical insights. Training and Education 2030 directs the force to learn from exercises, wargames, and live-force experimentation as part of a broader modernization effort.1 Students should gather around a map, shifting as they argue about positions of advantage and alternative schemes of maneuver made possible by emerging technology. Assumptions should bleed under the pressure of feedback loops from wargames, forcing students to re-evaluate operational art and design. Students should emerge with practiced judgment, the habit of testing ideas against adversary adaptation, and the confidence to revise a plan when the situation changes. That process requires reconceptualizing the classroom as a battle lab: educational forums where military professionals connect their study of war to major military problems of interest to the fleet, like the widespread use of practicum and project-based learning in higher education.
The familiar classroom rhythm of reading, discussing, and writing remains necessary, but they require a focal point in the form of a practicum connecting students to real-world military problems. A practicum is a supervised college or university course that allows students to apply classroom theories to actual, on-the-job professional practice. For the profession of arms, that practicum is a battle lab. A seminar on Corbett should help students frame maritime campaigns in support of analyzing a classified fleet problem. A course on operational art should force them to build, test, and defend a campaign concept linked to a major operations plan in a manner that helps planners consider branches and sequels. A discussion of a Marine Corps doctrinal publication, such as MCDP 1, should help them wrestle with uncertainty, friction, and initiative inside a future littoral fight, for example, when designing future exercise requirements for Balikatan. A battle lab gives students a controlled venue to build hypotheses that larger experiments can refine. It gives the schoolhouse a way to contribute without pretending that a seminar can replace the fleet, the Warfighting Laboratory, or a combatant command staff.
This design changes the way students experience professional military education (PME). They read with a purpose because the next session may require them to apply the idea and brief senior leaders. They are more deliberate in their research and writing because a sponsor may read the product. They conduct more disciplined debates to sharpen their ideas because a wargame or red team will punish weak assumptions. The classroom becomes a place where Marines learn how knowledge travels from books to actual military decisions.
Professional military education should connect the classroom to the fleet through structured practicums that force creative problem-solving. Marine Corps University (MCU) has a history and recent practice of making the battle lab a defining feature of its approach to education. The question becomes how to scale it while preserving core features of the curriculum, such as the study of military theory, history, and strategy, and adding a new focus on immersing students in classified instruction linked to joint all-domain operations. Establishing this balance is critical as students must enter the battle lab with a sufficiently developed analytical grounding.
An Old Marine Corps Idea
In 1929, Col James Carson Breckinridge published “Some Thoughts on Service Schools” in the Marine Corps Gazette. He argued for schools built around criticism, experimentation, original thought, and broader intellectual engagement with the changing character of war.2 The vision aligned with key ideas from education philosophy at the time championed by William James and John Dewey, centered on pragmatism and experiential learning.3 This approach emphasized the need to apply knowledge to problems rather than centering a seminar around theoretical instruction or historical cases alone.
The interwar Marine Corps Schools turned that vision into institutional practice. Under Breckinridge, the schoolhouse shifted its attention toward advanced base operations and the amphibious problem. The curriculum changed, and faculty contributed to doctrine. Breckinridge treated criticism as a professional virtue. The interwar schools treated a concept as something to test against geography, adversaries, ships, logistics, and tactical detail. They also created a community of practice: students, instructors, doctrine writers, and operating forces shared a problem and worked through it over time. At one point, the senior course closed so instructors could help develop the concepts the force needed. The episode deserves attention because it shows a schoolhouse operating as part of the force development system. The Marines who later executed amphibious campaigns in the Pacific inherited ideas tested, argued, and refined in schools as well as in the fleet.4 That combination of critique, experiment, and community is the core of the battle lab.
The analogy has limits, but the pattern matters. The interwar Marines faced uncertainty about naval warfare, amphibious operations, and the future operating environment. Today’s Marines face a different set of problems: precision fires, dense sensor networks, adversary reconnaissance-strike complexes, degraded communications, cyber and information warfare, unmanned systems, and AI-enabled staff work. This change is why MCU is inserting joint all-domain operations (JADO) into the curriculum.5
This new focus on JADO intersects the evolving role of battle labs at MCU. Between 2014 and 2024, the Gray Scholars program connected student research teams, faculty, and external partners around contemporary military challenges, including dense urban terrain, Arctic operations, manned-unmanned teaming, human-machine collaboration, expeditionary logistics, artificial intelligence, and amphibious operations.6 The work teams of students and faculty directly supported Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) work on Mosaic Warfare and force design.7 Initiatives like the TECOM (Training and Education Command) Warfighting Society and Fight Club—a collaboration among MCU, Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, the former U.S. Army Futures Command, and the 75th Innovation Command—used wargaming to explore the changing character of war and expose vulnerabilities in future concepts.8 More recently, the School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW) supported major experiments to integrate AI into military planning and sent students to work on classified problems in support of the fleet.9 These examples point to a larger proposition: the schoolhouse can receive hard problems from the force, expose them to disciplined inquiry, and return better questions, competing solutions, and officers trained in the process.
Defining the Battle Lab
A battle lab is a curriculum-linked practicum built around military problems that combines five elements. First, it has a sponsor, a live operational question, or a realistic future problem. Second, it aligns with student learning outcomes. Third, it uses a structured method, such as campaign analysis, wargaming, red teaming, operational design, data science, staff planning, and/or AI-enabled decision support, among other tools. Fourth, it produces an artifact that can be critiqued, revised, and delivered. Fifth, it includes structured reflection, allowing students to examine how they framed the problem, selected evidence, challenged assumptions, and made decisions under uncertainty.
A battle lab also has a rhythm. Students frame the problem, collect evidence, identify assumptions, generate alternatives, test those alternatives, receive critique, revise, and produce a final artifact. The instructor acts as coach, methodologist, and professional skeptic. The sponsor supplies friction: real constraints, classification boundaries, operational demand, and an audience with a stake in the answer. The result is education through disciplined use. Students learn by doing and then learn again by examining how they did it. A schoolhouse battle lab operates much like the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory but at a smaller educational scale. The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory plans, executes, and analyzes concept-based experiments, reporting findings for further testing and review.10 A battle lab uses students and faculty to expose assumptions, test concepts, and build judgment before an idea becomes doctrine, a requirement, or a plan.
The interwar Marines faced uncertainty about naval warfare, amphibious operations, and the future operating environment.
The educational theory behind practicums reinforces the point. David Kolb’s experiential learning model describes learning as a cycle of concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation.11 Donald Schön’s work on the reflective practitioner shows why professional education must teach people to think in action while confronting uncertain problems.12 Education theorists John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid connect practicums to what they call “situated cognition” and the idea that knowledge is tied to the activity and culture in which people use it.13 Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver’s research on problem-based learning shows how students develop flexible knowledge, problem-solving skills, self-directed learning, collaboration, and reflection by working through ill-structured problems.14
Four Battle Lab Models
Reconceptualizing the battle lab inside the classroom typically takes one of four forms. The first is the seminar-linked map exercise or tabletop exercise. This model is the easiest to insert into existing curricula, because the design can be simple. Students receive a problem statement, a map, a force list, a time limit, and a set of adversary assumptions. They develop options, brief them, and then watch an instructor or red team stress the plan. The after-action review asks what they assumed, what evidence mattered, what changed under pressure, and what the sponsor should study next. In one or two seminar periods, students practice problem framing, and sponsors receive a range of hypotheses. A seminar on expeditionary operations can become a noncombatant evacuation problem in a missile-threatened littoral. A class on command and control can become a tabletop exercise on degraded communications and AI-enabled staff support. A session on deception can become a multi-domain feint problem. Students move from discussion to decision. Sponsors see several approaches from officers with different operational backgrounds.
The model puts a heavy premium on the faculty. Instructors need to build external networks and deep relationships to identify and scope a problem appropriate to a two-hour session in the classroom. That often requires faculty to spend significantly more time on the front end to understand the problem and turn it into a seminar design aligned with the curriculum objectives and student learning outcomes.
The second model is the course-linked enduring problem. It is the strongest form because students have time to move from exposure to competence. A course can be organized for several weeks or months around one sponsor problem. Readings, classified briefings, methods instruction, workshops, wargames, design reviews, and final products can all point toward the same question.
The course-linked enduring problem model also applies to campaign design. School of Advanced Warfighting students have worked with U.S. Africa Command problems to develop alternative campaign designs and options for operational activities and investments while using data science and red teaming to refine their approach. Students learn to ask how a campaign is supposed to work, what indicators would show progress, and which assumptions are vulnerable to adversary adaptation. They must define objectives, identify mechanisms, build indicators, and explain why a given force package creates an advantage. This activity is where history and theory matter. They give students analogies, warnings, and vocabulary, but the practicum demands judgment. At the same time, combatant command planners see a broad range of options for augmenting their campaign plans.
Future naval force design offers another enduring problem. Currently, SAW is collaborating with the National Commission on the Future of the Navy to analyze alternative fleet structures.15 Students are building custom AI agents that analyze hybrid fleets and the future of amphibious operations. This model creates a feedback loop. Students learn about key emerging concepts like the Navy’s hedge strategy and tailored unmanned forces designed to augment carrier strike groups.16 Commissioners and senior leaders in the Naval Service can see how professionals think about key capability gaps.
These issues are ideal for a course-linked battle lab. Students can divide into teams studying the future of amphibious operations, hedge forces, hybrid fleets, contested logistics, and alternative maritime campaigns. Each team can use common assumptions, compare force packages, run map exercises, and identify implications across the DOTMLPF-P spectrum (doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, facilities, and policy). The result is a structured body of campaign analysis instead of disconnected papers.
Artificial intelligence agents should be part of this model as planning architecture, not used as a shortcut to prettier slides. Students can build workflows that collect evidence, compare courses of action, track assumptions, generate red-team questions, summarize doctrine, and identify capability gaps. Tools such as n8n allow students to build custom workflows from the bottom up. The educational value comes from configuring the tool, checking its sources, understanding its failure modes, and deciding where human review belongs.
… the planning sprint. A sprint pulls students out of the normal classroom rhythm for a week to a month to support a live or near-live problem.
The third model is the planning sprint. A sprint pulls students out of the normal classroom rhythm for a week to a month to support a live or near-live problem. The advantage is relevance. Students encounter incomplete information, classification limits, stakeholders, time pressure, and the friction that disappears in clean classroom cases. They learn that operational art is a disciplined way of making choices under constraint.
Planning sprints requires timing. Students need enough of the program behind them to contribute. Faculty need enough control to convert the sponsor requirement into an educational event. The sprint should end with two products. The sponsor gets a decision brief, branch plan, campaign analysis, wargame design, or options paper. Students get an after-action process that examines problem framing, evidence, assumptions, recommendations, and critique. The sponsor gains disciplined inquiry. Students gain practice under pressure.
Sprints also teach humility. A live problem rarely honors the boundaries of a syllabus. A student team may discover that the decisive issue is an authority, a partner, a sustainment problem, a data gap, or a political constraint. Those discoveries are educational gold. They show officers that planning is a social and institutional process as much as an intellectual one. The battle lab gives faculty a way to capture that lesson and connect it back to theory.
The fourth model is directed research. This is the oldest model and most in need of redesign. Topic lists age quickly. Sponsors rotate. Students select questions late. Papers arrive after decisions have moved on. The stronger model is networked directed research. Faculty curate the questions, identify sponsors, align methods, schedule touchpoints, and deliver products to people able to use them.
The Gray Scholars’ prior work on urban conflict offers the model. In 2015, students partnered with multiple defense organizations studying the future of urban warfare. Students spent the year conducting individual research but meeting as a group to compare findings and debate ideas. The papers were published as an edited volume entitled Complex Terrain: Megacities and the Changing Character of Urban Operations. The directed research effort became a professional contribution because it had a cohort, a common problem, faculty guidance, and a publication pathway.
The next step is to align master’s theses and campaign analysis papers with major institutional problems. Degree-granting programs at MCU can organize student work around future joint maritime campaigns, alternative force structures, unmanned systems, contested logistics, and campaign effectiveness. Students can analyze the performance of different force designs and identify DOTMLPF-P requirements. The outcome should be a portfolio of professional research, sponsored products, and publishable ideas.
Making Battle Labs Work
Treating classrooms as battle labs works when the institution provides five conditions. First, battle labs require faculty capacity. A meaningful practicum demands more than a clever scenario. Faculty must understand the operational problem, know the sponsor, teach the method, protect academic standards, and translate student work into usable outputs. This work requires scholar-practitioners who remain current on doctrine, adversary adaptation, technology, joint concepts, and fleet problems. Faculty development should include wargame design, red teaming, campaign analysis, data literacy, AI workflow design, and attending military courses that ensure currency with emerging concepts and capabilities.
Second, battle labs require time. A sponsor problem arriving two weeks before execution can produce a useful event. An enduring battle lab needs months of design. Students need readings, method instruction, sponsor interaction, analytic tools, and opportunities to revise. The faculty need time to align the problem with learning outcomes. As a result, battle labs need to be built into the curriculum, not treated as additions.
A calendar full of events can still produce little professional development if students never connect their decisions to theory, evidence, and critique.
Third, battle labs require methods. Battle labs should teach campaign analysis, wargame design, red teaming, statistics, source evaluation, force package comparison, and risk assessment. The best problems are those that immerse students in problem-solving techniques that help them grow as professionals. Students should not be treated as free labor. Rather, student growth must be as important as the products they produce for sponsors.
Fourth, battle labs require assessment. Sponsor satisfaction is one measure. Student learning is the decisive measure. Faculty should assess whether students framed the problem clearly, used evidence responsibly, identified assumptions, compared alternatives, adapted under critique, and communicated decisions. A university battle lab should maintain a small set of common standards: every project needs a learning objective, a sponsor or problem owner, a method, a product, an assessment plan, and a releasability plan. Those standards create quality control across different schools and programs. They also protect faculty and students from a common failure mode in innovation work: activity without learning. A calendar full of events can still produce little professional development if students never connect their decisions to theory, evidence, and critique.
The Way Ahead
The Marine Corps should make battle labs a standing feature of MCU. The portfolio should include seminar-linked exercises, course-linked enduring problems, planning sprints, and networked directed research. The sponsor network should include the FMF, Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, combatant commands, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, DARPA, the Navy staff, joint organizations, and commissions studying future force structure. The network should produce curated problems with classification guidance, desired outputs, faculty leads, and clear alignment with educational objectives.
Marine Corps University should also build a battle lab calendar. Early in the year, students can learn methods and run short map exercises. Mid-year, they can work on enduring course problems that require design, analysis, and revision. Later in the year, they can conduct planning sprints or synthesize directed research. This sequencing respects the learning curve. It also gives sponsors predictable windows for engagement and gives faculty enough time to build rigorous products.
Col Breckinridge understood that Service schools should cultivate original analysis. The interwar Marine Corps Schools showed that education could contribute to doctrine. Gray Scholars showed that students can help the force think through emerging problems. Recent AI planning experiments show that PME can test how new tools change staff work. The battle lab brings these strands together.
The Marine Corps needs PME that teaches Marines to test ideas before doctrine catches up. It needs classrooms where students argue with history, apply theory, use data, interrogate AI, design campaigns, challenge assumptions, and write for the profession. The classroom should connect to the fleet and remain protected for education. It should be intellectually serious and practically useful. A battle lab gives PME that balance. It is where Marines practice adaptation before the next war demands it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
>Dr. Jensen is the Frank E. Petersen Chair at the Marine Corps University and a Professor in the School of Advanced Warfighting as well as the Executive Director for the National Commission on the Future of the Navy.
Notes
1. U.S. Marine Corps, Training and Education 2030 (Washington, DC: Headquarters Marine Corps, 2023), https://www.marines.mil/News/Publications/MCPEL/Electronic-Library-Display/Article/3276167/training-and-education-2030.
2. J. C. Breckinridge, “Some Thoughts on Service Schools,” Marine Corps Gazette 14, no. 4 (December 1929); Benjamin Jensen, “The Classroom Is a Battle Lab: Using Professional Military Education to Usher in a New Era of Algorithmic Warfare,” Task & Purpose, March 6, 2024, https://taskandpurpose.com/opinion/classroom-battle-lab-algorithmic-warfare.
3. Pham Thi Kien and Bui Xuan Dung, “William James’s Pragmatism in Educational Theory: A Comprehensive Theoretical and Practical Analysis in Contemporary Educational Contexts” Pragmatism Today 16, no. 1 (2025), https://www.pragmatismtoday.eu/summer2025/William-James-Pragmatism-in-Educational-Theory-A-Comprehensive-Theoretical-and-Practical-Analysis-in-Contemporary-Educational-Contexts-Pham-Dung.pdf; Frank Riga “Pragmatism – John Dewey” in B. Akpan and T. Kennedy (eds), Science Education in Theory and Practice (Springer, 2020), https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/88549162/978-3-030-43620-9_16-libre.pdf.
4. Michael E. Doyle, “More Effective Education and Training,” Marine Corps Gazette, August 15, 2024, https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/more-effective-education-and-training.
5. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Campaigns and Operations, Joint Publication 3-0 (Arlington, VA: Department of Defense, September 10, 2024), Appendix D; Nicholas E. Bixby “Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO): The Maneuver Concept for Future Conflict,” Over the Horizon Journal (November 22, 2024), https://othjournal.com/2024/11/22/joint-all-domain-operations-jado-the-maneuver-concept-for-future-conflict.
6. Benjamin Jensen, “Diverging from the Arbitrary: The Gray Scholars and Innovation in the U.S. Marine Corps,” War on the Rocks, August 1, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/diverging-from-the-arbitrary-the-gray-scholars-and-innovation-in-the-u-s-marine-corps.
7. Benjamin Jensen and John Paschewitz ,“Mosaic Warfare: Small and Scalable are Beautiful,” War on the Rocks, December 23, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/mosaic-warfare-small-and-scalable-are-beautiful.
8. Benjamin Jensen, “Welcome to Fight Club: Wargaming the Future,” War on the Rocks, January 4, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/welcome-to-fight-club-wargaming-the-future; Benjamin Jensen, “TECOM Warfighting Club,” Marine Corps Gazette, June 2019, https://www.mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/TECOM-Warfighting-Club.pdf; Von Lambert and Tyler Quinn, “Wargaming Lessons from Exercise Sea Dragon,” War on the Rocks, January 7, 2020, https://warontherocks.com/wargaming-lessons-from-exercise-sea-dragon.
9. Benjamin Jensen and Dan Tadross, “How Large-Language Models Can Revolutionize Military Planning,” War on the Rocks, April 12, 2023, https://warontherocks.com/how-large-language-models-can-revolutionize-military-planning.
10. Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, “Experiment Division,” accessed May 16, 2026. https://www.mcwl.marines.mil/Divisions/Experiment.
11. David Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Prentice-Hall, 1984).
12. Donald A. Schon, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Ashgate, 1983).
13. John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid, “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning,” Educational Researcher 18, no. 1 (1989): 32–42.
14. Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver, “Problem-Based Learning: What and How Do Students Learn?,” Educational Psychology Review 16 (2004): 235–266.
15. Mackenzie Eaglen, Filemon Vela, and Benjamin Jensen, “The National Commission on the Future of the Navy: The Time is Now,” Breaking Defense, January 21, 2026, https://breakingdefense.com/2026/01/the-national-commission-on-the-future-of-the-navy-the-time-is-now.
16. Sydney J. Freedberg, “Navy’s New Hedge Strategy Calls for Tailored Unmanned Forces to Augment Carriers,” Breaking Defense, January 28, 2026, https://breakingdefense.com/2026/01/navy-hedge-strategy-carriers-drones-caudle; Bryan Clark and Dan Patt, Hedging Bets: Rethinking Force Design for a Post-Dominance Era (Hudson Institute, 2024), https://www.hudson.org/defense-strategy/hedging-bets-rethinking-force-design-post-dominance-era-bryan-clark-dan-patt; Bryan Clark, “One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Building U.S. Navy Hedges Against Rising Threats,” Sea Power Magazine, December 8, 2025, https://www.hudson.org/defense-strategy/one-size-doesnt-fit-all-building-us-navy-hedges-against-rising-threats-bryan-clark.
17. Benjamin Jensen and Henrik Breitenbach, eds., Complex Terrain: Megacities and the Changing Character of Urban Operations (Marine Corps University Press, 2019).
>Author’s Note: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect official policy or positions of the Marine Corps, DOD, or U.S. Government.