Connected Forces through Connected Education

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Eisenhower Paper

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Connected Forces through Connected Education

Harnessing NATO’s & Partner Nations Strategic Educational Resources

Julian Lindley-French

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1 Professor Julian Lindley-French is Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft, Director of Europa Analytica & Distin- guished Visiting Research Fellow of the National Defense University,

The views expressed are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the NATO Defense College or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

This paper was presented as background paper for the 43^rd Conference of Commandants held in Bucharest on 26-28 May 2014.

“Knowledge is power”

Sir Francis Bacon

Introduction

This background paper considers the future of professional military education (herein called defence education) in light of recent events, Alliance strategy, recent operations and prior discussions.

The 2014 Ukraine crisis has reminded allies and partners alike that the Alliance must be able to generate influence and effect across the conflict spectrum from the low-end to the high-end. As the Alliance considers its pivot- al Wales Summit in September 2014 and the end of major combat operations in Afghani- stan, in certain very important respects the twenty-first century transformation of NATO is finally beginning after more than a decade focussed on operations. At the same time, transformation takes place against the back- drop of a continuing economic crisis in Eu- rope, major cuts to European armed forces, and cuts to the US defence budget that will amount to almost two-thirds of the entire Eu- ropean defence investment by 2020.

As the Alliance shifts from campaigning to contingencies in a fluid and rapidly changing strategic environment, closing the growing strategy-capability-capacity-austerity gap will not only prove the Alliance’s most pressing

task but one that will require thinking out- side of traditional defence planning boxes.

The critical search will be one for comparative and affordable advantage if NATO is to remain the cornerstone of a security and defence alliance based on the shared and embedded practice the Alliance has established since its founding sixty-five years ago.

Equally, given the nature of change and emerging security challenges, the Alliance and its nations will need to consider radical solutions if NATO is to preserve credibility as a deterrent, warfighter, and stabiliser in a world very different from that of its first Sec- retary General, Lord Bruce Ismay.

For the moment the Alliance remains the only organisation in the world that can generate credible, legitimate military power across the crisis spectrum. But its ability to meet and sustain the full spectrum of missions over the medium-to-long term can no longer be taken for granted. Indeed, as the Ukraine crisis attests, NATO’s credibility, influence, and effectiveness is at risk. Therefore, it is vital that the 2010 NATO Strategic Concept is fully realised across the three core tasks of collective defence, crisis management, and co-operative security. However, even since those tasks were first enunciated at the 2010 Lisbon Summit, the magnitude of the risk and challenges they imply has itself grown and expanded markedly.

The only way to squeeze more effectiveness

Research Division - NATO Defense College, Rome

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out of Alliance forces will be through efficien- cies and deeper co-operation and integration between Allies. At the February 2011 Munich Security Conference Secretary General An- ders Fogh Rasmussen launched a new concept called Smart Defence to help close the gaps Allies face. One year later, at the May 2012 Chicago Summit, he reinforced this pro- gram with the Connected Forces Initiative.

But he also warned that the Alliance could fail at a time of profound strategic change if new thinking was not properly embraced.

As the Secretary General put it, “We need an initiative to complement Smart Defence;

one that mobilises all of NATO’s resources so we strengthen our ability to work together in a truly connected way. I call this the Con- nected Forces Initiative (CFI).” The Secre- tary General highlighted three areas that CFI would be designed to enable and support:

expanded education and training; increased exercises focussed on the NATO Response Force; and better use of technology.

Critically, the Secretary General called for a new relationship for NATO between strategy, technology and the security space in an age when no one service or force will own any of the five strategic defence domains of this century – land, sea, air, cyber and space. However, it is also an age in which states and their armed forces will have to be effective across all five domains. In effect, the Secretary General was describing the Alliance’s essential strategic dilemma – the use of credible but relatively small forces in a very large multinational space in which traditional concepts of borders and bounda- ries are increasingly meaningless. To solve that dilemma the Alliance established NATO Forces 2020 in effect to operationalise the Strategic Concept.

The Secretary General might have added a sixth domain – knowledge. As events sug- gest NATO Forces 2020 will need to be established on a credible and modernised Article 5 collective defence architecture. In the 21^st century collective defence will mean inter alia cyber-defence, air defence, missile defence, strategic communications and intelligence, fast strategic lift, and advanced ex- peditionary forces all of which demand capability and capacity reinforced by a knowledge

multiplier.

Given the nature and scope of emerging security challenges, the credibility, influence and effect will also be dependent on NATO acting as a strategic hub. Relationships between allies and partner nations, as well as military defence professionals and civilian security professionals, will be critical to the kind of hybrid, knowledge-based operations the twenty-first century is generating in which military power, civilian capability, and close interaction with host nations will be vital. Such operations will in turn need a much deeper understanding of each element of a campaign, with knowledge-based unity of effort and purpose-built on the better development and application of both human and hard capability and the interaction between the two. Indeed, it is precisely that juncture at which NATO Forces 2020, Smart Defence, and the Connected Forces Initiative reside, and for which knowledge and education are key enablers.

The Mission of the Conference of Commandants

The conference will consider innovative ap- proaches to defence education which will mobilise and network all of NATO’s and its Partners’ national strategic educational resources in support of the Connected Forces Initiative. This new approach is called Con- nected Education--understood as close vir- tual and physical linkages between educational establishments that strengthen the Alliance’s ability to work together in a truly connected way.

The Revolution in Strategic Edu- cation

The Supreme Allied Commander Transfor- mation, General Jean-Paul Poloméros, at the April 2014 Transformation Seminar in Paris emphasised the importance of synergy and best practices across Alliance education, exercising, and training efforts. NATO has several education facilities, including the NATO Defense College and the NATO School in Oberammergau that could be

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used to drive such synergy. There are also joint training centres in Poland and Norway designed to offer opportunities to train and learn together, supported by Allied Com- mand Transformation and Centres of Excel- lence under the Joint Force Trainer. These cover a wide range of specialist skills, such as cyber defence, counter terrorism, and IED protection.

However, the centrepiece of CFI is the network of national defence and security academies that exist across the Alliance. Indeed, to a very significant extent the synergy and shared best practice that could be generated and which would help greatly to harmonise the development of human capital through education and knowledge are dependent on the capability and capacity represented by the academies. This is particularly important as synergy is wholly dependent on the development of shared programmes, harmonised curricula, and the better use of emerging technologies in education to prepare officers and non-commissioned officers to succeed at every level of mission command.

Secretary General Rasmussen is particularly keen to generate far more value out of defence education across the Alliance. The aim is for the Alliance to work with national academies to promote skills and expertise that can give NATO forces a comparative advantage through enhanced human capital in future operations. This will be particularly important as NATO shifts from operations to contingencies at the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan in December 2014.

If the Alliance is to be transformed into a strategic hub it must be knowledge-based with intellectual interoperability generated via education and research. One idea could be to have an Allied Command Knowledge to work alongside the NATO Defense Col- lege and ACT, with such a capability help- ing the NATO strategic commands make far more efficient use of force and resource.

This would help the Alliance not only identify lessons from operations and best practices, but to apply them to planning via education, knowledge transfer, and sharing built on an agreed methodology.

Allied Command Knowledge would also ena-

ble the Alliance to maintain relationships with international organisations and non-govern- mental organisations vital to the realisation of shared objectives without the concerns many such institutions have of working with the Strategic Commands.

At the military level a much more scientific approach to exercising and training is needed if CFI is to be employed and NATO Forces 2020 realised. Critically, a rigorous development programme is needed as part of both CFI and NATO Forces 2020 established on the NATO Response Force and the other Graduated Response Forces (GRF) at the theatre tactical level. Exercise scenarios under CFI must thus be designed to better allow NATO forces to practice what they have learned, test what remains difficult and better share the results across the commands.

NATO Defense College and the other allied defence academies have a clear role to play both in the dissemination and consideration of findings. Indeed, only by providing realis- tic and challenging scenarios in exercises will working together become second nature when it comes to complex joint operations.

Moreover, by using the NRF as a platform for experimentation, all the GRFs could be brought up to a similar level of robust capability over time, thus rendering their use in an area of operations far more efficient.

Critically, such a development programme would require a scientific approach to exercises as part of an Alliance-wide concept of force development. Much of this work could be undertaken by the research and education community implicit in Alliance-wide defence education structures, and would enable a healthy injection of contemporary and novel thinking into the classroom. Another problem Alliance forces face is the cost of readiness. Particular importance should be placed on the role of defence academies as hosts of synthetic training that could complement vital but expensive exercises of both individuals—and, by extension, forces. This is a particular need at present. Due to operations mainly in Afghanistan, NATO’s exercise schedule has become dangerously weakened in recent years. Therefore, post- December 2014 the pressing need will not only exist for more ‘scientific’ exercises but

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better connected exercises to capture and build upon the “corporate memory” gained in Afghanistan. A tight relationship between SACT, the Joint Force Trainer, the Joint As- sessment and Lessons-Learned Centre (JALLC), NATO Defense College, and defence educators across the Alliance will be an important factor in ensuring such knowledge is not lost as people move on.

Equally, education and research also have a key role to play in establishing the Alliance’s future level of ambition. Specifically, the relationship between education, experimentation, rotation of forces, and future operations will need to be considered. For example, given current events US Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) could be rotated through the NATO Response Force as the US has of- fered. Such a commitment would in effect create a twenty-first century version of the old Reforger exercises by which US forces would fly into Europe in support of first re- sponders. Given the very different levels of interoperability between Alliance forces to- day and the different relationships between technology and doctrine, intellectual interoperability will be a key enabler for Alliance forces. The use of the NATO Defense Col- lege and other academies as sites for linked table-top map exercises and problem-solv- ing would be an important factor in maintain- ing hard interoperability.

Connected Forces through Con- nected Education

In May 2013 two meetings took place to consider the future of defence education across the Alliance. Both are relevant to the mission of the 43^rd Conference of Comman- dants in Bucharest. The first meeting, at Wil- ton Park in the UK, was entitled “Connected Forces, Educated Minds: Transformation of Professional Military Education.” The 42^nd Conference of Commandants took place in Oslo under the leadership of Lieutenant- General Arne Bard Dalhaug, Commandant, NATO Defense College, and Rear-Admiral Louise Dedichen, Commandant of the Nor- wegian Defence University College. Both meetings considered the role of education in the post Afghanistan era and took as their

mission the need to make smart defence smarter by delivering an outcome-based, learner-focused system of education and training across the Alliance.

Both meetings also identified a range of challenges defence educators must face.

The most pressing challenge is to convince commanders and policy-makers of the value of learning, and then that time and money should be invested in it. Three specific strategic challenges were identified: the setting of goals for education, training and research in a shifting strategic environment; the relationship between defence education and the rapidly changing civilian academic market;

and the growing gap between the generation and the use of technology in education and training.

Both meetings emphasised the importance in hard economic times that education should act as a key enabler of the human capital, which for the time-being remains the comparative advantage of NATO mili- taries. However, one of the lessons of the Ukraine crisis is the speed with which Rus- sia has modernised and professionalised at least part of its armed forces since the 2010 Russian Defence White Paper, a scenario in which defence education has clearly played an important role particularly as concerns junior and mid-level leadership. This con- trasts markedly with cuts to defence education all too apparent across the Alliance.

Consequently, the four thinking platforms of the 43^rd Conference of Commandants imply a range of pertinent questions.

Educated Minds and Knowledge

The scale of the education challenge needs to be properly understood. Naturally, the provision of education and the degree of intellectual interoperability it can foster will vary according to the level and capability of the learner. Therefore, programmes and curricula will need to be considered in the security and defence round, and tailored appropri- ately to support specialisations across the entire defence and security domain. One of the many challenges will be mid-level education that can produce what the Oslo meeting called “brilliant mechanics,” whilst at the same time generating higher-level education

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able to generate and reinforce the “strategic level intuition” of senior officers.

The transformation of Alliance armed forces being led by ACT must also take place in harness with the transformation of defence education. However, such transformation pre-supposes strategy, and for the future defence education model to be effective it must be based on a proper understanding and hard analysis of current practice across the Alliance. Only then will the nations be able to take the longer-term view necessary if education and training at every level of mission command is to be effective, and if which synergy is going to be fostered. The role of the Alliance could be to help the nations shape their future defence education in line with best practice across the Alliance. Should a collective knowledge base for the Alliance be built upon and around that of the NATO De- fense College to ensure coordination and im- provement of mutual cooperation in defence education?

At the same time, the Alliance will need to be conscious of the limits to synergy. ACT could well fail if the Alliance attempts to enforce intellectual interoperability via a rigidly applied NATO education standard. There would be simply too many cultural, political and ethi- cal barriers. Where should the Alliance best concentrate its efforts to harmonise defence education across NATO?

Implicit in both Smart Defence and the Con- nected Forces Initiative is the linking of education, training, exercising and research.

Would a new Alliance defence education vision (Connected Education) be useful as a vehicle for the dissemination of best practice and as a method to harmonise practice? In- deed, is the Alliance in a position to act as a clearing house for the exchange of information such an effort would entail, and thereaf- ter act as a best practice ‘consultancy’?

Could the creation of indicative NATO Edu- cational Standards help to foster common educational standards at the strategic and operational levels? Should ACT lead in the creation of benchmarks for proving relevance, and to ensure defence education is firmly-embedded in Smart Defence and the Connected Forces Initiative?

Skills and Competency Base

The focus of defence education across the Alliance must be on the needs of the learner. Given the emerging role of the officer- scholar in future concepts and operations, defence education will also need to foster a new kind of military leader, not unlike the Renaissance idea of the soldier-scholar-dip- lomat. Indeed, future operations will demand leaders that can be warfighters and reach out to all key partners and understand his or her command challenge in the widest pos- sible sense. How does one define “requisite knowledge” given that mission command is likely to lead to more decentralisation of command? What does the learner need to know and what skills must he or she possess and when?

To that end defence educators will need to consider how best to develop tailored career-long learning relationships so that talent can be identified early and fostered whilst at the same time meeting the needs of non- commissioned officers and enlisted person- nel. How will tailored, individual career development be measured and assessed? In many ways such individualism goes against the military ethos. When should tailored career development begin?

Demonstrating and measuring success is to a large extent linked to the willingness of defence education systems to allow failure. To what extent can qualifications become more reflective of performance so that those who work hard enjoy the fruits of their labours? To what extent can careers be sufficiently flex- ible to enable officers to undertake research without damaging their career prospects?

Such flexibility will be particularly important to enable the early identification of the elite 25% of officers who are likely to achieve high command and which will be a particularly important role for transnational defence education.

Learning Goals and Methods

The NATO Defense College on an academic level, and ACT on a strategic level, have vital roles to play in promoting intellectual interoperability by highlighting and disseminat- ing best practices across the Alliance. This in turn will help nations to identify and es-

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tablish new defence education standards – both formal and informal. Given the lessons from the ISAF campaign in Afghanistan, Operation Unified Protector in Libya, and Russian operations in Crimea, there is also a new balance to be struck to enable pre- paredness for missions across a very broad mission spectrum. This requirement will also demand a new balance between education and training, the needs of the war-fighter and the stabiliser, and between the Alliance and the wider security community. There will also have to be a new nexus between national and international defence education.

Thankfully, there are no insuperable barriers to strategic unity of effort and practice to promote closer harmonisation of Alliance defence education. However, sufficient will must be found at the highest levels in member nations if an Alliance-wide connected defence education vision is to be generated that could in turn inform national decisions, choices, programmes, and curricula.

Given the move away from operations to contingencies, can and should a firmer and more formal, structured link be established between lessons-learned and defence education? Does defence education need a new type of educator able to self-generate education-relevant research? As one example of the challenges faced by defence educators, in several of the Alliance member states defence educators are assessed using research guidelines driven by civilian universi- ties (such as the UK’s Research Assessment Framework). This tends to focus research in defence academies on the gaining of civilian publications rather than the needs of the defence establishment. A balance needs to be struck between the two competing sets of needs if defence establishments are to see value for money from research that can be fed directly into education. Could an Al- liance-wide defence research assessment framework be established? The Secretary General has emphasised the need for clus- ters of member nations to lead. Could a defence education “pioneer” cluster be established?

One proposal at Wilton Park was for the creation of an ACT-owned matrix that captures how defence education in each country is

structured and how programmes, curricula, and courses are structured. Would such a matrix help NATO nations better understand what if any consolidations of both institutions and programmes could be made? Could such a tool be made available to partners?

Contemporary coalitions of allies and partners will likely be comprised of both military and non-military actors. To avoid friction and to maintain a corpus of intellectual interoperability, defence education will necessarily need to take place in a multinational and multidisciplinary framework. How and to what extent?

External validation and performance-measuring of both education and training is critical to the measuring of success in both the civilian and military spheres. In many NATO nations such reviews are carried out by civilian education professionals. Is there a voluntary best practice model that could be developed for application across the Alliance? Could comparisons of defence education practice be carried out on a regular basis by peer institutions in NATO nations with the NATO Defense College and/or ACT providing validation and certification?

Improved Exploitation of Technology Emerging technologies need to be far better understood and exploited across the defence education community. In such circum- stances technology can be seductive, but given the nature of the profession of arms very careful consideration will need to be given to such developments to avoid faddism.

Advanced distance learning is likely to be a vital part of future courses and curricula, but its relevance and effectiveness still needs to be properly tested. Indeed, given the impact of technologies and new communications strategies on civilian education, some consideration will need to be given to just what practices could be imported into defence education.

For example, the development of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) promote knowledge but would on the face of it seem to do little to promote excellence. Could academies share courses with each other in Alliance-wide open courses? The balance between residential and remote courses is

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likely to change, as will indeed the relationship between deployed forces and the need for real-time knowledge (which is far more than actionable intelligence). What would the best balance for such courses? Could defence educators act as purveyors of deploy- able knowledge and by what means? Could technology be exploited to maintain quality at distance?

Distance learning course are plagued by poor quality and inappropriate use of weak sources. Distance learning also suffers from an essential paradox: if both technology and the information it affords the learner are to be affordably exploited; as the budgets of academies (and their like) are reduced the increased reliance on distance learning could also generate demands for increased access to information to service online learning. How could such demand be met, afford- ed, and quality maintained?

Distance learning raises other challenges.

Should distance learning be seen in the round together with new technologies supporting synthetic education and training? How can academies best support activities and each other to ensure best use of technology and indeed the provision of courses and educators able to exploit such technologies?

Technology and modularity go hand-in-hand.

However, the relationship between technology, tailored and blended learning, and programmes is complex and needs to be better understood. For example, the US undertook an Advanced Education Research Initiative to tap into the civilian revolution which builds on the J7 Review of Joint Education in support of National Defense University 2020.

This initiative might be adaptable to NATO- wide defence education. Indeed, there are similar initiatives in other member nations.

How can the Alliance exploit such analy- ses so that all member nations could exploit them?

Defence education needs to better exploit the revolution in the civilian use of education technologies. How can a better understanding of this process be established, and what new concepts and technologies exist that could be “bought off the shelf”?

Connected Forces through Con- nected Education: Balancing Am- bition and Realism

President Franklin Roosevelt once described the United States as the arsenal of democra- cy. Knowledge will be a key capability in the contemporary arsenal of democracies. Too often, too many Alliance-wide institutions de- voted to defence and security education look backward, not forward. Esprit de corps and tradition is important, but in this age when the nexus between strategy, capability, technology, and thought will be critical, a global reach of the mind will be the essential trans- mission between influence and effect.

This is particularly important for the future generations which will—far more than their teachers—see their lives enshrined by technology, social media and the world-wide web.

Education and research – the twin pillars of knowledge—will need to embrace such technologies and such media if the armed forces of the Alliance are to properly exploit all the enablers – civilian and military – that will be the West’s comparative advantage in a hy- per-competitive world.

NATO and its nations will find that challenging. It will be difficult for an essentially and inherently conservative institution and its constituents to rise to such a challenge.

However, that indeed is the challenge. It is a challenge made more difficult by the emerging tension in over-stretched and yet under- funded armed forces in which military leadership must at the same time be visionary, di- rective, and strong—and more decentralised and personality-based given the changing nature of increasingly individualistic socie- ties. Indeed, creativity and individuality are two sides of the same coin. It is precisely the creativity of Alliance forces that could be the affordable comparative advantage that makes the difference between success and failure in twenty-first century conflict.

The challenge will be made even more com- plicated by the need to work up programmes, courses, and curricula with partners. NATO has strategic partners the world over with whom NATO forces will work, and stability partners in and around Europe that NATO forces will support through capacity building.

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One of those key capacities will be knowledge.

However, NATO’s essential challenge remains: how can relatively small but highly- professional Alliance forces be credibly effective as deterrents, warfighters, and sta- bilisers across the five domains of air, sea, land, cyber and space and across the global reach of potentially simultaneous operations? Knowledge – the sixth domain – will be critical, for it is the key to precision, and it is precision which will ensure the appropriate balance between effectiveness and efficiency.

It is in that context that NATO, Smart De- fence, the Connected Forces Initiative, and defence education writ large must be seen.

In other words, if a balance must be struck between effectiveness and efficiency, it is effectiveness which must be the focus. In an age when it is unlikely that defence will see a major injection of investment, the only way to achieve that will be though deeper co-operation, specialisation, and pooling–and indeed some integration.

The integration of thought and knowledge is a natural first step because as with all such integration it must and will start modestly and in the tail. However, if the emphasis is efficiency at the expense of effectiveness, then in effect NATO will be appeasing reality and in time, given the nature and scope of the emerging security challenges, the Alliance will first fracture and then fail.

If the appropriate ambition could be generated, knowledge integration could start if a Connected Defence Education model for the Alliance could be generated. There will be the usual naysayers who will say such a model is impossible, that political and bureaucratic impediments are too great, or that national courses are fine given the vested interests

they serve. They are wrong. To close the strategy-capability-austerity gap the twenty- first century points towards it is vital the Alli- ance and its members are for once radical.

Radicalism, as ever, starts with knowledge.

Effective intellectual interoperability is the key to the future effectiveness of the Atlan- tic Alliance sixty-five years from its founding in a dangerous and big world getting more dangerous by the day. A Connected Defence Education model would necessarily be ambi- tious and include an assessment of all the knowledge, skills, and competences the Al- liance will need to succeed in the coming strategic, operational, and command challenges.

Even if such ambition is too much for some to swallow, as it will be, intellectual interoperability is the essential challenge for defence educators. It will certainly be challenging, as such a goal would cut across cherished short-term deliverables by which “success”

and careers are built in modern armed forces and governments. However, the knowledge and didactic space currently occupied by venerable and august institutions is fast vanishing. The nature of the security environment, emerging security challenges, the changing nature of the Alliance and the fast- changing nature of the learner will ensure that.

Knowledge and education are not merely support services at this challenging moment, but front-line enablers in the twenty-first century struggle for influence and effect in what will be a very challenging era.

As Marcus Aurelius said, “Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone”.

Are the Alliance and its educators up to that challenge? It is all a question of ambition.