You identified one objective
Quote:
The course serves the armed forces three small NATO nations which have to seriously consider territorial defense against conventional attack by a large power as well as irregular threats and are sending out expeditionary forces to fight coalition/alliance small wars.
Concur with max161, but further add the course should include a wargame (applied learning) that addresses the complex scenario you identified above. The best wargames are relatively slow paced, with numerous mentors from different disciplines available to provide insights (not answers) to the players.
I am against a narrow focus (strictly conventional or irregular warfare), because staff officers must be able to address a wide range of problems, but the curriculum you listed did not appear to address one of your major security concerns posted above?
Agreed that the first thing needed is to identify whats needed
Just a little extra though, if as you say much of the teaching is to better prepare them for working with others who's concerns are related to ability to defend against large interest with their own limited assets, it would seem prudent at least in that particular portion of course to practice ad hoc'ery:D
In that part of thinking outside the box is recognizing which box your in then planning from there. Case studies do provide a lot in this area both in military and civilian context's. Figure out how to expose them to walking a mile in others shoes. If nothing else it may help to remind them how nice their own shoes are or point out that wearing tenni's to the dance might not be the best idea:cool:
"Staff" is an environment all its own
Staff = bureaucracy. I mean that in the objective, academic sense, not the colloquial, derogatory sense. It is a social-collective all its own, with typologies and dynamics governing structures and relations throughout. We expect our people to operate -- thrive, even -- in this kind of environment, yet we do not teach them about it. This would be useful not just for staff, but for commanders (since we are a leader-centric organization) and just about everyone else as all are touched or even governed by the influences of the "laws" of bureaucracy and the ill-fitted organizational types to which we are married.
The fields of organizational sciences and collective action bring quite a bit of research to this area and we do not touch it. Authors like Schein, Mintzburg, Arquilla, Barabasi, Moffat, James Wilson, Zegart, Senge and Rothstein all touch upon organizational structure, flow, culture, and "fitness" of organizational types and the environments that surround them and are contained within them. Some, like Arquilla and Rothstein, deal directly with military issues of organizational mis-fit.
We barely study anything from this field in the brief overview of the Army as a "learning organization." What little study we do engage in begins just as the leadership FM: with the presumption that the US Army is a learning organization. That presumption itself is indicative of the lack of understanding of what a "learning organization" actually is. Those of us who have studied the above issues will say that the Army is NOT a learning organization, though it does contain people and groups who do learn. The Army is the very difinition of the "traditional" model, as opposed to the "learning" model. The difference is transparent to those who have not studied it, and thus it makes for rather silly discussion in the halls of Ft Leavenworth, Carlisle Barracks, and the satellite campuses.