War College Needs More Diplomats

ou'll be a curiosity up here," said the voice on the other end of the line. It was 1995, and my Foreign Service predecessor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC) in Newport, R.I., was calling me in Brazil to discuss arrangements for my upcoming faculty assignment. I was about to join the Navy's program, part of the ambitious Joint Professional Military Education effort, to help phase operational officers into broader command and staff responsibilities. Former pilots, Marine ground unit commanders or ship "drivers" emerge from the 10-month course prepared to serve on joint, sometimes multinational, staffs or with civilian agencies.

After two years in Newport, I conclude that my colleague was right. Teaching or studying at one of our service colleges far outside Washington has a particular flavor. There is no better place to absorb the mind-set, doctrine and mores that define our military services. But there are few places where information on the State Department is more sparse or more needed.

Picturesquely situated on the shore of Narragansett Bay, the NWC is immensely proud of being the nation's first war college, fostering the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan and offering a master's degree in national security and strategic studies. A tradition of academic rigor gives the NWC a relatively Spartan air. Students are graded in a demanding set of academic courses with virtually no extracurricular activity or official travel. The roughly 500 American students and 75 international students are in mid-career and range in age from the mid-30s to early 40s. Most are lieutenant commanders and commanders or equivalent. The NWC maintains a 60-to-40 ratio between Navy students and those from the other services and civilian agencies (including four from the State Department) and strives for a broad-based military-civilian faculty.

For military students in Newport, Vietnam and much of the Cold War are only childhood memories. In contrast to their parents or older siblings, these officers often share their generation's skepticism about U.S. purpose and involvement abroad. They are politically conservative and often sympathize with the non-interventionist doctrines associated with former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The students see the U.S. government as too prone to use military rather than diplomatic means in foreign affairs. Many see peacekeeping, humanitarian, drug-interdiction and other "operations other than war" such as Haiti, Somalia or Bosnia, as dangerous distractions from conventional missions. One detects an attitude of wry resentment toward a White House and State Department that, in the students' view, appear all too ready to fritter away U.S. military strength on peripheral foreign adventures.

Conflict vs. Diplomacy

If they are nevertheless obliged to undertake such missions, military officers in Newport at least tend to favor the use of maximum force to dominate the situation and to permit a quick exit. This is understandable, given their background and training-not to mention the U.S. public's general aversion to casualties. The trouble is that the reliance on only military criteria in such circumstances may frustrate achievement of the political goals, which stimulated intervention in the first place.

The United States' success in dealing with future non-war challenges depends on facing up to the skepticism of this upcoming generation of military officers. At a minimum, these situations will require greater-than-ever cooperation between civilian and military operators. By dint of their resources and their strategic focus, the war colleges are ideal laboratories to develop this understanding and to practice how military, civil affairs and diplomatic means can be best combined to deal with future, perhaps even more complex, Somalias and Rwandas. However, the State Department will probably have to be more engaged at the colleges.

NWC students come to Newport eager to learn about foreign policy processes, including the role of the State Department, that are key to their future effectiveness. They tackle with enthusiasm broad questions of national interest and grand strategy, reaching back to Thucydides and Clausewitz, as well as subjects such as decision-making dynamics and strategies to deal with global conflict in the 21st century. At the same time, the students perceive, correctly I think, that few Foreign Service officers and other civilian foreign affairs operators are prepared to discuss their military functions and culture. They note the lack of military experience among younger civilian officers. "What's really needed in the post-Cold War world," one student wrote in a paper on organizing for non-war operations, "is a new doctrine of military-civilian 'jointness.' "

Closing the Ranks

There are strong reasons for the State Department to be more involved with the current generation of military officers. The focus should be not only on those at flag rank in Washington, but also on officers from majors to colonels, now rising through the service colleges. Those are the officers who will serve on senior staffs and upon whom the Foreign Service increasingly will depend in the civil wars, refugee crises and human rights emergencies that seem inevitable in coming years. There is real value in helping our military colleagues appreciate State's geopolitical focus as well as better understand when and how to deal with State Department officers at home and abroad. By the same token, Foreign Service officers would become immeasurably more effective in working with the U.S. military, particularly in the field, if they could absorb its emphasis on strategic uses of force and logistical planning, as well as show awareness of its corporative attitudes, mores and constraints.

The State Department should review its involvement with military educational institutions such as the Naval War College. There are opportunities at these major centers of strategic planning, exemplary of the kind of physical and programmatic resources we will need in coming years. Perhaps the current level of State's student and faculty details to the war colleges-36 and 13 respectively-should be expanded. Senior officers could lead regular town meetings with war college students and staff-the same approach used with other important opinion-makers. The Foreign Service Institute could exchange speakers and short courses with the colleges. Also, State Department faculty could be plugged into the loop at strategic planning conferences, to keep military planners current on major security issues and to keep State thinking about those issues.

These and other initiatives could improve the colleges' access to State's point of view. At the same time, State officers would get the opportunity to reflect on uses of force and diplomacy, ranging from historical examples, such as Bismarck, Roosevelt and Mao, to lessons of the Gulf War and the so-called "revolution in military affairs." The focus is on reinventing American diplomacy and new roles for our military, beyond conventional wars. So, a closer approximation of the State Department's outreach and training program with that of the Pentagon's Joint Professional Military Education program seems worth a try.

Mark Lore retired last year as a career Senior Foreign Service officer. His most recent positions were deputy chief of mission in Brazil and professor of strategy at the Naval War College.