Adapting Professional Military Education to the Current Threat

The American military needs to incorporate adaptability-related skills into its education and training programs to better prepare personnel for the current threat. Understanding the current threat is a precursor to adapting to it. Lind and Wilson's generations of warfare model provides one such approach. It divides warfare into four generations, each with unique characteristics. Within this construct, the current adversary is predominately a Fourth Generation of Warfare (4GW) threat. Certain characteristics are common indicators of success in war. Boyd thought initiative, harmony, variety, and rapidity allowed one to adapt to and shape the battlefield, securing victory in war. These characteristics form the foundation of his observation-orientation-decision-action (OODA) loop, which illustrates how a warfighter can incapacitate an enemy by out-thinking him to victory. Orientation is the critical OODA step in an uncertain 4GW environment; adaptability is the essential skill to ensure a warfighter's OODA loop is properly oriented. Professional military education (PME) provides the perfect environment to learn adaptability-related skills, which consist of both cognitive and relational skills. This paper recommends incorporating them into the curriculum at the Air Force's Air Command and Staff College (ACSC), but other PME institutions can tailor these recommendations as desired. Incorporating adaptability-related training into ACSC and other Air Force programs will allow these skills to permeate the Air Force and make its cultural climate more adaptable, ultimately helping America win the Global War on Terror (GWOT).