Look, this gives me this is pretty provocative to actually hit the general I think you're familiar
with post war historiography in general has got a pretty bad name most of the time.
And that was, you know, particularly is that we have not only a scholar who spent his career studying this particular problem and make it better,
but also it's part of our little league we've heard about.
And essentially the whole notion of college, who can give us that sort of sense of connection, transatlantic,
not just because he has a background in flying helicopters to inhabit the service experience, but as before becoming searching.
And it was like saying that he writes or a series of different chiefs of I get the titles right.
I'll tell you it was about how leadership education in particularly if you think of the science of bombing
operation socioeconomic command and the report would be obviously developed The Wall Street Journal,
which I wrote, which is going to be factual,
it's very refreshing today because this 2011 published Cold War forces, Canadian aircraft procurement of food, fried chicken food,
and is now part of what he called the biography of Air Marshal Wilfred Curtis, chief of staff of the Royal Canadian Air Force in the post-war period.
Well, thank you very much, indeed. We'll be speaking to you very much.
Well, you can thank me after we're done. And that's what I usually say to people, if you like what you heard and please thank me.
But if you didn't, then throw soft objects and at least the sun are starting to break out, so I won't have to be quite as scintillating as I was.
I thought I might. It was if the rain continued.
Let me start by saying that while I am a public servant of the Government of Canada, I am also an academic for full academic freedom.
So what I will talk about are my views, which sometimes I think line up with public policy and other times probably don't.
But having dabbled in the field of military education for the last two decades,
I've gotten to the point where I'm at least willing to share my thoughts.
Now, truth has run off with the two men who operate the device.
But let's see what happens when we push that spacebar, right?
It's not one aeroplane picture just for the pilots in the room or the hardware check is a girl's room.
And yeah, what I'd rather be doing that than sitting trying to work in an education environment depends on the day and depends on the weather.
But all this to say that I came to education 21 years ago without any qualification, without any background in education.
And that is one of the I guess the damning themes of military education generally is that we
take practitioners who are very good at what they do and put them either in a classroom or in
charge of classrooms without giving them any of the the how to the why you need to stuff that
someone would get if they were doing an undergraduate or need a graduate degree in education.
So that's a bit of a a bit of a concern. I would also I see a couple of, I think, faces from last Tuesday night with Dr. Murray.
Are there those who were there when he was talking about the.
Okay. Just one, actually.
So Dr. Murray last week talked about how the US Army Commanding General Staff College, of course, would pretty much broken me.
I will tell you that there are things that work okay and things that could be improved and some things I think work as well as any.
Over the next few minutes and I'm going to try and go at the speed of light.
So there's time for discussion. Here's the bottom line upfront.
It's a highly complicated thing that we're going to talk about, and it's not just about generals, and I'll come to that in a few minutes,
but if I can steal something from Clausewitz to make a bit of a much of it,
you would think that education is simple because we all, at some point in our lives, experience lots of education.
But in fact, the simplest thing is always very difficult and complex when it comes to figuring out what needs to be done and doing it.
And I should actually tell a quick anecdote here about a more recent experience, again, with a German officer involved.
We had about 15 or 16 years ago sat at the staff college in Toronto and said, you know what?
We're not sure we're delivering the product that the military needs.
How do we validate? Use a bit of edge. You speak.
How do we validate what we're doing? But we don't have the customers getting the sorts of graduates that can satisfy the systemic needs.
We really didn't know. And our education expert said, well, we can validate training, but we've never tried to validate education.
So that's a problem, isn't it? Anyway, it happened to one of our students who was the chief of Quality Assurance of the French Academy in in Hamburg.
And he said, I bet I can come to talk to you about this.
The whole thing about the validation, about measuring whether you're doing things right or not.
And I thought, this is wonderful and the Germans can measure everything.
So we had a quiet summer and an afternoon.
A few of us showed up and he leaned on the podium more or less like this and said,
The first thing I must tell you is trying to measure the effect of education is a real [INAUDIBLE], right?
From there, we went on to have a rich discussion about the fact that it is very hard indeed to know if you're educating the
general and if you're educating the general properly to satisfy the needs of the service or in the case of Canada,
the services. Okay, so that's my real German story.
Here is the sort of larger remit that I think we're talking about here.
This comes from a 1969 study.
Anywhere, the things are underlined from here to the end and put emphasis added on several slides, but that is emphasis that.
So the chief, the chief of defence staff, someone who had seen combat, who had seen reorganisation of the Canadian military and everything in between,
said these words about a properly educated, educated who are effectively trained.
Now he's differentiating professional officer corps doomed at best to mediocrity and of worst to disaster.
Well, what in the name of heaven does that mean? And that's very qualitative.
How do I measure that? Goes back to the German problem. But that that is the remit.
That is what professional military education should be doing for us.
Okay. So the next, I hope about half hour.
There's lots of time for questions and we're trying to find some concepts as I understand them.
I'm going to look at the definition of the education requirement for the general and in the very larger sense of the word.
Look at the programs that we offer in Canada, which look awfully like the programs offered in UK and the US in Australia,
the ABC Eight Nations, you hear the five over the four eyes from time to time.
That's the group of sort of English speaking nations that were allies in the Second World War.
And then I'm going to make a few observations and conclusions and hopefully throw the
floor open to some lively discussion about what we might or might not be doing properly.
To educate my talking, as I just showed earlier about education, we're talking about training.
Where does learning come into it and does it matter? What about learning organisations and lifelong learning?
How do these sort of modern terms fit into to educate or do they should they?
The other half of the title is deals with General.
So what is the general and what competencies that she or he need?
How do they acquire these competencies? Is it in a classroom?
Is it by doing things? Is it a combination of all of all of those and more?
And should I be worried about using this generic term general?
Or should I be thinking more specifically about flag officers or air officers?
Are there differences between the three services? I'll use the British model, the three services.
And where does the officer corps come in? I'll come back to that in a minute, but it's certainly part of the deal.
And there's a larger thing called the professional army. So I can't talk about the general without including all of these things.
I can't talk about education without including all of those ideas. So how does it all fit together?
Well, we're an Oxford University is a concise Oxford dictionary to define education.
And it's a known development of character or mental powers.
Mental powers to educate, to give intellectual, moral and social instruction training to instruct for a particular purpose.
So it seems to be tending to the idea end of the spectrum, whereas training, actor, process of teaching or learning a skill or a discipline.
Well, there's the discipline of history.
There's a discipline, but a discipline or skill might also be something that we would associate with with technical trades.
Okay. To train the game. It's some sort of practice that we do, maybe physical, but maybe also intellectual.
Okay. And finally, to learn to gain knowledge of or skill in by studying.
So in the classroom, do we have students? Do we have pupils?
Do we have learners? Does it matter how we see the difference?
Is there a difference between them? Now something is not in the concise Oxford.
In fact, our learning outcomes, everybody more or less heard it.
Heard that term before. No, not at all. Maybe.
Okay. So learning outcomes is something that's relatively new, but it is effectively what is.
What product do you want? What capacities, competencies?
Abilities do you want?
The graduate of whatever it is you're doing to have a by the way, learning and learning or we're not found in the Concise Oxford.
There's why I'm not sure that they weren't there.
Now, under these more modern things learning organisations, this is defined by the name of Peter Singer,
the education guru in the United States in the last decade or so.
A learning organisation demonstrates constant reflection and improvement.
So trying to make things better in a military context, what we call that a lessons learned,
an after action, reflection sort of concept, perhaps mental models that help and taking action.
Gosh, that sounds like doctrine manuals that the military uses all the time.
That sounds like public policy statements and commitment rather than acquiescence to a shared vision.
Robin, I talked about this over lunch.
When the general comes into the room and says, I think we're going to do a left flanking, and everyone says, that makes sense to me.
Is that commitment to or is it acquiescence to?
We simply agree because we have to or do we agree because we're committed to that course of action or that philosophy and finally open dialogue?
And we can come back to that in questions, too, because that's not something that we would normally associate with the officer corps.
And I use the WI in the broadest context because I would disagree with what I just said, but like I say, we can come back to it.
Lifelong learning, largely a result of the rapid pace, the exponential development of technology over the last 30,
40 years, but not necessarily because knowledge and technology go hand in hand.
Are we committed to being lifelong learners or are we?
As Dr. Murray said last week, he knows generals in the U.S. Army who have not read a book since they went through staff college.
And I know an anecdote from Canada where a general was interviewed about what was he reading?
And he said, reading, I don't have time for reading. I'm too busy doing my job. Well, that's kind of scary, actually.
Okay. I'm going to stay on this education thing for a few more minutes.
In the 1950s, an American writer, Benjamin Bloom, developed a taxonomy of learning.
So we call it Bloom's taxonomy.
When I took this idea to higher command and staff directory staff about ten years ago, they said, this is something to do with horticulture.
I said, No, not so much. But that kind of confirmed for me that they weren't necessarily on the same page that I had
just found because I didn't know much about Bloom's taxonomy until about 15 years ago.
But he breaks bloom breaks learning down into three large domains.
Psychomotor doing things, you know, can I fly the aeroplanes?
Register the number of landings. I haven't seen the number of takeoffs, hopefully, yes.
The cognitive. Do I understand the process of flying and effective?
Am I going to use that aeroplane, that war machine in the right way?
I'm relating this to the military profession, but it can be related to any profession, to any undertaking.
I'm going to use my safe cracking skills to work with the police here against the police.
And so values and morals come into being able to do things and thinking about how I do or why I do things.
Also, talk quickly about spouse learning. It's not associated with bloom, but for those who learn by seeing things,
you are the visual learners who are appreciating these slides for those who learn by listening.
Those are the. Early learners and you're hopefully getting something out of my babbling.
And for the kinaesthetic learners in a sort of an ideal environment, hopefully by question and answer by toying with some of the things I've said.
And John, you'll learn that way. Well, we all know the people who get this get something from IKEA, and they're going to put it together immediately.
The instruction sheet, those are the kinaesthetic learners, the hands on people.
Back to balloons for a second. So you can see it's not just a blob of knowing about stuff or knowing about values.
If you look at that, look sorry does get backwards. Okay, let's go to values for a second.
We receive values. Okay. We we listen to sit and listen to somebody talking about the different sort of ethical models.
Great. Fine. I can regurgitate that. But do I really believe it? Maybe not if I get right into it.
If I'm a philosopher, or perhaps if I'm a practitioner of a certain philosophy, then I'm going to act based on my values.
And so that's the range here. Psychomotor reflex movements of the baby or part of my knee.
Sometimes if it's working right through being able to do skilled movement of movement.
Sorry feel I can actually land the aeroplane without scaring most people in it to non discursive communication.
This is the Olympic ice dancer who was say, how can anyone possibly do that?
Well, perhaps they don't even know,
but they have been able through practice and and certain physical abilities to do something magical with with their body.
I want to focus on the cognitive movement to know something is not necessarily the same as the ability to synthesise new ideas.
And we'll talk about that a bit more using not so much this slide as this slide.
When I apologise for the heavy water off of the Internet, all the words you write, but you can see some of the words.
So at the bottom end, can I remember things? Can I regurgitate facts?
Okay, fine. What does that give you? It gives me some knowledge.
Do I understand the facts that I'm regurgitating? That's important too.
And can I apply things really without challenging what they work, the way they work, or why ideas or why certain knowledge does go together?
That's all great stuff, but that is what are called these are what are called lower order competencies.
It's really getting up into being analogue, being able to analyse things and say,
Know this isn't working and I wonder why you taking it a part of me then to evaluate whole systems?
Well, paradigms would say, well, you know, this might have worked in 1842, but it's not working so much today in 2014.
Why might that be? And then create say, okay, that's all the information I have from those previous cases.
I am slightly different case. How can I come up with a solution that works today?
So I'm creating something that's new and appropriate for my circumstances.
So that's really where I would see and most of us, I hope, would see the general officer operating.
Breaking it down into something simpler for Germans and others.
And I say that with great affection because the Marines I know are thinking men and women.
So they have anecdotally been attributed with this notion of these notions,
educational items and reasons that they say in response to an unpredicted set of circumstances.
Whereas training produces a standardised response to predicted circumstances.
I for you back in simple pilot mode, when I go out and practice emergencies and somebody closes the problem on me.
I know what to do because I practised it a thousand times. However,
when someone says deploying the squadron to assemble more than I'm really going to
sit and think about it because that's not something that I can practice how to do.
Is there a clear distinction between training and education? I would argue not.
Some things that look very simple, in fact, take a whole lot of thinking.
Some things that look fairly complicated.
Maybe I can put into a bit of a process that helps me move along quickly until I get to the parts where things mark a little bit.
Professional education. Is there any difference between professional education and education generally?
I don't really think there is so much as to say that it's nothing more than learning for military is where brackets for any profession.
Think about the medical profession, the engineering profession.
Do these professions need some sort of competencies over which they have a range of control?
So I don't think that's unique to the military. Is it unique to the individual or is it pan professional?
Do I need a brand new doctor who can do certain things and more experienced specialist who can and can collaborate with that new
doctor and maybe somebody who's running the hospital or the NHS Trust who understands how both of those other sets are working.
Is it turn your education? I think it's both of those and more lifelong learning.
Yes, absolutely. Medical practice changes circumstances in a real world change.
Do you ever think there would be an Arab Spring? Imagine a general officer who's sitting here thinking they're going to turn in
Oxford and just this week I'm going to explode my brain by going to Holy Summer,
as mentioned. That's part of lifelong learning.
Hopefully that lifelong learning is not happening just in one general's mind or one doctor's line, but across the entire organisation.
If it's not, then you've got a problem because one or two champions of a new idea probably won't take that idea through any sort of implementation.
Two professions have some sort of a system where I take somebody who goes through a life
sciences program and I put them in a medical school and I give them a specialist certification.
Ultimately, they may be the head of a research institution in a university, or, as I said, the head of an NHS trust.
Hopefully, yes. And hopefully there is some sort of system. Does it have to be very disciplined or very defined,
or can it be just something where the profession understands that there are phases and stages of development?
Okay, so let's park education for a minute and look at the profession of arms who say all of this is about generals.
Well, I want to look at the profession and drill down into the general and then expand it back out to the profession.
So if we accept that a profession provides a service to appear society good so far,
and the military profession provides service to the state slash society, if you will, it is the last resort of the state of the nation state.
Generally speaking, if the military fails, it's largely because diplomacy has failed.
Maybe the economy has failed. There is no recourse but a military one.
And if it fails, then arguably the state is in a bad way.
Okay, so far. But it's generals who lead the profession.
So if the generals have lost their way, then arguably the profession is now at some risk.
And for Richard Gabriel, the other thing that's unique and we can talk about police services,
we can talk about fire services, but the military can send people to members of the profession to their deaths.
The the ethos and ethic of the police services in Canada is protect yourself, protect your body, then protect the public.
And they look at that and scratch my head and say, that's not how I think it should be.
But that, in fact is the professional ethic of the police services in Canada.
And I suppose if you're a constable up there all by yourself and you're lying in the ditch,
shot or dead, then you're not of much value to protecting anyone else.
So there perhaps is a good reason for that. But the military tends to put the well-being of the state before the well-being of the individual.
Okay. Finally, generalship or General is up there,
and this is a true extract from my work and I have the drone war expert in the back to tell me if I've taken out of context.
But hopefully you will do that. But feel free to.
So it's all about intellect. It's all about being sensitive, indiscriminately, using judgement, skills, intelligence.
So Clausewitz has said this is a really nasty business we're involved in, but if you're going to get it right,
if you're going to deal with the fog, you've got to have a mind and intellect.
You've got to be able to sort through the problems. What's skewed ahead here to a British model?
We've all had that other place about 2 hours as the crow flies.
Is that roughly you don't know? Well, as the helicopter flies, probably about an hour from here, just east or north of east, the 1939,
he says in his Generalship series, he says a general and I'm paraphrasing here, generals have to manage.
And I thought when I read this the first night, manage what happened to lead or command, which says, no,
you have to provide the general at that point in the professional continuum has to be able to provide for the needs of the army.
And then he goes on to say, and the general must be able to work with politicians.
And if we think of the experience of the Great War and the interwar period with lots of cuts to defence and our build-up towards the Second World War,
being able to work with politicians is fundamentally important for the health of the institution.
He looks at a couple of human more or would say human personal traits be strict but not stern.
And so don't be a complete, you know what, freedom, nasty sort of piece of work and have strength of character.
So you have to know what you're about.
You have to have personal courage, as I think what he's saying, you have to be able to say yes or no, mean it without being personal or vindictive.
So what about General as a manager? Is it a manager in the field?
What level of war in today's parlance is it the tactical level brigade?
And below is at the operational level level Afghanistan writ large,
or is it the strategic level sitting in Germany and trying to figure out where the army
or the Air Force or the Navy or the or the three services of the whole are going next.
What level of manager do we want? And the institutional manager, in other words.
And there is an operational corporate divide that I'm going to come back to in a few minutes.
Where do the generals come from, from the military profession as a whole?
Is it a closed system nationally? Generally it is, although we exchange officers from time to time at various points in their career.
By and large, you cannot walk out on the street today, look for somebody with a big brain or a lots of brawn and say,
you know, make it to the general if you put on a uniform, let's go because we're short of you and you really do the fine art.
No, we grow that individual from the point of being a very junior officer to the
point where they're deemed to have the professional competencies and experience.
And I'll come back to the experience part in a bit so that they can fulfil the functions
of a general officer to be a manager of the profession and of the institution.
And here are those here. Here are the three large chunks of activity that that I'm going to talk about now and again a little bit later,
a Stewart pardon me the fox to be here but leaders and stewards of the profession.
So this is the effect of domain. We're having a big deal in Canada right now of sexual assault.
And so the Chief of Defence Staff has come up with a statement saying this will not be tolerated,
it's already happened in other countries, Australia already and to some degree in the States,
I think so as a steward of the profession, as the one person,
the pinnacle of protection who must espouse and demonstrate that he espouses the values of the profession.
Is that the start? So that's the professional end of the paradigm, the strategic end of the paradigm.
That's really the management at the national level, trying to deal with the government,
with the public and with private organisations to make the institution as effective as it can be.
And then finally, the easy part, if you want to call it the easy part operations, including warfighting.
All right. So we're going to dive into the Canadian experience for a bit.
But as I said, having spoken to people at Defence Academy here and spoken to Australians, the Americans,
the Canadian national experience over the last 50 years is really not that much different,
I think, than what other nations have have done over time or the challenges that they've confronted over time.
So in 1969, just by way of background, the three Canadian services had been smashed together by Act of Parliament,
the corporal turned politician, not necessarily a sinister man,
and had decided that that from his experience in the Air Force and then the Army in the Second World War,
where he'd been seen off because the Air Force didn't need any more people.
So he had to do basic training again, if not more, in a different coloured uniform.
He said that wasn't very practical and when he became a minister in the mid 1960s he said,
I think we're going to have one service and so now we've got one service.
How are we going to develop officers for the one service? This is the point in time when lieutenant commanders were majors, but only briefly.
Right. So Rolly and his team, all of them combat veterans.
This is where I had my little baguette. I think it's okay. We developed this this model of officer qualities.
And they said and it's in the original document that soldierly values, ethos and ethics were the most important thing regardless of rank.
The most important in command ability was the next most important.
And these were invariable across the career. So you might be commanding yourself in the cockpit of a fighter,
a platoon of infantry or a boarding party or your ship's division, or perhaps a supply section in a logistics depot.
But you were commander. So whether it was that or whether you were commanding the entire Canadian Forces, it didn't really matter.
It was fundamentally important and fundamentally important to do it within some
sort of a military ethos or an ethics model that was good in terms of society.
Everything else was variable. So I wanted a junior officer who was exceptionally skilled in whatever that occupation might be flying now,
moving across the ground, sneak and peek or doing something else.
By the time that officer reached a position of Chief of Defence Staff, oh my goodness, no head in the trenches stuff was relatively unimportant.
I wanted a mid-career officer to have service competence.
So here I know how to fight my organisation, my subsub organisation, my little group of ten or 15 people here.
I know starting at that point how to fight the unit, my ship, my squadron, my battalion.
And by this point, I'm really capable at the formation level.
So a brigade or flotilla or a fleet, maybe a couple of airways, that too becomes relatively less important.
If I reached the strategic level, relatively less important.
You're not going to forget about it.
You're going to compare notes and say, Well, what's the difference between Brigade and the Navy when you're having chats with general officers?
Nice, but relatively less important. The third thing is that's about the time you reach mid rank relative.
Moderate is military expertise. How do I understand how all of the services fit together and provide service to the state?
And it becomes absolutely important when you reach the top of the food chain.
Now, three other things that are less related to the doing of the business in the last.
Want your lieutenant to be relatively capable of kind truth from knowing why.
So you want somebody, in fact in the role among all officers, even before you would possess a rudimentary degree or be put in contact with troops.
So you want somebody who has that big range of competent intellectual competency,
and by the time that person reaches Chief of Defence Staff, you would like them to be operating.
And here with the doctoral view of the world. You want somebody who can deal.
He calls it executive ability. But really the larger definition of someone who can deal with big, messy issues and big mess issues,
but problems that seem to have no solution officers have to solve problems that have no solution.
So relatively important for the junior officer.
Again, fundamentally important are the upper echelons and finally, military executive ability to be able to focus in on problems, huge,
huge systemic problems, national problems that have a military aspect to them and provide advice to government and other organisations.
So that's really a model. Now I think it's close to brilliant, I'm sure many years ago to.
For General Morrison from Australia, the chief of army right now.
We said, wow, this is worth the price of my ticket from Australia just to see this one slide.
So I feel kind of good about it. But I attribute it to people who have been through war, who had lived through the amalgamation of three services,
who had had to deal both on the battlefield and in the boardroom with problems that defied solution.
Okay, I'm going to skip over that.
That certainly says that the problems facing Canada and in fact, Natal in 1969 are not that much different than they are today.
So I think role model is still applicable. His guiding precepts for education, I think are more important.
Remain considers the scientific technological. You can read it as well as I can remain in contact with the world.
Don't try and study things in a vacuum.
Provide the right material at the right time for the orderly development of qualities demanded of the officers succeeding ranks.
So a a well-structured series of professional learning activities.
Who's going to build one officer factory? That's one of one of his his study members called it the Canadian Defence Education Centre.
If you scratch that out and wrote in Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, you'd have roughly the same sort of construct.
Eight One Cadet College or officer cadets would get an undergraduate degree in either science, engineering or humanities,
and then a K Defence College, which had a staff school providing basic understanding of the processes of running an organisation.
An army staff course really was an army guy, so he said, Well,
we have to have an army staff first because we always have had an Army special master where we kind of agreed a joint command and staff college.
So what JCS, JCA, JSC is he is now Canada had in the late 1960s in philosophical construct an advanced military studies course,
which looks awfully like what Commodore Mason has just come through not too many months ago.
And finally, a national security course, which was the Penn National Defence College.
When I say Penn National, about a third of the students were Canadian military, a third were Canadian civilians,
some public servants, some private sector, and a third were foreign, military or civilian.
So it was all about national security. It wasn't about defence.
Um, another quick one here. The courses must be sufficiently demanding to help build intellectual ability.
Holy Crown. I was gonna say Holy crap, but it would be more gentle.
Intellectual ability and executive ability. So this was all about building intellectual capacity.
Not to forget the military virtues, ethos and ethics, but to focus on brainpower and must include a postgraduate program.
This is being said in 1969 amongst a group of officers, most of whom do not have an undergraduate degree,
but recognise the value of learning of education and are calling for a post graduate program.
Let's talk about staff colleges for a couple minutes because staff colleges feed into the general officer population.
So when my favourite picture of the RCAF staff college in 1943, the first course,
it's got an army officer, so it's already joint and it's got a large dog.
So already has some, some class. There's their philosophy in 1943.
Not only did the officers learn how to do staff work, but they also have well-qualified speakers who talk about the broader context.
They liberalised this staff learning so that the graduates can put what they have to do on a day to day basis in a broader context.
They push the intellectual envelope out and this is what they say.
In fact, only by such a means can students be given a broader, more authoritative outlook.
So I'm not just sending aircraft to against Germany. I'm not just training thousands and thousands of people.
There's a broader global perspective that I have to think about that continued in 1945,
when the course is first expanded to six months, and then by 1959, it was a year long.
And what I would draw your attention to is get his thoughts down clearly on paper.
So this was about being able to wrestle the problem down to its constituent elements,
build some sort of solution, and explain that solution clearly on paper for someone reading it.
It was the days before PowerPoint, obviously by 1959.
Much the same argument is there with the utilitarian part of being able be making this something useful to the profession.
By 1959, there's also something that I think I didn't want to let the cat out of the bag at lunch.
But looky here, I say does not expound any easily, universally applicable doctrines.
The RCAF Staff College in 1959, I would argue, had recognised the fact that it was not about preparing people to do anything specific,
but giving them the intellectual skillset to do any next job.
Sound stage decisions in any situation. The Army.
Quite that far along, but able to deal with a range of problems.
And I would say here, when I went looking for evidence of what the Navy was doing,
any Navy to this point, they were sending some officers to Greenwich.
But articles written about naval professional development tended to focus back on the how to fight the ship,
which is vitally important, but wasn't at the same level as this, you know, an institutional bund fighting at this time.
The Navy was doing perfectly well.
So I suspect they reckon that their professional development system prior to integration of the services was good enough.
Okay. What was Canada doing at this time? In fact, what was most of Natal doing?
There was a Cold War on, so we were arming ourselves and sitting there ready to go and we were doing peacekeeping.
This was sort of the quintessential Canadian peacekeeping picture from Cyprus, where we spent 50 odd rotations of six months each.
So things were pretty stable. And then staying with the Canadian paradigm, things got really rocky.
Not only was Gulf War One taking place in 1990 where we sent some folks, but we also had an indigenous population uprising in one part of the country,
and it was the army, the federal service, that was called out to deal with a provincial problem.
Chief of Defence Staff at the time said We cannot fail. Which goes back to an earlier thought I had that kind of went away fairly.
Fairly okay. Uh, nobody killed, not much burned or destroyed,
but it certainly shocked everybody that we might have to call out the army in
Canada for an armed insurrection because that is an AK 47 on the bad guys back.
And they had killed a police officer early in the standoff, but the other things were worse and started a couple of years later.
There we were in Canada going off to another peacekeeping operation, this time in Somalia and old.
Within a couple of months, we had detained, tortured and killed a Somali teenager.
And we have the evidence there. And it's one of the two perpetrators.
Here is the other one. The first one tried to hang himself. The other one ends up on the cover of a national magazine.
And it leads to a provincial I'm sorry, in federal a Crown Commission, the title of which of the report of which was Dishonoured Legacy.
And it found huge problems with what the military was doing, not just after this is done.
In fact, you know, got many years off.
Virtually the same time we sent a Canadian commander to a peacekeeping operation was supposed to be in in Rwanda, and he's there.
And so Canada is not targeted, but Canada feels responsible for the genocide that takes place in Rwanda.
These are not things that a professional military should be allowed to happen at the individual level or the operational level.
And, oh, by the way, at the strategic level,
because two chief of Defence Staff ended up looking for work because they handled the situation very badly indeed.
One is was let go almost immediately and the other one about a year later, while he's trying to manage the process, failed miserably.
So we've had problems at the tactical, the operational and the strategic level within the profession,
and it leads to a decade of darkness with some pretty bitter pills for the military to swallow.
In fact, the minister, having reported to the Prime Minister what he's going to do,
sets up a monitoring committee, civilian oversight of the profession.
And we are told that we will do certain things, particularly in regard to professional development, education and leadership.
Not great. Well, Dallaire, who's recovered sufficiently and has terrible PTSD and tried to kill himself several times,
was recovered sufficiently that he is going to go off now and run a study on
rebuilding the officer corps and produces a document called Officer Ship 2020,
which looks awfully like the sorts of things that really in his crowd had discovered in the early sixties.
So not much had changed. But we're talking now about transparent resource management.
We're talking a little bit about here about the technical sophistication.
These are themes that Rollie has talked about, but they're brought up again.
No. Is this unique to Canada?
I think not, because at roughly the same time, here's a memo document that talks about more than just operations, higher management of resources.
So, again, I think there's evidence that this is a pan western nation, large western nation.
Circumstance and also develop a little bit later a framework that's much simpler of enrolees, but does again look at expertise, cognitive capacities,
intellectual capacities, social capacities,
being able to deal with people that aren't necessarily they don't look exactly the same as you and think the same as you.
The ability to see change in your organisation, transformation potentially and professional ideology.
So five important sets of competencies that all officers have to have, although they can vary with rank and responsibility.
So the bottom bullet here, I think is the is the critical one, critical thinking, embracing and managing change,
embracing, accepting, not acquiescing and participating in a learning organisation.
So this is in our concept document for the year 2020 and now finally in a professional value system,
how are we going to deliver that learning to the rank and file?
I can do some of that through formal courses, but actually I want to break out into some other ways of doing training, more training as necessary,
giving people the lower order information that they might need, education,
hopefully to expand or explode their brain box experience like from experience comes, I think,
wisdom, so that you've run into those big situations and you have seen that they can be dealt with and, you know, or have enough wisdom to say,
I can't fix this today, maybe I ought to fix it tomorrow, but I know that I can with my colleagues,
not necessarily on uniform fix it and finally solve their own.
Do I go off and deploy for a CCW fellowship?
Do I? Rather than playing golf on the weekends, do I get a master's or a doctorate?
So those are the sorts of things we're looking at.
Okay, here is a fairly standard and it's more or less an old version of a Canadian professional development system.
And I'm just going to key in on the senior officer stuff here.
But it's as you can see, it starts with junior officers and gives them what they need to be effective in their rank.
At this point, though, we break into the what's now called the Joint Command and Staff Program Staff College,
either in residence or by distance learning, and then at the higher level, a two week workshop on international relations,
the one year national security program, the PAN government thing, that role you talked about.
And finally, something for the baby general and the executive leaders program.
We'll talk about those for a wee bit now. I'm going to go as fast as ever.
I can all happens here where the Air Force started its college.
And here are the programs anyway. And this picture, just so you can see what it looks like.
Not a big place smaller than the Defence Academy, I would wager, but it satisfies the needs.
Particularly we have a distance learning operation going on in operating environments we have decided can be complex, ambiguous.
They're going from evolutionary to revolutionary.
Officers need general specific knowledge to deal with some of the things, some of the process, but they need the ability to deal with change.
What do I say that? Well, we take that guy and put him in that job.
And almost the first thing he says to the staff and the students and most at the time
is that we have to be capable of avoiding the trap of falling into the default,
that that's the plan and I have to stick with it. He said it better than I just tried to paraphrase it, knowing how to adapt.
And so when this gentleman showed up, he turned the curriculum on its head.
He said, I do not want the usual stuff that we get since staff college.
I want the students to be mentally challenged.
All know that sounds bad too. I want them to be intellectually challenged all the way through.
So what kind of pedagogy, what kind of learning philosophy should we apply them?
Something like this lower end to Bloom's. No, we said [INAUDIBLE] no.
We want something more active, intellectually active, that higher order stuff.
How do you get that research, debate, reflection?
Lots of our time. What? Twice while I was there that I had the hand on the throttle, I said,
we're going to cut 10% out of the curriculum content and we don't have we do that.
I said we're going to do it because there was no time for people to go away, think about what they had heard or read.
And it's hard to do because it appears to be free time, but it's not.
It's actually highly productive. So all have to say, if we do those things, we do them well.
We've created a graduate learning environment, so there's all that stuff over in the first box.
We want to practice some of the complex world, particularly those things that are time sensitive military activities.
So we're going to run exercises and simulations.
We would not be doing our job properly. We could not validate ourselves as being, I think, fully effective.
And I use we in the largest. The word if we didn't try to apply some of this knowledge and those processes that we're not very knowledgeable in,
in some sort of a volatile if it's fairly safe within the classroom, a volatile scenario, at least we ought to expose herself to real people.
And I'll come back to that in a second. Some of those real people are are the academic, certainly professionals, practitioners.
Is there a difference between a professional practitioner? Probably not. And high impact speakers.
We started for the general officer course to bring in CEOs, ministers of the crown heads of large non-government organisations.
Why? Because those are the sorts of people we're hoping will share their wisdom with our students.
These are the sorts of learning activities. So lectures, discussions, all of the stuff.
Which. Which staff colleges are jammed with might work well for staff colleges.
But we were talking about, again,
an exercise simulation symposia where we're bringing in speakers who may approach the same topic from different directions, God forbid.
Case studies where we're going to throw a big problem at students and say, okay, what would you do?
And now let's see what was done by those who lived through the circumstances seminar discussions.
And we all know that seminar discussions can go any which way.
And finally causing the student to do a little bit of thinking and research on their own, getting him to write something.
Free criticism, Fuller said in 1922 of each other's ideas.
That's what we were intending to have.
Now, back to this model for a second. What is it we were going to teach? What we were going to teach,
only 30 or 40% of the Canadian general officer cohort is actually involved in operations either directly or indirectly, 60 to 70%.
And of course, the numbers are going to vary over different services or at that strategic at that corporate point.
And in the organisation where they're having to deal with public service both within defence and across government, with NGOs,
with public organisations, with politicians, with academics, with people who don't look, smell and walk to walk the same way.
People in this venue, how do we prepare them?
You know, by the way, the 100% who have to be able to deal with the ethos and ethics of the organisation.
So what does our curriculum look like then when the National Security Programme.
Oops, sorry, it stop here for a second.
If we don't prepare the generals, the would be generals that we're talking about of four or five sixes only with the four ringers.
If we don't prepare them to work across government,
then we're going to they're going to be attacked by all the other departments who
are looking at Defence as nothing more than a cash cow for other public programs.
And in the absence of good relationships between executives in or out of uniform,
we're going to end up finding ourselves driven by things other than what we might want.
Okay, so what is it then? The National Security Program.
We thought people should know. We reckoned that there were three large leaves.
The first one had to deal with strategic security issues, global strategic environment,
which is going to change where we're going to give people a snapshot of what's up there in the particular year,
but try to give them the tools to deal with understanding and assessing and living within that context.
Largely what's happening in other government departments.
Is it important to know that education is a very it's a it's a resource rich activity, that health care is resource rich?
We've had Medicare in Canada for longer than I've been alive.
It's not something that's going to go away. Defence be damned.
So you have to understand that and accept that. General strategic leadership.
How do you how do you read an organisation? I got a rough idea how to lead my crew on an aircraft.
They don't make the flight commander squadron to work out on that badly for how do I not lead the Air Force or how do they need the
Canadian Forces who are two thirds of the people don't wear the same pilot uniform with you and they see me as a bit of a flake.
But I got to do it because that's my job. Resource management.
How do I buy F-35s? Do I want to buy cars? How do I explain to government and to the public when I want to buy a 35 or anything else for that matter?
And finally, security operations. So not to marginalise it, but if I can't get the organisation to run properly,
then I probably am not going to have the wherewithal to do security operations properly.
I talked about some of the exercises and exercises and scenarios are about getting the right people there to challenge the students.
This is not something that can be done in the schoolhouse, we reckon. So if we're going to have students prepare a memo to Cabinet,
then we're going to find a retired cabinet minister who's going to chew that memo apart and say, I don't understand this.
What is it that you really want me to do with this? And we had one minister who said, I'm having trouble.
So you want you've got frigates and you want to buy destroyers.
But are they both not sort of three ships at the Navy operates that are about 4000 tons each.
And the officer said, yeah, okay. So like I'm not understanding the problem.
Well, that too someone in uniform is going to feel ludicrous, but it is the reality of government.
So we want those sorts of people to to listen, to, to contribute and if necessary, to contribute very critically towards what it is needs to be done.
Keystones here are just just that.
For example, here are the three case studies from the Kennedy School of Governance that we used on the first national security program.
So where's the war fighting? Well, it's a very sort of historical war fighting scenario.
But the other two relate to public policy. That's my do that.
If you're going after Hurricane Katrina, we look at how the homeland was a homeland security above your what was your organisation?
Sorry, or FEMA?
Yeah, FEMA. How? FEMA failed miserably.
We looked at the the tension between, uh, between Margaret Thatcher, the Army and the government and police of Northern Ireland.
Um, worked out over a long period of time during the Troubles.
No easy solution to any of that. And solution has changed over time.
And that's what we wanted our students to appreciate the learning environment.
Who are these people that we have here? Clearly, academics are appropriate, permitted sometimes.
Other times we might want project practitioners.
And so this gentleman here, he was the commander of the Air Force and then the Vice Chief of Defence Staff,
the guy responsible for procurement and policies.
He's one of our facilitators because he can bring his experience to the students and this is actually
are getting city in China several years ago so that's a translator an F a military student over there.
But it's not about simply putting a directing staff in front of students,
somebody who has been given a set of pink solution sets and is told to get on with it.
It's about trying to find the right people for the right learning outcomes and getting them with the students who are the learners.
As I said, probably about a third Canadian military, a third public servant or public, uh, member of the public.
Corporate executives, absolutely. And we want them to understand us as much as we want to understand them.
And more importantly, as I said, we do not want a classroom filled with military practitioners who are going to
either explicitly or implicitly understand each other without much problem.
We want people that are to challenge what the military mind thinks is the right way to do something.
Curriculum, philosophy. You can read all that or just the bottom line here.
Building institutional capacity. One graduate, if you will, at a time.
So if the generals are well educated, not just on the national security program, but all through their staff college experience,
then hopefully we have people who can deal with transformation, not transaction,
build informal networks, get out there and represent the profession as it needs to be.
You know, a couple of next steps, and I think we're almost at the end here.
So the national security program, what it is,
is a program which like a CFD that produces a cohort for which new general and white officers and air officers rules with that point will be selected.
But what happens when they get knocked on the head in the Army and the general officers, they come back for a one week course.
That does not look at all like the American capstone program that goes for several weeks.
They get one week to learn how to operate in strategic order because several of our peers
have avoided going to the national headquarters until we all of a sudden become generals.
And then it's too late. It's much too late.
So two or three years ago, Chief of Defence Staff ago, uh, the incumbent and the fellow who replaced him said,
you know, we need something to fill in the gaps in professional.
We need to send people to Fiji here for war, or if we had one, we have one, one, I think graduate of the World Fellowship.
These are the sort of broadening experiences that we we absolutely have to target to fill in the gaps.
Individualised plans. Mentoring. Well, mentoring actually is a failed initiative at this point.
We can't figure out who's going to provide a little bit of this sort of advice to our general officers.
Why? Well, because they're general, you know. Right. Some of them think they do.
Others recognise that there's more out there than what their past experience will prepare them for.
So this is this is still a work in progress.
And there's a steady team working through going through it right now,
figuring out how to do it and then hopefully getting it approved at the highest levels.
Concluding Thoughts. I hope I heard the long and complex process is one that I have,
which I was totally ignorant of when I walked through the door of the staff college 21 years ago.
And unfortunately and with this, I would agree with Dr. Murray last week,
we have a bunch of practitioners who are all of a sudden cast in the role of educators and don't have any of the theoretical background,
don't understand the institutional world what they're going to do the job well, because that is the military mindset.
Get in there, figure it out quickly and do it as best you can.
And sometimes that just doesn't work because it is complex and it is all about a national capacity that we cannot deal with.
And so from time to time, we have to debate things like what did we learn and when do we learn?
Because we learn something as a captain that we need to learn in the game as a control, arguably the context for the Colonel.
My role is moral is largely different. So the title of the activity might be the same, but the actual activity is different.
We have to get the right teachers in the classroom. There I was in the very first day with my students bringing a three hour seminar on formal logic.
The only thing I knew about formal logic was that I had not understood it in the second year years and the second time I had to run that seminar.
A year later, I walked around the room, said, You know, I think reinforce what we want in my students.
Then I said, Here you go, you have 3 hours, deal with it, and I still don't understand it.
But the end of that go round. So we have to get the right teachers.
So arguably a retired chief or chief of defence staff would make an excellent practitioner teacher,
but not necessarily the right academic teacher, the right learners.
We want people who are open to this sort of thing and who will recognise that it's part of their professional duty,
their responsibility to internalise the knowledge that we're going to share with them and the values and the intellectual openness.
And do that. We can probably create a learning orientation now.
Now is it? So I will stop there. I have for myself quite often more questions than I have answers.
It's I don't know if if my questions are related purely to military education or if they are related to all professional education.
And so the thrust of my research while I'm here is to try and understand the long history of military education.
But I would certainly like to test that again once I figured out what it looks like.
Test that against what happens in other professions, too,
because I think it's it's important for us as a society to know that our professions are capable as they possibly can be.