Publishing Disclaimer: In all of its publications and products, Military Review presents professional information. However, the views expressed therein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Army University, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government.

---

From Consumer to Custodian

A New Model for Partnering with Civilian Universities

Col. Jan K. Gleiman, PhD, US Army, Retired
Lt. Col. Ryan L. Shaw, PhD, US Army, Retired

Download the PDF

Imagine a brigade combat team commander in 2032, preparing for operations in a contested littoral environment against a near-peer adversary. The enemy is not massing forces across a clear line of departure. Instead, it is contesting the electromagnetic spectrum, degrading commercial satellite services on which the brigade depends for logistics coordination, seeding false targeting data into AI-enabled fire-control systems, and exploiting civilian port infrastructure through a web of economic relationships the commander cannot untangle. The technology being used by the adversary was developed in university laboratories the commander has never seen and commercialized in private markets she has never studied. The influence networks she must counter operate through civil-society dynamics she was never taught to read. She is professionally competent in every traditional sense, but the environment she is operating in has outgrown the education she received.

This scenario is not speculative. It describes, with only modest extrapolation, the operational environment already taking shape. More importantly, it points to a structural problem at the heart of how the Army prepares its professionals for war.

For generations, the US Army has defined itself as a profession in part by its custodianship of expert knowledge. The assumption has been straightforward: most of the knowledge required to become a professional warfighter can and should be taught by the profession itself. Through doctrine development, on-the-job training, and a robust system of professional military education (PME), one generation transmits to the next the hard-earned lessons that set the professional soldier apart from the layperson and distinguish the profession of arms from other fields. This closed, internally stewarded learning system has reinforced both competence and identity. And for most of its history, it has worked. But it was built for a different strategic environment. Today, that model is under strain from two compounding structural pressures: speed and scope.

The speed of change—driven by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), cyber capabilities, autonomous systems, space integration, and globalized information flows—has compressed decision space and accelerated innovation cycles beyond what traditional institutions can match. At the same time, the scope of requirements for maintaining advantage has expanded beyond the traditional boundaries of the profession. Strategic competition now unfolds across economic and technological ecosystems, cultural networks, and civilian infrastructure that the military does not own and cannot control. The result is a widening gap between what the Army needs to know and what the Army can effectively teach. Left unaddressed, the consequences of this gap will not be academic—they will be operational.

Closing the gap requires more than internal reform. The Army must transition from a closed or semi-closed professional learning system to one that is deliberately open but still professionally governed by building deep, structured partnerships with civilian universities. To be clear, this must go well beyond the current practice of sending selected officers out for broadening assignments and hoping insights diffuse back into the institution. It requires treating civilian academic expertise as an operational resource that is professionally curated, deliberately integrated, and continuously available across the force.

This article begins by examining the logic of the Army’s closed professional learning system and the assumptions that made it effective. It then explains the two structural pressures—speed and scope—that have rendered those assumptions obsolete. Having identified what must remain internal to the profession, it assesses the limits of the Army’s current partnership frameworks, arguing that the problem is not a lack of engagement but a failure of design. Finally, it proposes a reorientation of how the Army approaches civilian university partnerships, moving from a posture of passive consumption to one of active custodianship and from episodic outsourcing to continuous integration. The question is not whether the Army must look beyond its own institutional boundaries, it is how to do so in a way that strengthens rather than dilutes its professional core.

The Semi-Closed System

The US Army’s identity as a profession rests on its responsibility to generate, steward, and transmit its own expert knowledge. This is not a casual claim but a deliberately constructed one. Fifteen or so years ago, the Army undertook a sustained effort to define itself as a “profession of arms,” culminating in a series of foundational publications that articulated its core attributes: expertise, trust, and stewardship.¹ These efforts were not merely descriptive, they were self-definitional, establishing the Army as both the producer and the certifying authority of the knowledge required for the ethical application of land combat power.

As a profession, the Army is entrusted by the American people with significant autonomy to develop its own standards, educate its members, and regulate the application of its expertise. This autonomy is sustained through trust, grounded in the expectation that the Army will maintain competence and uphold its ethic in the use of force.² In this sense, the Army does not simply consume knowledge; it retains for itself the prerogative of determining the canon of professional knowledge and certifying those deemed competent to apply it.

To fulfill this role, the Army has relied on a largely closed system of professional learning. Knowledge is generated internally through iterative training and operational experience, codified in doctrine, and transmitted through a highly structured system of professional education. One generation teaches the next, passing down hard-earned lessons about the conduct of war and the responsibilities of command. This system reinforces both technical proficiency and professional identity, ensuring continuity across time and preserving the integrity of the profession.

For most of its history, this model worked because the strategic environment was characterized by long periods of relative stability, interrupted only occasionally by periods of rapid change. During the stable periods, the assumption that professional warfighters could themselves generate and transmit the knowledge essential to their profession largely held. When major disruptions occurred—such as industrialization, the rise of airpower, or the advent of nuclear weapons—the profession was forced to adapt, often learning hard lessons through experience and struggling to incorporate new knowledge quickly. These moments, sometimes called revolutions in military affairs, demanded rapid adjustment, but they were relatively infrequent, allowing the institution to absorb and institutionalize change between shocks.³

Borrowing a term from evolutionary biology, this pattern of long stretches of stability interrupted by sudden change is often described as “punctuated equilibrium.” The Army’s professional model evolved within this context, and its effectiveness depended on the critical assumption that the boundaries of relevant knowledge were sufficiently stable and discrete to be managed internally.

This is, of course, an oversimplification; the American system has never been fully closed. As political scientist Richard Lacquement noted, the Army has always drawn on external knowledge and adapted through interaction with a broader ecosystem.⁴ More recent efforts to align PME with civilian academic standards reflect this reality.⁵ But the conceit of a closed system as constitutive of professional identity endures, even as the assumptions that underpin it no longer hold.

The current problem is not simply disruption; it is the frequency of disruption. There is no longer equilibrium punctuated by change but something closer to its inverse: the current environment features more punctuation than equilibrium. Today, even the semi-closed American model is proving inadequate to the adaptation challenge despite ongoing efforts to align standards, practices, and norms.

The Problem of Speed

The pace of change in the military-relevant technology landscape has compressed the timelines on which institutions traditionally operate. AI, autonomous systems, cyber capabilities, and space-based sensing are not just new tools; they are accelerants that are redefining the potential limits of operational tempo.⁶ Research on AI-enabled military decision-making indicates that algorithmic systems can process operationally relevant data at speeds that are orders of magnitude beyond human cognition, and that the future battlefield will increasingly be defined by systems that act faster than human-centered command processes can respond. In this environment, the speed of decision-making may itself become the decisive variable.⁷ The sensor-to-shooter timeline, once measured in hours or days, is now being compressed toward near-real time through AI-fused, space-based sensing and autonomous engagement systems. That compression does not wait for curriculum review cycles.⁸

These are not distant possibilities; they are extant competitive pressures already integrated into decision cycles.⁹ Researchers at the National Defense University have framed the current moment as one in which multiple converging technologies are simultaneously stressing legacy decision processes and compressing strategic and operational timelines.¹⁰ Gen. Joseph Dunford, then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described this environment as a race in which the speed of war was outpacing human understanding.¹¹ What Dunford identified as a challenge for command is equally a challenge for education.

The institutional consequences are significant. PME operates on timelines that are structurally misaligned with the pace of technological change. Curriculum development, faculty hiring, accreditation, and the annual or biennial rotation of students through resident programs are processes measured in years, while the emerging technology landscape is measured in months. By the time AI concepts are integrated into a capstone course at a staff college, their operational applications may already be obsolete. By the time a faculty member develops sufficient expertise to teach autonomous systems with authority, the next generation of those systems is already reaching the market. The innovation cycle is not waiting for the schoolhouse.

This is not a failure of effort or intent. PME institutions across the joint force have invested meaningfully in modernization, including new courses, new war-gaming methodologies, and increasing attention to emerging technology. Both Air University and the Army’s Command and General Staff College have begun integrating AI-enabled adaptive war games into PME to accelerate learning and maintain relevance in dynamic threat environments.¹² These efforts reflect genuine institutional seriousness, but they also illustrate the underlying structural problem: the Army and the joint PME system are perpetually adapting to change that has already occurred rather than anticipating what is coming next.

The operational stakes of this lag are not abstract. An officer corps that does not understand AI-enabled decision-making cannot effectively command forces that rely on it, integrate it with human judgment, or hold it accountable when it fails. An institution that cannot keep pace with the innovation cycle will produce leaders who are proficient in the last war’s technology while navigating the next war’s environment. In a competition defined by speed, that gap becomes a warfighting liability, not just a bureaucratic nuisance.

The closed professional system, however well-intentioned, cannot solve this problem from within. Speed requires access to knowledge at the frontier of development—and that frontier lies outside the Army’s institutional boundaries.

The Problem of Scope

If the speed of change has compressed the Army’s adaptation timelines, the scope of change has expanded the domains in which it must compete. These two pressures are mutually reinforcing: the Army must learn more, faster, across a wider terrain than its institutional systems were designed to cover.

Strategic competition with peer and near-peer adversaries no longer unfolds exclusively, or even primarily, on the battlefield. It unfolds continuously, across economic systems, technology ecosystems, information environments, and civilian digital infrastructure—domains the military neither owns nor fully controls but in which advantage is increasingly determined.¹³ Recent scholarship on the scope of disruptive technologies and their effects on the current competitive landscape shows a broad struggle spanning political, economic, and military-technological dimensions simultaneously. Advantage in this environment depends on national innovation ecosystems, not just armed forces.¹⁴ That is a fundamentally different competitive reality than the one for which the Army’s learning system was built.

The growing recognition of the falsely constructed peace–war dichotomy is a significant part of this shift. Strategic competition is not episodic. It is continuous, unfolding in and out of armed conflict. The problem is not that the Army misunderstands war—it is that it still treats everything outside of it as mildly interesting, tangential, or even irrelevant.

Adversaries contest influence, access, and advantage continuously through economic coercion, information operations, technological competition, and the deliberate exploitation of civilian infrastructure.¹⁵ The tools of this competition include supply chains, platform architectures, data-governance frameworks, and standards-setting bodies. Analysis of US–China technological competition, for example, describes the partial decoupling of technology ecosystems—including semiconductors, cloud platforms, and telecommunications standards—as a deliberate strategic objective.¹⁶ Understanding this competition requires fluency in international economics, technology policy, and political economy. While there are elements of these in some PME curricula, the cutting edge of knowledge in these areas lies largely outside the profession, most notably in civilian universities.

The role of private technology companies further illustrates how far competition has migrated from traditional military terrain. Recent scholarship has characterized leading technology firms as geopolitical actors in their own right. These entities and their cloud infrastructure, data platforms, and communications networks have materially shaped conflict outcomes.¹⁷ Andrew Krepinevich’s The Origins of Victory provides a useful frame for understanding why this matters for professional education. His central argument is that military advantage in great power competition flows not from the possession of advanced technology but from the capacity to identify disruptive innovations early, develop new operational concepts around them, and reorganize to exploit them before adversaries do. Krepinevich is explicit that the technologies driving the next military revolution, including artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, quantum computing, and additive manufacturing, originate overwhelmingly in civilian research institutions and commercial enterprises rather than in defense establishments.¹⁸ What this implies for PME is exacting: professional military education must develop officers who can read that civilian innovation landscape fluently, understanding not just the weapons systems already fielded but also the scientific and industrial trajectories from which future capabilities will emerge. The scope of learning required by PME is therefore defined not by existing doctrine but by the frontier of civilian knowledge that doctrine does not yet comprehend.

The war in Ukraine has become an instructive case study of how civilian digital ecosystems, including commercial satellite imagery, cloud migration of government data, and private-sector cybersecurity support, significantly influence military performance in ways that fall outside the traditional boundaries of military planning.¹⁹ Officers operating in this environment must be able to reason about the strategic implications of private-sector decisions and civilian infrastructure, not merely as background context but also as operational variables.

The informational dimension compounds this further. The United States International Cyberspace & Digital Policy Strategy describes competition for influence over cyberspace standards, data governance, and digital infrastructure as central to American strategic interests—and as fundamentally intertwined with economic and diplomatic competition.²⁰ This domain requires expertise in technology law, international norms, civil-society dynamics, and global governance—knowledge that is not captured in doctrine and cannot be generated within PME institutions as they are currently structured.

The Inviolate Core

In the face of all this change and the obvious demand for opening the closed system, it is important to remember that a core set of functions still does and always will remain the exclusive purview of internal professional formation. These are not simply matters of preference or tradition. They are the defining features of the military profession itself, those areas where authority, legitimacy, and expertise cannot be outsourced without eroding the Army’s identity and effectiveness.

First among these is the Army’s responsibility for its own technical and tactical mastery. No one else is going to teach the Army to drive tanks, lay artillery, or integrate fire and maneuver at scale, because no one else does those things. This is the irreducible foundation of the profession of arms: the ability to fight and win the Nation’s wars. As the Army’s own doctrine emphasizes, it is entrusted with the “ethical application of landpower” in service to the Nation.²¹ That expertise must be generated, maintained, and transmitted internally.

Second is the moral dimension of command in war. The authority to order soldiers into situations of extreme risk, even death, is unlike any responsibility found in most other professions. It carries with it a corresponding obligation to prepare leaders not only technically but also ethically and psychologically for the burdens of command. This cannot be taught abstractly or secondhand. It must be formed within a professional culture shaped by those who have borne that responsibility themselves. The Army’s ethic, grounded in trust with the American people and in the disciplined use of force, is not incidental to its function; it is constitutive of it.²² The transmission of that ethic from one generation of warfighters to the next is a core professional duty.

Closely related is the Army’s role as steward of the Nation’s legal monopoly on organized violence. The profession operates under civilian authority, but it retains professional autonomy in how it develops, certifies, and regulates its expertise. This autonomy is not a bureaucratic convenience—it is the basis of the trust placed in the profession by the American people. That trust depends on the Army’s ability to regulate itself: to define standards, to certify competence, and to enforce its professional ethic. As a “social trustee” profession, it exists to provide a public good that society cannot generate on its own.²³ To delegate that responsibility outward would be an abdication of duty and of the profession’s claim to authority.

Finally, and critically for the argument that follows, the Army must remain the custodian of its own knowledge core. Even as it increasingly draws on external sources of expertise, it must retain the authority to determine what knowledge is relevant, which standards apply, and how that knowledge is integrated into the profession. Partnerships can expand access to knowledge, but they cannot replace professional judgment. The Army does not simply consume knowledge; it curates, validates, and applies it in the uniquely demanding context of war. This custodial role is what allows the Army to adapt without losing professional coherence. It ensures that externally generated knowledge—whether from universities, industry, or elsewhere—is filtered through the lens of professional judgment and warfighting requirements.

But these functions have not been traditional weaknesses of the American military profession, they have been among its greatest strengths. The Army has long excelled at training units, developing leaders, and instilling an ethic grounded in discipline, trust, and service. This is not where we struggle. Looking backward, the critical challenges of the past two decades lie elsewhere. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army confronted gaps in its understanding of local cultures, political systems, religious dynamics, and economic conditions—domains that shape conflict but lie beyond the traditional boundaries of professional knowledge. Looking ahead to an era of great power competition, a different but equally demanding challenge is emerging: the need to understand and integrate rapidly evolving, dual-use technologies that are transforming the character of war.

The Army has not failed to recognize these domains; the challenge is structural. PME institutions cannot realistically hire and retain expertise across every discipline that now bears on strategic competition, nor can they replicate the research depth of civilian universities whose scholarly communities are organized around fields such as technology governance, information ecosystems, and political economy.²⁴ The Army’s irreplaceable expertise—in the application of land combat power, the ethics of force, and the moral burdens of command—does not extend to these adjacent domains, nor should it be expected to.

The scope of strategic competition has simply outgrown the knowledge that any single professional institution can generate, steward, and transmit internally. This is not a failure of effort or commitment. It is a reflection of institutional design. The Army is purpose-built to generate and apply organized violence in the service of the country. Universities are designed to generate and propagate knowledge across a wide range of domains, including those that increasingly shape military effectiveness. Recognizing that boundary is not a concession of weakness; it is a prerequisite for building the partnerships that can actually close the gap.

The result of those differing designs is not competition but complementarity. Given that complementarity, in light of the speed and scope problems described above, partnership cannot be considered a luxury, a matter of efficiency, or mere intellectual enrichment. It is a critical operational requirement. The question is not whether the Army should partner with civilian universities but how best to structure those partnerships to support warfighting effectiveness.

The Limits of Current Partnerships

The US university sector is the most extensive and productive research and education ecosystem in the world. American research universities generate a disproportionate share of foundational scientific and technological knowledge, anchor global networks of innovation, and produce graduates who shape the cutting edge of nearly every domain relevant to modern strategic competition.²⁵ If the Army needs to expand its expertise, potential partners abound. And to be fair, the Army already engages them in meaningful ways.

In the research domain, the Department of War has developed effective mechanisms to connect military requirements with university expertise through a variety of models and contracting arrangements, from longstanding and well-funded University Affiliated Research Centers to short-term, no-cost Cooperative Research and Development Agreements. These arrangements reflect a clear recognition that the Army cannot generate all relevant knowledge internally.²⁶ But they are designed to produce knowledge, not to transmit it systematically across the force. The gap they address is a research gap; the broader challenge is an educational one.

On the education side too, the Army’s engagement with civilian universities is real and valuable. The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps integrates civilian education into the commissioning pathway.²⁷ The Advanced Civil Schooling program sends selected officers to pursue graduate degrees at civilian institutions.²⁸ Fellowship programs place officers in academic, policy, and research environments where they engage directly with civilian scholars and practitioners. These experiences broaden perspectives, strengthen analytical skills, and expose participants to those critical domains of knowledge beyond the traditional boundaries of the profession. Just as importantly, they create space for reflection, something that is difficult to achieve within the tempo of operational assignments but is essential for the development of strategic judgment.²⁹

The problem is not a lack of partnerships; it is that those on offer lack the reach and rhythm the current environment demands. These opportunities are available to a relatively small fraction of the force. Selection is competitive, seats are limited, and participation requires stepping away from the operating force for extended periods. The knowledge gained through these experiences tends to remain concentrated at the individual level rather than being systematically integrated into the Army’s broader body of professional knowledge unless those individuals later serve as faculty within PME institutions.

Outside the officer corps, the gap is more pronounced. While enlisted PME has become more rigorous, it offers far fewer structured pathways to sustained engagement with civilian academic expertise. The noncommissioned officer corps, responsible for translating strategic decisions into tactical execution, has limited access to the interdisciplinary knowledge the current operating environment demands.³⁰

The result is a model of partnership that is episodic, selective, and only loosely connected to the core processes of professional formation. What does exist works well for the individuals it reaches, but it rests on an implicit assumption that knowledge can be outsourced and later reabsorbed—that officers can be “sent out” for broadening and then return with insights that will diffuse back into the institution.

In practice, that diffusion is uneven at best. The Army gains more capable individuals but not necessarily a more capable system. What is missing is a framework that makes the capabilities of civilian universities more consistently, broadly, and systematically available across the force without requiring soldiers to step outside the force to access them. Put plainly, the issue is not the absence of partnership; it is that existing partnerships are not designed to meet the current demands of speed and scope. This is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of design.

From Consumer to Custodian

This recognition is at the heart of the Department of War’s recent guidance demanding more deliberate alignment among advanced civil schooling, warfighting requirements, and national priorities.³¹ That guidance represents a first corrective step, but it is an incomplete response to the problem it rightly identifies. That problem is not partnership per se—it is passivity. As the Army expands its engagement with external institutions, it cannot relinquish its responsibility to define, steward, and apply the knowledge that underpins the profession of arms.

Too often, the Army has approached civilian education as a nonessential supplement to professional development—sending select officers out to be “broadened,” with limited direction over what they study and few mechanisms to integrate what they learn upon return. In doing so, it has behaved less like a professional steward of knowledge than a casual consumer of it. That model is no longer sufficient.

In an environment defined by speed and scope, the problem is not access to knowledge. Both the demand for knowledge and the supply of it are extraordinarily high. The limiting factor is time—and it is increasingly scarce. The periods officers spend in formal education are finite and consequential, and they cannot be left to chance. External knowledge should not be treated as an undifferentiated resource pool to be arbitrarily sampled; it must be deliberately selected, actively shaped, and systematically integrated. That requires a shift in posture, from customer to custodian.

Custodianship does not require a closed system; indeed, reverting to one would be a failure of custodianship. Rather, it requires reasserting responsibility for determining what knowledge matters, how it is used, and how it is transmitted across the force—even when that knowledge is developed elsewhere. Properly understood, this reframes the Army’s approach to educational partnerships. The purpose of engaging civilian universities is not to outsource professional education but to extend it while preserving the Army’s authority over content, standards, and application.

From Outsourcing to Integrating

If the problem is integration rather than scarcity, then the solution is not simply more partnerships, but a partnership system built on different principles. What the Army requires is not unstructured and transactional engagement with civilian institutions but a model that embeds external knowledge into the continuous development of the force. The challenge is to ensure that relevant knowledge, wherever it resides, can be brought into the profession in ways that are timely, usable, and aligned with warfighting needs.

One critical variable is not simply access to knowledge but proximity to its creation. Universities are not just repositories of knowledge; they are primary generators of it. Foundational advances in both emerging technologies and social concepts originate in basic research long before they are translated into commercial capabilities. Engagement at this level is not about acquiring finished ideas but about shaping awareness of what will matter before it becomes operationally visible. This is particularly important as the policy environment turns increasingly toward industry partnerships. Industry plays a critical role in scaling and applying innovation, but the underlying trajectories of knowledge are overwhelmingly set by research universities. Effective partnership requires engagement across both, linking the headwaters of discovery to the downstream processes of application and integrating research and education as mutually reinforcing functions rather than separate lines of effort. This is precisely the design of the modern research university.

But the more urgent and decisive problem is not content, it is delivery. The Army’s existing PME model concentrates learning at discrete points in a career. Soldiers step out of the operating force, attend resident programs, and then return to line units with upgrades to what is treated as an inherently static body of knowledge. This model is costly to the Army, disruptive to families, and rests on an assumption that no longer holds true: that the knowledge required for effective performance remains stable over the long intervals, often many years, between residential learning opportunities.

It does not. Technologies, tactics, and operational concepts now evolve on timelines measured in months, sometimes weeks. A system built on episodic education cannot keep pace. Army learning must become continuous, distributed, and responsive to operational need. This shift is not just aspirational, it is now attainable. Advances in learning technologies—pioneered largely in civilian universities—have made continuous, distributed learning feasible at scale. The objective is not simply more access to education but a different relationship between learning and the force itself, one in which the distance between knowledge capture, institutional adaptation, and operational application is continuously compressed. This aspiration implies specific design requirements for how partnerships are structured and what they are expected to produce.

First, the objective of Army learning must expand beyond the transmission of knowledge to the cultivation of learning itself. The primary outcome of professional development cannot be a soldier who has mastered a platform, a weapons system, or a body of doctrine at a given moment in time but one who has learned how to learn, who is capable of continuous adaptation as knowledge evolves. In this sense, every soldier must become a master learner.

Second, soldiers and leaders must be positioned not only as recipients of knowledge but also as contributors to its development. Many of the most consequential adaptations in recent conflicts come from troops in contact, not from doctrine shops or schoolhouses. The challenge is not simply to capture these innovations after the fact but to accelerate their integration across the force. This requires treating innovation as a core professional competency—one that can be cultivated, practiced, and expected. Every soldier must know and embrace their role in the innovation cycle and the discourse of knowledge.

Third, learning must be delivered at the point and time of need and the speed of relevance. This requires systems capable of delivering relevant knowledge directly into operational environments. The role of Army schoolhouses must evolve accordingly, from places where soldiers periodically go to learn to institutions that manage continuous learning across the force, integrating new knowledge, distributing it rapidly, and reinforcing development over time.

Finally, each soldier’s learning journey must be continuously managed and curated across a career. Learning cannot remain standardized, episodic, and disconnected from talent management. It must be customized, tracked, stacked, and credentialed in ways that allow the Army to understand precisely what its soldiers know, what they need to know, and how best to develop and employ them.

Partnerships that do not meet these criteria, however valuable in isolation, will remain additive rather than transformative. Properly structured, this is not outsourcing—it is integration.

The Army retains authority over what knowledge matters, how it is applied, and how it is transmitted. Civilian institutions expand the range of accessible knowledge and accelerate its development. The result is not a dilution of the profession’s core but an extension of its reach, enabling it to incorporate external expertise without relinquishing responsibility for its use. In this sense, integration is the operational expression of custodianship, a way of preserving professional coherence while adapting to a world in which the boundaries of relevant knowledge extend far beyond the institution itself.

Conclusion

The Army’s professional education model was built for a world in which change was episodic and war was bounded. That world no longer exists. Today, change is continuous, competition is pervasive, and the knowledge required to sustain warfighting advantage extends far beyond what any single professional institution can generate or transmit internally. This is not a failure of the profession but a reflection of institutional design meeting a strategic environment it was not built to handle.

The Army’s claim to professional authority rests not simply on its history or its hardware but on its demonstrated capacity to develop, steward, and transmit the expert knowledge required for the ethical application of land combat power. That claim is only as credible as the institution’s commitment to ensuring its members are educated for the war they will fight, not the wars that were fought before.

Adaptation is perhaps the most critical expression of professional stewardship. The Army’s obligation is not to preserve the learning system it had in the past but to ensure the learning system it builds for the future is adequate to the threats the nation faces. The closed system was not an end in itself; it was a means of ensuring professional competence. When the means no longer serves the end, stewardship requires change.

The partnerships this article describes are not a concession to academic fashion or bureaucratic pressure. They are a recognition that the frontier of militarily relevant knowledge has migrated beyond the institution’s walls, and that allowing that frontier to advance without engagement is itself a professional failure. Civilian universities are not competitors with the Army’s educational mission. They are, if properly engaged, its most capable force multipliers.

This requires the Army to accept a more demanding role than it has traditionally played in its civilian educational partnerships. The Army can no longer approach civilian universities as a customer; it must approach them as a custodian. That means asserting authority over what knowledge matters (while permitting and encouraging a vibrant discourse), actively shaping how external education connects to professional formation, and building systems that make continuous learning a standard feature of military service rather than an episodic privilege for the few. It means treating every soldier, across ranks and career stages, as a learner whose development is the institution’s ongoing responsibility.

The brigade commander in the opening vignette does not need a different Army. She needs an Army that educated her differently. She needs an Army that understood, years before she assumed command, that the environment she would face was already being shaped by forces outside the reach of any inward-looking schoolhouse. Building that Army is possible. It requires will, intentional design, and a reconsideration of what professional stewardship demands in an era of persistent competition. The Army has adapted before, under pressure, at cost. The case for adapting now, deliberately and ahead of that cost, has never been stronger.

The profession does not adapt by abandoning what it knows. It adapts by ensuring that what it knows is always equal to what the Nation requires.

---

Notes

1. US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) for STAND-TO, “The Profession of Arms,” US Army, 9 January 2011, https://www.army.mil/article/50206/the_profession_of_arms.
2. Robert L. Caslen Jr. and Nathan K. Finney, “The Army Ethic, Public Trust, and the Profession of Arms,” Military Review, special edition (September 2011): 13–20.
3. Max Boot, War Made New (Gotham Books, 2006), 7.
4. Richard A. Lacquement, Army Professional Expertise and Jurisdictions (monograph, US Army War College Press, 1 October 2003), 3–5, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1781&context=monographs.
5. Tamir Libel and Barış Ateş, “Academic-Military Relations in U.S. and Allied Professional Military Education Organizations, 1991–2024: A Comparative Analysis and Proposed Typology,” Armed Forces & Society OnlineFirst, 18 September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X251371307.
6. Jason N. Adler, “Modernizing Military Decision-Making: Integrating AI into Army Planning,” Military Review Online Exclusive, 26 August 2025, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Online-Exclusive/2025-OLE/Modernizing-Military-Decision-Making/.
7. Ashikur Rahman Nazil, “AI at War: The Next Revolution for Military and Defense,” World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews, ahead of print, 22 July 2025, https://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2025.27.1.2735.
8. Eric A. Wismar, “Future-Proofing PME: How AI Is Redefining Adaptive Wargaming and Strategic Readiness,” Wild Blue Yonder (Air University) Online Journal, 20 June 2025, https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Wild-Blue-Yonder/Articles/Article-Display/Article/4221801/future-proofing-pme-how-ai-is-redefining-adaptive-wargaming-and-strategic-readi/.
9. Lauren Kahn, “How the U.S. Is Using AI in the War in Iran,” interview by Ayesha Rascoe, Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR, 15 March 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/03/15/nx-s1-5745863/how-the-u-s-is-using-ai-in-the-war-in-iran.
10. James Giordano, “Convergent Critical Technologies Part 1: The Integrative Transformation of Warfighting,” Strategic Insights 38 (18 November 2025), https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/strategic-insights/38.
11. Jim Garamone, “National Military Strategy Addresses Changing Character of War,” Joint Chiefs of Staff, 12 July 2019, https://www.jcs.mil/Media/News/News-Display/Article/1903943/national-military-strategy-addresses-changing-character-of-war/.
12. Wismar, “Future-Proofing PME”; Timothy J. Williams Meadows et al., “AI-Enabled Wargaming at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College: Its Implications for PME and Operational Planning,” Small Wars Journal, 16 January 2026, https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/16/ai-enabled-wargaming-cgsc/.
13. Michael Raska, “Strategic Competition for Emerging Military Technologies: Comparative Paths and Patterns,” Prism 8, no. 3 (January 2020): 65–81, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/2053499/strategic-competition-for-emerging-military-technologies-comparative-paths-and/.
14. Giordano, “Convergent Critical Technologies Part 1”; Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers (Yale University Press, 2023), 412–14, 423–28, https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280098/the-origins-of-victory/.
15. Tom Harper, “The Era of Constant Competition – Purpose and Principles,” War Room (US Army War College) Online Journal, 29 July 2021, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/purpose-principles/.
16. Audrey Kruth Cronin, “How Private Tech Companies Are Reshaping Great Power Competition” (Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, August 2023), https://kissinger.sais.jhu.edu/programs-and-projects/kissinger-center-papers/how-private-tech-companies-are-reshaping-great-power-competition/.
17. Emily Bienvenue et al., “Private Tech Companies, the State, and the New Character of War,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1 December 2025, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/12/ukraine-war-tech-companies.
18. Krepinevich, The Origins of Victory.
19. Cronin, “How Private Tech Companies Are Reshaping Great Power Competition.”
20. Cronin, “How Private Tech Companies Are Reshaping Great Power Competition”; Anthony Blinken, The US International Cyberspace and Digital Policy Strategy (US Department of State, 6 May 2024), https://www.state.gov/bureaus-offices/under-secretary-for-economic-affairs/bureau-of-cyberspace-and-digital-policy/.
21. Army Doctrine Publication 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession (US Government Publishing Office, July 2019), 1-3, https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN43687-FM_1-000-WEB-2.pdf.
22. Peter Kilner, “Mitigating Moral Injuries Through Proactive, Ethical Leadership,” Military Review Online Exclusive, 12 October 2023, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/journals/military-review/online-exclusive/2023-ole/kilner/; Reed Bonadonna, “Military Command as Moral Prudence: Examples from History and Literature,” The Strategy Bridge, 28 November 2017, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/11/28/military-command-as-moral-prudence-examples-from-history-and-literature.
23. TRADOC, “An Army White Paper: The Profession of Arms” (TRADOC, 8 December 2010), 2, https://www.army.mil/e2/downloads/rv7/info/references/profession_of_arms_white_paper_Dec2010.pdf.
24. Matthew Powell and Dafydd Townley, “The Challenges and Opportunities for Academics in Professional Military Education,” Defence Studies 25, no. 3 (2025): 644–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/14702436.2025.2467746.
25. Kritika Agarwal, “Report Shows U.S. Still Leads the World in R&D – for Now,” Association of American Universities, 25 July 2025, https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-report/report-shows-us-still-leads-world-rd-now.
26. “Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC) and University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC),” Department of War Research & Engineering Enterprise, accessed 1 May 2026, https://rt.cto.mil/ddre-rt/rtl-labs/ffrdc-uarc/; John W. Lyons and James A. Ratches, External Collaboration in Army Science and Technology: The Army’s Research Alliances: (Defense Technical Information Center, 2013), https://doi.org/10.21236/ADA622063.
27. Kristy N. Kamarck, “Defense Primer: Senior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps,” In Focus No. IF11235 (Congressional Research Service, 2024), https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11235.
28. “Advanced Civil Schooling for Soldiers,” US Army, accessed 1 May 2026, https://myarmybenefits.us.army.mil/Benefit-Library/Federal-Benefits/Advanced-Civil-Schooling-(ACS)?serv=122.
29. Douglas Orsi, “Professional Military Education and Broadening Assignments: A Model for the Future,” Joint Force Quarterly 86 (20 June 2017): 41–48, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/1219675/professional-military-education-and-broadening-assignments-a-model-for-the-futu/.
30. Alan J. Brutus, “Civilian Education and NCOs,” NCO Journal, 1 March 2019, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/NCO-Journal/Archives/2019/March/Education/.
31. US Department of War, “Statement by Chief Pentagon Spokesman, Sean Parnell, on ‘Aligning Senior Service College Opportunities With American Values,’” news release, 27 February 2026, https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4418359/statement-by-chief-pentagon-spokesman-sean-parnell-on-aligning-senior-service-c/; Haley Fuller, “Hegseth Orders End to Pentagon-Funded Attendance at Several Elite Universities,” Military.com, 2 March 2026, https://www.military.com/feature/2026/02/28/pete-hegseth-orders-end-pentagon-funded-attendance-several-elite-universities.html.

 

 

 

Back to Top

July-August 2026