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Professional Military Education and Problem-Based Learning

 

Col. Celestino Perez Jr., PhD, US Army, Retired

 

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This article presents a justification for problem-based learning within professional military education (PME). The principal argument is that practitioner education should encompass—at routine, periodic intervals—the students’ application of curricular concepts during strategy-formulation and military-planning exercises. Moreover, these exercises should focus on historical and contemporary problems, crises, and wars.

PME Study

In 2025, Megan Hennessey, Brandy Jenner, and I published an exploratory study on strategic competence at a senior-level military war college. The aim was to observe how students, having nearly completed eleven months of instruction prior to graduation, would perform if asked to craft a recommended set of policy aims, a comprehensive strategy, and an accompanying military strategy for a real-world problem.¹

The study, while not generalizable, unveiled from an educator’s perspective troubling findings. Students did not apply curricular concepts to their work. Students failed to describe sufficiently detailed causal stories about how a set of proposed interventions would contribute to the realization of a political objective. Students failed to conduct research to explore the issue’s complexity. And, most strikingly, students did not know how to organize themselves for strategic work.² Such work includes crafting strategic options and assessing these options’ advantages and disadvantages.

Strategy is certainly an academic discipline pertinent to history, political science, security studies, and war studies.³ Researchers, applying inductive, deductive, historical, and interpretive methods, contribute sophisticated arguments assessing the conduct of political and senior military leaders during crises and wars.⁴ Yet, for policymakers and military professionals, strategy is not merely an academic discipline. Strategy is a practice. Strategic competence requires the cultivation of skills via repeated attempts and assessments. The crafting of strategies is integral to senior-service colleges, and the crafting of theater and campaign plans is integral to midcareer service colleges. It follows that military curricula should feature as their formative experience exercises that require military professionals to create, craft, develop, and produce. Creative thinking, if it has any meaning within a military or policy context, entails the crafting of policy aims, comprehensive strategies, and military plans.

The aforementioned PME study reveals various shortcomings that, insofar as administrators and educators wish to confront them, invite a reconsideration of military education’s purpose and teaching methods. If educators want students to apply curricular concepts to real-world problems, how might educators do so systematically? If educators want students to produce compelling causal stories or theories of success that link, albeit probabilistically, interventions to outcomes, how might educators do so systematically? If educators want students to fold into their creative work an appreciation for several converging systems (e.g., psychological, historical, technological, geographic, domestic, international, and alliance dynamics), how might educators do so systematically? If educators want students to know how to organize themselves to craft strategies and military plans, how might educators do so systematically?

Mens et Manus

The motto of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is mens et manus, or mind and hand.⁵ The idea is that theoretical knowledge is only useful insofar as it informs real-world practice. And, of course, real-world practice must be informed by theoretical knowledge. The motto suggests an appropriate relationship between theory and practice in practitioner-oriented curriculum. Such a motto might encourage educators to reflect upon how best to teach and assess whether students can recall and speak about curricular topics. Such a motto might also encourage educators to teach and assess how students can apply their learning during the performance of routine exercises whose difficulty is the intellectual equivalent of physical training.

If educators teach the importance of thinking historically, do they observe students competently doing the research requisite to trace the convergence of historical forces, or systems, to better understand the ecology of a real-world crisis or war? If students learn how cognitive biases can distort rational thinking, do students—within the context of sustained exercises—mindfully implement measures to dampen the distorting effects of these biases on strategy formulation and military planning? If teachers teach that a strategy comprises ends, ways, and means, do students—again within the context of sustained exercises—develop over time the ability to craft, assess, and align alternative ends, ways, and means to confront real-world problems? If teachers instruct about offensive military operations, do students—in routine exercises—assess the merits and demerits of attacking along a narrow or wide frontage or with a slower or faster velocity?

An appropriate analogy to consider is chess. Both strategy and chess entail performance. One could teach a wonderful course about chess without a concern for assessing students’ ability to play chess competently. One could teach brilliant and entertaining lessons on basic chess tactics, employing pieces in combination, chess openings, midgame development, and endgame approaches. One could teach philosophies of playing strategies, to include a variety of defensive styles and attacking styles. Finally, one could teach the history of chess by studying the games and styles as they vary over time.

The problem with the foregoing approach to teaching chess is that it cannot possibly develop competence in a player. No number of brilliant lectures or classroom discussions will alone raise the chess student’s level of play. Of course, chess students do receive instruction via lecture and classroom discussion. However, these students’ principal formative experience is playing at the board … over and over again … with teacher-to-player assessments after each game. A question to ask is whether the central formative experience in military classrooms is the lecture, or Socratic dialogue, or classroom discussion? Or is the central formative experience the application of curricular concepts to real-world problems? Another question to ask is whether educators—military or civilian—perceive the need to develop the comfort and competence requisite to evaluate students in such exercises?

Convenience of Real-World Problems

A potential obstacle to implementing a problem-based learning-centered approach to teaching military professionals is a perceived need to design a fictional, scenario-based exercise. This approach entails manufacturing a universe of historical, structural, and ideational dynamics that serves as the basis for applying curricular concepts to application exercises. Among the problems with the fictional approach, apart from the needless expenditure of time, is that it discourages the development of research skills. Instead of requiring students to research the historical forces or systems that constitute a crisis, students merely work within the confines of a scenario reference book.

Another approach is to simply employ real-world problems. If one wants to apply military lessons within the context of urban warfare, the Israel-Hamas conflict in the wake of the 7 October 2023 terrorist attack is well-documented and susceptible of student research. If one wants to apply military lessons within the context of large-scale combat operations, the Ukraine-Russia war is well-documented. If one wants to apply strategy-formulation lessons, the US interventions in Venezuela and Iran are superb teaching cases. The key is to describe the decision of an actual military or political leader, craft alternative plans and strategies, assess the actual and alternative approaches, and—finally—recommend a military course of action or strategic option after having weighed the advantages and disadvantages of each.

By repeating this exercise over the course of a semester or year, students can then incorporate additional lesson material in incremental steps. For strategy formulation, if the first exercise requires the application of brute force and coercive strategies, future exercises could fold in additional material pertinent to assurances, inducements, persuasion, domestic policymaking, civil-military relations, alliance politics, an adversary’s political and military systems, geography, technology, etc. Educators can design curricula that, like a rolling snowball or a course in mathematics, accumulates and integrates additional material. The idea is for students to keep applying what they learned and applied earlier to each future exercise while incorporating the latest lesson material. Of course, this approach has implications for curricular design.

Relevance of Theory

Theoretical knowledge and its application are central to strategy formulation and military planning. Theoretical or scholarly knowledge helps in two ways. First, it allows the military professional to “see” the world in a new way. Second, scholarly knowledge enables military professionals to identify the advantages and disadvantages pertinent to a strategy.

I teach military professionals, at both the midcareer and senior levels, causal logics. Causal logics are merely stories that explain why humans behave as they do. Implicit in every policy, strategy, military plan, operations order, and mission statement is a causal statement: if we do A, B, and C with our instruments of power or—at the military level—our troops, resources, relationships, and speech, good things, X, Y, and Z, will result. It follows that, as a teacher, I want students to think in stepwise, logical ways about causation. I want military professionals to interrogate their colleagues’ claims: Why do you think that a comprehensive strategy—which involves some combination of coercion, inducements, and persuasion—will cause adversaries, allies, and partners to do or not do what you have demanded? Or, if you’ve chosen a brute-force strategy, why do you think the destruction of X, Y, and Z will—more or less directly—result in the realization of your political objective? Within the context of a military plan, why do you think these dots you’ve placed on a line of effort or a line of operation will contribute causally to a desired end? Similarly, how might an adversary attack allies on land from east to west given constraints in manpower, weaponry, technology, and geography, and what might be the best way to defend against such an attack? To fail to ask these questions is to risk what Jeffrey Meiser calls “PowerPoint Nirvana.”⁶ Just because you put something on a slide does not mean it will produce the result you want.

My emphasis on causation brings to the fore a range of theoretical matters that military professionals should know. For instance, we know theoretically that coercion often fails. We know also that compellence fails much more often than deterrence. This sobering fact should prompt students to think diligently about how to increase the chances that coercion might succeed in a specific case. Theory also instructs that, in general, coercion can be much less expensive than brute force. After all, at a minimum, coercion entails nothing more than issuing a verbal threat; however, a disadvantage of coercion requires—unlike brute force—that the target accede to the demand if one’s strategy is to succeed. Theory proffers ways to increase the probability that a coercive strategy succeeds, including asking whether a coercive threat is credible and sufficiently painful to incentivize the target to accede to the coercer’s demand.⁷

Pertinent theoretical knowledge exists for nearly every lesson within mid- and senior-level education. If one is designing theater campaigns, books like Stephen Biddle’s Military Power should be familiar to military professionals, particularly in those programs wherein landpower is a focus.⁸ If one is designing comprehensive strategies, books like Alexander George’s Forceful Persuasion should occupy a central place.⁹ These are just examples. Tyler Jost’s Bureaucracies at War, Danielle Lupton’s Reputation for Resolve, Nikolas Gvosdev et al.’s Decision-Making in American Foreign Policy, Oriana Skylar Mastro’s The Costs of Conversation, Fotini Christia’s Alliance Formation in Civil War, Keren Yarhi-Milo’s Knowing The Adversary, Patricia Sullivan’s Who Wins?, and James Baker’s The Politics of Diplomacy are just some of the works that can inform the military professional’s understanding of comprehensive strategy and the role of military power.¹⁰

It is not important that military professionals read entire books or journal articles. All that they need to do, with educators’ help, is discern the core theoretical, causal story of the author’s argument. Moreover, military professionals should not consider any single author’s work to be above contestation. Military professionals should give each argument due consideration as offering causal possibilities while also actively seeking out counter arguments.

What problem-based learning allows is for military professionals to draw upon published theoretical accounts as they study a particular problem and decide, via an evaluation of military courses of action or strategic options, how best to intervene. Deduction is principally a scholarly approach wherein scholars test a theory by deducing hypothesized outcomes in particular cases. Induction is a scholarly approach wherein researchers craft a theory after having observed commonalities across a number of cases. Deduction and induction are scholarly approaches that place ultimate value on the theory, not the case. A scholar who is theorizing about the effects of a fragmented insurgency cares less about the outcome of the insurgency and more about the viability of the theory.

Military professionals, as practitioners, care less about theories and much more about the particular case. Whether a theory succeeds or fails in peer review and post publication matters little to the practitioner. Practitioners care more about the particular case they have been directed to study. What matters is the success of the intervention, not the success of the scholarly theory. Nevertheless, theory has much to contribute in a world wherein intuition alone fails. Intuition requires vast experience to hone. A grandmaster in chess can look at a board for three seconds and understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of a given side. A beginning chess player can do no such thing.

Military professionals, with theory, are able to see many more dynamics in a situation after having studied and applied theories to real-world cases in a classroom. This theory-practice relationship is captured via the concept of abductive reasoning, a concept first introduced by the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce for describing how scientists, ensconced in theories pertinent to a discipline, come up with new hypotheses.¹¹ Yale political theorist Ian Shapiro defines abductive reasoning as “reasoning on the basis of mature theories from observed effects to unobserved causes.”¹² This definition describes how practitioners draw upon theory to explain a complex set of dynamics by drawing upon mature, or published, theories.

If the concept of abductive reasoning is helpful, it allows educators and students to view each lesson in the curriculum as a source of theories to unveil dynamics that are relevant to strategy and military planning. For instance, a course in strategy formulation will likely feature lessons on grand strategy, military strategy, policymaking processes, alliance politics, the causes of war, interstate wars, civil wars, war termination, regional studies, just war theory, etc. Each of these lessons, as a source of mature theories, helps military professionals discern more aspects of a problem and, thereby, identify more advantages and disadvantages attendant to alternative strategies.

If war is indeed a dimension of politics, and politics is suffused with counterintuitive and hidden dynamics, consulting one’s intuition alone constitutes a failure to perform due diligence. Theory is essential to practice, particularly within the realms of national security and military affairs. Problem-based learning allows for the practice of abductive reasoning and the honing of strategic and military due diligence.

Blurring the Education-Training Distinction

Military thinkers often distinguish between education and training. Training is what the military provides to service members so that they may achieve competence at routine, procedural tasks (e.g., rifle marksmanship). Through repeated sessions at the rifle range and with the provision of feedback and assessments from certified trainers, service members will gain proficiency. If training prepares service members to perform routine tasks, educators prepare service members to think about a complex world. To simplify the distinction, training prepares service members for the known, while education prepares for the unknown.

The distinction between training and education is overwrought. An often-overlooked reality is that education, particularly practitioner education, entails the cultivation of certain skills. These skills—like playing a musical instrument or hitting a golf ball or firing a rifle—require repeated attempts and critical feedback if military professionals are to achieve competence at them.

I will describe five tasks, focusing here on senior-level military education, that policymakers and military professionals must practice to perform strategy well. These five tasks compose my idea of “strategy is performance.”

Causal literacy. The first task, which is twofold, falls under the name of causal literacy. Military professionals must understand (among many other things) how wars begin, unfold, morph, and dissipate. The theories that contribute to these dynamics take the form of X→Y causality (i.e., as X varies, so too will Y). These sorts of claims exist in many different dimensions pertinent to national security and military affairs, including psychological dynamics, battles and operations, civil-military relations, policymaking procedures, domestic political factors, international politics, geography, and technology.

If causal literacy entails the crafting and evaluation of discrete X→Y claims, complex or emergent causality entails appreciating how several otherwise discrete X→Y dynamics bump up against each other, become entangled, and at times create entirely new variables, or systems, or forces (I use these terms interchangeably). Given the innumerable factors that military professionals must contend with in the course of crafting strategies and plans, a real temptation is to succumb to what Elliott Cohen and Richard Betts describe as “strategic nihilism.”¹³ This idea holds that since the world is unmanageably complex, there is no way to craft successful strategies.

By applying problem-based learning in the military classroom, students will hone the intellectual ability to craft and assess causal claims. They will also become intellectually and emotionally comfortable with the idea of emergent causality, which holds that it is impossible to trace, in X→Y fashion, the onset of an event or crisis from a confluence of multifarious X→Y causal forces.

Normative reasoning. If causal literacy is a skill, so too is normative reasoning, the second skill that composes “strategy is performance.” If key causal questions concern whether the application of certain strategic means and ways are feasible, strategic ends are susceptible to a different sort of reasoning. Causal literacy is instrumental, whereas the critical evaluation of strategic means is normative. Instrumental or causal claims certainly inform normative evaluations, but they do not subsume them. Normative evaluations entail judgments about better or worse, good or bad, just and unjust. Normative evaluations, which include ethical judgments, depend for their final assessment on a certain configuration of values, priorities, and interests. For instance, whether to go to war or not certainly entails causal claims about possible outcomes, but it also entails questions about whether going to war is in a state’s interests. Empirical or factual claims do not wholly subsume questions pertaining to interpretive values, priorities, and interests.

Military students, placed within the context of problem-based learning, can hone their ability to reason and debate about normative ends. Self-awareness, empathy, and collegiality are important subskills students will improve with practice.

Consensus building. A third skill students can develop within the context of problem-based learning is consensus building. Suppose a small team of strategists have crafted the perfect strategy. Unless these strategists are able to build consensus outside of their group, the strategy has no chance of surviving organizational, bureaucratic, and palace politics. Any strategy must be socialized across many environments, including the interagency environment and alliance politics. Within the context of problem-based learning, students can hone their ability to craft compelling narratives tailored to disparate audiences. They can learn to bring forth the full weight of their intellectual work without using rarefied, jargon-filled constructions. Students can hone their ability to speak persuasively, concisely, and intelligibly.

Strategic assessment. A fourth skill is strategic assessment, or the ability to craft and assess alternative strategies with the aim of recommending the best one. This skill, which is encompassing of the others, is supremely difficult to train. If students do not feel intellectually dizzy or dismayed in the course of crafting strategies for real-world problems, educators are not using the classroom’s full potential.

Perspective-taking (or research). The final skill, which is requisite for the other four skills, is perspective-taking or, simply, research. There is no way to exercise causal literacy, normative reasoning, consensus building, or strategic assessment without gathering multiple perspectives on a problem or crisis. These perspectives may come in a journal article, a book, or a think-tank publication. These perspectives may also come from various practitioners who used to work or still work the same problem. Useful perspectives might also come from stakeholders directly enmeshed in the crisis. The key point is that the only way to tap into these perspectives—the only way to do perspective-taking—is to do research. Research is a skill that can be honed with repeated practice, feedback, and assessment.

Conclusion

Military professionals are fortunate relative to other bureaucratic officials. Resident military education, especially midcareer and senior-level programs, indicate the importance militaries across the world place on education. This time, although limited, is more than other bureaucratic officials receive.

How might administrators and educators improve their programs? In the United States, persons must undergo seven years of schooling beyond undergraduate training to become a surgeon. Yet, when a surgeon operates, only one life is at stake. When a military professional acts, as many as three, thirty, three hundred, three thousand, or thirty thousand lives are at stake. In some cases, entire polities are at stake. An exploration into whether problem-based learning provides observable benefits, particularly when placed routinely and centrally within the curriculum, is a worthwhile endeavor.

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Notes

1. Megan Hennessey et al., “Shallow Strategic Thinking: Findings from a Multinational Problem-Based Pilot Study,” Higher Education, Skills, and Work-Based Learning 15, no. 1 (2025): 112–29, https://doi.org/10.1108/HESWBL-08-2023-0235.
2. Hennessey et al., “Shallow Strategic Thinking.”
3. Colin Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford University Press, 1999); Lawrence Freedman, On Strategists and Strategy: Collected Essays, 2014–2024 (Oxford University Press, 2025); Nina Silove, “Beyond the Buzzwords: Three Meanings of Grand Strategy,” Security Studies 27, no. 1 (2018): 27–57, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2017.1360073.
4. Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (Simon & Schuster, 2010).
5. “What’s the MIT Motto?,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accessed 9 April 2026, https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/motto-mens-et-manus/.
6. Jeffrey Meiser, “Ends + Ways + Means = (Bad) Strategy,” Parameters 46, no. 4 (2016): 81–91, https://www.doi.org/10.55540/0031-1723.3000.
7. Reid B. C. Pauly, The Art of Coercion: Credible Threats and the Assurance Dilemma (Cornell University Press, 2025).
8. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton University Press, 2006).
9. Alexander George, Forceful Persuasion: Coercive Diplomacy as an Alternative to War (United States Institute of Peace, 1992).
10. Tyler Jost, Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation (Cambridge University Press, 2024); Danielle Lupton, Reputation for Resolve: How Leaders Signal Determination in International Politics (Cornell University Press, 2020); Nikolas Gvosdev et al., Decision-Making in American Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Oriana Skylar Mastro, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019); Fotini Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Keren Yarhi-Milo, Knowing The Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence, and Assessments of Intention in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2014); Patricia Sullivan, Who Wins? Predicting Success and Failure in Armed Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2012); James A. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy (Putnam Adult, 1995).
11. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, 1893–1913, ed. Peirce Edition Project (Indiana University Press, 1998), 226–41.
12. Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton University Press, 2005), 39.
13. Elliot Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesman, and Leadership in Wartime (Knopf Doubleday, 2003); Richard Betts, “Is Strategy an Illusion,” International Security 25, no. 2 (2000): 5–50, https://doi.org/10.1162/016228800560444.

 

 

 

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