Professional Military Education for the 'Pentathlete' of the Future

摘要

The strategic environment like the world around us is changing at an exponential rate and thus the challenges of leadership are also changing at an ever faster rate. As such our leaders of tomorrow must master tactical operational and strategic competencies to address a much larger scope of contingencies at a much earlier point in their military careers to include a greater focus on non-kinetic issues such as culture socio-economics and politics. However our current formal system of Professional Military Education (PME) continues to try and meet these growing requirements within a framework whose scope has changed little in the past twenty years. In order to prepare our future officers to become pentathletes in the future strategic environment there are significant modifications that need to be considered for the existing PME continuum. These pentathlete competencies that teach officers how to think vice what to think need to be introduced early during the pre-commissioning process and then reinforced through a Continuing Officer Education System (COES) that supports leadership development at formalized schools within the institutional domain and while serving in unit assignments within the operational and self development domains throughout an officer's career thus enabling life long learning.