Why a TECOM Warfighting Society?
Posted on: October 25,2019“We must always seek ways to become more effective in the way we train and educate our Marines and there should never be any barriers between training and education because both are absolutely required…We need to contribute to a maneuver warfare culture that renders intent and then enables a mature, intelligent, quick thinking subordinate leader to execute that intent. That we do not currently have this culture is evident to me from the Commandant’s question, ‘What do we need to do to reinvigorate Maneuver Warfare?’ He is asking because we are not fostering the mentality that enables maneuver warfare in those we train and educate. It must start with us here in TECOM.”
MajGen William F. Mullen, III., “Commander’s Guidance”
The TECOM Warfighting Society (TWS) was established by CG TECOM in November 2018 as a modern extension of the 20th century Marine Corps’ “Chowder Society” and the 19th century Prussian Army’s “Militäriche Gesellschaft”. The TWS was envisioned as a voluntary think-tank comprised of officers and staff-noncommissioned officers for the purpose of promoting personalized Professional Military Education (PME) and the transforming of ideas into concepts to improve the efficacy and capability of the modern Marine Corps. As the father of modern military education, Gerhardt Scharnhorst writes,
“…make it the responsibility of the regiments to place the same amount of emphasis on the Bildung [philosophy and education] of officers as they do on drill and discipline [technique].”
Charles, E. White, “An Aristocracy of Education”, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militärische Geselleschaft in Berlin, 1805-1805.,
Education and Training can be distilled into complimentary elements; the art and science of war. To put it simply they must address both cognitive skills education and technical task training. Through PME we address how to think and how to make sound, timely decisions:
“Adaptability and agility are related. Both lead to changes in missions, plans, procedures and outcomes, but adaptability is unimpeded by time constraints. Most individuals, groups and institutions can adapt slowly to changes. Agility on the other hand, implies a rapid adaptation to changes in a situation.”
Donald Vandergriff, Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War., Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2002., (44).
One of the methods that TWS seeks to develop adaptability for its members and for the Corps is through the use of modelling and simulation (M&S), wargaming and its derivatives (decision-forcing case studies and tactical decision games [TDG]).
“TDG are one of the best ways to develop decision-making skills with little cost, but the teacher must know how to facilitate a TDG or the wrong lessons are taught.”
Donald Vandergriff
TWS provides a repository of articles, scenarios for Force-on Force simulation, decision-forcing case study, historical study, and TDGs that can be used by leaders for their PME, to cultivate their subordinate leaders, and for use as a “rehearsal” for execution in training and combat. Our Commandant has expressed his guidance as such,
“The National Defense Strategy has directed us to focus in new areas, and this requires us to think, innovate and change. Addressing these new mission sets starts with ideas, ideas are developed into concepts, and concepts that are then tested and refined by wargaming, experimentation, and M&S…In the context of training, wargaming needs to be used more broadly to fill what is arguably our greatest deficiency in the training and education of our leaders: practice in decision-making against a thinking enemy.”
38th Commandant’s Planning Guidance, 2019., (17, 19)
TWS and its affiliates in Hawaii and California seek to carry out this intent: Time Now.
Comments
Information Age learning is the wrong term which is going on today. Too many people confuse this with using technology to solve our learning dilemma today-how to teach people to be more adaptive and exercise moral courage and judgement, prepare them for the stress of combat. Ironically, the tools exist from hundreds of years ago, and employed properly today, can greatly enhance how people learn and get better (evolve). Additionally, learning science has come a long way in the last 20 years, led by Dr. Robert Bjork at UCLA. He titled a briefing to the Army in 2006 the way we train is backwards to the way we learn. Despite, this well documented warning, the Army and Marines continued and continue today to use Industrial-age methods (rote memorization and PPT supported lectures to masses of people through online mandatory classes or in the classroom instructor-centric approaches. We must take the Commandant’s Planning Guidance to heart, we must teach the way we want to fight (Maneuver Warfare), and a methodology does exist. It is called Outcomes Based Learning (OBL).
Defining this paradigm shift from industrial to Information Age (or Cognitive Age: An era in human evolution when individual and organizational prosperity and survival are predicated on one’s ability to keep pace with a rapidly changing information environment) is something we’ve wrestled with to no avail. How do we transition from pedagogy to andragogy? It’s all about OBL-I think this entails a continuum of dynamic and cognitive training and education experiences, centered on the learner, leveraging diverse stimuli to better enable transformation of knowledge into informed decisive action.
Roy,
You are right, the future courses under OBL look nothing like most of them today. They use what Dr Bjork calls desirable difficulties where the pattern is not the same, but increasingly complex problems using different tools. Our fictional example illustrates another core learning concept, known as desirable difficulties, which demonstrates exactly how we will further raise the bar in a constructive manner that better reinforces long-term learning and performance. Desirable difficulties re-orients our normal crawl-walk-run approach, which currently focuses primarily on the student achieving competence at each level of “what” and “how” for a skill or subject area before moving to the next level. With the introduction of desirable difficulties, we are attempting to constantly force the student beyond their comfort zone (in fact, to keep them from developing one). Desirable difficulties applies constructive stress throughout the learning process to force students to constantly adjust, adapt and perform, through ambiguity, failure and constant change, to reinforce long-term learning. Most of us have exposure to the much more familiar practice of “Block Learning.” In Block Learning, students focus on one subject or specific set of information until we achieve whatever level of mastery is desired and then we move on and do not return. Think of your elementary school math class. You probably did a weeks-long unit on “Long Division” and then moved on to “Extended Fractions” and then moved on again. When you finished any given unit, you had a test or a quiz. You likely then did not return to the same unit again. Block learning like this is very effective for short-term retention and near-term test performance.
Interleaved learning, by contrast, varies the focus between multiple different subjects, sets of information, techniques, approaches, etc., moving from one to the other and back again. While it might seem that this would detract from learning that is not the case. Interleaved learning has been demonstrated to improve long-term learning and performance in comparison with block learning. Interleaved learning appears to achieve this by forcing the student to engage in a more cognitively rigorous learning process, which aids retention. Given that Marines must apply warfighting skills and knowledge at irregular intervals with, in some cases, years between instances, a practice shown to promote long-term learning in this way has particular value to us