Making Professional Military Education More Agile in the Air Force
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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. I was so pleased to welcome Lieutenant General Andrea Tullis back on the show. We talked about her experiences and insights into professional military education, both for the Joint Force and especially the Air Force. Enjoy the conversation.

Thanks for coming back on the show. I think this is your fourth time on the show. Yeah, no, that actually surprises me. It seems like yesterday that I did one, but it's good to come back. Well, you've been president and commander of our university for almost three years now. I think that makes you probably the most long-serving head of a PME institution in the Joint Force. In recent history. In recent history. It's a little unusual. Currently, I mean, currently, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's probably true. And I think that probably gives you a lot of unique insights on

where professional military education stands today, where you think it needs to go in the future, what its value is. And I appreciate you dropping by to talk about those things. I will admit I'm a two-year command design person. So the third year, it's been challenging, professionally challenging. And as I do think there are certain things that because I've been there long enough to be able to look back and reflect, it's been helpful. So I probably would say that

It's an opportunity to get after some of the things that literally just take time. I mean, things, there is a life cycle and two years is certainly not long enough to see some of the progress that we need to make in the PME enterprise. And that I think we're making.

Sometimes incrementally, and that's dissatisfying. I'll talk a little bit about that because we need to be more agile and a little faster. But I think we're in a good place. When I say we're in a good place, I think the Air Force is in a good place. I think all of the services are in a little bit of a different place. So some of our sister services will be in a better place on items that we would say, oh, yeah, we're really struggling there. But this is why I think it's really important that people realize that

The services all perform a unique role and mission. And I am very passionate about saying I'm not a believer in just having one joint purple PME that services the entire force. I think there is a real value to having domain expertise. And you see that when everyone comes together for joint PME. But we can't do that by trying to just sort of spread out

everyone's expertise and go down to one. I know there's a lot of debate of why can't we just have one school and send everybody to one school? That is what some of our European allies do, for example. Yeah. And it is a model. It can work. Some of those countries are much smaller than we are. Some of them's force design is very different. Some of them are prescripted and then they have career officers who are able to serve a lot longer.

than ours. Our model's just different. I went to a conference and we had our UK counterparts and our Canadian counterparts there, and it's always great to have them in the room because we talk about those things. What are the differences in the models? What's best of breed? Some of those are the law. There's actually laws and statutes that govern how we do things. And how do we be more collaborative? And how do we leverage best of breed? When you look at the pacing threat, China,

and the Air Force case of professional military education. What are some of those things you think that the Air Force really needs to do in-house when it comes to professional military education that can't be done in a joint institution? As great as National Defense University is, of course. Yeah, so I think what we've been working on the last two to three years is I think the Air Force strayed over the last, I'll call it two decades, out of necessity. We have been engaged in overseas operations extensively

Really, since the end of Desert Storm, we've come up with a little bit of our own unique Air Force language. We understand it. We've spoken it. It has a lot to do with air expeditionary forces and rotational deployments. We've disaggregated a lot of our capabilities down to singletons and really focused on

I'll call it servicing the customer, however small and short duration it was. And what that did to us is we walked away from... Sorry to interrupt, but you're referring to a lot of the 9-11 wars, basically, where the Air Force was a supporting service. Absolutely. Low-intensity conflict, operating from sanctuary areas, we're on our own timelines, we can move our logistics at a time of need, just in time, this, that, or the other.

operating, rotating from the state side over to a conflict area and then coming out of a conflict area and returning home to reconstitute. And so what that allowed us to do, particularly in the use of air operations centers, is you have a small cadre of highly skilled staff officers who that's their role. And then the rest of the force is doing a functional mission.

They're coming together to form a team at either an intermediate base or a forward operating base. And they don't need the kind of rigor in the joint planning process. They don't need to necessarily understand joint terminology until they show up, because I will say we're rapid adapters, we're rapid learners, and so we're doing a lot of things just in time. We can't do that for what a high-intensity fight that is global, that has no sanctuary areas.

And so we've spent the last couple years pushing that knowledge and distributing it across our force. So starting it at a session, so our second lieutenants are going to understand what an A staff is, you know, that very much looks like a joint staff and mirrors our sister services. This is what makes the Air Force different in that all of its education falls under, and some training falls under, Air University.

Whereas the other services, it's distributed differently. So it allows you to have this sort of continuum from that first touch point all the way to the most senior level education. Yeah, and so we've gone a lot to distributed learning. You know, a lot of our online content hadn't changed in decades. We learned a ton from the COVID experience on what we can do and should do distributed and what doesn't work very well and can only be done in person. And so our captains and company grade officers and NCOs are now getting introduced to

to the execution of mission command, which is very much a joint philosophy and practice, much earlier. And so it shouldn't be dependent upon your specialty. It should be, I'm a member of the profession of arms, and if I choose to stay past one tour of duty, when I say we, we as an Air Force, we owe you education and training. And so we should be pouring into you episodically but consistently throughout your career.

And some of it should be on demand. We have unbelievably talented inquisitive learners coming in the door, and they shouldn't have to wait to get access to content until they have a certain number of years in service or time in grade. They should be able to go online and access that content at the point of need. And how has all the different parts of our university, and this is probably too big of a question, but you could probably narrow it down for me, this concept of ACE, of

of agile combat employment where there's no single sanctuary, where you have to spread your forces and distribute and operate as such, especially in a scenario that we hope never happens, of course, but with a high-end fight with China.

How does an institution like your university both contribute to how that works and make sure that airmen are ready for that? Yeah, so this goes all the way back to our Air Corps Tactical School roots. So we serve as our chief of staff's think tank and standing research task force. And so I'll give our LeMay Center, which is led by Major General Parker Wright, some kudos here. That first starts with doctrine. So we send out a series of doctrine notes to the force that say, look, this is the direction we're going. This is where our chief of staff is taking us.

And doctrine isn't, it's not the law. It just gives you the right and left limits and sort of describes what history tells us our operations, which for air power, our agility, our ability to have centralized command, distributed control, and decentralized execution, how we operate within that. And then the next step is you bake those concepts into every echelon of our training. And you leverage mobile education teams to send out to the operational force. You train trainers. We

We participate in major theater exercises. Your listeners may be familiar with the exercises like Bamboo Eagle. We're going to do something called ReforPAC this summer. The European theater is very much used to doing reforgers and all kinds of exercises with our allies and partners. And so we have small teams on the ground there that observe, that assist, that train the staffs, and then that come back and do lessons learned and then infuse that into our curriculum so that

it should be invisible to the airmen. You know, they show up one day and they're getting more literate, I would say, at some levels. That's kind of in the middle because the second lieutenants and our airmen at basic training are getting this at the point of entry. And then they're becoming fluent. So the 10-month schools

have redesigned themselves and infused war gaming, educational war gaming, and the curriculum that enables commanders and staff officers to operate this way into their student experience. So it's been energizing for me to see. Yeah, I think when a lot of people that haven't experienced professional military education think about it, they might think about, well, they're just focused on

theory and international relations, which is not to say that international relations isn't there and isn't important, but so much of it really comes down to war fighting and thinking about strategy and operations. Yeah, so we are a practitioner school. All of our students are on scholarship. They all have a job waiting for them. They are going to have to go back out into a unit and actually practice what we're teaching.

And failure is not an option. So mistakes happen. We expect them to be learning opportunities, but our nation expects that we won't fail.

And so it's serious business. And so our research is deliberately tailored towards the art and science of air warfare. Our sister services that come to school with us, we have students from across the interagency. We have allies and partners that are in our classrooms with us. That is all designed so that we make our mistakes in the classroom so that we don't on the battlefield. And so it's a serious business. So we are not like the other educational institutions across

across the nation were very purposefully built. Zooming out a little bit, what are some things you think the Air Force writ large should be charging towards to make sure its

it's ready for this sort of more dangerous world that we're heading into. Yeah, so our big effort right now is if you think about professional military education, only about 30% of our force and even a smaller percentage of our National Guard and Reserve Force has the opportunity to come to Maxwell Air Force Base in person and experience PME. 70% then are out there doing the job every day and they are forced simply by our design

to do it through distributed learning. Some people are really good at retaining that and quite frankly leadership, which is the most important thing we teach, is really hard to do through a screen.

And so we are working on an entirely new delivery construct for how we enable the 70% of the force who can't come for 10 months to get educated. And so it's called Agile Learning. We started with our Air Command and Staff College, and we just went through a year of piloting and slapped the table on what's it going to look like going forward. And so now we're exporting that concept to both our officer and enlisted professional military education at every echelon.

so that the content, which is hosted online, you can choose to do the whole thing remotely, but you can also choose to do different blocks of instruction in different orders.

And then we'll have a capstone where maybe for three weeks, two to three weeks at a time, we bring everyone together or we send a team to you. So at a military installation, we'll bring together that organization, everyone who's enrolled and do tabletop exercises and leadership exercises and hands-on demonstrations of the learning outcomes have been achieved.

And so that's going to allow such a greater percentage of our force to have access to the content when they need it. And it really takes into account, I call it just like the way life is right now, right? So if you're in the National Guard or the Reserves, you didn't sign up for full-time learning and you have a full-time job aside from what you're doing on your weekends and during your two weeks of training. So the threat and the

And the complexity of the environment, I think, is one of the factors. But I think the other factor is this is the way people learn today. We have extraordinarily inquisitive learners. And if it's just knowledge-based, there's not a reason why we can't give you that content and let you do it at a time when you want to do it. Whether it's an audiobook, whether it's on your tablet, whether it's a hard copy because you chose to print it out and scribble notes on it.

There's a bunch of different options. And so that has been both energizing and frustrating for our faculty because we have found some people love it. Some of our best instructors in the classroom hate doing online learning. And we have found some who absolutely love doing the remote podcast learning, and that's all they want to do. So it's going to take a minute for us to, I would say, separate out and sort of redesign the

what our instructor cadre looks like so that we're leveraging that expertise. I think one of the exciting things is it gives us better options for bringing in what I'll call expert instructors that are contingent instructors because you're the expert on information operations and you're the expert on how to do a podcast. And so we're going to aggregate across the globe all of the people that need to be able to do what you do. And I'm going to say, hey, Ryan Evans is going to do a one-hour block of instruction on how to do a podcast. And

And it's going to be distributed learning. And you're going to get credit for that because that's the way the world should be able to function right now. And if you're zooming out, I can already see it coming together. So everything from contested logistics to all these warfare tasks, that's very exciting. What's the timeline for rolling all this out? So we're going to do two more pilots each.

It's a really exciting part to me because we're going to do it overseas this time because we want to see if we can get our allies and partners to participate at the overseas locations. Right now, it's really hard. So there's two big obstacles for our allies and partners. One is English language skills, right? So in order for us to make it into our in-residence courses, you have to get a certain score on the TOEFL. And for some countries, that's hard. The second is cost, right? So you have to be able to afford...

and get through the State Department processes for either what we call foreign military sales or the IMET education and training. And it can take two years for someone who you identify wants to go to training to show up. So in this model, if you're in Europe, if you're in the Pacific, and you're stationed in proximity with one of our U.S. Air Force bases, and you're sponsored by your host nation, so let's say you're in the U.K. and you're in the RAF regiment and you're near Mildenhall or Lakenheath, and we're offering adjuncts,

agile learning, you can be in the class with the same people that you work with and operate with every day and complete that. And so how many more students would they be able to put through our training? Again, leadership first, and it's about relationship building. These are the officers that we're going to be operating with on our worst day and on our best day.

particularly for the Pacific nations where it's the tyranny of distance, you know, bringing someone back from Japan or South Korea who might not be able to give 10 months, but if they can take some of it online and then show up for three weeks at Yokota or at Osan or Kunsan and be in a classroom with the officers that they're going to be working with in an air operations center or flying with, the potential there is amazing. And their leadership that I've spoken with

they're thirsting for it because they know that this is how we want to operate. And they're huge proponents of education. They are true believers. And then they're also acculturated to our way of doing business. And they're introduced to the way we operate, not just in wartime, but in peacetime. This is great. Thanks so much for coming back on the show. Yeah, that was awesome. Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the War on the Rocks podcast. Do not forget to check out our membership program at warontherocks.com slash membership. And we also have a new podcast that you may have heard of called Cogs of War. You can find it on your podcast app of choice. It's about defense technology and industry. I think you will love it if you care about these topics. Stay safe and stay healthy.