01 May 2020
UNCLASSIFIED

1

Foreword

The profound and rapidly changing character of war and conflict in the 21st 

century compels us to transform our leader development to maintain our 

competitive advantage and successfully prepare for the emerging ways of war 

our Nation could face. 

Our collective aim is the development of strategically minded joint warfighters, 

who think critically and can creatively apply military power to inform national 

strategy, conduct globally integrated operations, and fight under conditions of 

disruptive change. 

This document provides the shared vision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the 

outcomes we should strive for and lays out guidance to obtain them. This vision 

is intended to guide the development of leader development strategies and talent 

management approaches that will in turn produce the leaders required by the 

Nation.
UNCLASSIFIED

2

Developing Today’s Joint Officers for Tomorrow’s Ways of War 

The Joint Chiefs of Staff Vision and Guidance for

Professional Military Education & Talent Management

There is more to sustaining a competitive advantage than acquiring hardware; 

we must gain and sustain an intellectual overmatch as well. The agility and 

lethality of the force must be applied 

appropriately to deter, fight, and win against 

adversaries who have studied our methods 

and prepared themselves to offset our 

longstanding military superiority. This cannot 

be achieved without substantially enhancing 

the cognitive capacities of joint warfighters to 

conceive, design, and implement strategies 

and campaigns to integrate our capabilities 

globally, defeat competitors in contests we 

have not yet imagined, and respond to activity 

short of armed conflict in domains already 

being contested. 

The 21st century demands American officers be far better educated and more 

capable of directing and integrating the Nation’s military instrument. The 

intellectual capabilities described above are developed over a career and not as a 

result of episodic educational opportunities, especially when those opportunities 

are neither current nor rigorous. Rather, these capabilities are honed over 

thousands of hours of deliberate practice, pushing cognitive limits and 

intellectual performance. An officer’s career must be designed to continually 

develop, refine, and exercise new intellectual skills, especially up to and 

including the most senior ranks. 

Achieving our leader development aim requires a new trajectory for our 

professional military education (PME) that must include associated talent 

management systems. Our vision is for a fully aligned PME and talent 

management system that identifies, develops, and utilizes strategically minded, 

critically thinking, and creative joint warfighters skilled in the art of war and the 

practical and ethical application of lethal military power. 

THE SECURITY ENVIRONMENT AND GLOBAL INTEGRATED OPERATIONS 

Up to now, our PME programs have turned out officers who have served the 

Joint Force and our country admirably. The National Defense Strategy and the 

National Military Strategy clearly make the case that our security environment 

is changing. The return of great power competition raises the stakes for 

readiness and for innovation. While change is inherent to our understanding of 

war’s character, the accelerating pace and convergence of new technologies 

The evolving and dynamic 

security environment, which 

includes disruptive changes in 

the character and conduct of 

warfare, demands immediate 

changes to the identification, 

education, preparation, and 

development of our joint 

warfighters. 
UNCLASSIFIED

3

portends dramatic changes in how conflicts are waged, and thus requires

profound change in how we plan for and execute operations. To succeed in 

deterring or winning the conflicts of the future, we must similarly adapt our 

leader development enterprise and not shy away from fundamental change 

where appropriate. For the Joint Force, changes in the character and conduct of 

war and operations demand: 

• Continuous integration of national instruments of power and influence in

support of national objectives;

• Critical strategic thinking across the Joint Staff and other joint

headquarters;

• Unprecedented degree of global integration of the all-domain resources

available from our Combatant Commands to generate advantage for

ourselves and dilemmas for our competitors;

• Creative approaches to joint warfighting and sustaining momentum in our

campaigns;

• Highly effective coalition, allied, international partner and U.S.

coordination and integration; and

• Deeper understanding of the implications of disruptive and future

technologies for adversaries and ourselves.

These emerging intellectual requirements have not been the focus of our current 

leader development enterprise. We can do better at linking the selection of our 

students, the school they attend and what they learn there, and their 

subsequent assignments. We must consistently prioritize critical and creative 

thinking, continuous learning and professional development, and the pursuit of 

transregional and cross-domain excellence in the development and assignment 

of joint warfighters. We will collectively identify follow-on assignments that 

continue to exercise and build the new intellectual capital created through PME. 

Our country requires warfighting leaders and staff officers capable of waging war 

and leading in a dynamic, globally integrated environment. We cannot simply 

rely upon mass or the best technology. In the future, that technology may be in 

the hands of our opponents. Our job is to learn how to apply our capabilities 

better and more creatively. 

These requirements increase the demands on our leadership development 

continuum that we are not yet meeting. Put plainly, we require leaders at all 

levels who can achieve intellectual overmatch against adversaries. To 

achieve this, we must continue to adapt and innovate throughout our PME 

programs and talent management efforts to shift our policies, behaviors, and 
UNCLASSIFIED

4

cultures to keep pace with the changing character of war. The cognitive 

capabilities these leaders bring to globally integrated operations are not solely 

the output of a 10-month course; they are the product of a deliberate careerlong professional development ethos and learning continuum. 

DESIRED LEARNING CONTINUUM END STATES 

The development of leaders requires an enterprise-wide and holistic approach. 

Joint leader development for the 21st century is the product of a learning 

continuum composed of training, staff and operational experience, education, 

exercises, and self-development/improvement. To achieve intellectual overmatch 

against adversaries, we must produce the most professionally competent, 

strategic-minded, and critically thinking officers possible. Our established 

Desired Leader Attributes guide us toward this. Following is the vision for 

enhanced learning continuum end states for PME and Talent Management.

Requisite Joint PME End States. PME and JPME programs must provide 

graduates the initial knowledge and skills to prepare them for service as 

warfighting joint leaders, senior staff officers, and strategists who: 

• Discern the military dimensions of a challenge affecting national interest,

frame the issue at the policy level, and recommend viable military options

within the overarching frameworks of globally integrated operations;

• Anticipate and lead rapid adaptation and innovation during a dynamic

period of acceleration in the rate of change in warfare under the

conditions of great power competition and disruptive technology;

• Conduct joint warfighting, at the operational to strategic levels, as alldomain, globally integrated warfare, including the ability to integrate

allied and partner contributions; and

• Are strategically minded warfighters or applied strategists who can

execute and adapt strategy through campaigns and operations. All

graduates should possess critical and creative thinking skills, emotional

intelligence, and effective written, verbal, and visual communications

skills to support the development and implementation of strategies and

complex operations.

Requisite Joint Talent Management End States. Service talent management 

systems must provide officers opportunities to refine their existing knowledge 

and develop increasingly agile intellectual skills. Toward this end, these systems 

should: 
UNCLASSIFIED

5

• Reward continuous intellectual development and growth;

• Make individual officers accountable for academic performance and

record that performance in their permanent records;

• Target officers who have performed well for follow-on assignments that

hone newly acquired skills or broadening opportunities to apply their

skills in different ways; and

• Match officers’ cognitive attributes with appropriate PME opportunities

and positions of responsibility.

CRITICAL TASKS 

The following outlines fundamental changes we need for modern leader 

development. 

Adapt and Innovate PME. Our PME enterprise must continuously assess, 

adapt, and innovate. We cannot afford to be complacent, nor can we afford to 

shortchange PME institutions and their students with barriers to effective 

learning or inadequate resources. Our first task is to reorient the PME 

enterprise to prepare joint officers to operate globally, across all domains, and 

lead decisively throughout the remainder of their careers. Initially we must shift 

our PME curricula from a predominately topic-based model to an outcomesbased approach and emphasize ingenuity, intellectual application, and military 

professionalism in the art and science of warfighting, while deepening 

knowledge of history. Staying current means that our work is not done once 

these initial tasks are complete. Warfare, geopolitics, technology, and 

instructional methods will continue to change, and our PME systems must keep 

pace. 

Infuse Joint Context throughout Officer Careers. We must reassess our 

current JPME framework in the context of demonstrated experience over the 

past 30 years to ensure we are evolving JPME requirements of the 21st century. 

Because the need for jointness is broader and deeper in an officer’s career than 

our traditional Service-based career models envisioned, we must infuse 

jointness earlier and deeper throughout an officer’s career. Service PME and 

leader development, not just intermediate and senior-level programs, require 

infusion of the joint context. At intermediate and higher levels, this entails the 

ability to synthesize capabilities across the Joint Force and in all domains. This 

wider synthesis must include the broader joint context that includes the 

interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational arena. In addition, our 

intermediate PME programs also must ensure they deliberately provide the 

practical preparation for their graduates to serve more effectively as staff officers 
UNCLASSIFIED

6

in our joint headquarters. We cannot afford to treat jointness as an afterthought 

that can be bolted on later, in the midst of a crisis. 

Develop Practical Warfighting Skills. The driving mindset behind our reforms 

must be that we are preparing for war. In future wars we envision all-domain 

operations to generate effective joint command and control, globally integrate 

effects, and conduct cross-domain fires and maneuver. Maneuver, via 

simultaneous combinations of both physical and cognitive capabilities, across 

an expanded battlespace seeks to directly create critical vulnerabilities in an 

adversary’s systems and generate multiple dilemmas. The Joint Force’s ability to 

create and exploit these all-domain dilemmas is a critical operational advantage 

in future contingencies across the conflict spectrum. Globally integrated and alldomain operations present challenges for tomorrow’s warfighters that our 

educational system must adapt to today. 

Being cognitively prepared to conduct these operations necessitates an 

adjustment in how we educate tomorrow’s warfighter. Our educational system 

must sustain our ability to apply the art and science of war to the generation of 

both creative applications of military force and asymmetric warfighting. PME 

schools must incorporate active and experiential learning to develop the 

practical and critical thinking skills our warfighters require. These 

methodologies include use of case studies grounded in history to help students 

develop judgment, analysis, and problem-solving skills, which can then be 

applied to contemporary challenges, including war, deterrence, and measures 

short of armed conflict. Curricula should leverage live, virtual, constructive, and 

gaming methodologies with wargames and exercises involving multiple sets and 

repetitions to develop deeper insight and ingenuity. We must resource and 

develop a library of case studies, colloquia, games, and exercises for use across 

the PME enterprise and incentivize collaboration and synergy between schools. 

To achieve deeper education on critical thinking, strategy, and warfighting, PME 

programs will have to ruthlessly reduce coverage of less important topics. 

Adapt and Innovate Talent Management. Our collective talent management 

enterprise, based on individual Service personnel processes, must likewise 

continuously assess, adapt, and innovate. The positive benefits of adaptation 

and innovation in our PME enterprise are suboptimized if we do not wisely 

identify and nurture the development of the human talent in the Joint Force. 

Our best and brightest must be identified, assigned to schooling, and employed 

in such a way that maximizes both their potential and the benefit for the Joint 

Force. Careful selection of who goes to school and when, who teaches them, 

assessments of cognitive abilities, and purposeful post-PME assignments 

require adaptation and innovation to realize this vision. 
UNCLASSIFIED

7

Identify the Right Students. Services must align the best talent to the right 

PME venue and then sequence that talent toward the most critical strategic 

assignments. Critically, senior-level PME attendance must be based on talent, 

potential for strategic responsibilities, and return on investment, rather than a 

fair share or mechanistic allocation of all occupational specialties across a 

particular Service. It is essential that officers with the highest potential to be the 

warfighting generals and admirals of the future attend a resident 10-month War 

College program, so that they receive a strategic education. PME schools also 

must ensure prospective students have the attributes and professional 

competencies to contribute to peer learning and succeed in the course by 

applying tools such as entrance examinations, applications, or screening 

criteria. 

Demand and Reward Academic Excellence. In-residence PME is an invaluable

period of intense reflection and application to prepare for assignments of greater 

responsibility. We must reinforce a culture across our Armed Forces that 

enables professionals to apply themselves and grow to their potential in 

challenging PME programs and top-tier graduate studies to build upon and 

enhance their operational experience. We shall foster an environment where 

students are inspired to master the fundamentals of the art and science of war 

in an atmosphere and culture that encourages intellectual curiosity, stimulates 

critical thinking, rewards creativity and risk-taking, and understands the value 

of multiculturalism and allied perspectives. To move to a higher trajectory, we 

must remove constraints on student learning by supporting various learning 

styles, behaviors, and individual desires. Schools should capture student 

performance and potential in academic evaluation reports that include research, 

writing, and analytic achievements and demonstrated leader attributes. We 

should ensure PME performance is linked to the selection and assignment 

processes. 

Foster Professional Faculty. A highly professional faculty is the core of 

success. A world-class educational program is not an accident, nor does it come 

cheap; it is the product of deliberate design, founded upon a top-notch faculty. 

Every PME institution must make sure its military and civilian faculty are 

qualified instructors and current in the fields they are teaching. The selection, 

development, and management of PME faculty, and military faculty in 

particular, demands greater emphasis. 

• We must incentivize the right officers to pursue a faculty assignment and

the Services to facilitate such assignments. As such, Services should

implement the full array of talent management programs to incentivize

faculty assignments. A faculty assignment should be competitive, career

enhancing, highlighted during promotion boards, and tracked to ensure

follow-on assignments capitalize on skills gained. A cultural change of this
UNCLASSIFIED

8

magnitude requires leaders, at all levels, to corporately value faculty 

assignments, eliminate roadblocks impeding progress, and remove any 

stigma devaluing the importance of educating our future senior leaders. In 

this vein, we should consider lifting the blanket exclusion of same Service 

officers receiving joint credit for faculty assignments at CJCS-accredited 

Service JPME programs, allowing our programs to nominate certain 

positions as joint. 

• We must reward teaching excellence; attract, develop, and retain highquality professional faculty in our learning institutions; and leverage

professional civilian faculty with the credentials to teach at the requisite

levels. Because PME curricula must be as dynamic as the environment,

our faculties must be fully resourced for experiential learning, research

and course design, and for continuous curriculum assessment,

improvement, and integration.

• Success also requires that we fully invest in our academic support

architecture. In addition to our facilities, we have to resource, sustain,

and protect vital academic support functions, to include education and

information technology, and the organizational activities needed to

empower faculty and enable students to achieve the learning outcomes.

Regard PME as a Strategic Asset. We must innovatively leverage PME 

programs and curricula as a strategic asset to build trust and cognitive 

interoperability across the Joint Force and to integrate allies and key U.S. and 

international partners. To further this element: 

• Our PME institutions must be an agile and adaptable enterprise.

Collaboration across our PME network enhances our programs, builds

synergy and deeper understanding, and enables us to focus on key

problems. In the process, the education enterprise can serve our joint

warfighters with rigorous studies and research, concept development, and

exercise design. Our PME enterprise must be dynamic. To remain

relevant, we must periodically assess our programs, validate missions and

focus, as well as determine gaps and where new programs are needed. At

the same time, we should strive to make our PME enterprise accessible to

the force that is not in residence and support self-development and unit

professional development programs, recognizing that these extend the

core mission.

• We must continue to incorporate allied and partner students within our

PME system to better prepare our own officers for global operations.

Strong relationships between PME institutions are also important to

support allied and partner PME programs as we innovate, creating
UNCLASSIFIED

9

opportunities for closer ties and deeper collaboration, and for greater U.S. 

student participation. 

• We must include both the Total Force and select Defense Department civil

servants into senior-level development programs and PME to ensure they

remain integral members of our staffs and operations. In addition, we

must strengthen our interagency and intergovernmental perspectives.

Align Education and Utilization of Talent. The deliberate, purposeful use of 

PME graduates is an essential task directly linked to better campaign outcomes. 

We require effective processes for the assignment and utilization of PME 

graduates to ensure follow-on assignments capitalize on academic achievements 

and learning. We must deliberately leverage the academic experience, research, 

and experiential learning of PME graduates to a much greater extent. We must 

ensure academic evaluations capture officer accomplishments and expertise to 

aid the talent management processes. To achieve the vision outlined herein, we 

must reward officers who exhibit intellectual excellence with appropriate 

assignments and the potential to remain competitive in their careers. 

Additionally, we need to ensure we are producing a sufficient number of joint

qualified officers in our JPME system for the Joint Staff and joint headquarters. 

Leverage Joint Exercises. The use of exercises is a key part of the continuum 

of learning as well. We must be prepared to place exercise participants into 

situations of uncertainty and complexity where creativity, adaptability, critical 

thinking, and initiative are stressed and demonstrated. The planning and 

application of cross-domain capabilities should be a key part of these exercises 

as well to reinforce the developing cognitive capacity to recognize problems and 

opportunities and initiate rapid decision-making as an essential aspect of joint

integrated operations. Our joint exercises should be leveraged as a feedback 

loop that links issues and lessons back into our leadership development and 

PME system. Conversely, our scholars and practitioners in PME can contribute 

their educational research to support our combatant commanders as well. 

Identify and Develop Strategists. We need a select cadre of officers who can 

meaningfully contribute to the formulation of strategies. The joint community 

requires processes to identify and develop strategists, not just operational and 

campaign planners. PME schools and general and flag officers all must play an 

active role in identifying strategic talent and innovators. Advanced civil 

schooling, fellowships, and broadening opportunities offer valuable 

augmentation to the JPME enterprise, but they must have clear outcomes and 

do not qualify as JPME attendance. A select number of the students in our PME 

programs will demonstrate the potential to be more than applied strategists; 

they will also have the skills to creatively design holistic and integrated politicalmilitary and cross-domain strategies or develop new doctrinal concepts. 
UNCLASSIFIED

10

Consequently, we must create and preserve opportunities in our curricula for 

specialization. We must identify these potential strategists and tailor programs 

for them to develop their thinking and contributions. 

OUR IMPERATIVE 

We face a future that demands a change in emphasis and urgency. We must

identify and select officers who display an intellectual edge and can outthink

our adversaries in war amidst uncertainty and disruptive change. Creating the 

intellectual overmatch and mental agility that we require cannot be achieved by 

intermittent education or by past experience alone. It is created by the 

purposeful combination of education, training, rigorous exercises, and 

application in the real world. To meet this imperative, we have set the trajectory 

for a continuous transformation that must begin immediately. We require a 

concerted effort across the Joint Force to establish the foundation to implement 

this vision. The result will be a cultural and intellectual shift in the Joint Force 

and the Services. 

An investment in the cognitive aspects of our profession is not enough. We must 

ensure we develop mechanisms that integrate PME programs and talent 

management, constantly assessing and adjusting, iteratively moving leader 

development along our steeper trajectory to address creatively our most critical 

warfighting needs. We have a collective responsibility that demands we act with 

all due speed. Our Nation deserves and requires nothing less. 
Published by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2020 

An electronic version can be found online at: https://www.jcs.mil/Doctrine/