emsenn

SKILL

4 min read

Research Military Command (21st-century)

This skill is for researching contemporary military command (C2, mission command, staff work, operational art, operational design, campaigning, readiness, force generation, and service-branch institutions) using professional military journals and PME institutions as primary gateways.

0) Define the question in the school’s language

Write one research question using 2–4 terms from the school glossary. Examples:

  • How do recent authors argue mission command changes under AI-enabled C2?
  • What do contemporary journals treat as the boundary between operational design and campaigning?
  • How is force generation described as an operational constraint in long-duration campaigns?

Anchor terms:

1) Build a 21st-century corpus (2000–present)

Use three layers:

  1. Doctrine layer (definitions and formats). This anchors terminology.
  2. Professional journal layer (what practitioners and PME institutions debate right now).
  3. Academic layer (peer-reviewed theory and empirical work; use to test and generalize).

Start with the professional journal layer because it captures living operational discourse.

2) Journals to search first (professional / PME-adjacent)

High-yield sources for command, joint operations, operational design, campaigning, readiness, and service enterprise:

  • Parameters (U.S. Army War College Quarterly)
  • Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ) (NDU Press)
  • Naval War College Review (Naval War College Press)
  • Military Review (Army University Press)
  • Air & Space Power Journal (Air University Press)
  • Journal of Advanced Military Studies (JAMS) (Marine Corps University Press)
  • Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute) (professional forum; not a war-college journal)

Optional (useful, but varies in review model / access):

  • RUSI Journal (RUSI)
  • Small Wars Journal (fast-turn discourse; good for topic discovery)
  • Journal of Defence Studies (MP-IDSA)

3) Leading military colleges (PME institutions)

Treat these as institutional vantage points on command and campaigning (and follow their presses/journals):

  • U.S. Army War College (USAWC Press, Parameters)
  • National Defense University (NDU Press, JFQ; joint colleges)
  • U.S. Naval War College (Naval War College Press, Naval War College Review)
  • Air University (Air University Press, Air & Space Power Journal; Air War College)
  • Marine Corps University (MCU Press, JAMS; Command and Staff College, Marine Corps War College)
  • UK Defence Academy / Joint Services Command and Staff College (JSCSC) (PME + academic partnership model)

Important note: many “military colleges” are not universities in the civilian sense; they are PME institutions. The research point is: where contemporary command discourse is produced, taught, and published.

4) International PME (university-linked models)

When you want 21st-century command discourse outside the U.S., look for official defence-college structures and their university partners (when they exist). Examples to seed a search corpus:

  • Australia: Australian Defence College → Australian War College (academic delivery partnerships vary; Deakin University provides academic/support services for the Australian War College contract from January 2023)
  • Australia: UNSW Canberra at ADFA (Australian Defence Force Academy)
  • Sweden: Swedish Defence University

Use these to broaden the “command and campaigning” corpus beyond one national doctrine stack.

5) Universities to watch (civilian scholarship that frequently intersects PME)

Use these when you need academic framing, methods, or historiography around command and campaigns:

  • Major war studies / strategic studies departments (e.g., War Studies, security studies, defence studies)
  • Centers focused on the changing character of war, military history, civil-military relations, or defense management

Keep the list short and curated for your actual question; the PME journals above are usually the fastest entry point.

6) Practical search patterns (fast)

Pick 2–3 query templates and keep a running log of what works.

  • Term + journal: "operational design" "Joint Force Quarterly"
  • Term + war college: "mission command" Parameters or "campaign" "Naval War College Review"
  • Institutional constraint: "force generation" readiness deployment cycle
  • Cross-service integration: "joint" theater "command and control"

When you find a strong article, extract:

  • the problem statement it assumes,
  • the doctrinal vocabulary it uses,
  • what it treats as the key constraint (time, information, logistics, politics, institutions),
  • and what it recommends (if anything).

7) Capture into the vault (minimal, repeatable)

For each source you keep:

  1. Add a bibliography.bib entry.
  2. Create (or update) a local note under the school:
    • new term → terms/
    • canonical work → works/
    • case → case-studies/
    • analysis/essay → texts/
  3. Add a 3-bullet summary:
    • Claim (what it argues)
    • Mechanism (how it says command/campaigning works)
    • Constraint (what breaks the model)

8) Quality checks

  • Prefer primary sources for definitions (doctrine / official dictionaries).
  • Distinguish peer-reviewed/refereed vs. professional forum outputs.
  • Keep library definitions aligned with doctrinal ones; use texts to explore critiques and tensions.

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