The Missing Link
by Kelly Fodel, SOTECH Correspondent
Naval Special Warfare Command has recently completed a pilot course designed to establish and enhance an educational path for NSW midgrade SEAL officers. As more SEAL officers are added in the coming years and their leadership positions continue to grow, the Naval Special Warfare Command and Center recognized the importance of professional military education to develop the officer corps. Special Operations Technology has interviewed two of the men who helped establish this pilot education program.
GENESIS
The push to structure NSW officers’ professional military education received a boost with the 2007 Master’s thesis of SEAL Lieutenant Commander Thomas Donovan. “He was very passionate about professionally developing the officer corps,” said Brad Voigt, officer of professional development for the Center for SEAL and SWCC (Special Warfare Combatant- craft).
Donovan’s thesis outlined the critical need for better educating a SEAL junior officer, as well as the best and most efficient ways to meet educational needs. “It was kind of the genesis for the SEAL officers and myself, who thought we could be doing something at the lieutenant level,” said Voigt. “We are doing things differently than we were before the war on terror started. We are facing different problems, and lieutenants are facing different problems.”
Historically, a SEAL officer in training has followed a specific continuum. Following his six months of basic training in Basic Underwater Demolition School (BUD/S), he will be pulled out of the regular SEAL pipeline to attend the five-week Junior Officer Training Course (JOTC) before going on to complete SEAL Qualification Training (SQT). The new NSW SEAL LT Career Course is part of that training continuum, taught between BUD/S and SQT.
“In that JOTC course, we hit some of the same subjects as the new SEAL lieutenant career course, but [in JOTC] it is at a more basic level, and not as many subjects. It is more of an introduction to the military decision- making process at the tactical level,” said Lieutenant Commander Josh C. Butner, director of professional military education at the Naval Special Warfare Center.
The new career course fills a missing link in SEAL officer education. “There needed to be some sort of 03-level lieutenant officer professional development formally done in our community,” said Voigt. “We found a need coming off the battlefield, that we need to better train and educate our lieutenants.”
“The ideal candidate for our SEAL lieutenant career course is the SEAL officer who has done an assistant platoon commander deployment and has returned and now is in a billet to be a platoon commander and is at the beginning of his professional deployment, about a year and half out from his deployment,” said Butner.
In addition, the SEAL lieutenant career course satisfies the requirement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop joint professional military education programs. Each service must develop its officers through service-specific professional military education. “It is a tiered approach that the Army and the Marines are doing quite well, I think. We are excited as a small community to build this on our own,” said Voigt.
“Some of that legislation that focused on that joint-ness … we have developed the course [keeping in mind] the need for our NSW officers to be joint right from the get-go,” Butner said. “The course is as much joint as it is Naval Special Warfare, in fact, because that is just the nature of the business. The majority of our professors and instructors were from Joint Command, or Army or Marine Corps Command or Air Force. They came in and spoke about what they did specifically, and how they did it, and how we can integrate what they do, because that is the reality of the battlefield.”
With the need for a specific lieutenant career course established, leaders at the Naval Special Warfare Command went about structuring and developing the program. As they put it, they sought feedback straight from the horse’s mouth.
“We did a survey of the community. We asked 03s to 06s to identify the shortfalls. What exactly were you short of? What didn’t you know that you need to know? We asked senior officers what lieutenants didn’t know that they needed to know,” said Voigt. “People felt this was important … to take the survey and give us input.”
PILOT PROGRAM
“We are trying to educate them [not just] to the practicality of the things they are going to use, but also have them begin to look up and out, so they understand all the implications of the actions of their platoons on the battlefield,” said Butner.
With that in mind and survey results in hand, Brad Voigt and Tom Donovan set about determining the skills they wanted graduates of the first NSW SEAL lieutenant course to walk away with. “We came up with 15 skill sets that SEAL lieutenants and their seniors thought they should be getting more education on,” said Voigt. These included topics such as fire support and tactical battlefield operations. They also came up with some general knowledge sets, like counterinsurgency theory and national security.
In establishing a curriculum, they turned to the Army Captains Career Course Director. The Army and Marines have a school where they teach their 03s, so Voigt wanted to get their perspective and opinions to see if their curriculum could transfer to the SEAL lieutenant program. In many cases, it did.
“We don’t have the SEAL lieutenants to teach and spend time teaching, so the model we follow is bringing in the subject matter experts. Our goal was to get the best person in the world to come and teach. The result was that we got a lot of Ph.D. folks or subject matter experts in their fields to come in and teach the topics,” Voigt said. Of the approximate 40 instructors for the NSW SEAL lieutenant course, less than half were SEALs.
The program aims to replicate much of the knowledge that is taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, just in a shorter time frame. The NPS is considered the gold standard in officer education. “If NSW had the time and money, we would send all of our lieutenants there for Naval Postgraduate School,” said Voigt. “So, the next best thing is to take a lot of the expertise there, condense it down, distill it, and get it into the SEAL lieutenant course in a similar format.”
The pilot program took place in June 2008, with 11 students completing the four-week course at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, Calif. Subject matter experts were brought into town to teach approximately 40 seminar and discussion courses.
The curriculum included everything from advanced warfare and theory, to unconventional warfare, to ethics and leadership. Students were even instructed in naval writing and public speaking. Why public speaking? NSW believes that the way their folks conduct themselves in places like embassies or in front of other commanders is critically important.
SEAL lieutenants were even taught subjects you might not expect, including conventional principles. Since the Army and Marines learn these principles and SEALs often work closely with conventional forces, it makes sense that SEALs must understand the topic. “It was a surprising need that we found in the process [of researching and surveying lieutenants and their commanders],” said Voigt.
Special attention was paid to being a good leader in every way imaginable. For example, students were instructed on how to mentally prepare their platoons to return home, and the psychological impact of repeated deployments.
Providing a wide array of material in such a short period of time proved to be a delicate balancing act. Organizers say they could have filled eight weeks with information for students, but commanders cannot spare their SEALs for that long. “The perfect way to train is to take them into the actual environment and be shown in that environment. So every step back from that realistic educational training is a compromise,” said Butner.
Feedback from the students was positive. “It was stuff they had never received, and it was stuff that was relevant and important to the role of a leader. So I think we did pretty good with this first course,” Voigt said.
FUTURE OF THE PROGRAM
The next NSW SEAL lieutenant career course is scheduled for January 2009. This time, the course will likely be five weeks long and feature fewer topics. This is to increase learning and absorption by the students. “We’re always battling how much we can introduce and how much we can instruct and how much the student can learn,” said Butner.
They plan on holding the course every six months. The SEALs make up a small community, so the goal is to send 15 to 20 officers through each session. Though it is a bit early to say, the Naval Special Warfare Command may mandate the SEAL lieutenant career course as professional military education. Already, Butner believes that the West Coast Commodore Group One has mandated that west coast teams will attend.
For now, the focus is on studying the feedback from the pilot program to improve the course in the future. If the pilot is any indication, the NSW SEAL lieutenant career course is bound to be highly educational and worthwhile for junior officers. Voigt said one student gave the program high marks in his critique, saying he learned more in four weeks than in the past five years of his career. You can’t ask for a more positive review than that. ♦