High Level Military Education

8/9/2019 High Level Military Education

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Challenges. General De la Rosa mentioned them during the Opening speech.

The rapid evolving nature of Security and Defense make the education of our

cadres particularly important and difficult these days. Younger generations

demand new methods while new types of operations imply the need to teach

and train new techniques better suited to carry them out.

As for HOW to teach, our young staffers were born in the era of cell phones,

GPSs, laptops and the internet. Their mindsets are digital. They refuse to

search in a sequential way as we did in encyclopedias, they google it for a

point-to-point access. Now is measured in milliseconds and Home is round

and blue as seen from space.

Younger generations demand that we relate with them digitally too. Not jus t by

using VTCs or the Web for everything. They were born in a Global World and

understand it far better than we do.

That is not, by any means, an advantage. The world today is far more complex

than the one twenty years ago, and the knowledge that they wil l need to face its

challenges is very different from what it was required during the Cold War or the

Gulf War.

What we need now is flexibility, an open mind and the ability to relate dispersedpieces of information so that we make sense of scattered data. It is very unlikely

that we will have all the data available in a timely manner. It is not so much

having all the pieces of the puzzle as knowing how to look at what we have and

being able to see the whole picture.

And we need our Officers to be able to wo rk in a team. And we need them to be

able to lead it properly. They will have to lead not conscripts with hardly any

training but highly skilled personnel, so their leadership will have to be unlike

what we were used to.

They will have to work indeed, we already are not only within the narrow

margins of their own national service. Even Joint Operations are a thing of the

past. Combined-Joint was the next step; and a difficult one for many. We had to

learn how to deal with other militaries from different services. We worked hand


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in hand with our former opponents and boarded planes from Eastern European

nations which, conversely, were flying using NATO procedures.

Today, internal and foreign relations are ever more difficult to separate. Our

partners today when we go to work are diplomats, policemen, firefighters and

even long-haired NGO militants. Learning their ways and having them learn

ours will be as necessary as knowing how to work with our own Army or Air

Force.

But our Officers not only need to be familiar with Operations. Management of

resources of all type in an efficient way will be required on a daily basis. More

and more war is becoming the continuation of business by other means and the

involvement of national industries will also be a key fac tor we will have to

ponder.

Building on those ideas we developed the Curriculum of the Staff Course in the

Higher Defense College in Madrid. We are now in the process of updating it so

that it better adapts to the needs of our Armed Forces.

We start by providing our students with key background information they need

to be familiar with prior to arriving to the course. They should arrive with the

scattered information we mentioned before and we intent to provide the method

so they can make the most of it.

The Staff Course goes from the whole to the parts. We start with an overview of

how the World is organized, how it is governed, which and where are the

challenges. A strategic analysis of key areas both for our national interests and

for those of our allies is our first step.

Next, we will focus on Operations themselves. Once we understand where we

are going to fight, with whom and what for, we concentrate on HOW to do it. Westay up in the Strategic and the Operational Levels. Moreover, we keep

Operations and Logistics hand in hand as one cannot succeed without the

other. Our students learn how to plan and how to best use the assets they have

at their disposal. They not only grasp the idea of deploying forces but also of

force generation and sustainability.


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Most of the rest of the course will focus on practicing what they have learned

through a series of exercises designed to mimic real operations planning within

the limits of a school class.

Some people are born leaders, for all the rest, there is a method we can use to

make up for our lack of natural talent. Leadership is one of our key topics and

we will devote quite some time to it.

Students from the Diplomatic School and the Journalism School will participate

along with representatives of Medecins sans Frontiers or the Red Cross in

some or those exercises so that we grow used to working with them and vice

versa.

Finally, we will devote some time to new threats and to the role of the ArmedForces as a tool of the State for operations other -than-war . We speak of cyber

defense, space, terrorism, migrations, climate change, energy security, you

name it. And we just give them the tools to discuss the topics. We make sure

there are teachers available to lead the seminars and let them develop the

ideas.

Our Armed Forces are evolving and we intent to evolve one step before them.

In our College, we believe that our students need to master the ability to

investigate and analyze. That is central in our idea of higher military education.

That is why we provide the papers they need to know beforehand but also

demand they do some investigation on their own.

Then, our Tutor-teachers will lead the discussions and individual works and

engage with the students in further investigation and development of the

subjects, mostly in syndicate groups of no more than 10-15 students.

The ability to transmit what you know or think in a coherent way is something all

Staff Officers need. Our most important task is to inform our superiors in a

precise, concise and to-the-point way. That feature has to be developed to the

maximum extent possible.


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Excellency being our goal, there is a number of nations who entrust their

Officers to our College. All in all, 37 countries have, so far, sent their personnel

to ESFAS to get their Staff Degree. Of course, most nations in the 5+5 are

represented every year.

But there is more to our College than the Staff Course. We also have the Flag

Officers Course which our Colonels have to take prior to being promoted.

Unlike the Staff Course, this one is at least for the time being only for

national students.

Becoming a General Officer is much more than taking another step from the

former rank. All of the attendees are already highly competent professionals

who excelled in long years of service. The program is not designed to teach

them anything but to provide them with the latest strategic, political and

economical information available so they are in an excellent starting position.

ESFAS is part of the CESEDEN (Spanish Center for National Defense Studies) ,

which also includes EALEDE (Higher Defense Studies College). Meant to serve

as a civilian-military College in Security and Defense issues, EALEDE provides

tuition for many courses, namely, the National Defense Course, the Human

Resources Management Course, the Logistic Management Course,

Infrastructure Management Course and the Financial Resources Management

Course, European Security and Defense Course, 5 + 5 Course, Higher Latin-

American Officers Course, Afghan Officers Course and the Security and

Defense Master.

They include both military and civilian students and constitute the basis for

some of the investigative activity of the Center.

They say that modern warfare is about winning the hearts and minds. Muscle

is fought with muscle but if you are to win hearts and minds you have to build

better hearts and better minds for your own people.

And that is our goal.

Thank you.

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High Level Military Education