Interview by Tom Philpott

The mission of the National Defense University (NDU) at Fort McNair, Washington, D.C., is to educate officers, government civilians, and international officers in joint, multinational, and interagency operations. It does so through four colleges, two institutes, and five research centers. /// “I have the absolute best job in all of DoD,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn, president of the NDU. “Every day we’re making a difference, preparing future leaders, and pushing American values.” ///  A 1972 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., Dunn is a command pilot with more than 2,500 flying hours in the F-106 Delta Dart interceptor and F-15 fighters. He commanded the 1st Operations Group at Langley AFB, Va., in 1992 and 1993. He holds a master’s degree in systems management from the University of Southern California. /// A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dunn has served joint tours at Headquarters U.S. European Command; the Office of Deputy Secretary of Defense; Headquarters United Nations Command; and U.S. Forces Korea, where he was lead negotiator with the North Korean Army at P’anmunjom, Korea. Personal awards include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal with oak leaf cluster, the Defense Superior Service Medal, and the Legion of Merit. /// Before being appointed president of the NDU in June 2003, Dunn served as vice director for strategic plans and policy on the Joint Staff. In this interview, he discusses the NDU and the challenge of keeping a curriculum current in wartime. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

A hard-charging officer — performing well in assignment after assignment, learning his profession, and showing leadership — gets orders to the National War College (NWC) or the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF); why is that a good thing?
For officers, it shows they are in the top 25 percent of their year group, and the service has confidence in them. ICAF or the NWC provides an opportunity to get a master’s degree and to interact with officers of other services, international officers, and civilian officials from almost every department of government. Here’s a chance to think, write, read, reflect, and spend more time with the officer’s family.

We will put them in front of world-class faculty as well as distinguished speakers in and out of government, including every combatant commander, each of the Joint Chiefs, and the secretaries of Defense, State, and Homeland Security. I can’t even keep track of all the luminaries [appearing] here. They will travel overseas and around the States. They will see things and talk to people who prepare them for future leadership positions.

The services have their own professional military education tracks. How do the NDU colleges affect that?
ICAF just celebrated its 80th anniversary. The NWC soon will celebrate its 60th anniversary. These colleges have never taken away from the services’ colleges. What they do is provide a joint, international, and interagency look at national security. We’re at the high strategic level in trying to create thinkers. The services are at the strategic level and down a little into the operational level. So we’re complementary.

The driver behind joint professional military education (JPME) is the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. It cleverly tied together the education, assignment, and promotion systems. Fifty-one percent of ICAF and NWC graduates must go to joint assignments as they leave here. That assignment and their education here earn them a joint specialty officer designation. With that designation, they have an edge competing for promotions.

Do students apply or are they assigned?
Normally the services select their people. For civilians, each department has a different selection process. DoD has a very rigid process overseen by the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. It’s very competitive. People try very hard to get here because it is such a terrific experience for a mid-grade to senior-grade officer.

How did your graduation from ICAF in 1989 help you?
I was in that 49 percent who didn’t immediately go to a joint tour. But since my first joint tour in 1993, I have served only joint tours. This is my fifth. What I gained at ICAF was a perspective on “jointness,” [which is] hard to achieve without classroom experience.

There is no doubt that the synergies of jointness far surpass the capabilities that any one service brings to a problem. Congress has recognized that education for lieutenant colonels and colonels increasingly must be focused in a joint fashion. This year they gave DoD permission to have each of the service war colleges give JPME phase II credit to graduates as long as these schools achieve a diverse mix of students and faculty from all services.

What’s the difference between the NWC and ICAF?
The [NWC] goes deep into national security strategy, with students embarking on regional studies in the second half of the year. They look in a concentrated fashion at an area of the world. Near the end of the year they actually will go to that area, meet with foreign officials, interact with military counterparts, and talk to ambassadors and country teams. Many times they will get an audience with a nation’s president.

[ICAF] takes the curriculum of the war college and jams it into the first semester. The second semester is focused on the defense industry, which no longer means just building ships and planes, but also the software industry, health care systems, the media, [and] education. These [also] have a major impact on how America mobilizes to go to war.

ICAF students will first travel in the United States to see various key companies, and then they will travel abroad to see the foreign side.

You’ve taken courses at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Yet you maintain the NDU faculty is the best you’ve ever seen. Why?
They have a mixture of operational and academic expertise, and they’re always brought back to the real world by a student body that has 18 to 24 years of experience in the operational art. The faculty here can’t duck the tough questions. And they are not paid to research; they are paid to teach. Their full-time job is bettering students.

Additionally, we have a student-to-faculty ratio of 3.5-to-1 at the NDU major colleges. The next best in the country, when I looked two years ago, was [the California Institute of Technology] at 7-to-1.

There’s more to the NDU than ICAF and the NWC. Our biggest of four colleges, the Information Resources Management College, is probably our least known. It concentrates on the business and technology side of defense, awarding certificates for chief information officer, information assurance, information architecture, and e-government. Every course is delivered online — with no class time — so students are serving in the [Mediterranean], the Far East, or here in the United States. They are given assignments and a period of time to do it. Professors log on and lead discussions day and night. It’s a fascinating model, with 3,500 to 4,000 students a year.

We also have the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Va. [Teachers there] educate majors and lieutenant commanders, generally, adding JPME phase II to phase I education at service staff colleges. We have a course on information operations and a new course called Joint Advanced War-Fighting School. It’s an 11-month course that produces a joint operational planner. Our first [class] graduates in June.

Our mission is not only to educate tomorrow’s leaders, but [also] to create new thought and new thinkers through vigorous research. Research centers include an Africa Center; the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, which does Latin America; and a Near East and South Asia Center that [covers] Morocco to Bangladesh. We also coordinate closely with the Marshall Center and the Asian-Pacific Center.

Our oldest center is the Institute for National Strategic Studies. The newest is the Institute for Homeland Security Studies. Between those bookends is a Center for the Study
of Weapons of Mass Destruction, a [Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs], and the Center for Technology and National Security Policy.

What changes in JPME are under way at the NDU?
In my 20 months here, we have decided we need to broaden the JPME. We have a major’s course [for] majors; ICAF and the NWC [for] lieutenant colonels and colonels; and Capstone, a mandatory course for new one-stars.

We’ve recently created a new course, Pinnacle, for three-stars or future joint task force (JTF) commanders. We had our first course last October. We’ve also created a curriculum of instruction for O-1s to O-3s who are going to be part of a JTF and want to know about jointness.

Finally, we’ve developed joint educational programs for senior enlisted. One is called Senior Leader Enlisted Education. The other, modeled after Capstone, is Keystone. These have yet to be approved by the Joint Chiefs.

How well-read are officers arriving as students?
Very well [read], but it can always be improved. I recently asked our 10 students from industry, who pay tuition to study at ICAF, how they would grade our military students in terms of awareness of the world. They gave them absolutely top marks. Many said they are taking names for when they need somebody 10 years into the future.

Rep. Ike Skelton [D-Mo.], kind-of our grandfather of JPME, has a reading list — mostly historical works — of about 50 books. Recognizing that formal JPME occurs in chunks, three to five years apart, we think we need a way to keep our officers academically engaged. So with Skelton’s help, we created a pilot program that offers students the opportunity to buy 10 books [from] Skelton’s reading list, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ reading list, my reading list, or the commandant’s reading list. As a condition, they agree to participate in an online discussion [about] that book sometime over the next two years.

What most surprises students when they come to the NDU?
Most have come from long deployments or combat duty in Iraq or Afghanistan [and are used to] working 16-hour days. They are most surprised about the white space on the schedule. We give them time to think, relax, and kick back. Many are not used to that. We give them time for PT in the morning. We talk to them about health, about taking care of their family’s health.

Are there many foreign students?
About 10 percent of ICAF and the NWC are international students. This year we have 52. These people will succeed in their military. We have a hall of fame, about 25 officers, who rose to become either chief of defense or chief of staff of their service or to command a major multinational operation.

That helps build alliances?
The payoff is huge. We have people we know, who know us, who we nurture with information and time. It makes military operations tremendously more effective because they know our capabilities. There’s also an advantage to American taxpayers because the international officer who studies here is going to be more inclined to look at U.S. military equipment.

We’re at war. How does that change the NDU mission or the relevancy of studies here?
It makes them more complicated. Our faculty really has to adjust to keep ahead of students coming back from combat. The uniformed military’s role in our faculty is to bring recent operational experience into the classroom. We find students sometimes have more recent operational experience than faculty. So it’s a challenge to keep up with these extremely bright, talented, questioning students. We also have to rapidly adjust curriculum. With the NWC’s curriculum this year, 85 percent of readings changed from last year. Next year ICAF is going to do a stem-to-stern review of [its] curriculum, infusing [material from] the war on terrorism, homeland security, and more.

What role does the university have in examining actions in Afghanistan or Iraq?
We send faculty to duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they serve in key positions on the Coalition Provisional Authority, working under the ambassador or U.S. commander. I probably have five to 15 military officers there at any time and occasionally State Department personnel.

Can the NDU influence and educate policy makers?
Absolutely. Primary customers for [the] work of our Institute of National Security Studies are the undersecretary of defense for Policy and the director, Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff. We visit them once a year to lay out our research program. Sometimes they will say, “Great, but I need help in this area.” Even though I work for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who works for Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld, I also have other customers like Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice, the secretary of Homeland Security, [and the] director of the CIA.

You’re a kind of brain trust.
Very well put.

There was disagreement about Iraq. Retired officers such as Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Shalikashvili, USA, didn’t support the war. If staff at the NDU felt similarly, could they try to discourage decision makers from that path?
A central point to make is that we are an educational institution, certified to give a master’s degree by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. One thing they look at and worry about is: Do we have the academic freedom to say what we want to say? The answer is yes.

Now, uniformed people cannot criticize the chain of command. So there is a different set of rules for uniformed faculty. I urge faculty, “Be professional. If you don’t like a policy, criticize the policy. Don’t criticize the leader.” Frankly, to take on the policy rather than get personal will help them achieve what they want, which usually is a change. But academic freedom exists at the NDU. We have an “edu,” not “mil,” Web site address. We are looked at by Congress — by all our customers — as a balanced, academic institution.

Do your scholars do real-time analysis to aid policy makers?
Yes. We played an instrumental role after the president in January 2003 [started] the Iraq Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance led by retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, USA. He came to the NDU and said, “I want to run a two-day symposium to bring in the nation’s experts to tell me what I ought to be thinking about.”

We have had many conferences like that since then. When Army Gen. [George W.] Casey went to take over [Multi-National Force, Iraq], he came to us. We gave him not only a reading list and some homework assignments, but [also] we held a roundtable with him and our experts to give academic advice on what they saw. We are a venue for thought.

What happened to the NDU golf course?
The Army closed it right as I got here. Errant shots were breaking car windows, building windows, and the like. But the rumor among faculty was, “Dunn closed the golf course.” I tried to dispel it and was unsuccessful — until one day, at commander’s call, I said: “Have you ever known an Air Force officer who didn’t want a golf course?”