Getting to the Goal in Professional Military Education

Professional Military Education (PME) has been under fire from a broad range of critics for a variety of reasons, including credibility, intellectual rigor and administrative mismanagement. But PME provides an invaluable learning and growth experience to those beyond the select few of America's fighting forces who attend elite civilian graduate programs. The practitioner and security oriented curriculum, and inter-service and civilian mix of seminar students, is not available elsewhere. Therefore, PME must be fixed, not abandoned as some have suggested. A first step in fixing the problem is to identify gaps between what is intended by Congress and military leadership and what is being executed. This article proposes and outlines a study to identify those gaps.