What is a War College?

To many, the idea that Canada has a “war college” might come as some surprise. A quick word association game with “Canadian Forces” will probably elicit “peacekeeping”. We are, in the words of some of our best historians an “unmilitary people”. However, the Canadian Forces College is most definitely a college concerned with war, and not a school of peacekeeping.

Some basic terminology. Professional Military Education takes place continuously throughout a soldier’s career, as officers or non-commissioned officers. Basic education covers much of the technical information of what it is to be in the army, air force, or navy. Here, service members learn their trade and are immersed in the challenges of leadership. At this level, education is more “training” than education strictly speaking. Training is conducted to produce reliable responses to predictable situations. Learning to use a rifle, fly a plane, fix an engine all are examples of training. Education is about producing reasoned responses to unpredictable situations. At this early stage of their career, some Canadian military officers attend Royal Military College in Kingston for their bachelor’s level education.

The next major phase in an officer’s career occurs roughly midway, usually after the time they have been promoted to the rank of Major (or Lt. Commander if they are in the navy). At this point, officers attend a Command and Staff College. Here, they begin to learn about more broad issues such as international affairs, leadership, and military theory. However, the principle focus at this level is learning about Operational Planning, or how to design, set up and run military operations. The last stage of their education is at the War College level, where the focus is even broader. At this level, students are typically Colonels and naval Captains. The focus here is more like a civilian graduate school or a school of professional development. Here, students focus on leading institutions, in preparation for being promoted to Generals or Admirals. The areas of study here are solidly on international relations, command and leadership, and advanced studies on operational matters.

Canada, because it has a small military, combines several schools into one location. CFC has courses at the Command and Staff College and at the War College level. Furthermore, the College is fully “joint”, which is to say that there are no air force, naval, or land schools in Canada at this level of education. In many countries, there are still specialized schools. The US maintains colleges at the Command and Staff and War College level for all three services, as well as a set of purely joint institutions (National Defense University in Washington DC and Norfolk VA).

War Colleges and Command and Staff Colleges, particularly in Western nations, have mixed academic and military professional faculties. At CFC, there are 11 Professors from a variety of backgrounds, but with research agendas all focused on matters of defence and security. That makes us the largest such faculty in Canada, bigger than any other university! It wasn’t always this way; in 1998, I was the only one on staff, but that is another story.