For more than a century, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) has been the intellectual core of the Army’s learning enterprise. From its origins as America’s “School for War” at Fort Leavenworth to its present role as the nucleus of Army University, CGSC has evolved alongside the Army’s operational requirements and doctrinal evolutions to deliver cutting-edge warfighting … Read more The post Driving PME Modernization: How CGSC is Leading the Army’s Educational Transformation appeared first on Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University.
For more than a century, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC) has been the intellectual core of the Army’s learning enterprise. From its origins as America’s “School for War” at Fort Leavenworth to its present role as the nucleus of Army University, CGSC has evolved alongside the Army’s operational requirements and doctrinal evolutions to deliver cutting-edge warfighting capabilities that bridge the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war. Today, the college serves as an engine for professional military education (PME) modernization across the Army enterprise—enabling leaders to think critically, employ emerging technologies, and integrate warfighting functions. The imperative to educate tomorrow’s leaders provides decisive advantages in large-scale combat operations as the Army seeks to counter and defeat diverse threats in an era of accelerating change.
The requirement for continuous transformation, directed by the Secretary of the Army in 2025, establishes a framework and sense of urgency to modernize force design, tactical training, and military education under the new Transformation and Training Command (T2COM). This reorganization merges and replaces the Army Futures Command and the Training and Doctrine Command, also providing the accelerant to integrate transformation efforts in ways that reimagine and reorganize the entire PME system. T2COM’s mandate is clear: to drive change across the Army institution from concept to combat through education and training that prepare leaders to execute joint and multi-domain operations. Within this construct, CGSC is driving educational modernization under Army University governance in ways that translates modernization objectives into intellectual and technological overmatch across the operational force.
As part of this mandate, CGSC is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and calibrated personas to better deliver warfighting capabilities to the operational force. This includes employing AI programs to refine strategic analysis, accelerate operational planning, enable staff processes, and inform leader decision-making. Seeking to provide a relevant and cutting-edge learning experience, the college is incorporating the latest collaborative tools from the operational force, including One Brief, Vantage, AI Flow and Power BI to enhance warfighter education. Further, CGSC and its subordinate schools are strengthening partnerships with the Army’s combat training centers, centers of excellence—especially the Mission Command Center of Excellence and their command-and-control expertise—, and the Combined Arms Command-Training team in order to bring the latest lessons, trends, and decision optimization tools directly into the classroom.
America’s School for War
Since its founding in 1881, CGSC has trained and educated generations of Army leaders by continually adapting its curriculum to accommodate the evolving character of warfare while integrating new practices and technologies. In the early twentieth century, the college served as the proving ground for officers who would lead U.S. forces in World War I, developing staff planning processes that emphasized synchronization of theater logistics with fire and maneuver. During World War II, the college expanded dramatically to graduate thousands of officers to lead division, corps and field army operations across multiple theaters. The postwar period saw the integration of airpower, logistics, and emerging technologies into its instruction, laying the foundation for the operational art that defined Cold War planning to support NATO allies and counter Warsaw Pact adversaries.
CGSC continued to refine its educational approach to meet new strategic and operational challenges throughout the Cold War and post-Desert Storm eras with new pedagogical and technological reforms. The college’s curriculum shifted from rote staff procedures to courses on critical thinking and adaptive leadership, reflecting lessons learned from campaigns in Indochina, South America, and the Middle East. As the Army began the 21st century, CGSC led the intellectual transition to full-spectrum and counterinsurgency operations by preparing officers to synchronize conventional, irregular, and interagency efforts. Each transformation, which required innovation and adaptation at echelon, reaffirmed CGSC’s enduring mission: to educate leaders to think strategically and act decisively amid uncertainty and complexity.
This imperative for PME modernization continues under the Army Transformation Initiative and the T2COM reorganization that envisions a merging of Army University and the Army War College in order to better integrate the learning continuum across the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war. Under this new Army University construct, CGSC will bridge tactical training at Centers of Excellence with strategic education at Senior Service Colleges by combining new technologies and focus areas with proven instructional practices to graduate officers, non-commissioned officers, and Army civilians who are prepared to execute decisive leadership on arrival to their new commands. This includes direct integration of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and systems thinking into small-group seminar discussions and warfighting exercises. Just as it prepared leaders to operationalize mechanization of the past century, CGSC is educating leaders for a new era of autonomous, algorithmic, and cybernetic warfare.
Driving Warfighting Education
CGSC serves as the nucleus of professional military education for Army University and the Army enterprise through its four principal schools: the Command and General Staff School (CGSS), the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), the School for Command Preparation (SCP), and the Army Management Staff College (AMSC). Together, these institutions create a seamless continuum of education that produces officers, non-commissioned officers, and Army civilians with the required skills to plan, operate, command, and manage across the Army and joint force with a predominant, though not exclusive, focus on warfighting at the high tactical and operational levels of war. Standing in support, Army University Press amplifies professional discourse through multi-media delivery while the Combined Arms Research Library enables research and scholarly activities.
The Command and General Staff School is a school for applied warfighting and organizational leader development. It prepares majors to plan, synchronize, and execute corps and division operations through a curriculum that integrates data analytics, artificial intelligence, and system thinking while providing the largest Joint Professional Military Education certification in the Department of War. Students employ advanced tools and practices to analyze complex environments, develop operational approaches, and accelerate decision-making. Organized around small-group seminars that include joint, interagency and multinational representation, CGSS awards master’s degrees that balance theory with application to ensure that every major departs Fort Leavenworth ready to immediately lead and execute at “race pace” in assigned formations. The newly established Advanced Warfighting Certification, which is earned by the top cohort as a rigorous measure of effectiveness, identifies graduates with superior warfighting competency for employment by senior leaders.
The School of Advanced Military Studies serves as the Army’s premier course for operational planning and blends timeless theories of warfare with emerging operational sciences. Colloquially called “Jedi Knights,” SAMS students master division, corps, and joint task force operations through seamless integration of operational design and systems analysis to enable advanced planning and execution. Known for its exacting selection process and academic rigor, the school awards masters degrees while combining deep understanding of history, strategy, political science, and philosophy with data sciences and artificial intelligence to create a truly multi-disciplinary curriculum. SAMS, which administers the Army’s primary doctoral program, drives innovation through planning with AI-informed personas, deliberative LLM prompt engineering instruction, and collaborative tool implementation. The students who graduate this challenging course enable senior Army and joint force commanders to understand, visualize, describe, direct, lead and assess more effectively in complex environments.
The School for Command Preparation continues this continuum of education by developing command sergeants major, lieutenant colonels, colonels, and general officers to lead America’s Soldiers. As the Army’s aspiring command teams assemble from all over the world to learn and grow together at Fort Leavenworth, the pre-command course prepares them to lead formations, manage resources, and generate readiness amidst an unpredictable strategic environment. Benefiting from curricula that combines mentorship from experienced commanders and command sergeants major with challenging coursework, PCC graduates employ critical thinking to develop subordinates, evaluate performance, and manage resources. Notable innovations include the application of data literacy and AI integration to inform how leaders give guidance and apply judgment for planning and execution. Fundamentally, the course empowers command teams to make data-informed decisions that enhance lethality and agility while centering on the human dimension of leadership.
Finally, the Army Management Staff College provides Army civilian professionals with an advanced education in organizational leadership and resource management that is required to lead complex organizations. Taught by experienced practitioners with deep institutional knowledge attained by experience and certification, AMSC’s sequence of courses prepare civilian leaders in the Army’s workforce to align unit priorities, recruit and train personnel, and manage funding streams in ways that incorporate real-world data and case-based learning that parallels the Army’s operational decision-making models. Representing an essential, and often understated, component of Army professional military education that compliments the uniformed PME hierarchy, the school produces and disseminates a shared governing language across the Total Force that informs the foundation of the Army enterprise and ensures mission success.
Transforming the Learning Enterprise
The imperative to modernize PME, on behalf of Army enterprise, is more than a curriculum update: it represents a systemic transformation in how the institution learns and innovates. With administrators and faculty continuously devising new ways to reconceptualize learning, CGSC’s schools are deploying rigorous pedagogical approaches that include immersive simulations, artificial intelligence-supported analysis, and collaborative digital learning environments to replicate the speed and complexity of modern warfare. These instruments empower students to test plans and strategy in real time, explore operational dilemmas through enhanced wargaming, and execute enhanced decision-making. Yet the heart of this transformation remains the human intellect. The goal is not to replace judgment with machines, but to refine assessment and decision-making through data-supported insight to achieve true cognitive overmatch in the decision space.
In keeping with its mandate to deliver warfighting capabilities, CGSC’s efforts to modernize PME center on preparing graduates to lead in division, corps, and joint task force commands with the focus on winning in Multi-Domain Operations. This necessitates learning outcomes that provide the skills, judgment, and ethical considerations required to excel in joint, interagency, and multinational environments. Graduates will integrate warfighting functions and complicated staff processes within appropriate legal and moral frameworks. Emphasizing the use of critical and creative thinking with the benefit of historical understanding, CGSC ensures students can diagnose complex problems, adapt to uncertainty, and synchronize actions at echelon to achieve campaign objectives. This focus directly supports the Army’s modernization goals and aligns the college with the operational vision of the T2COM reorganization.
Faculty excellence underpins every aspect of the drive towards educational transformation. CGSC’s administrators, instructors, and professors combine operational experience with academic credibility to deliver advanced education that balances traditional pedagogy with adaptive curricula. Comprising a mix of uniformed instructors who bring recent operational experience and civilian professors who bring deep institutional knowledge, the educational teams at CGSS, SAMS, SCP, and AMSC guide students through accredited degrees and certified courses that strengthen, rather than dilute, the art and science of warfighting. Because of this commitment to teach and inspire the next generation of Army, joint, and coalition leaders, thousands of students depart Fort Leavenworth each year equipped not only with new knowledge, but with new ways of thinking that empower them to lead change across the Army enterprise.
Driving PME Modernization
CGSC stands at the forefront of the Army’s vision for continuous transformation across the enterprise. By aligning the distinctive missions of CGSS, SAMS, SCP and AMSC with the AWC under Army University’s unified learning enterprise, America’s School for War, in keeping with its historic mission to graduate combat leaders who can lead formations in large-scale combat operations, is directly supporting the Army’s vision for transformative change to combat emerging challenges and evolving threats.
CGSC’s efforts to enable this generational renewal will ensure that military education remains the foundation of warfighting excellence for America’s primary land power institution. These innovations, centering on the application of new technologies and practices to enhance educational delivery, will ensure that the college drives innovation directly in support of the evolving needs of the operational force.
Looking towards an uncertain future, the United States Army’s success will not be determined by technology alone, but by the intellect of those who employ it to win in the crucible of combat. By developing leaders who can out-think, out-learn, and out-adapt any adversary, the Command and General Staff College is driving change with a nested sense of urgency that is seizing opportunities provided by the spirit of Army transformation to catalyze warfighting innovation throughout classrooms and auditoriums where students translate ideas and inspiration into practice and application. As it has for more than a century, the CGSC will continue to modernize PME to enable cognitive overmatch in the most demanding environments. These changes, and others that will occur in coming months, will ultimately achieve the 41st Chief of Staff of the Army’s mandate for “continuous transformation” that means “iteratively adapting evolving how we fight, how we organize, how we train, and how we equip.”
Winning matters—and CGSC’s role in transforming PME will drive how we win.
The post Driving PME Modernization: How CGSC is Leading the Army’s Educational Transformation appeared first on Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University.
