Like many secular institutions in the West, the military often has overlooked the role religion plays in political life and conflict. The United States and its military increasingly are enmeshed in ...religiously charged struggles associated with the global 'war on terror' that require a more complex understanding of religion than traditional military education and training affords. A different approach, therefore, is needed given the high stakes and perils of not comprehending how religion is part of the problem in the wars waged by today's servicemen and women. Recently, some military voices have offered proposals to redress the deficit in religious knowledge and understanding. This article echoes those calls and goes further to argue that efforts to increase 'religious situational awareness,' though essential, depend upon a deeper educational foundation and broad-based study of religion. Several illustrations, offered from a U.S. perspective, show how the study of religion enhances knowledge about military life, culture, and outlook as they bear upon contemporary global conflict.
This article investigates the impact of change and organisational culture on the growth and development of the South African Military Academy. It explores the impact of Nationalist Party rule since ...1948 and black majority rule since 1994 on the institutional culture of the South African military and how that influenced the development of the Military Academy. This is intertwined with an investigation of the nature and impact of the diverging military and academic subcultures at the Academy. The article contends that, together with the historical exclusion of blacks and women from the military, the marginalisation of white English-speaking citizens by Nationalist Party rule denied the Academy the exploitation of a significant portion of the country's human resource potential in the interest of institutional development. The same happened with the introduction of racial quotas and the marginalisation of whites since 1994. The Military Academy has, furthermore, historically been too reflective of the organisational culture of the South African National Defence Force and its predecessors instead of informing that culture to meet the challenges of military professionalism. The Academy has a potentially vital educational role to play in the South African and Sub-Saharan African militaries, but requires some changes in its organisational culture to fulfil that mission.
Discusses changes in training structure, content, and methods, with the focus on developing training for CSS staffs operating as staffs, not for individual training.
This report discusses changes in ...training structure, content, and methods, with the focus on developing training for CSS staffs operating as staffs, not for individual training. The focus is on large unit staffs: corps and echelons above corps headquarters and support commands. The document discusses shortcomings of the current approach to CSS staff training, and then proposes a process-oriented approach. It illustrates how microworld models can be used to train CSS processes. It then goes on to describe how pilot testing of prototype models indicates that this approach is feasible for large unit staffs. It concludes with a proposed training strategy that the authors believe is more appropriate and useful for meeting the challenges posed to the Army by personnel turbulence, split-based operations, increased reliance on information, and decreased training resources. The authors believe this approach has applications beyond the CSS training environment. They argue that the microworld models in a carefully designed training strategy are appropriate to any business that needs to train staff under distributed conditions in uncertain environments and to avoid time- and resource-intensive costs of bringing staff together for a large game in a central location.
In historiography of the Colombian military, the process known as the Military Reform and the professionalization of the national army is said to have begun in 1907. With this in mind, the article ...investigates a fundamental issue: military education, or the drilling of the troops and the training of the offcers in the military schools between 1886 and 1907. Its aim is to understand how the army attempted to achieve this goal. There were both advances and steps backward toward such goals during these years.
We describe the educational character and leadership development processes used by the United States Air Force Academy that other educational institutions may find useful. Our processes include an ...integrated educational curriculum designed to complement and integrate the experiential learning that results in achieving specific organizational outcomes, co-curricular activities in cadet living, and a specific focus on the ethical development of leaders’ respect for human dignity and cultural competency as well as the mechanisms to assess and refine our processes.
