Different patches. The same posture.

You didn’t arrive at this moment alone. For four decades, the U.S. military quietly built something the civilian world struggles to name: a constellation of graduate schools devoted to a single, deceptively simple problem. How do you turn a leader’s intent into direction a team can actually execute? The officers who came through them are rare. This is who they are, where they were forged, and why their work matters far beyond the uniform.

The community no one thought to name.

Most people know the military trains people to fight. Fewer know that, beginning in the 1980s, each of the services set out to solve a harder problem: not how to win a battle, but how to design a campaign. The task was to take a vision expressed in a single sentence by a senior commander and translate it into a coherent plan that thousands of people, across services and domains, can carry out under pressure and against a thinking adversary.

Each service answered that question in its own way, because each faced it differently. The Army needed operational artists who could connect tactics to strategy. The Air Force needed strategic theorists. The Marines needed decision-makers who could thrive in uncertainty. The Navy needed officers who could translate sea power into joint campaign plans. The joint force needed warfighters who could employ every service as one. And across all of them, the nation needed strategists who could see how domains, services, and instruments of power converge.

Individually, each school produces officers who change how their service plans and fights. Together, they form something the Department of Defense has depended on for every major operation of the last thirty years but has never formally named: a distributed community of planner-strategists whose combined capability is greater than any single program could create alone.

If you came up through one of these schools, you lived inside that community. It shaped how you see. The person you are now is the proof that it works.

What SAMS built for the Army.

In the early 1980s, an Army officer named Huba Wass de Czege noticed something his peers had overlooked. Studying the interwar Army, he found that officers who completed a second year of advanced education between the world wars were dramatically over-represented among the division and corps commanders who won the next one. The Army had once invested in intellectual depth. Then it had stopped.^[1]

By the 1970s, the gap was glaring. The Command and General Staff College taught tactics; the War College taught strategy. But the operational level in between, where campaigns are designed and a commander’s vision becomes the plan units execute, went largely untaught. With senior backing, Wass de Czege proposed a second year of graduate education for a competitively selected few. They would not simply learn procedures. The aim was for them to become masters of doctrine without becoming indoctrinated.^[1]

The School of Advanced Military Studies was approved in December 1982 and opened in June 1983; its first class of thirteen officers graduated in May 1984.^[2] Within a decade, commanders had given the graduates a nickname that stuck: Jedi Knights. When the Army wrote operational art into its doctrine in the 1986 edition of FM 100-5,^[3] SAMS produced the officers who could actually apply it, and when planning turned real, in Panama in 1989 and in the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, SAMS-educated planners were at the center of the campaign designs.^[4] The proof was no longer theoretical: invest in operational-level education, and you produce officers who change how wars are planned.

Today, SAMS still teaches the way it always has: small seminars, deep reading, history walked on the ground at places like Grant’s Vicksburg, and campaign problems that have no clean answer.^[1] Students write a serious monograph and earn a master’s degree, and the Army’s most demanding planning jobs are waiting for them. They are the officers a division or corps commander reaches for when the problem outruns the procedure.

What SAASS built for the Air Force.

By the late 1980s, the Air Force was asking itself a pointed question: where, exactly, will the next generation of strategists come from? The answer was the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, chartered in 1988, opened to its first class at Maxwell Air Force Base in 1991, accredited in 1999, and renamed in 2002.^[5]

SAASS occupies a distinctive place among the four Service Advanced Warfighting Schools. Where SAMS, SAW, and MAWS concentrate on producing operational planners, SAASS sets out to produce strategic theorists: officers who study not only how to plan a campaign, but why strategies succeed, how strategic logic compounds across decades, and what that means for air, space, and cyberspace power. A Department of Defense review of those four schools found SAASS to be the one whose explicit purpose was producing strategists rather than planners. Its mission, as that review recorded it, was to “produce strategists through advanced education in the art and science of air, space, and cyberspace power for the Air Force and the Nation.”^[6]

The method is austere and total. Eleven months. Forty-five students, drawn from across the Air Force, the sister services, and allied nations. A recent class included officers from the United Kingdom, Germany, and, for the first time, Italy. There are no lectures. Only seminars. Students read on the order of four books a week (airpower history, international politics, strategic theory, the philosophy of war), then defend their thinking across the table.^[7] The year ends with an eighty-to-hundred-page thesis, oral comprehensive exams over the entire curriculum, and a degree few civilians have heard of: the Master of Philosophy in Military Strategy.^[8] Graduates move into the strategy jobs that shape national decisions: the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the faculties that teach the next generation.^[7]

What SAW built for the Marine Corps.

The Marine Corps wanted something different again. Not operational artists, not strategic theorists, but officers qualified to lead the planning for the most complex expeditionary operations the Corps undertakes, and to do it under genuine uncertainty.

The School of Advanced Warfighting was built to develop, in its own words, lead planners and future commanders “with the will and intellect to design and execute joint campaigns and naval expeditionary operations.” What sets it apart is a deliberate choice of method: SAW is, by design, a problem-solving and decision-making course rather than a planning course. Planning is just the vehicle. Students are handed a mass of information and a problem, and made to decide: in case studies, on staff rides across real battlefields, and in wargames where their plans must survive against an opponent who is trying to win.^[9]

The class is small, only about two dozen officers a year, and the credential at the end is unusual.^[6] Beyond a master’s degree, a Marine graduate earns the 0505 designation: MAGTF Planner. It is not a diploma so much as a certification that this officer is trusted to lead the planning process for what the Marine Corps does, under the worst conditions, without hesitation.^[9]

What MAWS built for the Navy.

The Navy faced a problem that hid in plain sight: the service that commands the world’s most powerful fleet had no systematic way to teach officers to translate sea power into the campaign-level plans a joint commander could actually use. The Maritime Advanced Warfighting School at the Naval War College in Newport was built to close that gap.

Thirteen months, drawn from across the services, moving from theory through application into real work. The capstone is the tell. It is not a simulation. MAWS teams are assigned as adjunct planners to a numbered fleet or a joint force staff and develop plans that directly support actual combatant-command requirements, briefing real commanders along the way. The school’s graduates earn a planning qualification the Navy treats as on par with the Army’s, Air Force’s, and Marine Corps’ advanced schools, and when a fleet or a combatant command needs operational-level planning capacity, MAWS graduates are who they reach for. Once a year, MAWS planners join the other advanced schools for a combined theater-campaign wargame: the first hint that these separate roads were always meant to cross.^[10]

What JAWS built for the combatant commands.

By 2004, the services had built excellent single-service planners and strategists. What no one was teaching was how officers from every service plan together, at the campaign and theater level, as one joint force. The Joint Advanced Warfighting School, at the National Defense University, was created to close exactly that gap. It was proposed by Andrew Marshall, the legendary director of the Office of Net Assessment, with the strong backing of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.^[11]

A JAWS class is about forty-five officers: lieutenant colonels and commanders, colonels and captains, as well as interagency and international equivalents. Learning occurs in small seminars deliberately mixed across the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Space Force, Coast Guard, civilian agencies, and allied militaries. The curriculum runs along five fields of study, including theory and history, strategy, operational art, effective communication, and the synthesis of it all into joint campaign plans. Graduates earn a Master of Science in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy and JPME Phase II credit, and active-duty graduates move into predetermined assignments, predominantly at the combatant commands.^[11][12]

What BSAP built for national-level policy.

In September 2001, Army leaders convened to answer a question they could no longer defer: what does an Army strategist actually need to know? Direction followed in early 2002, approval that summer, and in June 2003, seven officers, the plankholders, sat down at Carlisle Barracks for the pilot of what became the Basic Strategic Art Program.^[13]

Today, BSAP runs under the Army War College: a resident course, offered three times a year, that every officer entering the Army’s strategist career field must complete. It is built around a handful of core modules (strategic theory, national security decision-making, contemporary strategic challenges, institutional and operational strategy), and grounded with staff rides from Gettysburg to Grant’s final campaigns and field study among the agencies of the National Capital Region.^[13] Its real contribution is alignment. Every Army strategist who walks into the Pentagon has worked the same frameworks and speaks the same dialect, so that officers from different cohorts who meet at a combatant command don’t spend weeks calibrating. They are already synchronized.

What JADS pioneered for the future fight.

As warfare expanded into space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum, the Air Force recognized a new need: not specialists in one domain who coordinate with others, but strategists who think across all of them at once. The Joint All Domain Strategist concentration, born as the Multi-Domain Operational Strategist program, is a selective, year-long track inside Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell.^[14]

JADS students learn to see six domains (electromagnetic spectrum, space, air, land, maritime, and human) as a single integrated environment, and to study strategic and operational design, decision theory, and risk alongside the Air Force’s most senior strategic research efforts. The Secretary of the Air Force, in Senate testimony, called it “the example” for how the force should innovate its education, and it has been recognized for that innovation.^[14] But JADS plays a role no other program fills: a large share of its graduates go on to SAASS, SAMS, or SAW, arriving already fluent in how the domains interact.^[6] It doesn’t just fill one chair in the planning room. It makes every other chair more effective.

Where the schools converge.

Each of these schools sends its graduates down a different road. The proof of the community isn’t what any one of them produces. It’s what happens where the roads cross.

In 2008, the Department of Defense established the Joint Enabling Capabilities Command. JECC is not a school. It is the crossroads, purpose-built to provide rapid planning support to the joint force. When a combatant commander faces an emerging crisis, JECC’s planners can deploy on short notice to help form the headquarters a new joint task force needs.^[15][16]

Look at who fills that room. An officer who sees the operational design. One who understands the strategic logic. One who knows how to force decisions under pressure. One who can translate maritime capability into the joint plan. One who can employ every service as a single force. One who can visualize effects across all six domains. One who connects the plan to national policy. No single school produces all of that. Together, each contributing the capability it was built to provide, they produce a combined planning capacity that the nation has leaned on in operation after operation, from disaster response at home to crisis deployments abroad.^[15] That is the community, working exactly as designed.

More to them than you know to expect.

Here is what should interest anyone outside the military. The discipline these schools teach is a specific set of habits: frame the problem before solving it, separate the symptom from the root cause, build a plan that survives contact with reality, and make complex direction clear enough that a team can act on it. This is not a military skill that happens to wear a uniform. It is one of the most valuable and least understood capabilities in any organization.

When these officers leave active service, they carry that capability into the civilian world, where it is desperately needed and rarely recognized. The systems thinking that synchronized a corps can untangle a supply chain or a turnaround. The decision discipline that held under fire steadies a leadership team in a crisis. The habit of translating vision into executed direction is exactly what organizations struggle with most, and exactly what a planner-strategist was trained, for thousands of hours, to do.

The civilian world has plenty of words for “leader,” “strategy expert,” and “project manager.” It has almost no words for someone trained to turn intent into coordinated action under uncertainty. That gap in the language is part of why this capability stays hidden. It shouldn’t.

Is you.

If you came through one of these schools, you already know the recognition is real, even when the words for it are missing. You are not simply a veteran, a leadership expert, or an alumnus of a network. You are a military-educated operational planner and strategist: someone who has studied the art of seeing systems, learned to operate in the space between intent and action, and been held to a standard, in a seminar room and under pressure, by people who understood exactly what was at stake.

That is rare. It is not common. And it is shared: across SAMS, SAASS, SAW, MAWS, JAWS, BSAP, and JADS, across active duty and the civilian sector, across every service. The schools that produced you were built to endure and to adapt; the community they produced deserves a home that endures with it, independent of any single institution’s form. It should be a place where the connections forged in those classrooms persist, where you remain findable to the people who speak your language, and where what your community knows can be amplified into something larger than any one program.

That is what ERETAI exists to build.

1. Dwight D. Domengeaux Jr. and Barry M. Stentiford, “The School of Advanced Military Studies,” Small Wars Journal, January 23, 2026. smallwarsjournal.com
2. “SAMS idea began in Vietnam,” Fort Leavenworth Lamp, May 28, 2009. army.mil
3. Kevin C. M. Benson, Educating the Army’s JEDI (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2010). kuscholarworks.ku.edu
4. David Maxwell, “Review: Raising the Bar: The School of Advanced Military Studies and the Introduction of Operational Art in U.S. Army Doctrine,” Small Wars Journal, March 30, 2026. smallwarsjournal.com
5. “History of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies,” Air University. airuniversity.af.edu
6. PME Lethality Working Group Final Report: The Art and Science of Warfighting, PME and Strategic Thinkers, long version draft final, November 28, 2017. jcs.mil
7. Nelvis Sera, “Inside SAASS,” Air University. airuniversity.af.edu
8. “School of Advanced Air and Space Studies” (official), Air University. airuniversity.af.edu/SAASS
9. “School of Advanced Warfighting” (official), Marine Corps University. usmcu.edu/SAW
10. “Maritime Advanced Warfighting School” (official), U.S. Naval War College. usnwc.edu
11. “Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS)” (official), Joint Forces Staff College, National Defense University. jfsc.ndu.edu
12. “Operation Graduation: JAWS Commencement,” Joint Forces Staff College, June 12, 2023. jfsc.ndu.edu
13. “Basic Strategic Art Program (BSAP)” (official), U.S. Army War College. armywarcollege.edu
14. “Joint All Domain Strategist (JADS)” (official), Air Command and Staff College, Air University. airuniversity.af.edu/ACSC
15. “JCSE: A history,” MacDill Air Force Base. macdill.af.mil
16. “US Army South leverages JECC expertise,” U.S. Southern Command, April 16, 2024. southcom.mil

School and program names identify the education our members received. Each school speaks for itself; follow its own page for anything official.