The Schools
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.
Contents
- The Community No One Thought to Name
- Operational Artists: What SAMS Built for the Army
- Strategic Thinkers: What SAASS Built for the Air Force
- Decision-Makers: What SAW Built for the Marine Corps
- Maritime Planners: What MAWS Built for the Navy
- Joint Warfighters: What JAWS Built for Combatant Commands
- Army Strategists: What BSAP Built for National-Level Policy
- All-Domain Strategists: What JADS Pioneered for the Future Fight
- The Crossroads: Where the Schools Converge
- Beyond the Uniform
- The Real Distinction… Is You
- Request Your Invitation
- References
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.
Operational Artists:
What SAMS Built for the Army
In the late 1970s, 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. They would become, in his phrase, “masters of doctrine without becoming indoctrinated.”[1]
The School of Advanced Military Studies stood up in 1984; its first class numbered thirteen officers.[3] Within a decade, commanders had given the graduates a nickname that stuck: Jedi Knights. When the Army rewrote its doctrine around operational art in the 1982 edition of FM 100-5, 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.[1] 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.[2] 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.
Strategic Thinkers:
What SAASS Built for the Air Force
By the late 1980s, Congress was asking the Air Force a pointed question: where, exactly, will the next generation of strategists come from? The answer was the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, established in 1991 at Maxwell Air Force Base, 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 is to “produce strategists through advanced education in the art and science of air, space, and cyberspace power for the Air Force and the Nation.”[7]
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.[4] 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.[6] Graduates move into the strategy jobs that shape national decisions: the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the faculties that teach the next generation.[4]
Decision-Makers:
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.[8]
The class is small, only about two dozen officers a year, and the credential at the end is unusual.[7] 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.[8]
Maritime Planners:
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.[9]
Joint Warfighters:
What JAWS Built for 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.[10]
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 full joint qualification and a Master of Science in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy, and 100% of all US military officers move into the joint billets the Department designates as requiring the very highest planning expertise.[10] In time, commanders learned to ask the same way they had once asked for SAMS: “Is a JAWS graduate available?”
Army Strategists:
What BSAP Built for National-Level Policy
In the weeks after September 11, 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.[11]
Today, BSAP runs under the Army War College: a sixteen-week course, 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.[11] 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.
All-Domain Strategists:
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.[12]
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.[12] 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.[7] It doesn’t just fill one chair in the planning room. It makes every other chair more effective.
The Crossroads:
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 stand up the headquarters a new joint task force needs on short notice, not over weeks.[13]
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.[13] That is the community, working exactly as designed.
Beyond the Uniform:
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.
The Real Distinction…
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.
Request Your Invitation
This community was built by decades of military education devoted to a single discipline: turning complex vision into clear, executed direction. Every person on this platform has been shaped by that training. Every conversation is grounded in that foundation.
Your tribe is scattered now: different bases, different cities, different careers. But it is real, it is yours, and it is here. The only version of this that doesn’t work is the one where you don’t show up.
Row Well and Live.
Your Crew
You have a name. Now find the crew that shares it.
References
[1] 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 ↑
[2] Garrett Chandler, “Should You Go to SAMS? Yes.,” From the Green Notebook, August 8, 2025. fromthegreennotebook.com ↑
[3] “School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS),” U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (official). usacac.army.mil ↑
[4] “Inside SAASS,” Air University / Maxwell AFB Public Affairs, December 3, 2025. airuniversity.af.edu ↑
[5] “SAASS prepares Airmen to translate national strategy into military action,” Air University, March 9, 2026. airuniversity.af.edu ↑
[6] “School of Advanced Air and Space Studies” (official school site), Air University. airuniversity.af.edu/SAASS ↑
[7] “PME Lethality Working Group Final Report,” Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2017. jcs.mil ↑
[8] “School of Advanced Warfighting” (official), Marine Corps University. usmcu.edu/SAW ↑
[9] “Maritime Advanced Warfighting School” (official), U.S. Naval War College. usnwc.edu ↑
[10] “Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS)” (official), Joint Forces Staff College, National Defense University. jfsc.ndu.edu ↑
[11] “Basic Strategic Art Program (BSAP)” (official), U.S. Army War College, School of Strategic Landpower. armywarcollege.edu ↑
[12] “Joint All Domain Strategist (JADS)” (official), Air Command and Staff College, Air University. airuniversity.af.edu/ACSC ↑
[13] “Command History” (official), Joint Enabling Capabilities Command. jecc.ustranscom.mil ↑