A Powerful Civil-Military Dialogue

It’s not every day that graduate students are tasked with designing a strategy to deter China from engaging in large-scale combat operations in the Indo-Pacific. This spring, however, the Fletcher Strategy Team, composed of Zachary Udin F25, Betsi Dejene F26, Amir Aviram F26, Alan Blanchet F26, Matthew Davis F26 and Ryland Pitts F26, took up this task at the fourth annual Army War College Strategy Competition. 

Associate Dean Abigail Linnington developed the program at Fletcher after hearing about the competition from her colleague, retired United States Army Colonel Celestino Perez.

“We taught at West Point together and were both army strategists during our careers,” she said. “There is a broader sports competition that brings all of the military war colleges together to compete in the fields of friendly strife at the U.S. Army War College. Tino, being the strategy professor that he is, said, ‘Why don't we test our minds across the war colleges?’”

Perez and his network of strategists and academics thus saw an opportunity to involve students in security studies at civilian universities as well.

“We want there to be a political-military conversation to make the competition more realistic,” she said. “How do you consider the use of military force within the greater political and military context?”

This year was Fletcher’s second time sending a delegation, where they competed against 21 teams, including the Army, Navy and Air Force National War Colleges, the French and Australian War Colleges and five policy schools. 

Promoting Divergence of Thought

Fletcher’s team was thoughtfully assembled to integrate a multitude of perspectives: international students and students from the U.S., folks specializing in security affairs alongside prospective diplomats. Under the direction of military fellows, Mike Hultquist and Nathan Scott, the team developed a compelling strategy and advanced to the semifinals. 

“You get vastly different responses to the same prompt from teams that are coming from an academic or a military background,” said Scott. “Teams of civilian students tend to have much less applied experience versus military teams, but I think, holistically, their responses are better built out.”

To prepare the team for the competition, Scott and Hultquist walked them through the DIME framework – assessing the problem and developing diplomatic, information, military and economic responses. 

“The civilian students have a collective experience that the military doesn't have,” said Hultquist. “They've been employed in the civilian workforce. The experience they bring really lends itself to the diplomatic, information and economic pieces that you will not see from our peers in the military, because they're just not exposed to it.”

This background becomes essential to success upon receiving the competition’s prompt. For many participants, Hultquist sees that they attempt to solve the problem before understanding its dimensions.

“Nate and I really focused on understanding the problem,” he said. “You have to identify what the problem is before you solve it.”

“As soon as the Fletcher team figured out what the problem was, the rest of it was super easy,” he added. “You'll see the military falls into the same trap. Because we're all problem solvers, when you get a lot of colonels together, they all solved the problem pretty much the same way. When you look at the civilian teams, there was divergent, incredible thinking. I think that's really the big difference. We saw a lot more viable options outside the military response.”

Deeply Rewarding Practical Experience

For Udin, the competition represented an exciting culmination of his work in International Security Studies at Fletcher and provided him with a helpful glimpse into the work he hopes to pursue following graduation. 

Prior to enrolling in the Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy program, Udin worked for six years at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent federal agency that monitors human rights and provides policy recommendations to the executive and legislative branches. Pairing International Security Studies with Global Governance and International Organizations, he wanted to prepare for a career in national security and spent the summer after his first year as an intern with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation.

Udin found that working with such a diverse team to answer complex questions about a whole-of-government strategy challenged his thinking. 

“Since the six of us came from diverse backgrounds with different academic focuses – which is a strength of the Fletcher community – we had a wide range of ideas on how to best tackle the prompt,” Udin said. “It took careful internal thought and coaching for us to really drill down to what the essence of the problem was, and which of our great ideas were the most useful.”

“My biggest takeaway is that I – and my Fletcher peers – can truly do the work of strategy-making in the real world,” he added. “The tools that Dr. Linnington taught in Strategy and Grand Strategy are indeed the best, and most widely-used, methods that practitioners use in government to support senior leaders. Seeing the lessons come to life in a real-world scenario like the Army War College Competition was deeply rewarding on a personal level for me.”

A Platform for Civil-Military Dialogue

The competition was an eye-opening experiential learning opportunity for the team members and military fellows alike. Scott saw the competition was a powerful exercise in team building and problem solving under pressure. Hultquist found the collision of various perspectives to be particularly impactful. 

“Students have worked together on group projects, but not a lot of them have worked together as a group trying to solve problems,” he said. “Ryland, our Department of State fellow, would bring a people-first focus to defense conversations. Then Betsi would bring her technical background, really looking at other ways we could counter China and integrate Taiwan.”

For Linnington, such a collaboration across points of view is the competition’s ultimate goal.

“One of the underlying purposes of this is the civil-military dialogue,” she said. “It's always important to a democratic society’s political leadership, and this is one of the practical ways that you can build a dialogue between military and civilians, see each other's experience and respect the strengths that they bring to the table.”

“People have this preconceived notion of who somebody is that joins the military, or why somebody joins the diplomatic corps,” she added. “We're trying to break some of that generational or experiential difference down with conversation and friendly competition. I would like our students to see military folks’ tactical experience, their briefing styles and their electric confidence level. I think, for the military, they get thrown back on their heels at how adept the thinking is from a group of 20-somethings managing the political and the economic factors alongside the military factors, and they're not overwhelmed by the complexity of it. They thrive under it.”

Read more about Fletcher’s International Security Studies Program and field of study.