While the war colleges each Service maintains bow to their Services' cultures, and the National War College and Eisenhower School are joint, these institutions share certain commonalities in preparing lieutenant colonels and colonels and their Navy equivalents for the next level of responsibility. Seen from the perspective of an administrator, the war colleges should aim to be "intellectual centers of excellence with a mix of the best and brightest military and civilian faculty members." Properly resourced and staffed, the schools could serve as percolators for new and even counterintuitive thinking egged on by incisive research on impactful areas, and also as launching pads for the sorts of inquiring and innovative officers needed to confront the challenges of a fast-paced age

The military's new command system, known as mission command, requires that subordinate leaders at all levels are at once aggressive and disciplined in accomplishing the mission. Accordingly, the Chairman's "conduct of military operations through decentralized execution based upon mission type orders" calls for commensurate professional military education (PME), but the emphasis on relative autonomy has not been as pronounced as needed. Among areas where PME is found wanting is not allowing students time to think about what they are learning. Implanting civilian instructors with more experience in building in time for research and reflection, and requiring writing—an operations order a week is suggested—will help develop the critical thinking mission command demands

There was a time when “jointness” had no champions. There was a time when professional military education at the Service colleges offered little in the way of joint content. Joint military operations often revealed a lack of basic coordination, much less cooperation or cohesion. Despite examples in World War II of joint coordination in various operations, after the war, Army Chief of Staff General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Chester Nimitz committed their respective Services to work together to establish a joint military education effort 40 years before the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 required it.