Success of any military organization depends on the experience and good judgment of its leaders. Ideally, all commanders should have a high level of professional education and training in addition to some critically important character traits. Moreover, the higher the level of command, the more important it is that commanders and staff meet these requirements. Wars are not won or lost at the tactical level but at the operational and strategic levels.

Unprecedented levels of joint Service cooperation occurred during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This teamwork did not come about by serendipity, but by the vision of the 1989 Report of the Panel on Military Education of the One Hundredth Congress (the Skelton Report) that described four elements within the joint professional military education (JPME) framework.

In joint professional military education (JPME), there is no tool more powerful than the written word. Whether in the form of books, journal articles, opinion pieces, or course papers, students and faculty members demand high levels of intellectual rigor and reflection in both the products they read and the ones they produce. Scholarly writing requires precision in terminology and recognition of the limits and boundaries of one’s arguments. When done well, written works make indelible and permanent contributions to our professional domain of knowledge.