Academics

SAASS is an Advanced Study Group (ASG) offering a rigorous, interdisciplinary, and professionally-oriented program of graduate education designed to produce military strategists capable of analyzing and communicating security issues to practitioners and policymakers. It is the only ASG schoolhouse to offer a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Strategic Studies. An intensive 48 week-program, the MPhil in Strategy consists of 36 credit hours of required courses as well as the completion of master’s thesis project and oral comprehensive exams.   

Class size is generally limited to no more than 38 Air Force active-duty officers; up to three joint-service officers from the Army, Navy, and Marines; up to two officers from the Air Reserve Component; and several officers from closely allied nations upon invitation from the Chief of Staff, US Air Force. Because total enrollment usually does not exceed 45 students, SAASS maintains an exceptional 1:3 faculty to student ratio. 

Seminars of 11-12 students allow for discussion-based learning and close collaboration between students and faculty. This is both a benefit of SAASS as well as a necessity—commonly referred to as the “book-a-day club,” SAASS seminars offer more opportunities to participate in discussions, ask questions, and engage in hands-on, application-based activities and exercises. At SAASS, you will receive a level of mentorship and intellectual partnership that is unparalleled in joint education.  

The SAASS curriculum is designed to develop five competencies crucial to the practice of strategy. Strategists are theoretically and empirically driven, critical and analytical in their assessments, and effective communicators. Strategists define problems to devise effective solutions—it is in the thoughtful definition of problem sets where the heart of strategy lies.

1. Theoretical Competency: Strategy often follows an “if-then” logic. SAASS educates strategists to think theoretically, parse ambiguous claims and guidance, and articulate statements of cause and effect that characterize the contemporary security environment. 
    
2. Empirical Competency: Effective strategists are familiar with past examples of successful and unsuccessful applications of strategy and can produce and evaluate analogies between the past and present. SAASS educates strategists to think in historical terms, ensuring they are equipped to make informed decisions that avoid repeating past mistakes while applying historical successes to the contemporary security environment. 
    
3. Critical Competency: Effective strategy is tied to clear, rational, and calculative thinking. SAASS encourages students to rigorously test their own ideas, interrogate conventional wisdoms, and engage in serious introspection. Graduates are educated to avoid intellectual complacency and institutional bias in assessing and characterizing the contemporary security environment.  
    
4. Analytical Competency: Strategists define problems. SAASS educates strategists to sort through conflicting military and political interests and deconstruct concepts and problems into their component parts to accurately define problem sets characterizing the contemporary security environment. 
    
5. Rhetorical Competency: Successful strategists communicate effectively. SAASS educates strategists who not only create and develop strategy but who can clearly communicate the logic and reasoning that underpins a strategy’s design to multiple audiences. 

SAASS graduates are expected to:  

• Demonstrate the ability to think critically about the relationship of military force to statecraft.  
   
• Possess an advanced understanding of military history, military airpower, and military and political theories and their modern application to air, space, and cyberspace power.
   
• Articulate a robust comprehension of the roles of air, space, and cyberspace power as strategic instruments of national policy. 
   
• Explain, using a reasoned synthesis of theory and experience, how modern military force and its airpower component can best be applied across the spectrum of conflict.  
   
• Argue effectively and responsibly about military strategy at all levels using evidence and logic. 

SAASS 600 Foundations of Military Theory - 4 Semester Hours
This course explores classic as well as contemporary military theory and strategy.  These works, across different time periods and domains, have significantly influenced thought about the art and science of war.  Students place each work in its context, analyze the text, evaluate its central and supporting propositions, and conduct comparative assessments of these works.  In so doing, students gain a detailed understanding of the body of classic and contemporary military thought while enhancing their critical thinking skills.

SAASS 601 Foundations of Strategy - 3 Semester Hours
This course is an interdisciplinary examination of the theories, methods, and concepts that inform the art and science of strategy and decision-making. Readings draw from the study of politics, history, economics, organizational behavior, science, culture, and morality. Students will read widely and instructors will expose them to a number of ways humans think about social phenomena. 

SAASS 627 History of Air Power I: Air Power in the Age of Total War - 4 Semester Hours
This course contextualizes the rise of airpower in the first half of the 20th century within the global competition and conflict between revisionist and status quo powers from 1918-1945. It is divided in half in terms of coverage of the European and Pacific wartime theaters of operations, charting German and Japanese challenges to the post-1918 state system and kinetic and non-kinetic US and British responses to these challenges. As such, 627 explores national variations in airpower theory development and strategy formation, airpower’s stabilizing or destabilizing effects on the international order, and the success and limitations of airpower in the First and Second World Wars.  It concludes with a field study abroad stressing affective learning in locations where events analyzed in the classroom occurred, allowing students to uncover and evaluate historical parallels to the contemporary security environment.

SAASS 628 History of Air Power II: Air Power in the Age of Limited War - 4 Semester Hours
In 1945, many strategists assumed that future wars would look like the Second World War. This expectation proved half correct, for while the wars of the last eighty years have indeed been aerial, to date none of them have approached the campaigns of 1944-1945 in their totality. Strategists employing airpower have instead found themselves operating in a world of significant limits. This course explores the application of airpower since 1945, beginning with the conflicts of the global Cold War, continuing through the post-Cold War campaigns of the 1990s, and concluding with air operations since 9/11. Students consider the rapid changes in tactics, technology, organization, politics, and society that shaped air employment, and what these meant for military strategists in competition and conflict. Together with SAASS 627, this course provides an overarching examination of American airpower in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

SAASS 632 Foundations of International Politics - 4 Semester Hours
This course introduces students to frameworks and analytical lenses used to assess strategic problems in the international arena. The rationale for this course stems from the conviction that one cannot develop strategy without a working knowledge of international politics and how power is exerted in relations between nation-states. The study of international politics is inherently interdisciplinary, and students therefore read foundational and contemporary works that draw on a wide range of disciplines and methods. Scholarship from international relations, comparative politics, political theory, economics, communications and sociology, among others, help students identify state interests, goals, and tactics in international politics. Examining external and internal factors that shape state goals and behaviors though multiple lenses, rather than traditional IR paradigms, sharpens analytical acuity and creative problem solving.

SAASS 633 Coercion in Theory and Practice - 4 Semester Hours
This course is designed to provide students with the conceptual tools to analyze coercion, including the scholarly vocabulary and definitional clarity required for its understanding. Students will learn how to critically analyze how actors have pursued coercive strategies to achieve their interests and how to evaluate the role signaling plays. Students read widely from the theoretical canon of coercion and deterrence, covering topics on escalation dynamics, the role of credibility, the impact of emerging technology, and non-kinetic levers of coercion. The course is designed to ground student understanding in what coercion is, what determines if it fails or succeeds, and what levers are most useful to achieving coercive aims.  

SAASS 644 Irregular Warfare - 3 Semester Hours
This course examines irregular warfare in all of its forms, including terrorism, insurgency, revolution, and civil wars. The course pays particular attention to the role that geography, ideology (including violent extremism), technology, and grievances play in starting and sustaining irregular groups. Lessons within the course also devote significant attention to combating and defeating irregular threats, including ensuring tactical actions are coherently linked to strategic goals and narratives.

SAASS 660 Technology and Military Innovation - 3 Semester Hours
This course presents theories and utilizes case studies to help students understand the role of technology in military innovation. It also considers the components of success and failure in military innovation, and the impact of successful military innovations on strategy and war. The course draws on theories that connect technology to the social characteristics of war: politics and politicians, interservice competition, bureaucratic compromise, intelligence, and the cultural cleavages of states, militaries, and services.  

SAASS 665 Space Power - 3 Semester Hours
This course examines the space domain's history and the use of space in the context of national interest, national security, and the conduct of warfare. Integral to this process is the development of critical thinking on the utility of the space domain to further US strategic goals. Students will assess the opportunities and challenges for the United States and international community presented by increased activity and growth in the space domain: effective space strategies and policies, the development of space power theories, commercial integration, increased state competition, and the securitization/weaponization of space assets to optimize national power.  

SAASS 667 Information, Cyberspace, and Cyber Power - 3 Semester Hours
This course examines the fundamentals, development, and evolution of information, cyberspace, and cyber power to foster critical thinking about the underlying concepts, strategies, and issues that optimize cyber power as an instrument of national power and to advance the development of each student’s personal philosophy of air, space, and cyber power.

SAASS 690 Thesis - 7 Semester Hours
In SAASS 690, students work with the SAASS faculty in identifying, developing, and executing a research project of their own design, culminating in the production of a master's thesis. SAASS 690 encompasses the entire academic year. In the first portion of the year, students consider research interests in military strategy in conjunction with an academic mentor and the faculty as a whole. Beginning in October, students refine their topics of choice into research projects in close collaboration with a faculty adviser. From November to May, students execute their research project under the oversight of a faculty committee. SAASS 690 proceeds from an academic model of research design and execution, but its pedagogical purpose is ultimately for professional military strategists. The process of producing a master's thesis offers an opportunity to practice the in-depth analysis and critical thinking necessary for the development of sound military strategy. 

SAASS 699 Comprehensive Examination - 4 Semester Hours
The faculty employs a two-hour oral examination by a board of three terminally credentialed faculty members, including one from outside of the School, to determine the degree to which the student has synthesized the SAASS curriculum. The interrelationship among courses and application of concepts and contexts to contemporary and future problem sets feature prominently in the examination.