PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
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 Military Strategy. 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.
PROGRAM OBJECTIVES
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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Demonstrate the ability to think critically about the relationship of military force to statecraft.
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Possess an advanced understanding of military history, military airpower, and military and political theories and their modern application to air, space, and cyberspace power.
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Articulate a robust comprehension of the roles of air, space, and cyberspace power as strategic instruments of national policy.
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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.
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Argue effectively and responsibly about military strategy at all levels using evidence and logic.
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
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, as well as nature and character, of war. Students place each work in its context and analyze the text and evaluate its central and supporting propositions. In doing so, this course equips students with a conceptual toolbox to use in subsequent courses. In addition, the course is designed with theoretical works in conversational "pairs" facilitating comparative assessments of them. By the course's completion students gain a detailed understanding of the body of classic and contemporary military thought, distinguishing between what is timely and timeless, while enhancing their critical thinking skills.
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 military strategists think about social phenomena.
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 explores German and Japanese challenges to the post-1918 state system and kinetic and non-kinetic US and British responses to these challenges via 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, allowing students to uncover and evaluate historical parallels to the contemporary security environment.
This course examines how airpower has matured under strict limitations on its use. It spans three periods. First, it considers the Cold War when the US fought several limited wars under the nuclear umbrella perceived of as “battles” in a competition between superpowers. The course then examines the dramatic transformation of air power during the “unipolar moment” where the preponderance of the fighting occurred in the Middle East, both before and after September 11, 2001. The final period will cover the “return of great power competition” to examine what combat in the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War may imply for the future character of war, specifically in the Indo-Pacific. It explores the evolution of the air weapon that shaped (and was shaped by) theoretical debates, technological revolutions, and the challenge of crafting effective strategies to meet regional and global challenges.
This course introduces students to concepts and frameworks for understanding international politics. The concepts and frameworks are used to analyze how states use power to advance interests and meet strategic challenges in the international arena. The rationale for the course is that one cannot successfully develop national security strategy without a working knowledge of how state and non-state actors interact and communicate internationally. The study of international politics is inherently interdisciplinary, and students’ working knowledge of international politics is supported by readings in history, sociology, security studies, and economics. Topics include the making of world orders, how change occurs in the international system, bases of state power and statecraft, bases for cooperation, economic interdependence, and geopolitics.
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.
Through the study of theory and history, this course aims to expand on operational knowledge and provide strategic insights about how irregular warfare might fit into a geopolitical context characterized by strategic competition. Additionally, the course examines the critical actors in irregular warfare, the dynamics amongst them, and their means and methods of leveraging power and influence. Central questions of the course include how irregular warfare actors, their behaviors, and their operating environment (both geographic and information) differ from traditional war, how success is measured in irregular warfare, and on what timeline, what constitutes power and control in irregular warfare, and what role ideology and grievance play in irregular conflicts. Additionally, students will consider how the United States and its partners should prepare for irregular warfare in future conflict.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.