The United States Army War College is a United States Army school located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the 500 acre (2 km²) campus of the historic Carlisle Barracks. It caters to high-level military personnel and civilians and prepares them for strategic leadership responsibilities.
As the Army's most senior military educational institution, it provides a function similar to that of the Naval War College and Air War College, each an academic institution administered by a sister service of the United States Military, and trains colonels or lieutenant colonels who are board selected for admission.
The War College is a split-functional institution. While a great deal of emphasis is placed on research, students are also instructed in leadership, strategy, and joint-service/international operations. Approximately 600 students attend at any one time, half in a two-year-long Internet-based program, and the other half in an on-campus program lasting ten months. The college grants its graduates, both civilian and military, a master's degree in Strategic Studies.
The Army handpicks most of the students who participate in the residential program, but the student body always includes officers from the other military branches, civilians (from the Pentagon, State Department, and the National Security Agency), and several dozen senior officers from foreign countries. For example, the residential Class of 2004 included:
- 268 officers from the Army (active, Reserve, National Guard), Navy (active, Reserve), Air Force (active, Reserve, National Guard), Marine Corps (active, Reserve) and Coast Guard;
- 30 senior civilian employees of the federal government; and
- 42 officers from other countries.
Majors with the specialty of FA 59, Strategic Plans and Policy can attend the Basic Strategic Arts Program (BSAP). Army applicants must have already completed the U. S. Army Command and General Staff College (where they receive training after achieving the rank of Major).
Read more about United States Army War College: Mission, History, Basic Strategic Art Program, Center For Strategic Leadership, Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, PKSOI Stability Operations Lessons Learned Information Management System (SOLLIMS), Notable Alumni
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, army, war and/or college:
“Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“What is called common sense is excellent in its department, and as invaluable as the virtue of conformity in the army and navy,—for there must be subordination,—but uncommon sense, that sense which is common only to the wisest, is as much more excellent as it is more rare.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)
“Here was a place where nothing was crystallized. There were no traditions, no customs, no college songs .... There were no rules and regulations. All would have to be thought of, planned, built up, created—what a magnificent opportunity!”
—Mabel Smith Douglass (1877–1933)