Abstract: This paper argues that (military) leaders need to develop four critical capabilities to succeed in a disruptive and ambiguous environment. It goes on to contrast these desiderata with the fundamental trade-off between readiness and quality that permeates all military training and education, including academic studies. To counter a specific threat within a given time frame, some level of forces of sufficient quality (Gefechtswert) must be made available immediately, even though this adversely affects long-term effectiveness. Finally, we ask what can be done in officer education to alleviate the trade-off. I will argue that flexibility at both the personal and programme levels is key, and that the institution of a military university is best suited to provide it.

Problem statement: How to understand the political challenge to academic education for officers since the Zeitenwende?

So what?: Military planners and political decision-makers must balance readiness (= current consumption) and education (= investment in future capabilities, flexibility and sustainability) carefully. Preparation to deter over long periods and to succeed in a drawn-out conflict demands more than just short-term readiness, although this is a necessary condition for staying in the game.

Every Man a Scholar?

The U.S. Military Academy at West Point famously calls for “every man an athlete”.[1] Indeed, in the past, a case could certainly be made that physical prowess was a precondition for being a capable officer. Modern war, on the other hand, has become hybrid and multi-dimensional, with added complexity, ambiguity, and disruption. A much higher degree of civil-military interaction is also required. Physical demands may take the form of personal resilience rather than athleticism. Finally, no human can run faster than a drone can fly.

Supposing that brain, rather than brawn, decides future tactical success, some might claim that “less drill, more thinking” stands for modern military education. However, this would mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Drill and thinking are not substitutes, but complements: it is a surgeon’s drill in routine operations that keeps her mind free for the unexpected complication. If officers cannot lead or plan because their minds are bogged down by keeping up with standard procedures under battlefield pressure, they are certain to fail.

The Raison D’être of Academic Programmes for Officers

Some very prominent flag officers in the Western militaries did not complete any undergraduate academic education at all (although allied institutions may have awarded them a postgraduate degree all the same). This is sometimes used as an argument in favour of rescinding academic programmes for officers. However, this argument runs afoul of the Berkson fallacy.[2] The reason is that it looks backwards, working with successes from an ex post perspective, and in so doing, disregards the many officers who were left on the wayside precisely because they did not receive an academic education.

Based on the classic employee life-cycle models,[3] three main functions of human resource management can be distinguished:

• Personnel recruitment;
• Personnel development; and
• Personnel retention.

Recruitment concerns the quantity and quality of applications. Academic education and training can contribute to a higher number of applications in two main ways. First, they increase career opportunities for officers who leave the military before reaching pension age.[4], [5], [6] This can be seen as part of the overall compensation package that officers receive for signing up. Second, academic education furthers the social standing of the officer corps in a world where professions are increasingly academised.[7] Quality is also affected because workers tend to self-select into professions, and completing academic programmes, especially hard ones, can serve as a signal of ability.[8]

The role of academic education in personnel development for officers, i.e., in improving their fitness for the job, viz., their capability to lead, plan, and solve problems, has shifted into focus since the Zeitenwende, a term coined by then German chancellor Olaf Scholz in a speech on the Ukrainian war on February 27, 2022.

Personnel retention refers to keeping an efficient workforce engaged within the organisation. An obvious contribution that academic education can offer in this regard is the provision of further education programmes and a forum for internal discussion and self-development. There is another, perhaps more important way, however: as societal and technological change accelerates, people’s working lives and careers will likely be considerably longer. This implies that leaders must be able to adapt to ever-changing environments and be capable of self-improvement. Academic training, methods and reflection provide the groundwork for this adaptability.

Zeitenwende and Its Implications for Officer Education

The writing had been on the wall.[9], [10] However, it needed Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, launched in February 2022, for final public and political recognition. As General Carsten Breuer, Generalinspekteur of the Bundeswehr, has put it, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has forced a wholesale revision of security-policy axioms that had gone unquestioned for decades, returning the question of war-fighting capability and societal resilience to the centre of political attention.

Yet reading the Zeitenwende solely through the lens of the Russian threat would be a strategic error. A realistic assessment of the coming decades must also encompass the systemic rivalry with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the broader confrontation between democratic and authoritarian orders of government, persistent instability across sub-Saharan Africa, and the role of Iran — all of this against the background of climate change, demographic pressure, and intensifying distributional conflicts within and between societies. The new Kriegsbild is not monothematic; it is constituted by the superimposition of multiple, mutually reinforcing crises.

Early analysis of the Ukraine war confirms two factors that had long been anticipated in conceptual terms: the increasing hybridisation of modern conflict,[11] for one, and the integration of dimensions,[12] driven by digitalisation and AI, for the other. The automated processing of large data sets for target acquisition, the integration of commercial drone technology into lethal strike systems, and the real-time conduct of war in the social-media information space are no longer exceptional features but structural characteristics of contemporary combat. The conflict space is no longer bounded by the physical battlefield; it extends across all dimensions and includes the entire societal information environment. Moreover, disinformation must be understood not as a peripheral nuisance but as a systematic instrument of hybrid attack, against which officers must be actively equipped—in their professional roles as well as in their private capacity as citizens.[13]

The structural transformation of warfare poses a specific challenge for personnel management: fewer soldiers must operate increasingly complex, digitally mediated systems and use them effectively.[14] Reconnaissance and effects networks, logistics chains, and command-support systems all depend on data-intensive processes whose underlying logic officers must be able to intellectually penetrate—not merely as end users, but as designers and critical evaluators–if they want to use the systems effectively and contribute to their further development. This demand arises precisely at a time when demographic change and growing heterogeneity in the life plans of younger cohorts make recruiting sufficiently qualified candidates a structurally difficult task.

The operational environment confronting future officers is aptly characterised by the VUCA framework—Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity.[15] Both military and civilian decision-making have to cope with an acceleration of events, the structural opacity of hybrid situations, the complexity of networked cause-and-effect relationships, and the principled ambiguity of tactical and strategic assessments. This imposes new demands on leadership. Breuer is unequivocal about the implication: it is simply impossible to anticipate all future operational requirements through courses, manuals, or digital reference tools. Neither the trajectory of hybrid threat scenarios nor the pace at which adversaries will exploit emergent technologies can be predicted with sufficient confidence. What endures is the capacity to judge and act in unfamiliar situations, grounded in a robust intellectual foundation.

Resilience for crisis and war is not exclusively a military category—it is, as Breuer argues, a whole-of-society imperative.[16] For a parliamentary army operating under heightened public scrutiny and active information contestation, this observation carries direct implications for officer qualifications. Officers are not merely military specialists; they are citizens in uniform who must be capable of conducting and sustaining the security-policy discourse within their institutions and in civil society alike.

What Academic Education for Officers Must Achieve

The demands outlined above make a strong case for academic education as the indispensable foundation of officer qualification — a case resting on four distinct arguments. First, the operational complexity described above demands a level of analytical capability that vocational training alone cannot provide. Second, academic education is not merely instruction; it is formation (Bildung) — the cultivation of the reflective disposition that underlies the normative demands of Innere Führung. Third, as developed below, drill and thinking are complementary, not substitutive. Fourth, in a society in which roughly sixteen per cent of the population now holds an academic qualification, and in which the bachelor’s degree is increasingly characterised as the new Abitur, Helmut Schmidt’s founding vision of an officer corps comparable in educational standing to senior civil servants can only be sustained at master’s level. Breuer underlines the systemic point: there is no better institutional environment for developing free, independent, critical, and evidence-based thinking as an integral dimension of personality than a university.[17]

It also follows that a generalised bachelor’s degree does not suffice. Nor does a bachelor’s degree in “military science”. The argument here is analogous to the one in favour of physical training: It does not matter much which sport you choose if the training is systematic, hard, and rigorous. The hallmark of universities is that their teaching is derived from the lecturer’s own research, which, in turn, is subject to international peer review. So, the Bundeswehr is aiming for a sufficiently ambitious university education.

More Drill, More Thinking – In An Interdisciplinary Setting

This formula counters a widespread misconception. The intuitive view holds that more education comes at the cost of military craft, and vice versa. This substitution logic must be explicitly rejected. The analogy of the surgeon is instructive: the entire repertoire of operative procedures must be so thoroughly internalised that they demand no deliberate cognitive effort, thereby freeing the mind for the unexpected. Transposed to the officer, this means that full mastery of drills, standards, and routines is not the antithesis of independent judgment — it is its precondition. Only those who can handle standard situations without cognitive loading retain the mental resources to reason creatively and responsibly when plans fail, situations are ambiguous, and novel problems demand real-time solutions.

This competence profile stands at the centre of what university education can uniquely offer. German military doctrine has long defined leadership as a creative activity grounded in character, capability, and intellectual force — a characterisation that has remained essentially stable across decades. University education should be understood not as a civilian addition to military training but as the systematic cultivation of precisely those faculties that constitute command as an art. The capacity to subject assumptions to scrutiny, to weigh competing evidence, to resist disinformation, and to maintain analytical discipline under pressure is not an optional supplement to operational competence; it is its intellectual infrastructure.

Breuer, reflecting on his own formation, notes that the interdisciplinary methods he acquired during his studies at the Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg — in particular, the capacity to integrate divergent perspectives in open discourse — served him throughout his subsequent career, in command, staff, and ministerial roles. Given the long tenures typical of Bundeswehr careers and the speed at which operationally relevant knowledge is superseded, the capacity for self-directed learning deserves recognition as a qualification, coordinated with, not subordinated to, functional expertise.

A competence profile adequate to the new battlespace must include a normative-reflexive dimension that goes beyond narrowly conceived cognitive skills. An officer of the Bundeswehr does not execute every order simply because it has been given; action must be grounded in one’s own critically examined conviction. Four constitutive principles of the kind of campus culture that can foster this disposition may be identified: the relentless pursuit of knowledge, a commitment to truthfulness, openness to dissenting views, and acceptance of the better argument within an evidence-based discourse. These principles are not merely compatible with Innere Führung; they actively strengthen it.[18]

The demands arising from hybrid conflict and information warfare confer on officers a specific mediating function between the Bundeswehr, civil society, and the scientific community. Meeting this requirement presupposes a qualification that transcends technical expertise and encompasses the capacity for informed political and ethical judgement. The original rationale for Helmut Schmidt’s founding of the Bundeswehr universities — preventing the emergence of a military caste isolated from civil society — has lost none of its force under the conditions of the Zeitenwende; if anything, it is newly reinforced by the structural demands of the contemporary threat environment.

Summing up, there are four critical competencies for officers that academic education must impart, and help to develop:

• Tactical and technological inventiveness;
• Analysis of situations and scenarios by model development;
• Handling of risk and ambiguity; and
• The ability to “call bullshit”.[19]

This is, of course, by far not all: General Norman Schwarzkopf once said that “leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without strategy.” Fortunately, the principles of Innere Führung and Gute Wissenschaftliche Praxis are commensurable, and both fit in well with an order based on human rights and individual liberties, such as the Grundgesetz. 

Education versus Readiness

The investment-versus-consumption trade-off is one of the oldest problems in economics. It is particularly relevant for the current debate on military readiness (German: “Einsatzbereitschaft”). For training, soldiers are withheld from combat in two ways: by occupying them and by keeping the training organisation from other duties. In the same manner, resources devoted to research are not available for current production.[20]

Calling for readiness in a situation of present danger does not imply prodigality. However, strategic thinking needs to look beyond immediate necessities and optimise the allocation of resources over time (as well as exploring ways to increase these resources in the first place). Any analysis of this problem must begin with a close look at the definition of readiness for war (Kriegstüchtigkeit).

If there is one common ground of war experiences at the strategic level, it is that wars last longer than their instigators seemed to expect. The Kriegsbild is also changing constantly. An all-out but short conventional war, like the one envisioned during the Cold War days, differs from a hybrid scenario in which a nation may have a division-sized or larger formation employed in a shooting conflict while simultaneously serving as a platform for HNS and being subjected to sabotage and cyber-attacks, with the civilian population and civilian production continuing on a peacetime footing (or nearly so). Note that in such a scenario, the political concept may be to preserve the peacetime footing as long as possible.[21]

This paper considers two models, a static and a dynamic one. In the static model, a fixed body of military personnel must be divided optimally between training and readiness roles. There are two types of costs to consider. One is the loss of present combat power and effective deterrence due to part of your force being tied up in training and education, and the other is the loss of future combat effectiveness and deterrence through reduced training and education.

Note that there is another potential cost of foregoing training, viz., a reduction in the number of future recruits. Training and education are major attractors for military service. No one signs up to fight a war, and those who would do so might not be accepted into a modern Western army. Fighting is what one trains for; fighting is what one’s prepared to do at any instant, yet fighting remains a burden one must assume in an emergency. The fight itself is not what motivates a sane person to join the military service. Training and education, however, are.

As the percentage of personnel who engage in training increases, the cost of a loss of readiness rises, while the future cost falls. Increasing marginal costs are assumed to be the standard in economics. The following graph illustrates the idea: a static optimum occurs where the two curves intersect (marked by two asterisks ** as is the custom in economics).

A corner solution, with no training or with all training, would make no sense. The model also yields some comparative statics results: as expected, crises strengthen, the marginal cost curve for readiness shifts to the left, implying less training in the optimum. If educational institutions were to adapt better to military needs, the marginal cost curve for foregoing training would shift upwards, ceteris paribus, urging for more education.

A full analysis requires a dynamic model. The figure below describes a minimal version developed using the commercial simulation package Stella.[23] This model is much too simple for real work as it ignores the need for infrastructure (barracks, training sites, computers), matériel (most prominently, weapons for training and labs/libraries for education) and lecturers/trainers, the availability of all of which may well be constrained. It also implicitly assumes education and training to take place in a peacetime setting.

The squares represent stock variables, all denominated in terms of the number of persons. The arrows with valves stand for flows as people move through the system. The circles are parameters and formulas, and the red arrows stand for (hypothesised!) causal effects. The main process is found in the middle: Out of the high school graduates eligible for an officer career, a certain number apply and start their academic education. The “education” symbol is hatched, indicating it is an “escalator” variable – objects entering it are kept inside the box for a preconfigured period.

After completing their academic education, officers receive further training in their military branches and specialities, which again takes a given amount of time. After that, the officers are combat-ready and transferred to their respective units. The term Kampfkraft refers to the number of combat-ready personnel (the quantity dimension[24]).[25]

However, there is also a quality dimension labelled Einsatzwert, which represents the average effectiveness of a single officer in their duties. The overall force is then given by the variable Gefechtswert, which is computed as the product of quantity and quality. The duration of both academic education and specialist training is supposed to increase the individual Einsatzwert.

There is a by-product of academic education and Einsatzwert: the social standing of the officer corps, which one may safely assume is higher the more competent the average officer, the higher her formal level of training. Finally, note the feedback loop in the lower left corner of the figure above: applications depend on the size of the relevant cohort as well as on the attractiveness of service, which is in turn positively influenced by (the duration of) education and training, in addition to some measure of society’s perception of external threats.

To complete the model, we need to specify the functional relationships mathematically and calibrate the model’s parameters appropriately. Please note that using production data, even with very simple models, may require the discussion to be classified. The following modelling decisions were made:

• Service attractiveness is the sum of threat, training attractiveness and attractiveness of education.
• For training and education attractiveness, we assume that they are an inverse U-shaped function of the duration of the respective programme. Initially, attractiveness increases as programmes lengthen, but at some point, longer schooling reduces attractiveness.
• Einsatzwert is produced from the duration of education and training according to a standard Cobb-Douglas production function. This linearly homogeneous function is not just a staple of economics but also has the attractive property that the output becomes nil as any input is reduced to zero.

The model is just a graphical representation of a system of differential – or, in our case, difference – equations. Using methods from optimal control theory, we can look for controls (parameters that we can change) that maximise Gefechtswert after a given time, say over the four years from 2026 to 2030. To do so with an ambition to implement the results as policy, however, we would need to make sure that Gefechtswert, as defined in the model, is in fact what one wants to maximise and that the model is, to quote Albert Einstein, “as simple as possible, but no simpler”.

A second approach is to use the general modelling structure presented in this paper as the basis for a wargame. Wargames are essentially simulations with human input[26] and can accommodate a greater variety of modelling assumptions while also accounting for human creativity. A broad spectrum of wargame types is available, including so-called “matrix games”, in which no recourse is made to the computer and the simulation is free form, run by umpires.[27] This would essentially obviate the need for model calibration, but at a cost of less analytical rigour and replicability.

The Strategic Role of Readiness

When asked about the prospects of a Japanese attack on the U.S., the Imperial Japanese Navy‘s commander-in-chief, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, reputedly said, “If I was told that I had to do it, then you will certainly observe [the Navy] going all out for half a year to a year. However, I do not hold conviction about the outcome after 2-3 years.“[28]

Wars (of attrition) end in a corner solution, where the defender is no longer able (or willing) to commit the optimum level of resources to the conflict.[29] And simulations show that in the long haul, initial readiness counts for nothing.[30] Productivity, economic growth, resource use, and technological progress (including operational and some tactical innovations) are key factors in military success.

In the final analysis, the sole purpose of readiness is to avoid being overwhelmed at the outset. To be able to stay in the game, such that the long-term (economic) forces can unfold. We saw the importance of this point in Ukraine in 2022, and it is also reflected by Yamamoto’s famous prediction I quoted at the outset of this section. This is how I interpret the German Generalinspekteur’s well-known aphorism “fight tonight”: If there is an attack today, the Bundeswehr will of course oppose it with what it has available now, and it will be willing to do this rather than cave in. In planning, the Bundeswehr will try to ensure that we do not end up cornered right at the start.

This is an important element of credible deterrence and therefore a key condition for planning. A strategic plan is not acceptable if it allows for too large a probability of ending up in a corner solution at any point in time, not just the very beginning. What does “too large” mean? That risk must be determined at the political level!

All the same, the planning horizon must extend beyond “tonight”. This implies that military academic institutions, such as the Universities of the Bundeswehr, still have a role to play in wartime. This role largely depends on strategic parameters set in the political realm, but a few (conditional) consequences will be outlined in the final section.

Military Universities in a New Age

This final section proposes the creation of military universities as a way ahead for officer education. It begins by listing the defining characteristics of such an institution, then proceeds to a brief discussion of its guiding principles. Note that we are not talking about a military academy such as the US service academies or indeed the Theresan Military Academy itself. What sets a military university apart from these institutions is the following four defining characteristics of universities that do not (fully) apply to academies:

• Teaching at a (military) university is based on, and developed from, its lecturers’ own research;
• The institution ensures quality by competing for renown in the international academic community, and by subjecting its members to external peer review;
• Universities are open and pursue the transfer of scientific knowledge to and from society at large; and
• The institution has a considerable degree of autonomy and operates based on ground rules emphasising academic freedom and ensuring self-governance, including the selection of leadership.

On the other hand, run-of-the-mill universities do not suffice either. The military variant must conform to the following characteristics:

• A military university focuses on topics of security and total defence,[31] with an emphasis on the requirements of the armed forces;
• There is a bi-directional gateway between the university and the military that allows for knowledge transfer in a privileged and secure manner;
• Research can use and safely process classified data. Military security is enforced on campus; and
• (Military) students are part of a hybrid academic and military community and receive further military training within the confines of the academic requirements. Civilian students are treated as members of the same community and are invited to build links with their military colleagues to further civil-military cooperation in crises and war.

There exist obvious tensions between these demands, the most blatant one being between openness and the need for operational security. A military university, for example, would not typically be able to employ a person from China in a lecturer position, or open its PhD programmes to people from Vietnam. This means that if we want to establish a military university, we need to strike a fine balance.

Dual Use as a Guiding Principle

The central guiding principle for any military university is dual use. This term is not to be construed in the conventional narrow sense of a civilian project, development or product that can also be shoehorned into a military application.  It is much broader than that.

The preceding section discusses the increased attractiveness of an officer’s career, which is due to the social standing and the civilian employability of her academic education. A bachelor’s in troop-level tactics and military history might not cut it. Nor would a postgraduate degree in accounting bear on military employment at all (for the simple reason that accounting is mainly a private burden that serves the fisc). Based on this point alone, dual use is a requirement at the programme level.

However, the argument does not stop there. This paper also noted that success in future warfare and hybrid conflicts will require more civil-military interaction than during the Cold War.[32] This implies that officers must acquire the competencies to work and plan jointly with civil servants and private suppliers. In addition, total defence and human security are more than just military concepts, and stove piping at the tactical level might not be helpful.

Finally, the dual-use principle must also apply to research efforts. Although research is free and must remain so, additional resources provided by a military university or its sponsors can be directed towards projects that demonstrate a plausible dual-use angle. In short, the dual-use principle permeates everything.

Gateway into the Armed Forces

The safe and regular bi-directional transfer of knowledge between the armed forces, the MoD and a military university is another hallmark of its operation. A military university capitalises on its status within the military establishment. This can be done by facilitating the movement of officers between postings in the field, staff work and research positions – an idea that appears particularly appealing in the areas of procurement, force planning and Concept Development & Experimentation. This approach requires a dedicated interface through which the armed forces can place requests for scientific advice and analysis.

Integration into Military Training

Recent experience has shown that improved integration between the academic and the military parts of university education for officers is indicated. This is not just due to the increasing need to impart ethos and attitude, but also an important prerequisite for saving time in overall officer education.

Dual Roles

What do military universities do when war breaks out? At least in the case of a short-term armed conflict between peers, it is overwhelmingly likely that all academic education will be suspended, and the students will be made available immediately for field roles. In a prolonged war of attrition, this does not appear quite so clear. And in a (prolonged) crisis, in hybrid scenarios or with a limited engagement, some academic education might continue. Research is likely to be maintained in all cases, albeit with greater focus on military applications; in the absence of students, accommodation can be repurposed for HNS; the university’s administrative personnel can take on military administrative functions, and so on.

Whatever decisions are taken in this regard, military universities differ from ordinary ones in that their members have dual (or triple) roles depending on the state of the world. This includes everyone, from the students to the research staff. These additional roles need to be planned for and trained.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that academic education at military universities serves a dual purpose in the contemporary battlespace. On the one hand, it inculcates the four critical competencies – intellectual openness, comfort with risk and ambiguity, tactical-technical inventiveness, and the capacity for critical judgement – that officers require to navigate VUCA environments and hybrid conflict.

On the other hand, it provides the foundation for self-directed learning and adaptation over the course of a long military career, during which the specific content of initial training will inevitably become obsolete.

In an era of accelerating technological change, demographic constraint, and systemic geopolitical rivalry, armed forces cannot afford to treat academic education for officers as a discretionary luxury. It is, rather, a strategic imperative – and military universities, uniquely positioned at the intersection of academic rigour and operational relevance, are a suitable instrument.

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[1] “Every Man an Athlete: The United States Military Academy’s Intramural Program,” in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, National College Physical Education Association for Men, 1973.

[2] David Atkinson and Joanne Peijnenburg, “Beyond Berkson: Further Light on the Selection Bias,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 66, no. 1 (February 2025): 143–52, https://doi.org/10.1215/00294527-2024-0039.

[3] Olena Gladka, Victoria Fedorova, and Yana Dohadailo, “Development of Conceptual Bases of the Employee Life Cycle within an Organization,” Business: Theory and Practice 23, no. 1 (2022): 39–52, https://doi.org/10.3846/btp.2022.13510.

[4] In the Bundeswehr, this still applies to a majority of officers. For a quick calculation, consider that the Bundeswehr has about 42,000 officers, roughly half of whom are tenured. Promotion to lieutenant occurs after three years of service, and the tenure decision usually takes place around the twelfth year. Let us assume a steady state where officer candidates enter the armed forces at an average age of 20 and are pensioned off at age 60. This implies that about one third of the young officers stay on: 9/(60−32) = 0.321.

[5] Note that offering tenure to everybody may relax the personnel constraint in the short run, but will create legions of overaged lieutenant colonels who do not contribute very much to combat power and may reduce it by clogging decision-making processes. It might also reduce the average quality of the staff officer corps as selection criteria are weakened.

[6] Note that this may harm the retention goal because it improves the outside option for officers.

[7] Dieter Euler and Eckart Severing, “Academisation or Vocational Drift?” BWP – Vocational Training in Research and Practice (2025), https://www.bwp-zeitschrift.de/en/bwp_34905.php.

[8] Michael Spence, “Job Market Signaling,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3 (1973): 355–74; Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Sorting Out the Differences Between Signaling and Screening,” NBER Technical Paper 93 (1990).

[9] The next two sections have been compiled using AI, specifically Claude (Sonnet 4.5 Extended). This LLM was fed two German-language texts by this author and other contributors, asked for a structural summary with respect to the demands on, and of, officer education, and then translated the result into English. The author finally revised the result. Input consisted of the following: Klaus B. Beckmann, “More Drill, More Thinking!” interview in Hardthöhen-Kurier 2 (2023); idem et al., Festschrift zum 50-jährigen Bestehen der Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg (Hamburg: HSU/UniBw H, 2023). Included are: C. Breuer, “Bildung und Ausbildung stärken die Einsatzbereitschaft der Streitkräfte in der Zeitenwende”; Klaus B. Beckmann, “Gedanken zu 50 Jahren Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg.”

[10] Karl Gloger and Georg Mascolo, Das Versagen: Eine investigative Geschichte der deutschen Russlandpolitik (Berlin: Ullstein, 2025).

[11] Valery Gerasimov, “The Value of Science Is in the Foresight: New Challenges Demand Rethinking the Forms and Methods of Carrying out Combat Operations,” Military Review 96, no. 1 (2016): 23–29; Mark Galeotti, “Russian Hybrid Warfare and Other Dark Arts,” War on the Rocks, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/03/russian-hybrid-warfare-and-other-dark-arts/; Andrew Mumford, “Hybrid Warfare: The Continuation of Ambiguity by Other Means,” European Journal of International Security 8, no. 2 (2023): 143–63.

[12] The internet is rife with public comments on the MoD. See, for instance, U.S. Army, “Outthinking Adversaries: The Future of Warfare in a Multi Domain World,” 2025, https://www.army.mil/article/289600/outthinking_adversaries_the_future_of_warfare_in_a_multi_domain_world; F. Becker, “Warfare in Many Dimensions,” Mad Scientist Laboratory Blog, 2018, https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/17-warfare-in-many-dimensions/. For a different viewpoint, consult Alexander C. Fox and Franz-Stefan Gady, Multidomain Operations: The Pursuit of Battlefield Dominance in the 21st Century (Howgate Publishing, 2020).

[13] C. Breuer, “Bildung und Ausbildung stärken die Einsatzbereitschaft der Streitkräfte in der Zeitenwende,” in Festschrift 1973–2023, ed. Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg (Hamburg: HSU/UniBw H, 2023), 8.

[14] Klaus B. Beckmann, “More Drill, More Thinking!” interview in Hardthöhen-Kurier 2 (2023): 53–55.

[15] H. F. Barber, “Developing Strategic Leadership: The US Army War College Experience,” Journal of Management Development 11, no. 6 (1992): 4–12; Nathan Bennett and G. James Lemoine, “What VUCA Really Means for You,” Harvard Business Review 92, nos. 1–2 (2014): 27–31.

[16] C. Breuer, “Bildung und Ausbildung stärken die Einsatzbereitschaft der Streitkräfte in der Zeitenwende,” in Festschrift 1973–2023, ed. Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg (Hamburg: HSU/UniBw H, 2023), 12.

[17] Breuer, “Bildung und Ausbildung stärken die Einsatzbereitschaft,” 13.

[18] Klaus B. Beckmann, “Gedanken zu 50 Jahren Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg,” in Festschrift 1973–2023, ed. Helmut-Schmidt-Universität/Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg (Hamburg: HSU/UniBw H, 2023), 25–42.

[19] David D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (New York: Penguin Books, 2021).

[20] That would be the case, however, if the services of recruits were misused—for example, by employing them in officer clubs—or if there were any slack in the employment of enlisted personnel.

[21] This is not new. In the great wars (Napoleonic, First and Second World Wars), there was always a tendency to keep up social life among the civilian population as far as possible. And this very social life is something that opposing strategists seek to attack, from bombing campaigns in World War II to Putin in Ukraine. (These attacks also consistently achieve less than their proponents planned for. It appears that civilian life is not, as a rule, the centre of gravity.)

[22] A strikingly similar graphic can be found in James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). There, it is used to determine the optimal quorum for decisions by majority vote. Note, however, that Buchanan and Tullock use total rather than marginal cost curves. So, in their case, the interior optimum need not occur where the curves intersect.

[23] ISEE Systems, accessed May 6, 2026, http://www.iseesystems.com.

[24] Note that there is no flow leading out of Kampfkraft, which therefore never depletes. This means that the model is only suitable for describing a medium-term buildup, such as the German Aufwuchs. For other considerations, one would need to turn Kampfkraft into an escalator variable as well and model a movement into the pension system or a transfer to the reserve. When modelling a war of attrition, combat losses would also need to be added.

[25] With apologies to all tacticians.

[26] Klaus B. Beckmann, “Wargaming als Methode für Analyse, Entscheidungsfindung und Forschung,” Hardthöhen-Kurier 41, no. 1 (2025): 24–27.

[27] “Matrix-Wargame,” Wikipedia, last modified April 4, 2026, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix-Wargame.

[28] Reddit, “What Is the Full Context of the Admiral Yamamoto …,” r/AskHistorians, accessed February 16, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b76r2b/what_is_the_full_context_of_the_admiral_yamamoto/.

[29] We cannot develop this argument here due to a lack of space. However, see Klaus B. Beckmann, On War: A Minimal (Game) Theory (mimeo, Helmut-Schmidt-Universität, 2025), available from the author on request.

[30] Klaus B. Beckmann and Lars Reimer, “Dynamics of Military Conflict: An Economics Perspective,” Review of Economics 65 (2014): 265–85.

[31] These are broadly construed and basically encompass all factors relevant to human security. Topics like climate change, lack of economic growth, sustainable energy supply, the clash of political systems, and the perils of fake news, therefore, all come within the purview of a military university.

[32] And even at that time, host nation support (HNS), logistics, and medical support were unthinkable without recourse to the civilian sector. Remember the military purpose of all those small municipal hospitals that Germany is now disbanding as inefficient?