Naval War College Students Graduate MAWS: Operational-Level Planning Course

By Chief Mass Communication Specialist James E. Foehl, U.S. Naval War College Public Affairs

NEWPORT, R.I. (NNS) -- Thirty-five students from the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Air Force graduated from the U.S. Naval War College's (NWC) joint service Maritime Advanced Warfighting School (MAWS), Sept. 5.

MAWS, a 13-month program that begins in August, is leveraged around the core curriculum of the intermediate-level course (ILC) and focuses on operational art-of-war and the Navy and Joint planning processes.

"This school is important, not just to the Navy, but our country as a whole, because it teaches and gives a specific tool set to our military that helps us excel," said Capt. Richard LaBranche, NWC's MAWS program director.

Students who graduate from the MAWS program receive a Joint Planner-ONE (JP1) Additional Qualification Designator and normally go on to serve in operational-planning billets.

"Operational-level planning ensures that when you have a strategy and national policy that all the tactical actions that take place are in alignment with those higher level objectives," said LaBranche. "What the MAWS graduate is able to do is come up with a plan to use joint and maritime power in order to achieve the commander's objectives."

MAWS also serves as an integral component of the NWC educational mission to develop strategic and operational leaders with the skills required to plan, execute, and assess combined, joint, and naval operations.

Over the course of the academic school year, MAWS students complete 120 hours of electives in the first two trimesters, all focused on operational art-of-war and the Navy and joint planning processes. Their final trimester is Joint Military Operations (JMO), completed with MAWS in order to fulfill case study and planning process requirements for the course.

"We teach the JMO course, tailored to operational planning," said LaBranche. "We go over case studies of past operations, have students dissect the plan for the operation pertaining to the case study, find out where it was planned well and where it could've been planned better."

"Students then re-plan [the operation], do a staff-ride to the location of where that plan took place and look at the operational environment," said LaBranche. "They study the terrain and the environment so that they can apply their knowledge in actuality."

Following completion of the core-curriculum trimesters, students graduate from NWC but continue on with a three-month capstone project before completing MAWS and earning their JP1 designator.

During the capstone, students participate in a real-world planning problem for a combatant commander, fleet commander, or a numbered fleet commander.

"We were tasked with providing a concept of operations to Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet (COMPACFLT)," said 16-year Navy veteran, Cmdr. Spencer P. Austin, a MAWS program graduate. "They gave us an area they're looking to develop ideas about to work with."

The students worked together over the course of the summer to provide valuable inputs and ideas to influence real-world situations.

"We were able to apply that planning process, start to finish, as if we were out there in the fleet, go through the entire process without distractions, and provide a full brief and several white-papers to the maritime operations center director at COMPACFLT," said Austin.

Austin also noted the significance that comes with the preparation and delivery of briefing the commander.

"There's some maturation that happens when you do that. It also gave some of the students that are going to work out there an opportunity to talk with their future bosses and get a feel for what they're going to be doing."

"Anybody who's serious about their profession should consider attending this school. There's an educational opportunity here that you won't get anywhere else," said Austin. "This is the first time in my career I learned how to do planning properly. The operational-level of war requires a very detailed, structured approach to planning and the MAWS course teaches that."