Graduate Certificate in Strategic Defense Policy
Strategy is a theory of how force produces a political result. Most people never learn to state one.
For practitioners in national defense, international security, strategic policy, foreign affairs and intelligence, and for people entering those fields. Two graduate courses: how strategy is built, executed and judged, and what two centuries of total war reveal about the gap between a plan and an outcome.
Overview
Strategy is the argument that connects what a state wants to the force it is prepared to use. Stated badly, it becomes a list of activities. Stated well, it explains how specific means of national power produce a political result, which is a claim that can be tested and can fail.
Two graduate courses, one theoretical and one historical.
The first is about building and judging strategy. You assess situations, compare alternative courses of action against national political purposes, and think in a disciplined and original way about the international environment and the strategies available in it, including those that depend on joint, interagency, and multinational partners. The framing is the traditional one: strategy as the relationship between the purpose of war and the means of achieving a political end, which the course calls a theory of victory.
The second tests that theory against the hardest cases. It examines the origins and practice of total war from the French Revolution to the end of the Cold War, working through the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War and both World Wars. The question is not only how modern war evolved but whether "total war" is a useful description of these conflicts at all, which is the kind of question that teaches a practitioner to be careful with a convenient category.
The pairing is the point. One course gives you the analytical apparatus and the other shows you what happened when states applied it at scale.
What you will learn
By the end of the certificate you will be able to:
- State a strategy as an argument, connecting specific means of national power to a defined political objective, rather than as a list of activities
- Assess a situation and compare alternative courses of action against what the nation is actually trying to achieve
- Account for joint, interagency and multinational partners, whose participation changes which strategies are available
- Evaluate why strategic policy succeeded or failed in particular cases, which is the first published outcome
- Trace how modern war evolved from the French Revolution through the Cold War, and what changed about the relationship between states and the wars they fought
- Interrogate the category of total war itself, and judge whether it usefully describes the conflicts it is applied to
- Synthesize complex information about strategy and military operations into a position you can defend
- Apply strategic concepts to contemporary problems through case studies drawn from global environments
For your next step visit:Certificate Admissions
For complete details on tuition costs:
Tuition and Fees
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