1 Comment

Thank you, Leyton, for publishing a great think piece to help us think about aligning our discourse and our purposes for it with the venues that are or should be available.

I would like to add a couple streams because "Published" can be broken down into several categories -- as in, Published for What?

The Published stream as described aligns with publishing in the traditional sense, which is to say a permanent entry into the domain of expert knowledge -- enduring and timeless works, perhaps.

I would also recommend the following two additional lines to the Published stream. The first is published for the academic environment -- with "students" and "practitioners" as the audience. We have not had enough discussion about the kinds of materials that our PME institutions need to distill many resources into practice knowledge for training and education purposes. The sequence would look like this from left to right.

"Seminar dialogue" -- This is a facilitated type of dialogue whereby students engage and learn from each other and the faculty learn from students (as well as students learn from faculty). This is more structured than a podcast or ordinary discussion because there is a learning outcome to meet.

"Faculty papers" -- This is a meta-analysis of practice knowledge put together generally not to promote a school solution but as a tool to facilitate dialogue and have students and practitioners (these should not be confined to the schoolhouse) wrestle with the questions raised. At the Army War College, we produce a number of these types of products for public consumption -- see https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/reference-materials/

"Poster Sessions" & "Conference Presentations" -- These are opportunities for students and faculty to engage with each other informally in an academic-style setting to present and debate important topics of research and innovative solutions

"Keynotes" -- These are opportunities for soldiers to engage with high-level experts on matters inside and outside the military, an important channel of outreach, to fuel dialogue.

The second thread I would propose is publishing for archival purposes. Militaries face brain drain problems and old pubs have an annoying habit of disappearing, especially online. We need to sustain archival records of our corporate knowledge and make it easy to use, otherwise we risk finding ourselves unknowingly restating old knowledge or forgetting past lessons. Again, from left to right on the spectrum Leyton provided:

"Oral Histories" -- The Army Heritage and Education Center and the Center for Military History has done these and they are an extraordinary resource. I have used them for my own research, but I fear this is becoming a lost art.

"Journals" -- Journaling is definitely a lost art. No one has time for it. But where would we be as an Army if not for all the journals that general officers past used to keep that allows all of us to gain and sustain historical mindedness?

"Unit Histories" -- In my view, these devolved over time into public affairs puff pieces. They should be centers for debate and lessons learned. What did the unit or command do over the year or operation, what went well and what didn't, and what lessons should be learned. Debates over questions of military science, warfighting, and responsible command should be fueled by practical problems, and unit histories are a vehicle that permits the sharing of knowledge to promote those debates.

"Repositories" -- Ok, so this one does not align with "TED Talk" or "Presentations" but we need to figure out how, in an environment with severely constrained time and limited resources, to ensure our corporate knowledge is organized, searchable, and available. Even DTIC is not sufficient because it is a difficult thing to query and it is far from complete (it is also too restricted for the purpose I am talking about). A pilot attempt at this is the Defense Management Library which aims to collect and store past and present resources related to defense management for senior leader use -- https://dml.armywarcollege.edu.

Hope this is helpful -- but great piece, Leyton, much appreciated!

Expand full comment