The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2007 directed the Secretary of Defense to establish levels of joint qualification to ensure Flag Officers/General Officers (FO/GO) are highly proficient in joint matters.
According to the Navy Personnel Command’s webpage, a Level III (the highest level) Joint Qualified Officer (JQO) requires:
“… completion of Joint Professional Military Education (JPME) Phase I, Phase II and a Full Joint Tour. A Full Joint Tour is obtained by meeting the time requirements in a Standard JDAL billet (S-JDA), the Experience based Self-Nomination process (E-JDA) or a combination of S-JDA and E-JDA credit. A minimum of 36 points is required for the E-JDA or combined S-JDA & E-JDA path, but some officers may require greater than 36 E-JDA points due to a recency points clause that requires at least 12 points to be accrued as a LCDR or above. Officers that complete a Full Joint Tour via an S-JDA billet are not subject to the recency points clause.”
There are many paths to attain JPME Phase I, completed between years five through ten of commissioned service. To meet the FO/GO selection requirements, service in a joint billet is built into every officer’s career path. Each service ensures that completing these two elements of the JQO process are straightforward and simple to accomplish.
Completion of the JPME Phase II requirement can be more difficult. In the Navy, assignments typically include an intermediate stop in Norfolk to attend the ten-week course offered four times each year. Unfortunately, the nuances of a detailing an officer from one job to the next can limit the space between assignments to accommodate the ten-week curriculum. The result often is an officer who arrives at his first joint job with little to no understanding of the joint force. The joint command may elect to send the officer to the resident course, but routinely it does not. Given the criticality of most joint billets and the tendency for officers to serve only the minimum requirement of 22 months and one day, most joint commands rely on the parent service to ensure attendance at JPME Phase II following their joint tour completion. This creates a downstream “detailing crunch” to build in a ten-week stop (and the associated temporary duty costs) into the officer’s pipeline either enroute to or following the next tour (usually a command billet).
The Joint Staff currently meets service requirements for annual general military training (GMT) through joint knowledge online (JKO) training. JKO topics mirror those required by the services (e.g., alcohol and substance abuse awareness), and officers assigned to the Joint Staff complete them online every calendar year. Most JKO courses offer a pretest to assess the individual’s knowledge of a topic before the refresher training begins. The pretest questions link to training blocks the course covers. If an officer correctly answers all the questions for a training block, he validates that portion of the JKO course. This process rewards knowledge retention from prior training and focuses the officer’s time on GMT areas where he lacks knowledge. This pretest, validation, and focused training method provide a model for revamping the JPME Phase II training.
Ideally every officer attends the resident JPME Phase II course as an intermediate stop enroute to his first joint billet. For those unable to fit the course into their orders, a method should exist to validate the knowledge they have acquired about the Joint Force during their time in a joint billet. Within six months of departing his joint billet, an officer would take an exam assessing the knowledge expected of a graduate from the resident JPME Phase II course. The questions would assess knowledge in sections that mirrored the progress of JPME Phase II. For every section where the officer scored greater than 90 percent, he could validate that week of JPME Phase II provided he scored greater than 90 percent in at least four sections. After the JPME Phase II instructor cadre scores the test, he or she would send a letter to the individual officer, his Joint Command personnel officer, and his service personnel bureau to document which weeks of JPME Phase II were still necessary to satisfy the full requirement. The officer then would work with his command and service personnel bureau to determine the best path to accomplish the necessary travel to Norfolk to complete the JPME Phase II requirement.
The above method offers advantages for the officer, the Joint Staff and the parent service. For the service and the Joint Command, it will reduce temporary duty funds by minimizing the time required to travel and stay in Norfolk to complete the resident course. Moving from a single ten-week block to a smaller number of weeks which do not necessarily run concurrently reduces disruption to the Joint command, which would make the travel time more palatable to the chain of command. Additionally, this option would open seats in a resident course that is already difficult to obtain while potentially making the JPME Phase II schoolhouse more responsive. After testing this method, the data may reflect a need to tailor how the course is taught. For example, if every officer taking the test validates the same section of the course, the schoolhouse may decide to eliminate that portion of the curriculum from the resident course based on the idea that the required knowledge is easily learned during on-the-job training in a joint billet. Finally, for the individual officer, this method will reward hard work in a joint billet, streamline the JPME Phase II completion process, and ultimately produce more officers with the Level III Joint Qualified Officer requirement complete.
