Vincible Ignorance: Reforming Australian Professional Military Education for the Demands of the Twenty-First Century

The 3rd issue of the Vanguard occasional paper series, Vincible Ignorance: Reforming Australian Professional Military Education for the Demands of the Twenty-First Century, by Professor Michael Evans, was released in December 2023. 

Drawing on his extensive military and academic career and experience in Australian professional military education (PME), Professor Evans offers a timely review of PME over the past 20 years, and proposes a range of reforms to ensure the ADF’s educational requirements are ‘fit for purpose’ to meet the security changes of the 2030s and beyond. 

At the heart of Evan’s critique is that the ADF has become over reliant on a two-tier 20th century philosophy of education and training based on large, but episodic, residential courses disconnected from the requirements of career-long learning.

Instead, Evans argues, Australian PME must be viewed as a system composed of 3 layers of linked learning:

• academic education (provided by scholars)
• professional foundation studies (provided by scholars and military specialists)
• military training (provided by military experts). 

Accordingly, this study recommends a form of educational shock therapy by proposing the introduction into the joint professional military education continuum of ‘just-in-time’ blended and short (remote-residential) Profession of Arms Foundation Courses.

Author

Professor Michael Evans is the General Sir Francis Hassett Chair of Military Studies at the Australian Defence College, and a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University.

Professor Evans is extensively published in Australia and overseas, particularly in the United States. He was the lead author of the Australian Army’s LWD 3-0-1, Counterinsurgency (December 2009) and a consultant on the Army’s 2014 capstone doctrine, LWD 1, The Fundamentals of Land Power.

He is responsible for the design and delivery of the Australian Defence College’s Apollo, Strategos and Advanced Military Studies short course program for professional development.