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The United States Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) is one of three United States Army schools that make up the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This rigorous graduate school consists of two programs: the larger Advanced Military Studies Program (AMSP), and the Advanced Operational Art Studies Fellowship (AOASF), which is attended by more senior officers. The student body is small, but diverse; the U.S. armed forces, U.S. interagency, and allied military forces are represented at the school.

The first class started in the summer of 1983 and graduated 13 student about a year later. Due to increasing requirements for SAMS graduates by the U.S. military, the school was expanded during the 1990s. The 2010 graduating class comprised over 120 students. The modern course is "enormously rigorous" and produces "leaders with the flexibility of mind to solve complex operational and strategic problems in peace, conflict, and war".

The school, which issues a masters degree in Military Art and Science, is both a training ground and a think tank for some of the Army's brightest officers. It provides its graduates with the skills necessary to deal with the disparate challenges encountered in contemporary military and government operations. Since the first class graduated, SAMS planners have supported every major military campaign, providing "the Army with many of its top campaign planners for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries". Graduates are colloquially known as "Jedi Knights".

History


The SAMS course was designed to fill a post-Vietnam War gap in U.S. military education between the CGSC focus on tactics and the war college's focus on "&thinsp;'grand strategy' and national security policy". In 1981, Colonel Wass De Czege convinced Fort Leavenworth's Lieutenant General Richardson that a second year of military education was needed for select officers. After receiving the final approval, Wass de Czege and two other U.S. Army officers planned and developed the school for a summer start in 1983. Although there was some disagreement as to the course purpose, Army leaders and the course designers settled on a plan to provide officers with a "broad, deep military education in the science and art of war."

In June 1983, the first class of 13 U.S. Army students began in the basement of Bell Hall at Fort Leavenworth. Along with some initial internal challenges with facilities and scheduling, the school's early years were marked with uncertainty about how its graduates would be accepted and how they would perform in the force. But the initial results from the field were positive. By the time the first class graduated, SAMS had already become "the symbol for intellectual renaissance in the officer corps". And when Wass de Czege, as the first director, relinquished the school's reins to Colonel Richard Sennreich in 1985, the school was already beginning to produce results: "The Army as a whole and the College in particular came to view SAMS as a useful experiment." By 1987, there were additional positive signs. Enrollment of high-quality officers was up and sister services were showing interest in sending students to SAMS. The program's growing popularity and reputation also began attracting students from allied countries. Yet, regardless of the positive signs, prospective students still saw the school as "a slightly chancy thing to sign up for". A second year of school away from the force to attend a school that had not yet proved its value in combat was risky. But the school's chance would soon come.



The "first test of battle" for SAMS graduates came in December 1989 during Operation Just Cause in Panama. A core planning cell of seven SAMS graduates "crafted a well rehearsed and well executed plan that simultaneously struck some roughly 50 objectives in a single coordinated blow". According to Colonel Kevin Benson, the tenth director of the school, "The Army and SAMS faced a test of battle and the new group of highly-educated planners appeared to have passed the test with flying colors."

With its first "combat" test complete, the Army's leaders began to draw on SAMS to assist in additional ways. In the early 1990s, U.S. Army leaders called upon the school to help develop Army doctrine. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas E. Mitchell, Colonel James McDonough (the fifth SAMS director), and various other members of the SAMS team played a significant part in revising the U.S. Army Doctrinal Manual 100-5 Operations in 1990–1993.

SAMS began to have effects across the force. Lieutenant General Guy C. Swan noted that SAMS graduates were indispensable in Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. They were expected to "re-engineer the decades of planning that had gone into the GDP [General Defense Plan] almost overnight". Swan stated that this was "the first true test of SAMS on a large scale".

Although the school's reputation was growing, its biggest test was still ahead—Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Indeed, SAMS graduates are "remembered most famously in the early days for producing the 'Jedi Knights' employed by Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf in developing the famous 'left hook'&thinsp;". But the efforts of SAMS graduates were not limited to the initial planning effort. 82 graduates were participating in "a wide array of command and planning tasks", in the theater by February 1991. These efforts "established SAMS in the minds of the leadership of the Army as a place to turn to for superb planners".

After Desert Storm, the school again looked ahead. The Army was "grappling with a range of new problems: military operations other than war, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement operations". The school and its graduates examined the situations in Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia, and SAMS' "Jedi Knights" participated in operations worldwide, as well as domestic contingencies such as those in Los Angeles and Miami (after Hurricane Katrina). The course itself continued to change in the waning hours of the twentieth century. Under Colonel Gregory Fontenot, the school moved from Fort Leavenworth's Flint Hall to Eisenhower Hall (image below) in October 1994. In later years, the school's leadership also expanded the number of seminars and the civilian faculty.



The military continues to draw heavily on SAMS in the twenty-first century. SAMS planners have played a significant role in the Global War on Terror. The United States Central Command requested planners from SAMS along with its "sister schools", the United States Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS), which was designed to be similar to SAMS, as well as the United States Marine Corps's School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW). SAMS students from the 2002 and 2003 classes participated as "reach" planners in the preparations for the invasion of Iraq, as well as the "post-hostility plan for the occupation of Iraq".

The school itself continued to morph to meet the demands of a changing world. An additional faculty expansion occurred in 2005–2006, and the Fellows' curriculum shifted further away from that of the AMSP program. To keep pace with increasing demand for SAMS planners in the force, the commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command directed an expansion that was approved by the Chief of Staff of the Army, and the school's 11th director, Colonel Steve Banach, began a winter-start course in 2007. During this period, SAMS also "continued to serve the Army at war as a 'reach' asset", helping deployed headquarters plan operations and contingencies. By 2011, the school was ready for new quarters, moving into the newly renovated Muir Hall at Fort Leavenworth on 30 August 2011.

Contributions
SAMS graduates have supported every major military campaign between 1984 and 2009. Lieutenant General David Huntoon stated in 2009 that SAMS "has established a corps of leaders, thinkers and planners who in the last two decades have reset the conditions for American military success”. SAMS graduates are known "for their critical thinking skill sets", and are a "commodity [consistently] called for by combatant commanders around the world today". In 2010, Brigadier General Sean MacFarland stated that,

"In a crisis, the president always asks, 'where are the aircraft carriers?' In the Army, leaders ask, 'Where are the SAMS graduates?' Just as the aircraft carrier was a game changer in naval warfare, SAMS graduates and practitioners of operational art have been game changers in land warfare."

The school has earned laudatory comments from various other senior U.S. military leaders. According to Major General David Hogg, "SAMS has a reputation for producing skilled planners that can take complex ideas and develop cohesive plans." In 2010, Army Vice Chief of Staff Peter W. Chiarelli, "praised the school ... for being at the forefront of the effort to remake strategic military planning for the 21st century". Lieutenant General David Huntoon stated that, "SAMS could rightly be called the most brilliant education for critical thinking in military history, and the most revolutionary change in the planning structure of standing armies since the creation of the Prussian General Staff in the mid 1800s."

The Course
The mission of SAMS is to "educate the future leaders of the Armed Forces, Allies and the Interagency at the graduate level to be agile and adaptive leaders who think critically at the strategic and operational levels to solve complex ambiguous problems". This applies to both the AMSP and AOASF programs. In support of this mission, SAMS' leaders view AMSP as a three-phase program: (1) military intermediate level education at the United States Army Command and General Staff School or equivalent, (2) AMSP, and (3) a tour as an operational planner in the force.

In the twenty-first century, over two hundred male and female applicants typically vie for slots in the summer classes, and the competition is rigorous. Selection for this challenging program involves an application process which includes an examination, an interview, and a supervisor assessment. Applicants must also complete the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff School or an equivalent intermediate-level education course offered by another uniformed service. The student body of SAMS comprises mostly U.S. Army field grade officers from combat, combat support, and combat service support branches. However, in the 1987–1988 academic year, the U.S. joint services began participation with three U.S. Air Force graduates; officers from the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps followed in the next two years. In later years, other U.S. government agencies also began sending students to SAMS. The first U.S. Government interagency graduate was John Riodan, of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), who attended the AMSP in 2007–2008; the first Federal Bureau of Investigation student, Special Agent Danny Day, attended the AOASF beginning in 2009. The United States Department of State is also represented at the school.

Various foreign militaries are represented in the student body. In 1999, the school graduated its first international officers—Norwegian and Canadian. Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Jordan, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Romania, South Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom have also sent students through the course. The diversity of the student body continues to expand in the twenty-first century. Warrant officers were first admitted to SAMS in the 2010–2011 class, including its highest ranking warrant officer graduate, CW5 John Robinson.

Advanced Military Studies Program
The majority of SAMS students participate in the Advanced Military Studies Program. The purpose of the AMSP is to educate students in "military arts and science." The AMSP course focuses on operational art and covers a variety of subjects, including

"instruction on military problem solving; classical and contemporary military theory and history; Army and joint doctrine; the fundamentals of operational planning; battle dynamics; division, corps, and Joint Task Force (JTF) operations; the operational theory and practice; air, sea and Special Operations Forces (SOF) operations; contemporary military operations; and the application of national elements of power."

Besides clasroom studies and operational exercises, students must complete a research monograph and "a rigorous comprehensive oral examination" in order to complete the course. Following graduation from the AMSP program, officers serve on a division, corps, or Army Service Component Command staff, or in an assignment "appropriate to their functional area".

Advanced Operational Art Studies Fellowship


The AOASF is the "senior program" at SAMS, and focuses on "planning and executing full-spectrum operations in coordination with other government and nongovernmental agencies". It comprises senior lieutenant colonels and colonels (or civilian equivalents). Military AOASF fellows have typically commanded a battalion-sized unit in their respective service. It is an equivalent program to the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania and instructs 16 students annually.

The program began as the Advanced Operational Studies Fellowship (AOSF) in 1984 as an AMSP "companion program" by diverting lieutenant colonel War College selectees to Fort Leavenworth for an equivalent education program—then remaining for a second year to help instruct AMSP students. Because highly-qualified officers could not remain as faculty permanently, this program was designed to mitigate the effects of periodic faculty reassignments due to operational requirements. The AOSF program allowed students to complete the AMSP in their first year and then serve as the "principal instructor" for the AMSP during their second year. In 1995, the name of the program was changed to its current version, and the focus of the course shifted toward the strategic level of war.

During the first year, the AOASF curriculum includes "classroom investigation of the multinational, joint and interagency environment, and extensive travel to DOD regional commands and headquarters around the world". In the second half of the course, the students "serve as AMSP graduate-level seminar leaders or other faculty positions as assigned by the SAMS Director". This course focuses on the operational and strategic realms of war and "prepares future Colonel-level commanders and operational planners" for assignments as leaders and to serve in "critical staff positions within combatant and service component commands". It encompasses "military theory, military history, strategic studies, regional studies, applied strategy, campaign planning, and practical work in joint planning", and involves "extensive travel".

The AOASF is designed to graduate (1) "Innovative risk takers willing to experiment," (2) "Exceptional commanders, schooled in the art of command, and leaders of campaign planning and strategic and operational design," (3) "Creative leaders who can solve complex-adaptive problems at the strategic and theater-strategic levels of conflict," (4) "Expert evaluators of the practical strategic and operational implications of cultural differences," and (5) "Masters at developing and mentoring junior officers." Fellows completing AOASF receive credit as a United States Army War College graduate, and typically serve in a follow-on command assignment or work for a three- or four-star general officer as a member of his or her staff.

Notable Graduates

 * General Charles C. Campbell (Class of 1986)
 * General David M. Rodriguez (Class of 1989)
 * General Charles H. Jacoby, Jr. (Class of 1991)
 * Lieutenant General Don Holder (Class of 1984)
 * Lieutenant General William G. Webster (Class of 1984)
 * Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, IV (Class of 1988)
 * Lieutenant General Benjamin C. Freakley (Class of 1988)
 * Lieutenant General Mark P. Hertling (Class of 1988)
 * Lieutenant General David H. Huntoon (Class of 1988)
 * Lieutenant General Michael D. Barbero (Class of 1989)
 * Lieutenant General Guy C. Swan (Class of 1989)
 * Lieutenant General James M. Dubik (Class of 1991)
 * Lieutenant General Terry A. Wolff (Class of 1991)
 * Lieutenant General Vincent K. Brooks (Class of 1992)
 * Lieutenant General John E. Sterling, Jr. (Class of 1992)
 * Lieutenant General William F. Grimsley (Class of 1994)