Staff colleges (also command and staff colleges and War colleges) train military officers in the administrative, military staff and policy aspects of their profession. It is usual for such training to occur at several levels in a career. For example, an officer may be sent to various staff courses: as a captain they may be sent to a single service command and staff school to prepare for company command and equivalent staff posts; as a major to a single or joint service college to prepare for battalion command and equivalent staff posts; and as a colonel or brigadier to a higher staff college to prepare for brigade and division command and equivalent postings.

The success of staff colleges spawned, in the mid-twentieth century, a civilian imitation in what are called administrative staff colleges. These institutions apply some of the principles of the education of the military colleges to the executive development of managers from both the public and private sectors of the economy. The first and best-known administrative staff college was established in Britain at Greenlands near Henley, Oxfordshire and is now renamed Henley Management College.

History

The first modern staff college was that of Prussia. Prussian advanced officer education began under the reign of Frederick the Great in 1710.

The Seven Years' War demonstrated the inadequacy of the education that generals had at that time, but it was not until 1801 that staff training in a modern sense began when Gerhard von Scharnhorst became the director of the Prussian Military Academy. Prussian defeats by Napoleon I led to the creation of the Allgemeine Kriegsschule (General War Academy) with a nine-month programme covering mathematics, tactics, strategy, staff work, weapons science, military geography, languages, physics, chemistry, and administration.^[1] The German staff courses have been used as a basic templates for other staff courses around the world.

Staff course formats

Nations have taken a wide variety of approaches to the form, curriculum and status of staff colleges, but have much in common with the Prussian courses of the early 19th Century. Some courses act as filters for promotion or entry into a specialist staff corps. The length of courses varies widely, from three months to three years, with some having entrance and/or exit examinations. The more senior the course, the more likely that it will include strategic, political and joint aspects, with junior courses often focusing on single service and tactical military aspects of warfare.

Idiom

Certain terms of art or idiom have developed in staff colleges over time, and then been used in wider college or university settings and everyday usage, including:

• staff refers to the professional personnel (usually called directing staff (DS)) and employees of the college;
• fight the white, normally expressed as do not fight the white (as in do not go against the staff's pre-determined answer), where the 'white' is the question given to students, which may lack realism or not fit current operations. A "pink" is the Staff College's staff answer to a particular problem or issue. Pinks and whites referred to the color coding of course material where problems and information for use of students was printed on standard white sheets of papers while material intended for use by directing staff (which often contained suggested solutions/answers) was produced on pink sheets. This practice originates from staff colleges of British origins. The tradition survives across several Commonwealth staff colleges such as the Command and Staff College, Quetta.

Staff colleges

The following is an incomplete list of staff colleges, by continent by country:

See also

• Command and Staff College (disambiguation)
• International Association for Military Pedagogy
• International Society of Military Sciences
• Staff (military)
• War college

References