Shaping Defense Policy

• Semester: Fall 2018
• Course ID: 371V
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 28462

Description

The Department of Defense (DoD) is a large, complex and consequential enterprise. It spends nearly $600 billion a year, employs almost three million people and conducts activities that have major domestic and international ramifications.  

This graduate level seminar deals both with results and with processes—what our defense policy is, and how it is made and implemented. The objectives of the course are to (a) use DoD as an example of the way in which policies are developed and carried out in large organizations, and (b) help graduates who take defense-related jobs to orient themselves within the national security establishment, whether they are working in the Pentagon, at OMB, on Congressional staff or in defense-related corporations.

Course Outline

Because most students have not had experience with the military, the seminar will start with an overview of military terms and organizing principles. Students will become familiar with the basic documents that shape the institution, beginning with Title 10 of the United States Code. Following that, the course will follow a logical progression from the articulation of national security strategy, through decisions about military organization and resources to responses to current security issues. 

The course is organized around my belief that the Defense Department, like all organizations, must focus on five basic concerns: purposes, money, people, things and information. An organization’s success in addressing those concerns—in this case, DoD’s ability to achieve its mission—is determined by a sixth key concern: the quality of its leaders. These topics make up the “meat” of the course.