Students

The National War College annually hosts roughly 220 mid-career students drawn from the U.S. military services, civilian U.S. government departments and agencies, and more than 30 foreign countries. These students are selected for attendance by their services, departments, and countries, in consultation with NWC. (There is no process for others to "apply" for admission to NWC. Incoming students who have been selected for NWC can find relevant materials here.)

Military students are either 0-5 (lieutenant colonel or Navy commander) or 0-6 (colonel or captain) in rank (or in a few international cases, 0-7 or flag officer rank). Civilian students are of comparable seniority. All come to NWC with extensive experience in their fields; many possess another graduate degree.

For administrative and social purposes, NWC organizes its student body into eleven "homeroom" committees. Each committee of 20 or 21 students represents a microcosm of the full student body mix headed by its own student committee chair and advised and assisted by two to three faculty members. Students remain assigned to the same committees throughout the year, and those committees are the locus for student gatherings before, between, and after classes, for student intramural athletic competitions, and for the students' extracurricular social activities.

The seminar is the basic teaching and learning venue at NWC. Committed to maintaining a teaching seminar size of thirteen students for core courses 6100-6600, NWC runs seventeen seminars simultaneously for each of these core courses, each under the tutelage of a faculty seminar leader.

Each core seminar is a microcosm of the full student body, reflecting as accurately as possible the mix of military and civilian students in the class, as well as the composition of the services and various federal agencies. Individual core course seminars consist of a student mix that is roughly 18 % Army, 18% Air Force, 18% Sea Service, 31% civilian, and 15% international. Almost all core seminars have two International Fellows, one Marine, and one State Department officer. A typical seminar might have: one armor officer, one JAG officer, and one foreign affairs officer from the Army; one submariner from the Navy; one infantry officer from the Marines; one bomber pilot, one missileer, and one logistics officer from the Air Force; one International Fellow who is an 0-6 aviator in his country's air force, and another who is a surface warfare officer in his country's navy. Key to International Fellow distribution is regional distribution to ensure a wide variation of regional expertise and perspective in each seminar.

This mix reflects one of the most important advantages of the War College: The ability that it provides students to interact with and learn from peers from other backgrounds and experiences. Students routinely report that the range of service, interagency and international perspectives reflected in the NWC seminar rooms provides them with many of their most important learning experiences during the year. Because of the seniority of NWC students, they end up learning as much from each other as from their instructors of guest speakers, and the broad range of student backgrounds helps to ensure that the process will provide wide-ranging and diverse insights.

Students are re-sectioned into different teaching seminars for each of the six major core courses and are also sectioned for core course 6700, international Field Studies. (In AY10 NWC sponsored 22 trips to various locations around the globe.) These re-sectionings are managed to maximize students' exposure to the population at large of their NWC classmates. Our goal is to ensure that students are not seated in a seminar with another student more than twice during their core course experience, to enable students to interact intellectually with a high percentage of their classmates. Students also participate in elective courses, through which they encounter students from throughout the National Defense University (ICAF, CISA, IRMC, and NDU) system.