The teacher has slipped away and left the afternoon’s work to his students. Fourteen of them sit with their laptops and water bottles around a U-shaped group of tables while a 15th, their leader this day, stands at the open end and points to slides on the wall above him.
With the end of the school year approaching, these men and women in their 20s and 30s are ticking off the progress they’ve made as a group. Questions are quickly answered or designated for follow-up, labor-saving hacks are suggested, a chuckle arises over one action option, and at 30 minutes sharp, they break into teams to finish drawing up a military response to the threat of invasion in Taiwan.
This is a joint warfighting class in April 2025 for students holding a major’s rank or the equivalent. With constant changes in both military capabilities and the geopolitical landscape, continuing education — often tailored to service branch, rank and specialization — is the name of the game for all service members.
But in many ways, this class is different. Two entire walls are windows, one facing out over Pennsylvania Avenue four stories below and the U.S. Capitol dome down the street. Through the opposite wall, you can look in across open floors of steel, glass and wood to see students with no connection to the military studying solo at sofas and tables.
I think we’re getting very motivated, academically minded students who have extreme future potential to be high-level leaders in their services.” ~ Maj. Joshua Gonzales, U.S. Space Force
Still, the joint warfighting students don’t seem distracted by the sunny spring afternoon or their soaring surroundings. “Can we just clarify what we mean by ‘maintain access to global commons?’” one student asks. A discussion ensues. They resolve that it probably doesn’t matter.
“I kind of held their hand a little walking through the process; now we’ll see if they fall or run on their own,” said their teacher and the secretary of defense in the warfighting scenario, U.S. Space Force Maj. Joshua Gonzales. He has little doubt about the outcome. “I’m blown away by the things that my students put together, things I never would have known to do as a student,” he told Apogee. “I think we’re getting very motivated, academically minded students who have extreme future potential to be high-level leaders in their services.”
The 15 students are among 69 enrolled in the second class of the Space Force version of joint professional military education (JPME) for high-ranking officers — two programs administered in tandem and hosted by program partner Johns Hopkins University through its School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Hopkins’ Bloomberg Center in Washington. For majors and lieutenant commanders, there’s intermediate level education (ILE) through the Schriever Space Scholars Program. For those with colonel or captain in their title, there’s senior level education (SLE) in the West Space Scholars Program.
Space Force leaders trust they’ve come up with the right option for the Pentagon’s newest and smallest service — a location rich with opportunity for education from military and civilian sources, a collaboration to keep down financial overhead and with a university ranked No. 2 by Foreign Policy magazine for international relations master’s programs. Perhaps most importantly, they’ve created a learning environment to serve their mission that also appeals to the partners on whom the mission relies.
The first cohort of 49 started class in July 2023, eight months after the first chief of space operations, Gen. John W. “Jay” Raymond, turned over command of the Space Force to Gen. B. Chance Saltzman. “It fits right in line with JPME schools, just with a different approach,” said Space Force Col. Joshua Wehrle, a West Scholars student who served as Raymond’s executive officer. “Gen. Raymond and Gen. Saltzman wanted to do things differently, and I think they really hit it out of the park.”
International appeal
Mixed in among all the Guardians in the Schriever/West programs are military officers from five allied nations and from all U.S. service branches, as well as leaders from federal agencies such as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The first cohort had only one international student. Saltzman reiterated the importance of international partners when he previewed the service’s new International Partnership Strategy during a speech at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in April 2025. He spoke of a “seamless multinational space coalition” to empower partners, improve interoperability and fully integrate allied capabilities.
Whatever else it accomplishes, Schriever/West — by relieving students who are busy leaders of their day-to-day responsibilities during this 10-month master’s-degree course — gets its students thinking big thoughts along lines suggested in Saltzman’s speech. The task is made easier, their teachers say, by the achievements and motivation this cohort brings to the programs.
Completing JPME I and JPME II is required to become a general or flag officer. High achievers in one service often are sent to JPME training with another service, and 24 students from services other than Space Force are attending Schriever/West this year. Thirty-one of the students are Guardians. But even after nomination by their employers, all students must clear a hurdle unique among JPME programs: admission to the prestigious SAIS Master of International Public Policy (MIPP) program.
“One of their priorities is that students who come to the MIPP program have a global perspective,” said Col. Kirk Johnson, commandant of Schriever/West and leader of Space Force Detachment 3 in Washington, part of the Delta 13 education unit of Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM). “We also think that’s important; that’s a complementary priority. One of the ways our students get that global perspective, in addition to the subject matter they’re studying, is by interacting with students from other countries. What we do wouldn’t work if everyone were in a cubicle in front of a screen listening to a recorded lecture.”
to study ethics in space warfare.
Gonzales pointed to Paul-Andre Johansen, a lieutenant commander in the Norwegian Navy and a student in one of Schriever’s three joint warfighting seminars. “When I’m teaching in class, he’ll say, ‘Hey, this is how we do it in my country; do you all do something similar in America?’” Gonzales said. “And we can all have that engagement where we’re learning from each other’s processes. The U.S. always fights with allies and partners, we never fight by ourselves. We need to understand each other, how we think and how we speak.” Johansen agreed, telling Apogee, “Coming here, learning about the space domain, and learning a language by which to communicate on issues within the space domain is very valuable.”
International students are nominated from within their nations, and selection is based, in part, on the international engagement strategy of the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force/International Affairs, with input from STARCOM. In 2025, students come from Brazil, Canada, France and Italy, as well as Norway. Schriever/West has a cap of eight international students and 85 students overall — a number that would require more resources to accommodate. Some nations, as well as U.S. agencies, may refrain from nominating candidates because of the cost or out of concern they’ll fall short of the SAIS admission standards, said Gregory Miller, dean of the Schriever/West programs. “That’s the downside,” Miller said. “The upside: We know whoever does get accepted is going to be really good. This filters out people looking for a check in the box, just to get PME. These applicants want to be challenged.”
Student overachievers
Wehrle specialized in space operations with the Air Force before moving to the Space Force and most recently served in the Pentagon as a liaison to Congress. He said he’s picking up lessons from fellow West scholars he might not get in a career of military assignments. One example: “I’ve learned a lot from our border patrol guys, how space supports drone activities on the border.”
Schriever/West students take every opportunity to learn, even when it means creating their own opportunity, Miller told Apogee. Some students couldn’t get into an elective class taught by space systems engineer Nicholas Rotunda from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, a national security testing ground whose contributions to the U.S. space program date to its beginnings. So they asked if they could do independent study with Rotunda instead. Not for credit, they told Miller. “‘We just want to do it on our own,’ they said. And he [Rotunda] was willing to do that. We get a lot of type A students in our student body that way overachieve.”
Similarly, students filled up an extracurricular workshop on ethics held by Magdalena T. Bogacz, who teaches lessons in philosophy as an assistant professor of military and security studies. “We meet outside the class and deal with ethical dilemmas and provide them with a process for ethical reasoning and decision-making,” Bogacz said. “We work on developing the kind of ethically responsible leadership we want them to bring back to the force. It’s on the side, to enrich their ethics education.”
Is philosophy, including Just War Theory and the teachings of Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, a hard sell to career military personnel drilled in all matters martial? “No,” Bogacz told Apogee. “Where they’re coming from is an advantage. The students are hungry for those different perspectives. They didn’t know how much they’d like it because they never had a chance to do it. This is their first opportunity for deep philosophical reflection.”
The Schriever/West programs may be among the most selective of PMEs, but Miller, who taught in civilian colleges, finds PME students across the board to be highly motivated. “You assign readings in the civilian world and it’s a suggestion. In PME, they’re going to do their damnedest to complete the assignment. Here, they’re sending us good officers and the vast majority are accepted. That suggests there’s a correlation.”
The roots of the program predate the Space Force, with a single-seminar pilot known as the Schriever concentration through the Air Force Command Staff College (AFCSC) at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. The Air Force later picked it up and expanded it. Miller and other faculty made the move from AFCSC to Washington, D.C. The Schriever scholars program takes its name from Gen. Bernard A. Schriever, architect of the Air Force’s ballistic missile and space program, and the West scholars program is named for Gladys Mae West, a mathematician and one of the so-called “Hidden Figures” whose computing work helped create GPS.
The ILE program at Maxwell had some 500 students, SLE about 100. The smaller Space Force enrollment was a factor in deciding to partner with a civilian university, one that could provide a building, a library, student information systems and other resources. The Bloomberg Center opened in fall 2023 with SAIS and the new Schriever/West programs as a tenant, along with Johns Hopkins programs in business, arts and sciences, and other advanced academics. Some 3,000 people a day walk in and out of the 10-story structure, originally built for the museum of news called the Newseum and rebuilt for Johns Hopkins to house offices, an auditorium, sweeping common areas and 38 state-of-the art classrooms, some of which seem to hang in space.
“You walk into a classroom and plug in your computer and it works every time,” Gonzales said. “Anybody can pull up their laptop, throw their images on a screen and collaborate wirelessly.”
Beyond STEM
A half dozen Schriever/West students made the SAIS Dean’s List in the first year. Those who finish either program graduate with a Johns Hopkins MIPP degree as well as JPME I or JPME II certification. Nobody has failed out. One reason, Miller said: “SAIS has a pretty good grasp of who will do well and who will not. The red flags for them are if someone didn’t do well as an undergrad or didn’t move on afterward and do well in a graduate level experience.”
Many students who choose this Space Force education come with a background and even a graduate degree in a STEM field — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Communication and the written word may not have been their strong suit, Miller said, but they develop skills in these areas through the research papers they’re required to write. “Some have trouble at first, but because they’re able to deal with complex issues, they’re able to figure it out. They’re able to succeed. And some of our best students have been those who only have a STEM background. This is actually kind of cool. ‘What are the implications of building this thing or designing this thing?’ Without strategy — informed by politics, economics, geostrategy — they would fail.”
The Washington location also distinguishes the Schriever/West programs from other PMEs. Students’ employers are responsible for housing in the pricey district region, and those who must commute long distances are advised to take public transit and use the time studying. It’s a price worth paying, all agree. “This is the heart of government,” Johnson said. “The Pentagon, the State Department, NASA headquarters. We’re two blocks from the Capitol. Some assignments are to attend a congressional hearing and take notes. Students rub shoulders with people from all over the world who have all different perspectives. That’s a really unique opportunity.”
Saltzman had visited the campus three times before the second school year ended. Said Gonzales, “It’s relatively easy to get someone to come over from the Pentagon to do some kind of senior leader engagement. If you’re at Maxwell Air Force Base, you’re not going to get that. If you’re at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, you’re not going to get that.”
The partnership with SAIS also offers Schriever/West students academic opportunities no other PMEs can provide: more than 120 electives in a broad range of subjects and taught by Johns Hopkins faculty. Electives are taught concurrently with the core classes, or flights, which are designed to meet JPME and Space Force requirements. Schriever/West leaders also have bookended the shorter SAIS semester calendars with core classes and inserted more during the month-long SAIS winter break — including field trips to space-related sites — to ensure a 10-month session for their students. That’s the norm for a JPME in-residence program.
Schriever/West students take four electives over two semesters and their top choices sound like bull’s-eyes for high-ranking military officers. Among them: Information Operations in the Digital Age; How and Why States Compete in Cyberspace; Norms, Rules and Regimes for Outer Space; Technology and International Competition; The Human Face of Battle. “They could do all four on cyber and policy or they could mix it up,” Miller said. But competing as they are for seats with all SAIS students, they don’t always get their first, second or even third choices. That’s especially true for international students, who might get the nod later than others to enroll here.
Never fear, Miller tells incoming students. “They’re nervous about whether they can get into electives. We’ve had students who didn’t get into the first nine classes they chose. But they got into the 10th, and they loved it.” A post-session review bears this out, with all the electives hitting many of the topics that are required in JPME programs. “The only response we got is, ‘This elective is fantastic.’”
That’s the assessment of Schriever student Christopher Shepherd, a Space Force major who will return next semester as an instructor in the Schriever program. “It may seem hard to find ties back for the Department of Defense students, but there’s always a tieback. My advice is to take whatever sounds interesting to you.”
Top-tier approach
Shepherd was an operations-focused Guardian whose career took him from GPS command and control in Colorado Springs to a stint working with the National Reconnaissance Office in New Mexico to Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, then a deployment with electronic warfare units before he joined the operations staff at U.S. Space Command. Now, with his Schriever education, he has turned to thinking those big thoughts.
One highlight for Shepherd came during a core class, Understanding Strategy, when he and his fellow students were presenting 10-minute summaries of their research papers. “Hearing everyone’s thoughts on next steps in acquisition, operations, launch as a service to different theaters, where everyone’s mindsets are going, it was just mind blowing,” he said.
Bogacz also worked at civilian schools before entering professional military education and gives high marks to the Schriever/West programs. “This model resembles top-tier research institutions where the emphasis is on exposure to a variety of backgrounds,” she said, “a variety of opinions and experts from a variety of different fields coming in, quite often from fields that may seem not necessarily connected to what we do.”
In the space realm, where change happens at a breakneck pace, establishing a curriculum that remains relevant over a 10-month session can be challenging. With this in mind, each core class undergoes review by program leaders once it ends and Joint Staff adjustments are made from time to time in the JPME I and II standards. “We teach concepts,” Johnson said. But students and faculty also find ways to introduce the latest developments in space defense into their core sessions. They apply enduring principles to discuss breaking news such as the threat of Russian nuclear weapons in orbit, the Israel-Hamas war, and the release of the Space Force’s landmark Space Warfighting framework.
“One of our functions here is to be the Space Force ILE and SLE schools,” Johnson said. “We have a responsibility to understand what the Space Force is trying to accomplish, what kind of culture we’re trying to build, what kind of leaders we’re trying to build, and then reflect that in what we teach.” He added, “The profession of arms is fundamental to what we teach here. This is joint professional military education. Our whole purpose is to inculcate in our students a stronger, deeper, more intellectually rigorous sense of what it means to be in the profession of arms.”
The bulk of the student experience at Schriever/West occurs in the setting of Socratic dialogue, a series of group questions and answers designed to deepen understanding. The 46 students in the Schriever ILE program and the 23 in the West SLE program take different core classes but come together for certain sessions, including elective classes and end-of-year tabletop wargaming.
Student Wehrle applauds this approach. “The school allows us in electives and in PME classes to talk about news with peers without pressure from those around us at work,” he said. “Unfortunately, so many of those thoughts will never leave this building, but they’ll be in the back of our heads. We can draw upon them to teach our junior officers, to teach our enlisted folks, to teach our peers, ‘Hey, it’s OK to think out loud.’ There are obviously red lines of propriety we cannot cross as military officers, but if you have a good idea, let’s talk about it, let’s have an open discussion.”
Rolexes and Vans
Studying alongside students from other military services and nations is a feature of JPME training across all the services. The Schriever/West programs take this concept to a new level, thrusting their students into the largely younger student body of a civilian graduate university. They take electives together. They share common spaces. They socialize. The situation is unusual enough that Schriever/West students, including those with security clearances, get a special security briefing reminding them of what information people in their positions must hold back.
“One of the things that I think scares a lot of PME people is that we don’t have control over these elective classes,” Miller said. “These are SAIS professors. We’re not watching over them, making sure they’re hitting certain requirements. But our response to that is that these are people with 20 years at the World Bank, former ambassadors, retired generals. If you look at the SAIS faculty pages, it’s incredibly impressive. And these are the people our students get to take classes from.”
Miller, who is also teaching one of the SAIS elective courses this year, has 21 students in that class — nine from Schriever/West, two from Italy, one from France, one from Norway, two South Koreans, one from Japan and one from China. “What’s really interesting is when you hear the colonels complaining about the 22-year-olds in the class: ‘They have no world experience, they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ But then they’ll be like, ‘Oh, so that’s how that generation works. I get it now. Now I can work better with the enlisted folks and the new officers who are coming in.’”
Wehrle obtained his ILE certification at Maxwell, where all his classmates had a military affiliation. “That’s not a bad thing, that’s just where we’re at,” he said. “But being here, we are with students who have just graduated as undergrads, we’re with everyone from people in business suits and Rolex watches to people in Nirvana shirts and Vans. Understanding and getting to know those individuals was something that I was not prepared for. I thought we are going to be in our Schriever and West Space Scholars cohorts and we’re going to band together and lock shields and no one’s going to be allowed to come into the tree house. But that’s not how it is. And I absolutely love that.”
In one of his elective classes, Shepherd’s work group consisted of a student from India and one from Pakistan, two historic adversaries, as well as a student from the United Kingdom, the former colonial power that ruled them. “All students at this university have been very respectful,” Shepherd said. “If there’s hostility or ill will between countries, you don’t see that between the students.” Shepherd, who came to the Schriever program with a master’s degree in space systems from the Florida Institute of Technology, appreciates the exposure he’s getting to different points of view. “A lot of time in the military, we’ve been brought up to think similarly in the way we approach a topic or problem,” he said. He welcomes the opportunity “to get those different experiences as we work through problems, knowing that we won’t have blind spots.”
The cultural learning process goes both ways: Schriever/West students and teachers, who don’t wear their uniforms to class, are seeing an appreciation for the military grow among the civilian university’s student body. It’s a world many had been unfamiliar with or had dismissed as largely focused on destruction.
“We came in thinking about the benefits of our students’ exposure to younger students — students who may never have worked a day in their life yet, international students,” Miller said. “What we didn’t think about was the opposite side of that — that these students who haven’t had much exposure to the military are going to now hear from a military perspective. They’re seeing that these are actually thoughtful, intelligent people who want to avoid war, who want to engage in cooperation and diplomacy and deterrence. I’ve had students say people approached them to say, ‘I didn’t realize how smart people in the military were.’”
Bright future
The relationship presents an opportunity to promote the role of the Space Force, in particular, program participants agree — a service still broadly associated with a short-lived Netflix comedy series and confused with the Department of Defense combatant command. “We can market the military to people who’ve never had any experience with the military,” Gonzales said. “Our students are advocates for the military and many people have the wrong idea about what the military is. They only know what they’ve heard. There’s not a whole lot of people who go into the military. These career officers are out telling our story to the greater populace.”
The Space Force just celebrated its fifth birthday, so it’s playing catch-up with the other services in many respects — including professional military education. The U.S. Coast Guard, for example, hadn’t learned about the Schriever/West programs until recently and will now consider nominating students. Miller hopes federal civilian agencies such as the State Department, NASA and even the Surgeon General will assign teachers to Schriever/West, as they have to other PME programs. One issue to address is that the Space Force, small as it is, designates a colonel as its JPME leader and he’s outranked in joint discussions by the general and flag officers representing the other services. Leaders aim to see their graduates move on to billets that make the best use of their intense education — as joint planners, or high-level leaders in their services.
We have a responsibility to understand what the Space Force is trying to accomplish, what kind of culture we’re trying to build, what kind of leaders we’re trying to build, and then reflect that in what we teach.” ~ Col. Kirk Johnson, commandant of Schriever/West
Schriever/West can already claim some success here. The latest list of Space Force delta commanders includes a number of graduates from the earlier Schriever concentration at Maxwell, and the first Schriever/West-SAIS international graduate was named to the general staff of his country’s military and sent to its space component, Johnson said.
As the newest of the JPMEs, Schriever/West also has the opportunity to catch up better. Leaders and faculty see the opportunity for the research and standards developed here to trickle down to education and training across the force — to places such as the National Security Space Institute and the Noncommissioned Officer Academy, both at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. Bogacz also envisions new rules and norms in space ethics arising from student and faculty research. “In terms of space ethics, we are the pioneers,” she said. Gonzales noted that the so-called “Bomber Mafia,” developers of a winning air strategy during World War II, arose from Maxwell and its schools. He sees opportunity for developing advanced digital wargaming at Schriever/West to build on materials now borrowed from the Air Force. Still, Gonzales, like his fellow teachers, is proud of what the programs and the students are already accomplishing in just their second year.
“They’re learning joint warfighting so when they go to any station, they’ll be value-added on day one,” he said. “They can plug right into joint planning teams. I’d like to ask a commander whether he’s satisfied with what he’s receiving from the schoolhouse, and I’m very confident they’ll say yes.”