Colonel_Hardstone
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Foreword
I say this because I fear that some of my Pakistani friends and classmates may find the judgments made in this study, particularly in the present climate of tension between our two countries, to be overly harsh, unfair, unjust, or simply wrong. I hope this is not the case, as I have tried to be as scrupulously objective as possible. Any criticism I have levied at either the Staff College or the Pakistan Army should be taken as it was intended—constructive criticism aiming to promote positive change in both institutions.
History and Significance
The Staff College is widely considered to be the premier professional military education institution of the Pakistan Army. Although the National Defence University in Islamabad is responsible for training the Army’s senior military officers in the operational and strategic levels of war, it is a relatively young institution spun off from the Staff College, which had that responsibility from 1962 until 1970. In assessing the relative importance of the two institutions, one former Commandant of the Staff College explained, “Many may think that the higher leadership is determined by the NDC [National Defence College, now the National Defence University], not quite so. It is the C&SC [Command and Staff College] that...determines...who goes to NDC.”
Because only about 20 percent of Staff College graduates are selected to attend the NDU, for the remaining 80 percent, their year in Quetta represents the only higher level professional military education they will ever receive. The Staff College’s unmatched reputation in the Army is based on a combination of factors, including its age, its roster of distinguished alumni, and the circumstances surrounding the Partition of British India in 1947.
In 1900, the size of the Indian Army was approximately 150,000 officers and men, with about half its strength comprised of regular British Army units. Yet only six slots annually were reserved at the British Army Staff College at Camberley for officers in the Indian Staff Corps. When Field Marshal Lord Kitchener became Commander-in-Chief in India in 1902, he developed a plan to reorganize and increase the size of the army. With a new and larger requirement for trained staff officers, and knowing that Camberley would not be able to satisfy it, he determined to start his own school to train Indian Army staff officers. Kitchener’s proposal was deemed unacceptable by the Army Council on the grounds that a Staff College in India might foster another “school of thought” in the British Army. Kitchener replied furiously that there was no school of thought in the British Army, except for the opinions of a few senior officers, and refused to back down. Within three years he obtained sufficient funding for his staff college to open temporarily at Deolali while a more permanent institution was constructed at Quetta, a site chosen specifically for its proximity to the northwest frontier of British India. The first course consisted of 24 students, one-third from the regular British units in India and the remainder from the Indian Army. The newly named Indian Staff College moved to Quetta in 1907. Its roster of distinguished faculty members and graduates over the next 40 years boasts eight field marshals and 20 full generals, including such luminaries as Field Marshals Bernard Law Montgomery, Sir Claude Auckinleck, Lord Slim of Burma, S.H.F.J. Manekshaw and Muhammad Ayub Khan, and Generals Lord Ismay, Sir Douglas Gracey, and K.M. Kariappa, the first native-born Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army.
As the deadline for Partition loomed in the spring of 1947, Field Marshal Auckinleck, then the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, recommended a division of the army’s personnel and assets between the two soon-to-be- born states in the proportion of 70 percent to India and 30 percent to Pakistan, roughly the percentage of Hindu and Muslim soldiers in the Indian Army. By July 1947, the division was well underway in the agreed categories of personnel, moveable stores and equipment, and installations, with the overall percentages slightly modified to 64/36. Of the 46 training installations in British India, only seven were in the territory that would become Pakistan. And of these, only the Staff College was considered to be a major asset. Three others were the much smaller schools of military intelligence, air defense artillery, and logistics, and three were minor educational support facilities.29 Although two-thirds of the personnel and moveable stores ultimately departed Quetta, the prized 10,000-volume Staff College library remained intact. A part of the Staff College folklore is that the sole remaining Pakistani member on the faculty, Lieutenant Colonel Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, who later became Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army and ruled Pakistan under martial law from 1969 to 1972, slept in front of the library door for several nights to prevent departing Hindu faculty members from taking any books with them to India.
Mission and Objectives
Like its name, the purpose of the Staff College has changed several times over the years. In the original 1905 charter, the purpose was “to train staff officers for the Indian Staff Corps and the same regulations, entrance requirements, and methods of training as those in force at Camberley were to be adopted.” By the Golden Jubilee in 1955, the purpose had become “to train officers to the standard required of a second grade staff officer up to divisional level of war.” At the Platinum Jubilee in 1980, the purpose had slightly broadened “to train selected officers for war and in so doing fit them for grade 2 staff appointments and with further experience, for command.” Today, the mission has even further expanded “to impart necessary education to selected officers, enabling them to assume grade-II appointments and to inculcate in them personal and professional ethics and abilities to prepare them for higher command and staff roles.”
Organization, Senior Officers, Faculty, and Students.
The Staff College is normally headed by a Commandant in the grade of major general. It is divided into an Administrative Wing and an Instructional Wing, the latter being headed by the Chief Instructor (CI) in the grade of brigadier. The Instructional Wing consists of four Divisions of approximately 100 students each. Each Division is headed by a Senior Instructor (SI), a colonel, who is assisted by 12 to 13 faculty members in the grade of lieutenant colonel. These are known as the Directing Staff, or DS. Each Division consists of between 8 to 10 Syndicates of 10 students who are supervised by one DS. The Pakistani students selected
to attend the Staff College are captains/majors with between 8 and 12 years of service (although lieutenant colonels in specialty branches like engineers occasionally attend), have graduated from their respective arm/service mid-level career course, and have passed a competitive examination. Officers possessing a Bachelor of Arts/Science or its equivalent are eligible to earn a Masters of Science (War Studies) degree from the University of Balochistan while attending the course.
The Commandant is the central figure at the Staff College, exercising a profound influence on the faculty, the curriculum, and student behavior. Nevertheless, he is circumscribed in his ability to institute major changes because the Staff College falls under the general staff oversight of the Inspector General of Training and Evaluation (IGT&E), a lieutenant general, who is a principal staff officer at the Army General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi. Only if the Commandant has been able to forge a special relationship with the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), as Major General S. Wajahat Hussain was able to do in the construction of the new Staff College main building in the mid-1970s, is he able to exercise a relatively free hand.34 For example, an initiative by Major General Muhammad Safdar in 1982 to create a small cell at the Staff College to study army doctrine and other conceptual issues was stymied until the COAS overrode the objections of the IGT&E. Another initiative by Major General S.T.H. Naqvi to completely reorganize the traditional operation of the Staff College, upgrade its curriculum, and double its output of graduates, initially found favor with the “progressive” COAS, General Mirza Aslam Beg, but the initiative foundered on his retirement and it was never raised again.
Even on routine matters, the Commandant is occasionally overridden by GHQ. A former Commandant once proposed two relatively non-controversial initiatives. One was to organize a college seminar involving all past Commandants to hear their views on the future direction of the Staff College, and the second was to hire on a contract basis a small number of retired officers to act as mentors for the Directing Staff and assist them in creating new exercises and curriculum. Both were summarily vetoed by the IGT&E.37 Asked why they were rejected, the former Commandant explained that the Pakistan Army is a highly centralized institution and a pernicious cultural factor often influences its decision-making process. Any new initiative at almost any level, he explained, is often considered by more senior officers to be a subtle form of criticism of either their former stewardship (for example, of an institution like the Staff College) or their current oversight responsibilities. This reflexive aversion to criticism, whether it is overt or merely implied, may explain why it took the Pakistan Army nearly 20 years to authorize an official history of the 1965 war with India, another 29 years to publish the results, and then to restrict circulation by making the book available only to Army officers.38 The Army has never addressed its performance in the disastrous 1971 war with India that resulted in the loss of East Pakistan and half the country’s population. No official history has been written, and one probably never will be, because any objective rendering of that event would have to address the poor decision making of many senior Army officers. Such cultural factors may also explain why college traditions are so venerated and why the institution changes so little from year to year and from decade to decade.
The students at Quetta are generally considered to be the very best and brightest of the Pakistan Army, and selection to the Staff College is their first major step toward upward mobility in the Army. Currently, about 700 cadets graduate annually from the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) in two classes (two classes begin each year, six months apart). Of these officers, approximately half will eventually be selected to attend the Staff College. In earlier years, the selection rate was lower, roughly 35 percent. Expansions to the main Staff College building over the years have increased the capacity of the college to approximately 400 students, approximately 360 Pakistani and 40 foreign—or “allied”—students.
Pakistani students considered for selection are grouped according to their PMA graduating class, or “batch,” and are eligible to take the Staff College competitive examination every year over a five-year window of eligibility. The examination consists of a series of written papers that are designed to gauge a candidate’s professional military knowledge and communication skills. The test is administered in English. The top finishers in the competitive examination do not necessarily attend the Staff College. Instead, they may be offered an opportunity to attend either the British Army, Canadian Army, or Australian Army staff colleges, which are considered to be equivalent educational institutions and operate on similar pedagogical principles and techniques inherited from the British Army. Officers that are not selected to attend the Staff College fall off the path of upward mobility. They will be trained for repetitive assignments in intelligence, logistics, administration, or other functional career tracks, and will likely retire at no higher grade than major or lieutenant colonel. Students at the Staff College are overwhelmingly from the three combat arms of the Pakistan Army: infantry, armor, and artillery. Relatively few students from the Army’s combat support and logistics services are selected, and the number of officers from the Pakistan Air Force and Pakistan Navy has never been more than 1 percent in any year.
Curriculum and Methods of Instruction
The Staff College course is 44 weeks long and is divided into four study terms of 8 to 11 weeks duration. In the first three decades of the study, the course was conducted on a calendar year basis, with students arriving in late January and graduating in December. More lately, the course begins in late June and finishes in May of the following year. The curriculum consists of three major subject areas. The first, Professional Studies, is comprised of purely military subjects like military history, combat and supporting arms doctrines, operations of war, higher operations of war, specialized warfare, sub-conventional warfare,
joint warfare, training, logistics, operational analysis, command and leadership management, and staff officer skills. The second area is Developmental Studies, which consists of strategic studies, writing analytical papers on selected and assigned topics, attending the annual Staff College seminars whose topics vary from year to year, and a study tour of Pakistan (there are separate tours for allied and Pakistani students). The third area is Research Skills, which includes the writing of an individual research paper and a group research paper. These papers form the basis for the award of a Master of Science degree in the Art and Science of Warfare by the University of Balochistan.
Subjects taught at the Staff College use the basic teaching methodology inherited from the British Army and still in use in many Commonwealth countries. For Americans, this is a major change from the methods of instruction they are used to in U.S. Army schools which rely primarily on the “teach, practice, master” style of pedagogy. The most common instructional techniques at the Staff College are the tutorial discussion (TD) and tutorial exercise (TE) in which the syndicate DS assigns readings and facilitates discussion among the students who are expected to have mastered the information through self-study at home or in small group assignments referred to as “sub-syndicate work.” These are supplemented by formal group lectures (L) in the main auditorium and model discussions (MD) and map exercises (ME) in one of four model rooms, so named because the central feature of each room is a very large “sand box” for modeling terrain. DS not assigned to individual syndicates are responsible for preparing and leading these discussions and exercises. Formerly a major part of the course, outdoor exercises (OE) that used to be conducted in large training areas north and west of Quetta have been sharply curtailed in recent years due to the deteriorating security environment in the province of Balochistan, of which Quetta is the capital city and a prime target for terrorist attacks. A normal class day is six to seven hours, but the Staff College expects students to spend at least four hours each night on self-study or group work. The normal work week is six days, five in classes and one day each weekend scheduled for individual study.
Evaluation of Students
The Staff College has evolved a comprehensive method of evaluation that includes both faculty and student inputs. Every syndicate consists of eight or nine Pakistani students and one or two allied students. After each term, the syndicate rosters are “shuffled” so that a student never has the same DS twice, and rarely will he have more than one or two Pakistani students twice in a syndicate during the year. Thus, each student receives four separate evaluations by four different syndicate DS during the year. There is also a peer rating done each term in which students are asked to rank in order on a scale from 1 to 10
each of his fellow students in three specific areas: ability as a leader, ability as a team member, and capacity as a friend. Each student also receives a mid-course evaluation and a final evaluation by the division Senior Instructor. The Staff College year includes five or six major war games, each with a different operational focus and a different geographic setting. Students are assigned to fill various command, staff, and controller positions where their performance is observed by their syndicate DS as well as several non-syndicate DS members who are the exercise “sponsors.” The non-syndicate DS submit inputs to the student final evaluations, as does the Chief Instructor and Commandant, both of whom carefully observe the exercises and are periodically briefed by students holding the senior exercise appointments.
When all of these inputs are collated and weighed, the students are counseled and given suggestions about how to improve their performance prior to the mid-course break. After the final course evaluation, they will be awarded one of five possible grades: B+ (10-15 percent), high B (40 percent), B (35 percent), B low (10 percent), and C (1 percent). These grades become the basis for the Staff College recommendation to the Military Secretary, the senior officer in GHQ responsible for personnel matters, for the student’s next posting. The postings are announced at the end of the course by the Military Secretary in a presentation made to the Pakistan Army students only. No allied students are allowed to hear the results although most subsequently learn informally where their classmates will be assigned. The most prestigious assignment and desired posting is to become a brigade major of an infantry or armor brigade.46 Typically, about half of the students receiving a B+ grade immediately are assigned to this position after graduation, with the remaining half being selected to attend a foreign military staff college or deferred for a few months to complete required periods of regimental service. Another reason the Pakistani students strive for the B+ grade is that it automatically adds four percentage points to an individual’s Officer Efficiency Index, a running average of his previous fitness
reports. Students earning a High B or a B get two percentage point increases while anything lower merits nothing. Thus, nearly every Pakistani student views his year at the Staff College as the single most important event in his military career up to that point.
I say this because I fear that some of my Pakistani friends and classmates may find the judgments made in this study, particularly in the present climate of tension between our two countries, to be overly harsh, unfair, unjust, or simply wrong. I hope this is not the case, as I have tried to be as scrupulously objective as possible. Any criticism I have levied at either the Staff College or the Pakistan Army should be taken as it was intended—constructive criticism aiming to promote positive change in both institutions.
History and Significance
The Staff College is widely considered to be the premier professional military education institution of the Pakistan Army. Although the National Defence University in Islamabad is responsible for training the Army’s senior military officers in the operational and strategic levels of war, it is a relatively young institution spun off from the Staff College, which had that responsibility from 1962 until 1970. In assessing the relative importance of the two institutions, one former Commandant of the Staff College explained, “Many may think that the higher leadership is determined by the NDC [National Defence College, now the National Defence University], not quite so. It is the C&SC [Command and Staff College] that...determines...who goes to NDC.”
Because only about 20 percent of Staff College graduates are selected to attend the NDU, for the remaining 80 percent, their year in Quetta represents the only higher level professional military education they will ever receive. The Staff College’s unmatched reputation in the Army is based on a combination of factors, including its age, its roster of distinguished alumni, and the circumstances surrounding the Partition of British India in 1947.
In 1900, the size of the Indian Army was approximately 150,000 officers and men, with about half its strength comprised of regular British Army units. Yet only six slots annually were reserved at the British Army Staff College at Camberley for officers in the Indian Staff Corps. When Field Marshal Lord Kitchener became Commander-in-Chief in India in 1902, he developed a plan to reorganize and increase the size of the army. With a new and larger requirement for trained staff officers, and knowing that Camberley would not be able to satisfy it, he determined to start his own school to train Indian Army staff officers. Kitchener’s proposal was deemed unacceptable by the Army Council on the grounds that a Staff College in India might foster another “school of thought” in the British Army. Kitchener replied furiously that there was no school of thought in the British Army, except for the opinions of a few senior officers, and refused to back down. Within three years he obtained sufficient funding for his staff college to open temporarily at Deolali while a more permanent institution was constructed at Quetta, a site chosen specifically for its proximity to the northwest frontier of British India. The first course consisted of 24 students, one-third from the regular British units in India and the remainder from the Indian Army. The newly named Indian Staff College moved to Quetta in 1907. Its roster of distinguished faculty members and graduates over the next 40 years boasts eight field marshals and 20 full generals, including such luminaries as Field Marshals Bernard Law Montgomery, Sir Claude Auckinleck, Lord Slim of Burma, S.H.F.J. Manekshaw and Muhammad Ayub Khan, and Generals Lord Ismay, Sir Douglas Gracey, and K.M. Kariappa, the first native-born Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army.
As the deadline for Partition loomed in the spring of 1947, Field Marshal Auckinleck, then the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, recommended a division of the army’s personnel and assets between the two soon-to-be- born states in the proportion of 70 percent to India and 30 percent to Pakistan, roughly the percentage of Hindu and Muslim soldiers in the Indian Army. By July 1947, the division was well underway in the agreed categories of personnel, moveable stores and equipment, and installations, with the overall percentages slightly modified to 64/36. Of the 46 training installations in British India, only seven were in the territory that would become Pakistan. And of these, only the Staff College was considered to be a major asset. Three others were the much smaller schools of military intelligence, air defense artillery, and logistics, and three were minor educational support facilities.29 Although two-thirds of the personnel and moveable stores ultimately departed Quetta, the prized 10,000-volume Staff College library remained intact. A part of the Staff College folklore is that the sole remaining Pakistani member on the faculty, Lieutenant Colonel Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, who later became Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army and ruled Pakistan under martial law from 1969 to 1972, slept in front of the library door for several nights to prevent departing Hindu faculty members from taking any books with them to India.
Mission and Objectives
Like its name, the purpose of the Staff College has changed several times over the years. In the original 1905 charter, the purpose was “to train staff officers for the Indian Staff Corps and the same regulations, entrance requirements, and methods of training as those in force at Camberley were to be adopted.” By the Golden Jubilee in 1955, the purpose had become “to train officers to the standard required of a second grade staff officer up to divisional level of war.” At the Platinum Jubilee in 1980, the purpose had slightly broadened “to train selected officers for war and in so doing fit them for grade 2 staff appointments and with further experience, for command.” Today, the mission has even further expanded “to impart necessary education to selected officers, enabling them to assume grade-II appointments and to inculcate in them personal and professional ethics and abilities to prepare them for higher command and staff roles.”
Organization, Senior Officers, Faculty, and Students.
The Staff College is normally headed by a Commandant in the grade of major general. It is divided into an Administrative Wing and an Instructional Wing, the latter being headed by the Chief Instructor (CI) in the grade of brigadier. The Instructional Wing consists of four Divisions of approximately 100 students each. Each Division is headed by a Senior Instructor (SI), a colonel, who is assisted by 12 to 13 faculty members in the grade of lieutenant colonel. These are known as the Directing Staff, or DS. Each Division consists of between 8 to 10 Syndicates of 10 students who are supervised by one DS. The Pakistani students selected
to attend the Staff College are captains/majors with between 8 and 12 years of service (although lieutenant colonels in specialty branches like engineers occasionally attend), have graduated from their respective arm/service mid-level career course, and have passed a competitive examination. Officers possessing a Bachelor of Arts/Science or its equivalent are eligible to earn a Masters of Science (War Studies) degree from the University of Balochistan while attending the course.
The Commandant is the central figure at the Staff College, exercising a profound influence on the faculty, the curriculum, and student behavior. Nevertheless, he is circumscribed in his ability to institute major changes because the Staff College falls under the general staff oversight of the Inspector General of Training and Evaluation (IGT&E), a lieutenant general, who is a principal staff officer at the Army General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi. Only if the Commandant has been able to forge a special relationship with the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), as Major General S. Wajahat Hussain was able to do in the construction of the new Staff College main building in the mid-1970s, is he able to exercise a relatively free hand.34 For example, an initiative by Major General Muhammad Safdar in 1982 to create a small cell at the Staff College to study army doctrine and other conceptual issues was stymied until the COAS overrode the objections of the IGT&E. Another initiative by Major General S.T.H. Naqvi to completely reorganize the traditional operation of the Staff College, upgrade its curriculum, and double its output of graduates, initially found favor with the “progressive” COAS, General Mirza Aslam Beg, but the initiative foundered on his retirement and it was never raised again.
Even on routine matters, the Commandant is occasionally overridden by GHQ. A former Commandant once proposed two relatively non-controversial initiatives. One was to organize a college seminar involving all past Commandants to hear their views on the future direction of the Staff College, and the second was to hire on a contract basis a small number of retired officers to act as mentors for the Directing Staff and assist them in creating new exercises and curriculum. Both were summarily vetoed by the IGT&E.37 Asked why they were rejected, the former Commandant explained that the Pakistan Army is a highly centralized institution and a pernicious cultural factor often influences its decision-making process. Any new initiative at almost any level, he explained, is often considered by more senior officers to be a subtle form of criticism of either their former stewardship (for example, of an institution like the Staff College) or their current oversight responsibilities. This reflexive aversion to criticism, whether it is overt or merely implied, may explain why it took the Pakistan Army nearly 20 years to authorize an official history of the 1965 war with India, another 29 years to publish the results, and then to restrict circulation by making the book available only to Army officers.38 The Army has never addressed its performance in the disastrous 1971 war with India that resulted in the loss of East Pakistan and half the country’s population. No official history has been written, and one probably never will be, because any objective rendering of that event would have to address the poor decision making of many senior Army officers. Such cultural factors may also explain why college traditions are so venerated and why the institution changes so little from year to year and from decade to decade.
The students at Quetta are generally considered to be the very best and brightest of the Pakistan Army, and selection to the Staff College is their first major step toward upward mobility in the Army. Currently, about 700 cadets graduate annually from the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) in two classes (two classes begin each year, six months apart). Of these officers, approximately half will eventually be selected to attend the Staff College. In earlier years, the selection rate was lower, roughly 35 percent. Expansions to the main Staff College building over the years have increased the capacity of the college to approximately 400 students, approximately 360 Pakistani and 40 foreign—or “allied”—students.
Pakistani students considered for selection are grouped according to their PMA graduating class, or “batch,” and are eligible to take the Staff College competitive examination every year over a five-year window of eligibility. The examination consists of a series of written papers that are designed to gauge a candidate’s professional military knowledge and communication skills. The test is administered in English. The top finishers in the competitive examination do not necessarily attend the Staff College. Instead, they may be offered an opportunity to attend either the British Army, Canadian Army, or Australian Army staff colleges, which are considered to be equivalent educational institutions and operate on similar pedagogical principles and techniques inherited from the British Army. Officers that are not selected to attend the Staff College fall off the path of upward mobility. They will be trained for repetitive assignments in intelligence, logistics, administration, or other functional career tracks, and will likely retire at no higher grade than major or lieutenant colonel. Students at the Staff College are overwhelmingly from the three combat arms of the Pakistan Army: infantry, armor, and artillery. Relatively few students from the Army’s combat support and logistics services are selected, and the number of officers from the Pakistan Air Force and Pakistan Navy has never been more than 1 percent in any year.
Curriculum and Methods of Instruction
The Staff College course is 44 weeks long and is divided into four study terms of 8 to 11 weeks duration. In the first three decades of the study, the course was conducted on a calendar year basis, with students arriving in late January and graduating in December. More lately, the course begins in late June and finishes in May of the following year. The curriculum consists of three major subject areas. The first, Professional Studies, is comprised of purely military subjects like military history, combat and supporting arms doctrines, operations of war, higher operations of war, specialized warfare, sub-conventional warfare,
joint warfare, training, logistics, operational analysis, command and leadership management, and staff officer skills. The second area is Developmental Studies, which consists of strategic studies, writing analytical papers on selected and assigned topics, attending the annual Staff College seminars whose topics vary from year to year, and a study tour of Pakistan (there are separate tours for allied and Pakistani students). The third area is Research Skills, which includes the writing of an individual research paper and a group research paper. These papers form the basis for the award of a Master of Science degree in the Art and Science of Warfare by the University of Balochistan.
Subjects taught at the Staff College use the basic teaching methodology inherited from the British Army and still in use in many Commonwealth countries. For Americans, this is a major change from the methods of instruction they are used to in U.S. Army schools which rely primarily on the “teach, practice, master” style of pedagogy. The most common instructional techniques at the Staff College are the tutorial discussion (TD) and tutorial exercise (TE) in which the syndicate DS assigns readings and facilitates discussion among the students who are expected to have mastered the information through self-study at home or in small group assignments referred to as “sub-syndicate work.” These are supplemented by formal group lectures (L) in the main auditorium and model discussions (MD) and map exercises (ME) in one of four model rooms, so named because the central feature of each room is a very large “sand box” for modeling terrain. DS not assigned to individual syndicates are responsible for preparing and leading these discussions and exercises. Formerly a major part of the course, outdoor exercises (OE) that used to be conducted in large training areas north and west of Quetta have been sharply curtailed in recent years due to the deteriorating security environment in the province of Balochistan, of which Quetta is the capital city and a prime target for terrorist attacks. A normal class day is six to seven hours, but the Staff College expects students to spend at least four hours each night on self-study or group work. The normal work week is six days, five in classes and one day each weekend scheduled for individual study.
Evaluation of Students
The Staff College has evolved a comprehensive method of evaluation that includes both faculty and student inputs. Every syndicate consists of eight or nine Pakistani students and one or two allied students. After each term, the syndicate rosters are “shuffled” so that a student never has the same DS twice, and rarely will he have more than one or two Pakistani students twice in a syndicate during the year. Thus, each student receives four separate evaluations by four different syndicate DS during the year. There is also a peer rating done each term in which students are asked to rank in order on a scale from 1 to 10
each of his fellow students in three specific areas: ability as a leader, ability as a team member, and capacity as a friend. Each student also receives a mid-course evaluation and a final evaluation by the division Senior Instructor. The Staff College year includes five or six major war games, each with a different operational focus and a different geographic setting. Students are assigned to fill various command, staff, and controller positions where their performance is observed by their syndicate DS as well as several non-syndicate DS members who are the exercise “sponsors.” The non-syndicate DS submit inputs to the student final evaluations, as does the Chief Instructor and Commandant, both of whom carefully observe the exercises and are periodically briefed by students holding the senior exercise appointments.
When all of these inputs are collated and weighed, the students are counseled and given suggestions about how to improve their performance prior to the mid-course break. After the final course evaluation, they will be awarded one of five possible grades: B+ (10-15 percent), high B (40 percent), B (35 percent), B low (10 percent), and C (1 percent). These grades become the basis for the Staff College recommendation to the Military Secretary, the senior officer in GHQ responsible for personnel matters, for the student’s next posting. The postings are announced at the end of the course by the Military Secretary in a presentation made to the Pakistan Army students only. No allied students are allowed to hear the results although most subsequently learn informally where their classmates will be assigned. The most prestigious assignment and desired posting is to become a brigade major of an infantry or armor brigade.46 Typically, about half of the students receiving a B+ grade immediately are assigned to this position after graduation, with the remaining half being selected to attend a foreign military staff college or deferred for a few months to complete required periods of regimental service. Another reason the Pakistani students strive for the B+ grade is that it automatically adds four percentage points to an individual’s Officer Efficiency Index, a running average of his previous fitness
reports. Students earning a High B or a B get two percentage point increases while anything lower merits nothing. Thus, nearly every Pakistani student views his year at the Staff College as the single most important event in his military career up to that point.
