This paper evaluates the potential for defence research to contribute to the long-term development of higher military education. Motivation for the paper emerged from recent organisational changes at the Ministry of Defence by which the Strategic Research Institute (SRI), joined the University of Defence (UoD). Both institutions, SRI and UoD, are obligated and dedicated towards respecting and implementing national strategies, laws and norms related to scientific research and education as well as towards fulfillment of prescribed accreditation standards for academic education and scientific research. The main idea here is to evaluate a scientific research approach conducted by the SRI, through the lens of the guiding principles for development of academic studies which are declared in the national strategy for education development. A few of the questions we tried to answer were: how relevant are the research topics?; who needs research results?; how should the research process be conducted?; and what about the quality of research results? Development of scientific research connections, higher education and practical needs of the military organisation are very important for all three domains, particularly for future security challenges. Military research organisations, along with the higher education component, have to be capable of perceiving future security challenges, conducting scientific research and offering some proposals based on scientific methodology. However, in the selection of the research topics, they have to respect the views, needs and priorities of other organisational entities which are part of the military organisation.
Scientific research in the defence sector (Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces), particularly in the domain known as “military sciences” or “defence sciences” is an important issue and a specific endeavour with a multidisciplinary character. Beside their uniqueness, defence research institutions are obligated to respect general rules, norms, laws and strategy related to the business of scientific research. Strategy for scientific and technological development is a document which defines a long term vision, goals and principles (
Higher military education is a specific kind of education whose main mission is to create (graduate level) and develop (postgraduate levels) professional military officers. The military education system in Serbia, for example, has a mission to create: “the identity of a professional officer – a leader, honourable, loyal, trained and prepared for intellectual and ethical challenges of an officer’s vocation in service of the homeland” (
Scientific research is an inherent part of academic education. Scientific activities which are undertaken at academic institutions support the education process in several aspects. They contribute to the long-term development of educators. They offer possibilities for inclusion of students in the field of scientific work particularly at master and doctoral levels. They contribute to the development and modernisation of study programmes. Research centres, laboratories and institutes incorporated in the organisational structure of the university have to be the spearhead of scientific research at university. Scientific research is highly creative, very demanding, and an uncertain kind of business, and, being such, stimulates creative thinking and propensity towards the persistent work of students and educators.
Future security challenges and their perception have a dynamic character which varies over time due to the changes in other domains (economic, political, technological, social, etc). This is particularly evident when comparing the new security strategy of the European Union from 2016 (European External Action Service 2016) and the previous one from the year 2003 (European External Action Service 2003). The new one is several times bigger, more concrete, better structured, more pragmatic and action oriented. If we recall the main events related with direct and indirect security violation of the EU in the period after 2003 it is not unusual:
the increasing oil price which occurred in June 2008 (more than 140$),
the global economic and financial crisis since 2007;
“the Russia-Georgia war in August 2008;
the Arab spring; the rise of China;
changes in the strategic pivoting of the USA towards Asia;
wars in the Middle East;
the migrant crisis (several years, multi-directional);
the crisis in Ukraine;
terrorist attacks in a number of EU cities;
the instability in the Balkans;
Brexit (23 June 2016); etc.
It is interesting that the new security strategy of the European Union was officially presented on 28 June 2016, only a week after the Brexit referendum in the UK (23 June 2016). The uncerainty and complexity of security challenges for small states is even greater because they need to take into account in the influence of global and regional powers (
Consideration of relations between future security challenges and the scientific research for military and defence needs, as well as to the higher military education process is important and logical. Both processes, scientific research and education, are long-term endeavours. Time frames for scientific projects are measured by years, at least one or two years for smaller projects. The time frame for higher military education is about four years. With these time aspects in mind, it is logical to ask questions about the relevance and actuality of the future research outputs as well as the preparedness and adequacy of the competencies of future military officers.
The military education system in Serbia is obligated to fulfil all standards of higher education prescribed by the Republic Ministry for higher education and science. One of those general documents is a strategy for education development (
Quality
Relevance
Efficiency
Internationalisation
Mobility
Scope and
Modernisation. (
Here, we evaluate a scientific research conducted at the University through the lens of the guiding principles listed above. Some questions which will be tackled are: how relevant are research topics?; who needs research results?; how to conduct the research process; and what about the quality of research results?
The next aspect of efficiency could be related to the relationship: engaged resources versus achieved results. Money, time, hardware, labs, etc, are all important when evaluating the efficiency of one project. For example, it is not the same when the project team of 6 researchers working 4 years produce a similar level of results as 3 researchers did in 2 years. Both projects could be wrongly evaluated with similar marks because of the similar overall results of the projects. However, it is clear that the second project team was much better – they produced a similar output in half the time than the first project team. Additionally, the second team is even better (twice, in the above example), because they did the job in a similar way to the first team but with less researchers. To sum up, the second research team is four times better than the first one (6x4 researcher-years, versus, 3x2 researcher-years).
Project evaluation measures have to take into account those differences and compare in a fair way different individual contributions of the research personnel. The individuality aspect is important because scientific research is highly creative and a very demanding endeavour which often creates some kind of new value. However, high demands in scientific research and the uncertainty factor may be misused sometimes, somewhere by some researchers, as an excuse for their low productivity and a lack of scientific results. As a consequence of that, there are some negative tendencies: organisational self-isolation from the wider academic community; subjective and biased instead of objective and unbiased valuation of individual and group results; ignoring of academic standards, and a rise in the phenomenon known as toxic leadership, which degrades a productive working atmosphere. Because of those risks and challenges it is very important to pay attention to the proper and adequate valuation of research work at academic organisations, particularly those in the public sector which are, by definition, far from other kinds of checking, control or verification on the market.
Scientific research in the context of higher military education is performed through a number of projects which are proposed and conducted by the departments of the military educational organisations. Ideally, the doctoral, master and even bachelor thesis should be developed as part of ongoing scientific projects. Also, participation in scientific projects is an effective way to develop the scientific and educational competencies of the professors. Further, conducting scientific research at military educational organisations contributes, particularly in the long-term perspective, to the development and improvement of study programmes as well as to the modernisation of educational resources. A good example of the last aspect is establishing a simulation centre at the Military Academy and involvement of simulation tools and methods in the educational process. The predecessor of that was the intensive use of simulation methods and tools at master and doctoral levels at one particular department of the Military academy (department for military logistics, and in the decades prior to that, it was a department for technical sustainment). In that sense, scientific research is the second central component of academic education. Research centres, laboratories and institutes incorporated in the organisational structure of the University have to be the spearhead of scientific research at the University and a proper place where students are introduced to the latest achievements in any educational and scientific field.
However, implementing beneficiaries of the contribution of science to the education is not an easy task, nor simple endeavour. Large organisations have complex structures and many sub-organisations. With the passage of time, the initial concept of internal cooperation may vanish and sub-organisations tend to conduct their own partial agendas and values, on account of a parent-organisation main agenda. This phenomenon is known as organisational silos and it is an open question for modern business, management and public administration. Scientific institutes and centres which are incorporated in the structures of the University have particular importance. They should be leaders in recognizsing and dealing with contemporary complex practice in defence business by furthering both military education and research (
A couple of successful efforts in carrying out research projects with established links between science and practice are (country case Serbia): Strategic Research Institute, an organisation in the University of Defence, which recently finished one externally ordered scientific project called “Propensity to Serve in Military Active Reserve” (
The second example is the ongoing project at the Strategic Research Institute, which is known as “Hybrid Warfare – Experiences and Perspective” (
Appropriate selection of a research topic that is, answering the first fundamental question: “who needs that project?” The first step is crucial, particularly for the aspect of relevancy. This is about connecting theory and practice. The main point is searching for a connection between theory (science) and practice. In order to obtain the relevance of research for practical problems, the simplest way is to ask the “practice” side to give a proposal (or a set of proposals) for research. That is, they are expected to formulate a problem (or a set of problems) which they want to be solved by the use of scientific resources. In that way, the relevance aspect is assured in advance: the proposer of the research topic is identified and it is logical to expect that he will be a main user of future scientific results. The importance of connecting research and practice was also recently stressed (
Conducting a research process. The crucial thing in this phase is the capability of a research organisation to produce a research plan, to find resources needed for the research, to define proper timelines, to prescribe indicators of success, and to motivate, lead, control, support and guide research staff towards successful realisation of a research plan. As mentioned at the beginning, scientific work is a creative activity but also uncertain, and because of that the research path is an oscillatory movement between hits and misses. Due to this character of scientific research processes, scientific organisations as well as individual researchers have to be resilient, flexible, persistent and self-critical in doing their research work.
Verification and validation of research results answers the second fundamental question: “how good are the results?” produced during research on the project. Publishing research results in scientific journals and the proceedings of scientific conferences is a “modus operandi” in the business of scientific work. In order to be published, an article has to be read and accepted by the journal’s editor and peer reviewers. After being published, the paper is exposed to critics and review by a wider readership. So, the paper has to be good enough in order to fulfill scientific standards. Scientific monographs (books) should arise from several journal articles and are dedicated to a particular scientific problem or application. Patents, innovations and technical solutions arise directly from scientific research and are directly applicable in the real world. In short, a collection of scientific publications of various types is the main shop- window of the scientific project conducted at academic institutions. Publishing for international scientific journals has a very important place in evaluating a project’s success, as well as in valuing individual contributions of researchers. In practice, however, many problems may arise: unbalanced production of individual researchers, reluctance towards publishing at international scientific events, weak proficiency in foreign languages, limited reading and monitoring of relevant literature (particularly those in foreign languages), poor computer proficiency (particularly among the social scientists), lack of research capabilities (many individuals entered research and academic organisations because of good working conditions and not because of propensity towards creative but demanding scientific work), etc.
The University of Defence is on its way towards consolidating higher military education and the research function. It started recently with organisational changes which strengthened relations between education and research organisations. One of the next crucial steps is clarifying a long-term vision, values and guiding principles for future work. Incorporated research organisations should bring new quality into education as a premier function of the University of Defence, while at the same time it needs to transform itself in the direction of a better research capacity in order to satisfy relevant needs of the military organisation now and in the future.
In this paper, we discussed relationships between the research and education function at the University of Defence in order to clarify contributions to development of the long-term vision of the system of higher military education. We did that from the perspective of the research organisation which is attached to the University of Defence. In order to achieve synergetic effects from organisational unification, we offered some prospective proposals for managing future research projects at the University and strengthening its overall capacity.