No common understanding? A scoping review of professional military education in the twenty-first century

Abstract

In 2010, a report on EU member state military higher education concluded that “[t]here is no common understanding between the Member States about how the education of a young officer should be organized or what competences he or she should have” (Paile, 2010, p. 11). Similarly, Syme-Taylor and Jalili describe the field as “somewhat ill-defined; an heterogenous collection of diverse articles with discernible thematic linkages, rather than a unified literary tradition with consistent conventions and a self-referential process of evolution” (2018, pp. 98–99). A survey of this field is therefore timely. This article is the first scoping review of the peer-reviewed literature in English on professional military education (PME) in the twenty-first century. Following the conventions of scoping reviews we describe the characteristics of the peer-reviewed literature on PME, identify its main thematic concerns, and pinpoint some gaps in the literature that can inspire and guide further research.