Dates: 25 January – 19 February 2027 (4 weeks) 

Strategic Competition (SC) is a four-week, practitioner-focused, skills-based resident course for experienced military officers, civilian officials, and industry professionals. It helps participants assess competition across regions and domains and develop realistic options for action. Participants bring a strategic problem from their ministry, command, agency, company, or region and refine it through problem framing, analysis, coordination, implementation planning, and strategy stress-testing. Held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the resident format supports sustained professional exchange.

The course supports the Marshall Center mission to assess, align, and advance European-led security, deterrence, and defense through strategic analysis, skills-based training, and regional expertise, while placing these challenges in a global context. It applies ends-ways-means, DIMEFIL instruments of national power (Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement), assumption testing, risk assessment, public-private orchestration, strategic communications, and indicators of success or failure. Government, military, industry, and academic perspectives link political objectives to capabilities, resources, implementation, and assessment.

The course examines how technology, acquisition, finance, industrial capacity, critical infrastructure, global supply chains, and chokepoints shape advantage and vulnerability. It considers how Russia, China, Iran, non-state actors, and transnational networks use military and nonmilitary tools across regions, and how disruption in one theater creates effects elsewhere. Particular attention is given to transatlantic defense industrial readiness and links among national strategy, operational demand, and industrial capacity.

The Transatlantic Industrial Readiness Program, established to align military, government, industry, and security practitioners to advance European-led deterrence and defense by 2035, will be integrated throughout the course, with particular emphasis in Modules 1 and 4.

Module 1: Strategic Foundations and Problem Framing

Participants build a shared language for strategy, competition, deterrence, coercion, resilience, campaigning, and escalation. They examine strategy from both national and industrial perspectives, including how political objectives, policy, investment, production capacity, and resource constraints shape strategic choices. Drawing on the Transatlantic Industrial Readiness Program model, participants apply these concepts from their national perspective to develop a science and technology strategy that supports the transatlantic industrial base. Participants then frame their real-world problem, identify interests and constraints, and align ends, ways, means, risk, and assumptions. The module concludes with a strategic assessment.

Module 2: Strategic Competition and the Changing Global System

Participants examine how state and non-state actors compete across political, military, economic, informational, cyber, space, technological, societal, and legal domains. Global supply chains, maritime and digital chokepoints, logistics, energy, critical minerals, data, and infrastructure illustrate interdependence, coercion, resilience, and cascading risk. Multi-Domain Operations show how effects are created across domains and why national, allied, partner, and private-sector tools must be orchestrated below, through, and above armed conflict.

Module 3: From Strategy to Future Capability – Regions and the Global Security Order

Participants examine the dynamics of strategic competition in different regions and how those regions are linked globally through various domains ranging from geopolitics and economics to technology and supply chains. The module applies strategic competition frameworks to Europe, the MENA region and Africa, the Indo-Pacific, Arctic, and South America. Building on knowledge of these regional dynamics and inter-regional links, participants will construct future scenarios for the global security order. The exercise connects political objectives, ends, ways, means, assumptions, risk, sequencing, coordination, and measures of effectiveness.

Module 4: Strategy Implementation and Capstone Wargame

Participants apply Transatlantic Industrial Readiness Program principles through structured wargaming to stress-test their strategies against realistic scenarios. Supported by regional practitioners and informed by challenges identified by leaders in the field, the capstone introduces adversary adaptation, allied and partner decisions, industrial constraints, supply-chain disruption, escalation pressure, and second-order effects. Garmisch-Partenkirchen's proximity to Munich's innovation and startup ecosystem, combined with the timing of the course around the Munich Security Conference, provides participants an opportunity to engage with senior leaders and peers and distill key themes and implications. The wargame exposes assumptions, identifies decision points, and improves adaptability rather than predicting outcomes. Participants depart with a refined strategy brief, implementation pathway, risks, indicators, and candidate options suitable for senior-leader use.

The Marshall Center's resident courses are designed to build strategic competencies through lectures, seminars, workshops, simulations, and individual consultations. By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Apply strategic thinking to frame problems, align ends, ways, and means, and assess risk and uncertainty.
• Analyze strategic competition through global, regional, NATO, EU, national, partner, adversary, and industry perspectives.
• Assess the strategic implications of global supply chains, chokepoints, critical infrastructure, and industrial dependencies.
• Develop realistic strategic options using DIMEFIL, risk and assumption analysis, strategic communications, and disciplined resource choices.
• Evaluate technology development and acquisition strategy as a process for translating political objectives and operational demand into capabilities.
• Test strategic options through wargaming and structured analysis to refine implementation pathways, expose risk, and improve adaptability.
• Produce implementable, evidence-based recommendations for senior leaders and build professional networks that strengthen cooperation and collective security

The ideal candidate for this resident course is an experienced security professional with the following characteristics:

• Eight to 15 years of experience in security, defense, foreign policy, intelligence, industry, technology, acquisition, or related fields.
• Military officers, civilian officials, and industry professionals responsible for policy, planning, strategy, analysis, capability or technology development, acquisition, security cooperation, or implementation.
• Professionals from government, defense, industry, technology, finance, or academia whose work contributes to national, regional, global, or transatlantic security.
• A working understanding of security institutions, resource decisions, and decision-making processes.
• A need to analyze, develop, implement, or advise on strategy, capability development, acquisition, resilience, or institutional response.

The course is offered in English only. A minimum score of 80 on the English Comprehension Level (ECL) test, or an equivalent score or qualification under the ALCPT, NATO STANAG 6001, TOEFL, CEFR, or recognized university-level English coursework, is required.