Then we can go right back to the discussion of setting an age cap for someone running for President. If you support that, fine. As of today, there is no law limiting one's age for serving.


I've not been able to come up with anything that qualifies Obama, either.

IamMe, being unable to deal with the actual topic of the thread, neue regel in typical fashion changed the topic to
age.  Nothing unusual is it?

You've got me IamMe. How does crashing five airplanes as a Naval pilot, and surviving in a Vietnamese prison with the last one that was shot down, equate being an expert on foreign policy or becoming a CIC?  It is actually a fallacious issue, put forward by the militarists.  The same ones who elected a former AF pilot, who never saw a day of combat, but spent most of the actual time he claimed to have flown around guarding Houston,TX instead flying a bar stool in Alabama. Oops I've changed the topic again, but you asked. 

He attended the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. during 1973–1974.

Core Course Integrating Themes: At the conclusion of the curriculum, students will understand that:

• National security strategy and policy are formulated and implemented within international and domestic political processes and environments that are dynamic, changing and replete with competing interests. As a consequence, policy is often as much an outcome of bureaucratic processes, compromise, and the influence of a dominant personality as it is of 'rational' calculus.

• State resources are limited, requiring policy-makers to set priorities among competing domestic and international interests, and to accommodate the allocation of resources between selected domestic and international objectives. Means and ends must be judiciously matched within strategies designed to accomplish national objectives.

• National security objectives and strategy must be devised and implemented within environments where ethical norms inform and constrain policy-makers’ freedom of action.

• A national security strategy must identify the interests of the nation and the challenges to those interests, and specify the objectives to be met through the use of specific policy instruments, particularly in any use of military force.

• Instruments of policy must be orchestrated within a cohesive strategy that deliberately integrates the selected instruments to achieve specified objectives.

• As a component of national security, military strategy and operations require the development within the Armed Forces of a joint culture that fosters the teamwork essential for deterrence, joint war fighting, and multinational endeavors. Planning and prosecution of joint campaigns and major operations require competency in joint skills, including the ability to orchestrate air, land, sea, space and special operations forces into effective joint teams.

Academic curriculum found here:National War College

It's not on his resume'.......

My guess is you havn't read the curriculum....it is a full year in residence course:

Core Program:

All students, including research fellows, normally must complete the core curriculum. The core program averages 9 to 13 class contact hours per week, generally in the mornings, and consists of the following major courses:

6100 - Introduction to Strategy

This course introduces the elements of strategy, critical thinking and strategic analysis to develop and provide the foundational strategic thinking skills required for the balance of the curriculum. Using selected frameworks and examples of strategy, students will begin their year-long examination of the components of national security strategy, the assumptions behind strategic choices, relationships among the instruments of national power, the orchestration of the instruments of power in pursuit of national security objectives and the roles of leadership and ethics in national security strategy.

6200 - War and Statecraft

This course analyzes the distinctive, and multi-faceted, phenomenon of war, to include: its character, conduct, nature, and scope; its military and non-military dimensions; and the ramifications of its use and potential use to achieve political objectives. The course explores key concepts regarding war and how those theoretical underpinnings have affected the design of military strategy. In so doing, the course provides students with a solid theoretical foundation for developing military strategy. Students will study a framework for critiquing—and designing—military strategy that will benefit them in subsequent examinations of military issues in other courses, in the end-of-year strategy applications, and in their efforts to develop strategy after graduation. The course further examines the elements comprising the military instrument of power and how that instrument can be employed in combination with other instruments of statecraft in peace and crisis, as well as in war.

6300 - The Non-Military Elements of Strategy

This course analyzes the non-military tools available to strategists and how those tools flow from the broader elements of national power. Specifically, the course analyzes the nature, purposes, capabilities and limitations of the non-military instruments of power, and investigates and critiques a variety of ways that strategists use these instruments. The course explores how instruments of power differ from but are dependent upon underlying national power, particularly in the areas of economics and information. Discussions reference peace, crisis and war to provide a comprehensive review of the non-military instruments’ role in national security strategy. The course provides detailed information on the non-military tools available to national security strategists, the various uses of those tools, both singly and in conjunction with one another, and helps set the stage for the end-of-year applications in national security strategy course.

6400 - The Domestic Context and U.S. National Security Decision-Making

This course provides the students with an understanding of the complex reality of the domestic context in which American strategists must make decisions. It considers the domestic context from multiple perspectives. It evaluates how broad domestic political and cultural factors, as well as resource and economic constraints, affect policy formulation and execution. The course further examines the structure and process of U.S. national security decisions. Here the course considers both the historical, philosophical and Constitutional foundations of inter-agency and inter-branch processes, and their subsequent evolution and current form. One element of this investigation will be a study of American civil military relations. Finally, the course will focus on individual and group level decision-making, to include a discussion of individual leadership and legitimate dissent within the U.S. national security policy process.

6500 - The Global Context

The purpose of this course is to help students understand the world and emerging strategic challenges from a perspective that is not U.S.-centric. Students will study selected nation-states and international regions, developing a familiarity with the role played by culture and history, as well as the key emerging trends in that region. They will analyze international trends and developments, compare and contrast regional contexts and national perspectives, and recommend how best to prioritize US interests within and across regions. The course will also examine how non-state actors, transnational actors and global trends shape the strategic environment. Students will develop a working knowledge of the international security context that is essential for creating, analyzing and carrying out national security strategy and policy.

6600 - Applications in National Security Strategy

This capstone course integrates and synthesizes the fundamental themes from the entire curriculum. The course will examine a series of strategic national security and homeland security challenges confronting the nation today. Students will work in small groups to assess select transnational security issues, determine U.S. objectives, identify key assumptions, and develop a range of policy options that include evaluations of the risks and benefits of each option. Students will practice the critical thinking skills introduced in course 6100 and select the military instruments (6200) and non military instruments (6300) best suited to these security challenges. Each exercise will also require an assessment of key domestic and national decision making enablers and constraints (6400) as well as a keen appreciation for the global context (6500) in which the U.S. must develop and implement its strategy. Students’ preparations for their field studies (6700) will be integrated into a program that develops specific regional strategies. In keeping with the goal of “putting theory into practice,” students will give oral presentations, field questions from “real world” officials, and produce written options memoranda designed for senior decision makers.

6700 - Field Studies in National Security

The National War College curriculum focuses on strategy at the national level, to include the integration of all elements of national power. It addresses national security policy, the theory and practice of war, the domestic and international context of national security strategy, contemporary military strategy, and joint and combined warfare. In turn, the policy and strategy process takes place in specific political, military, economic, social, geographical, and governmental contexts. It is a process that has bilateral, regional, and global dimensions. Understanding the formulation and implementation of policy and strategy requires in-depth knowledge of the current and prospective foreign policy situation in nations and regions affected by U.S. policies, and even more importantly, an understanding of how such strategic judgments are formulated. The Field Studies program is designed to integrate all the themes of the core courses and meet NWC/JPME objectives by providing a “test bed” for the synthesis of the entire year’s curriculum. These studies provide opportunities for NWC students and faculty to discuss policy issues with political, military, business, media, and academic leaders of other nations that affect the security of their nations and regions as well as the security of the United States. This interaction moves NWC strategic education from the theoretical world to the world of reality. There is no classroom substitute for the intensive learning that comes from face-to-face exchanges and personal experiences gained through discussions and activities overseas.

I'm impressed you "understand the axioms"......I'm sure you understand the axioms of simple mathmatics too......still doesn't make you a mathmatician.

Where did Obama do his full year in residence training again?

You guys can try and wish John McCains service, command, and national security education away all you want....but the ink on his resume' is dry....and Obama's resume here is still blank.

Here's where McCain's vaunted experience led him after the attacks on 9/11:

[By the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001], Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

While pushing to take on Saddam Hussein, Mr. McCain also made arguments and statements that he may no longer wish to recall. He lauded the war planners he would later criticize, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. McCain even volunteered that he would have given the same job to Mr. Cheney.) He urged support for the later-discredited Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi’s opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and echoed some of its suspect accusations in the national media. And he advanced misleading assertions not only about Mr. Hussein’s supposed weapons programs but also about his possible ties to international terrorists, Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks. […]

[A]fter Mr. Bush declared he would hold responsible any country condoning terrorism, Mr. McCain called his leadership “magnificent” and his national security team the strongest “that has ever been assembled.” A few weeks later, Larry King of CNN asked whether he would have named Mr. Rumsfeld and Colin L. Powell to a McCain cabinet. “Oh, yes, and Cheney,” Mr. McCain answered, saying he, too, would have offered Mr. Cheney the vice presidency.

Even during the heat of the war in Afghanistan, Mr. McCain kept an eye on Iraq. To Jay Leno in mid-September, Mr. McCain said he believed “some other countries” had assisted Osama bin Laden, going on to suggest Iraq, Syria and Iran as potential suspects. In October 2001, when an Op-Ed page column in The New York Times speculated that Iraq, Russia or some other country might bear responsibility for that month’s anthrax mailings, Mr. McCain interrupted a question about Afghanistan from David Letterman on that night’s “Late Show.” “The second phase is Iraq,” Mr. McCain said, adding, “Some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.” […]

[W]hen the Czech government said that before the attacks, one of the 9/11 hijackers had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official, Mr. McCain seized the report as something close to a smoking gun. “The evidence is very clear,” he said three days later, in an Oct. 29 television interview. (Intelligence agencies quickly cast doubt on the meeting.) [paste this in your browser to see the source: nytimes.com/2008/08/17/us/politics/17mccain.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin]

In other words, McCain gave every indication that he would have made all of the same errors that Bush made.
This is "experience" our nation can do without. 

Here's something thats even funnier;