News Releases

The partnership between the Command and General Staff College – Intermediate Level Education (CGSC-ILE) and the University of Kansas’ School of Business has grown stronger in its second year. The program has more than doubled since its inception and has grown principally through “word-of-mouth”- recommendations from the 11 graduates of last year’s class. This partnership has offered an excellent opportunity to Logistics-oriented CGSC-ILE officers to receive an advanced degree in their chosen profession. The Master of Science in Business (MSB) with a concentration in Supply Chain Management and Logistics offers the military logistics professional a “bridge” between the military and the civilian side of logistics and it does so seamlessly with the CGSC-ILE curriculum. KU recognizes six elective credits offered by CGSC-ILE’s Department of Logistics and Resource Operations (DLRO) and has done an outstanding job coordinating the demanding schedule to be as accommodating as can be hoped. On the administrative side, it is obvious they took all the lessons learned from last year’s class to make the program “hassle-free” through the excellent collaboration and hard work of the administrative staff at KU, the Ft Leavenworth’s Education Center and DLRO.

The program itself is administered with an acknowledgment of our military experiences and professional education with the express purpose of bridging the gap between the military and the civilian side of logistics and leadership/management/ethics. The curriculum begins with the fundamentals of Accounting, Finance, Statistics and Managerial Economics and progresses through Procurement, Information Systems, Change Management, Transportation Logistics, Project Management and culminates in the Capstone in Supply Chain Management- designed to bring together what we learned in group-oriented exercises. The instructors were cognizant of our ILE workload, and our time away from formal academics (most of us have been out of school over a decade) but knew exactly what they wished to teach and worked hard to keep that fine balance between rigor and overload to make this course challenging without being overwhelming.

My impressions from this program were exceedingly positive and gave me a new appreciation for all that I have learned from the military in my 18 years of service with 13 years in the logistics field. We, as a group of mostly military officers, worked exceedingly well together producing products in a time-constrained environment that were appreciated by our instructors- an ability that we all learned in the military and usually take for granted. Also, the civilian practices learned in this program translate very well and has many analogous processes in the military. The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis along with the Baseline Process for Execution parallels our Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP) and our Center of Gravity (CoG) analysis; the risk mitigation techniques are virtually identical to our Composite Risk Management; Strategic vision and imperatives mirrors our commander’s intent and command philosophy- just to name a few. This program did exactly what I expected and hoped, it rounded out my professional education and improved my technical competence by providing the terminology and even more of the analytical tools and processes that I will carry forward to future assignments and ultimately into the civilian sector. I highly recommend this program for any professional logistician.

Dominguez graduated with his Master of Science in Business with a concentration in Supply Chain Management and Logistics in May 2010.