In 1989, then-Commandant Gen Alfred M. Gray, Jr., presided over the launch of the Marine Corps University (MCU) as the Service's primary educational institution. His interest in PME never waned. Twenty-six years later, at the 2015 CornerStone Conference at MCU—speaking to a roomful of active and Reserve commanders and sergeants major about his formidable PME legacy—a long-retired Gen Gray quipped, "It doesn't cost anything to think."1
In a published reach-out to all Marines, current MCU President, BGen William J. Bowers, delivered an invitation for ideas about PME-stating,
Our PME System is in a constant state of review and refinement, and we need recommendations from the force to help us develop and deliver the most professional, current, relevant, and challenging curriculum possible in order to prevent stagnancy.2
With a proposal that will add immense and enduring value to PME, and thereby to Marines' daily professional lives and to the Corps, we embrace Gen Bowers' encouragement to try to identify where and how PME can be refined and improved. Something important is categorically absent from today's system, something that can be incorporated without at all diminishing the existing and developing indispensable components of PME.
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