The civilian workforce isn’t underdeveloped. It’s underinvested.

The Department of War says it wants civilians who can operate at the strategic level — people who can think long-range, integrate across domains, and contribute meaningfully to national-level decision-making.

Yet the funding model for civilian development tells a different story.

Military Participation = Centrally Supported

Civilian Participation = Locally Funded

On paper, civilians are eligible for many of the same high-end development opportunities as their military counterparts.

In practice, eligibility and access are not the same thing.

Military development programs are typically supported by centralized funding structures that move personnel through established education, training, and assignment pipelines. Civilian participation often depends on local organizations absorbing months of TDY, travel, and per diem costs from already constrained budgets.

The result is a predictable gap between policy and participation.

The recent award of an $8.4 million contract to Arizona State University’s Strategic Thinkers Program highlights this challenge.

The investment signals a clear commitment to building strategic thinkers across the force. Yet for civilians, participation remains largely theoretical because the costs associated with attendance—months of TDY, travel, and per diem—must be absorbed by the participant’s home organization rather than funded at the enterprise level.

For military personnel, established funding and assignment systems help bridge that gap. For civilians, the decision becomes a budget problem.

Commanders and supervisors are left balancing mission requirements against a substantial, unplanned expense. The resulting dilemma is familiar: “I’d love to send you, but I can’t afford it.”

The issue is not Arizona State University.

The issue is a development model that assumes civilian participation without funding civilian participation.

But here is the part the system consistently gets wrong: civilians are not underdeveloped.

The workforce is not sitting around waiting to be trained. In fact, the opposite is true.

Every so often, a number stops you in your tracks. For me, that number was 115,000 — the number of training hours logged by a small segment of our International Cooperation workforce.

One hundred fifteen thousand hours.

That is more than 55 years of full-time development.

And it did not happen because someone directed it.

It happened because the mission demanded it.

This data reveals something the current policy framework struggles to recognize: we are not a workforce lacking development. We are a workforce whose development is largely invisible to the system.

We track courses, but not capability.

We log hours, but not judgment.

We measure attendance, but not expertise.

The result is predictable.

When civilians are labeled “underdeveloped,” the system is often not describing a talent gap.

It is describing a tracking gap and a funding gap.

If the Department of War wants civilians who already operate at the strategic level to continue developing that capability, it must address both.

That means centralizing TDY and PCS funding for long-term education.

It means protecting civilian quotas instead of leaving participation to the luck of a command’s budget cycle.

It means building a real civilian development pipeline—one that recognizes the capability that already exists and invests in expanding it.

Because the truth is simple.

Civilians are already doing strategic work.

They are already solving complex problems, integrating across organizations, and carrying institutional memory that the force depends on.

What they lack is not talent.

What they lack is access.

Access blocked not by ability, but by policy.

The Department of War has been clear about the strategic capabilities it wants.

The civilian workforce has been clear about its willingness to develop.

The missing piece is not talent.

The missing piece is investment.

You can’t build a strategic pipeline on unfunded mandates.