The schools made us. The community keeps us.
The Professional Home for Military-Educated Operational Planners and Strategists. Find and be found by your people, wherever the service sent you.
Requesting an invitation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. ERETAI (AIR-ih-tie) is the Greek word for the oarsmen.
A community forged in shared discipline should not be set adrift after graduation.
The nation built these schools to produce the people who turn a leader’s intent into a plan a team can execute. Then it sends them everywhere. More than forty years of that investment should not evaporate at the schoolhouse door. These professionals do not need saving. They need supporting.
We could solve so many of our own problems, and create so many opportunities, if we just knew each other existed.
A foundation, governed by the community and answerable to it, is how the community outlasts its founder, any one school, and any one class.
We know you. We are you.
We know the work you put in. The relationships should last, the opportunities should be there, and the people who need what you bring should be able to find you.
From the founder
Eric Fowler, PhD · Founder, The ERETAI Group · Colonel, US Army (Ret.) · SAMS and JAWS graduate · Former Director, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2023 to 2026
I was one of the school directors. I could not muster an alumni association. There was no way to resource one with the time, talent, or finances to make it work, and in uniform I was part of the Department of Defense, officially part of the problem. Volunteers and spreadsheets were what we had, and I fault no one for it. The Department has other priorities. The cards are simply stacked against us.
It wasn’t until I was out, and could form proper legal entities, that I could build the infrastructure we needed. The Army’s strategists had already shown it can be done: the Army Strategist Association has served Army strategists for years, and it is the inspiration for this Foundation. To really solve the problem, I had to stop thinking of it as a JAWS problem, or even a JAWS-related problem, and see it as a problem above any one program, any one service, and any one community. It is a we problem, and the most damning part of it is that we don’t know who each other are. So we had to make it bigger. Someone with a vision for a support structure with staying power had to build an institution, three of them in fact, that could keep investing in this national treasure so that we, the public, keep getting the most out of it.
All it takes is a little competence, character, and commitment.
He speaks for himself, not for the Department of Defense or National Defense University. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense, National Defense University, or the U.S. Government. The Army Strategist Association is an independent organization and is not affiliated with ERETAI.
To each other, and to the world.
The Foundation is being formed to make that connection three ways: online, locally, and in person.
ERETAI Connect
Not a single group chat. A network that crosses services and generations, with a room for every school, every program, and every class.
Operated today by The ERETAI Group, LLC, for the community. Consulting opportunities, the Group’s included, are posted inside Connect on the same terms for every organization, and reach only the members who have said they are open to them.
Visit ERETAI ConnectERETAI Chapters
Members near each of the schools and in the places alumni land, welcoming the newest graduates and gathering the ones who came before. The earliest classes had nobody waiting for them. Be the one waiting for the newest.
Raise your handERETAI Commons
In-person gatherings where planner-strategists meet the people who need them and have never heard of the schools: employers, civic leaders, neighbors. All of us are smarter than one of us.
Built for us, by us, and sustained through us.
You don’t have to lead any charge or log in every day. Just be findable. Then, if you can, pull a little harder.
Before the graduates knew they were one profession, they were already rowing in rhythm.
In 1983 the Army built the first of these schools to close the gap between tactical execution and strategic intent. Within a decade the Air Force and the Marine Corps had built their own, and the joint community its own after that, each with its own doctrine, cadence, and culture. Beneath those differences ran a deeper, shared current: service, strategic thought, and quiet professionalism.
Though the graduates rarely wore the same patch, they shared the same posture: head down, blade in the water, pulling hard for the team.
In ancient Greece, the eretai were the oarsmen: unseen, synchronized, and essential. Their job was movement. They rowed in unity, through the fog, trusting one another to hold the course.
That same spirit has defined the graduates of these schools for decades: trusted, disciplined, and unseen by design. Every school had a name for its own. Nobody had one for the whole.
They were, in essence, eretai.
ERETAI doesn’t create that culture. It reveals it. It reconnects those who thought they were rowing alone.
No worthy vision should fail for want of planning, and no planner’s talent should go to waste.
Your seat is waiting. Come home.
Now row well in a new direction.
Request Your Invitation
