The Commando College, a successor of the Commando Cadres Supplementary School, was established on 20 July 1967. Over the past 55 years’ building, combat, and development, under the absolute, direct leadership of the Party, Central Military Commission (CMC), and Ministry of National Defence (MND), first and foremost the Commando Command, the College has successfully accomplished all assigned tasks, especially education and training, meeting requirements for force generation and development of commando operational art, contributing to cultivation of the Heroic Commando Command’s tradition of “an extremely elite force, incredible brave, ingenious and bold warriors, and powerful strikes”.

During the war of resistance against U.S. aggression for national salvation, the College trained thousands of command and staff officers and technical experts for direct combat on various theatres of war and major campaigns such as the 1968 Spring Mau Than General Offensive and Uprising, the Route 9 – Southern Laos Campaign of 1971, the historic Ho Chi Minh Campaign of 1975, contributing to complete liberation of the South and national reunification. In the period of national construction and defence, the College focused on strengthening its staffing, facilities, and gradual reform of training programmes, contents, and methodologies; successfully accomplished its training mission to provide cadres for defending the Southwest border and Northern border; together with people and other forces nationwide, firmly protected national independence, sovereignty, unification, and territorial integrity and completed international duties. Currently, the College is in charge of training commando officers, non-commissioned officers, and technical experts for the entire military; training counter terrorism forces for the Ministry of Public Security and friendly nations; and ready to undertake A2 mission, counter terrorism, fight for safeguarding sovereignty over waters and islands as well as other tasks entrusted by the higher echelons. Given its outstanding achievements, the College was awarded the Hero of the People’s Armed Forces in 2014 by the State and many other noble rewards.

To gain such outcomes, generations of cadres, lecturers, cadets, employees, and soldiers of the College have constantly stayed united for addressing difficulties and challenges and resolved to reform and accomplish their education and training missions assigned by the Commando Command and MND. The College has drawn on its results to set out measures to improve education and training quality to meet requirements of the new period as follows:

Building of pure, strong party committees and organisations at all levels to successfully lead education and training missions. This is a vital solution, which provides a solid foundation for the College’s accomplishment of all assigned tasks. To implement this solution, the College Party Committee and Board of Directors request their departments, faculties, and units to deeply perceive and strictly realise higher echelons’ resolutions and directives regarding Party building. Education is further promoted with a view to making party committees, party organisations, all cadres, and party members steadfast in Marxism-Leninism, Ho Chi Minh’s thought, the Party’s goals and ideals. Attention is paid to ideological work and good alignment between “building” and “combat,” in which “building” is the core. Priorities are given to implementation of the Conclusion No. 01-KL/TW, dated 18 May 2021 of the Politburo (13^th tenure) on further stepping up studying and following Ho Chi Minh’s ideology, morality, and style as well as the CMC’s Resolution No. 847-NQ/QUTW, dated 28 December 2021, on bringing into play fine quality of “Uncle Ho’s Soldiers” to combat individualism in the new situation, laying the foundation for effectively preventing signs of deterioration in political ideology, morality, and lifestyle among cadres and party members, especially the members of party committees and leading cadres in departments, faculties, and units.

Obstacle training

It is necessary to regularly strengthen party committees at all levels in terms of quantity and quality; raise party secretaries’ and members’ knowledge, work ability, working style, and experience, especially the abilities to put forward and operationalise resolutions; strictly adhere to the principle of democratic centralism and regulations on party meeting; heighten cadres’ and party members’ spirit of self-criticism and criticism. Leadership regulations of party committees at all levels, especially those relating to key aspects, need to be improved, ensuring closeness and in accordance with principles. Party committees and organisations are requested to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of inspection and supervision of party discipline under the motto of “extended supervision, focused inspection”. The content of inspection and supervision concentrates on leading education and training missions in connection with conducting Party rectification and building and the Conclusion No. 01-KL/TW of the Politburo (13^th tenure). During implementation, special importance must be attached to ensuring closeness, fairness, and objectivity; inspecting and supervising party organisations and cadres in positions vulnerable to shortcomings, striving to have 90 per cent of party committees, organisations, cadres, and party members graded as good and excellent.

Cultivation of lecturers’ professional competence and pedagogical methodology. Lecturers are subject of teaching and learning process and play a direct role in orienting and coordinating cadets’ knowledge acquisition and professional skills. The College, therefore, grasps and strictly carries out Decision No. 89/QD-TTg, dated 18 January 2019, of the Prime Minister, which approves the project to “Promote ability of the corps of lecturers and management cadres at tertiary education institutions to meet requirements of basically and comprehensively reforming education and training in the 2019-2030 period. It also implements the project to “Develop the corps of lecturers and cadres in the military to meet requirements of fundamentally and comprehensively reforming education and training in the military in the 2020-2030 timeframe”. Priorities are given to standardisation of lecturers and cultivation of high-quality lecturers and leading experts by various means, including proposing rotation of cadres and lecturers to improve their experience; sending qualified cadres and lecturers to postgraduate training courses as well as courses on foreign language and information technology, organising pedagogical training courses and teaching competitions. Pedagogical activities such as classroom observation, teaching practice, approval of lessons according smart school model are regularly carried out to enhance lecturers’ pedagogical skills. Consequently, the corps of lecturers is always stable, properly structured; possess political steadfastness, good ethics, and passion for their jobs; is qualified for intensive teaching according to modern teaching methodology; is capable of applying technology and effectively handling specialised classrooms, contributing to increased effectiveness of teaching and learning process.

Proactive reform of training contents, programmes, and methodologies. To ensure knowledge requirement for each education level in accordance with national standard; ceaselessly pursue the “basic, systematic, uniform, intensive” goal in education and training; continue to synchronously reform education and training objectives, contents, programmes, and methodologies in the direction of modernity and international integration; realise resolutions of the Party Central Committee on education and training and the Resolution No. 627-NQ/DU, dated 19 February 2013, of the Commando Command Party Committee, the College Party Committee and Board of Directors advocate reforming contents, programmes, and methodologies in the direction of developing learners’ competence. Accordingly, the College requests the Training Department, other departments, and faculties to collaborate with one another to design contents and programmes in the direction of increasing night training, field training, and high-intensity extracurricular training; decreasing the time for general training from 30 to 25 per cent while increasing specific training from 70 to 75 per cent; closely combining training with physical training, studying foreign languages and information technology, thereby improving cadets’ creative thinking, command style, and soft skill to satisfy practical demand of grassroots units. Under the “expedient, basic, firm” motto, the College has added counterterrorism techniques and tactics, A2 operation, offshore island operation to training contents to meet practical requirements. As for tactical training, individual training is associated with collective training from squad to section, platoon, and company level. Basic drill is applied from battalion level onwards. Regarding technical training, the cadets take lessons collectively before being divided into smaller groups for basic training and integrated training. As for complex contents requiring high accuracy in majors such as Urban Combat Commando, Maritime Commando, and Martial Arts, model teams are used in the training process. Besides, classrooms for specific purposes, gymnasium, martial arts training rooms, rooms for simulated indoor tactical training, and indoor shooting ranges are employed to place learners into virtual close-to-combat scenarios.

Close combination of education, training, and scientific research. On clearly perceiving the vital role of scientific research in enhancing education and training quality, the College Party Committee and Board of Directors pay constant attention to leadership of cadres’ and lecturers’ scientific research. Scientific research has become one of the criteria for selecting good lecturers and management cadres. The College provides sufficient facilities and materials for conducting scientific research; closely instructs the registry, approval, and official acceptance of projects as provided by regulations. Thus, scientific projects, coursebooks, teaching materials, technology innovation initiatives are done with high quality, most notably the project on development of commando operational art, which has been effectively applied in practice, contributing to increased quality of education and training as well as combat training and readiness in units. The College has conducted 15 scientific projects, introduced 118 initiatives, compiled 69 coursebooks and many other teaching materials to serve the need of each type of learners and fulfil education, training goals since 2012.

The College Party Committee and Board of Directors draw on the achievements to continue to leverage their initiative and creation to ceaselessly enhance education, training quality; build a comprehensively strong, revolutionary, regular, advanced, exemplary college; and further beautify tradition of the Heroic Commando Officers Training College.

Senior Colonel, Doctor Nguyen Xuan Binh, Rector of the College