Military Experimentation - navy operations

Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2001 by Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr.

Both Service-Level and Joint

The U.S. military plans to fight as a joint force, one that draws upon all the services' capabilities. This makes sense, as modern technology has enabled each of the services to operate far outside its traditional battlespace--and into the battlespaces of the other services. Joint experimentation should therefore encourage a spirited, though friendly, competition among the services to determine the proper mix of capabilities. To its credit, the Army has sought to expand the major exercise on urban operations it planned for September 2000--now known as the Joint Contingency Force Advanced Warfighting Experiment, or MILLENIUM FORCE 2000--to include participation from the other three services as well as the staff of Joint Forces Command. Once again, this represents a bottom-up approach by the services, as opposed to top-down encouragement from senior Defense Department leaders.

Certainly, there are operations or campaigns that one service may dominate, such as antisubmarine warfare, long-range precision strike, and space control. Here, service experimentation might assume primacy over joint experimentation. However, given current and projected technology trends, such cases at the operational level will likely become increasingly rare.

Exploited in Developing Future Requirements

It goes almost without saying that the insights and lessons derived from experimentation must be harvested if innovation and transformation are to succeed. Focusing on post-transformation challenges and opportunities helps to ensure that the military is addressing the right questions with respect to future warfare and thus can get the right answers with respect to emerging requirements. These insights mean little, however, unless they actually influence the way requirements are determined, budgets are shaped, resources are allocated, institutions are adapted, and forces are developed.

At present it is unclear how this is to be accomplished. Even if one assumes a robust level of service and joint experimentation focused on emerging challenges, it is not clear how the insights will be translated into new requirements. As one senior general officer has put it, "You fund these things and do an experiment and you find out great things, but then [do] you have to wait another two years or so before you get it into the normal budget process?" [17]

Indeed, in recent years both the Defense Department's Planning, Programming and Budgeting System and the Joint Chiefs' Joint Requirements Oversight Council (with its "joint warfighting capabilities assessments" approach) have seemed incapable of effecting significant changes in service budget shares or in program focus, despite the declared determination of Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen to transform the U.S. military. [18] Promising new capabilities or force elements--such as unmanned combat aerial vehicles, moving-target-indicator satellites (such as Discoverer II), the arsenal ship, Strike Force, the Deep-Strike Brigade, the STREETFIGHTER littoral operational concept, and the Trident SSBN conversion to conventional missile carriers--have been terminated, delayed, or jeopardized. Yet support for such programs as modernizing tactical air and heavy divisions continues unabated, even though it is far from clear these would fare well in an anti-access power-projection environment.