Joint concept development at joint forces command

Military Review, July-August, 2004 by Jeffrey J. Becker

WITH POLITICAL certainties no longer certain and technologies of war and peace progressing faster than ever before, rapid changes characterize today's world, and bring dangerous new threats to the Nation's security. U.S. adversaries continually and rapidly adapt to contest U.S. military superiority and support developments unfavorable to American interests. The United States does not have the luxury of extended time lines to construct new military capabilities. U.S. military forces must be intellectually and substantively agile enough to adapt to change faster than their adversaries.

To attain this agility, America must experiment with novel concepts and construct an environment of experimentation that rapidly identifies new challenges and opportunities and examines lessons learned from U.S. military operations worldwide. The U.S. military must identify options to further explore through wide-ranging "discovery" experiments in hypothetical crisis situations. Robust follow-on experimentation using detailed hypotheses will ensure that the capabilities observed in the experiments are, indeed, the right ones, and rapid prototyping will place capabilities in the hands of warfighters to obtain their feedback before more major investments in time, resources, and intellectual capital.

Each of the services, combatant commands, and defense agencies must adjust to changing circumstances to field the best capabilities. U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM), in particular, must bring together new ideas from throughout the U.S. military through joint concept development and experimentation (JCDE). By rigorous and sustained testing of new ideas, USJFCOM will ensure that future U.S. forces will be relevant instruments of national power to protect the Nation.

JCDE will provide a body of evidence of which senior military leaders can base decisions to allocate scarce resources of time, personnel, and money. USJFCOM has developed a joint concept development (JCD) path to--

* Provide observations, insights, and actionable recommendations from experimentation results to senior leaders to inform them of options for future force investments from 2015 to 2020.

* Provide recommended solutions to important questions that military leaders confront every day.

Insights and observations, in the form of program, budget, or experiment recommendations, will help decide whether to refine a concept, transfer it to prototype development, or stop work on it altogether. The concept-development path at USJFCOM is the leading edge of joint military experimentation and the first step in a rigorous program to answer questions concerning priorities and capabilities that require investment. Concept development provides the intellectual backbone that allows advocates of change to say with some authority that multiple paths have been explored and that differing ideas have competed, contrasted, or been amalgamated to create a body of evidence for decisions about configuring the joint force.

JCD Path

The JCD path encompasses conceptual development activities and experiments through 2005, allows USJFCOM to integrate its experiments with the efforts of other U.S. services and combatant commands, and arranges Department of Defense (DOD) concept experimentation efforts in time and space.

Through the crafting of scenarios, wargame venues, and the competition of concepts for future military operations, the JCD path creates an environment in which to test these new ideas and allows USJFCOM and the services to develop concepts within a common, joint frame of reference. This frame of reference allows DOD to determine future joint requirements in a collective way before acquiring actual capabilities. The shared, collaborative investigation will result in a shared understanding of the future joint environment and the development of the coherently joint capabilities that USJFCOM describes as "born joint."

Developing "born joint" military capabilities is an important shift in perspective. Instead of welding together each service's capabilities after they have already been developed, joint capabilities are explored from the beginning of the force-development process. This new vision of jointness--as the coherent integration of forces rather than deconfliction after the fact--allows senior decision-makers to preclude, rather than resolve, interoperability problems by building capabilities that are joint at the outset.

The JCD path provides this perspective by framing military challenges in a joint context--a common set of intellectual tools that can be used throughout DOD for all military experimentation. The joint context includes several significant elements:

* A common set of issues that senior military leaders and joint warfighters in need of solution identify.

* A discourse of concepts that highlights the unique strengths and shortcomings of operational-level concepts that the joint staff, USJFCOM, and each of the services develop.

* A shared set of scenarios reflecting challenging strategic and military problems.