Joint concept development at joint forces command

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

USJFCOM is also developing new organizing principles for joint experimentation. The characteristics of future joint operations reflected a vision of transformed military capabilities, but the command needed newer challenges to develop even more advanced concepts. In a joint mission area analysis, USJFCOM surveyed joint warfighters, including the joint staff, regional combatant commanders, and the services. USJFCOM asked joint warfighters to describe the most critical warfighting issues they felt were in need of joint solutions. The command received over 300 specific responses and strategic guidance from senior DOD leaders, distilled them into three categories that are now the organizing principles for JCD investigations. The themes are--

* Achieving decision superiority.

* Creating coherent effects.

* Conducting and supporting distributed operations.

Achieving decision superiority. Achieving decision superiority addresses generating and sustaining high quality, shared situational awareness within an interagency and multinational environment to make decisions and take actions at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels necessary to make decisions and take action faster than any adversary. U.S. military superiority also depends on the degree of command centralization in a global, distributed, and fully networked environment. In challenging military environments, command structures must be flexible enough to give commanders the degree of centralization or decentralization that a specific contingency or engagement requires.

Creating coherent effects. USJFCOM's survey respondents were concerned that warfare is an increasingly integrated effort, involving all of the instruments of national power and harmonizing coalition efforts during operations. Because of this, USJFCOM must turn its attention to ensuring that the Nation configures its joint warfighting capability to create, maintain, and support the application of effects to achieve national objectives. Creating coherent effects requires the joint force to organize, plan, and train the harmonization of military, interagency, and multinational activities at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels against any type of adversary--from conventional enemies to those who operate on the cusp between combatant and criminal activity.

Conducting and supporting distributed operations. This category includes how to plan, prepare, and execute operations simultaneously in multiple theaters and across widely distributed points of action within each theater. The joint force must have this capability against adversaries actively working to deny access to the area even if the theaters lack robust infrastructure. Distributed operations inhere an ability to deploy, fight, command, and sustain forces while maintaining pressure on an adversary. The joint force must deny the adversary sanctuary from which to operate while protecting U.S. forces.

These three categories are the lens through which USJFCOM will analyze and evaluate experimental operational concepts in the JCD path. A larger number of specific questions that address the most difficult problems the warfighter faces today lend themselves to focused experiments within these three categories. USJFCOM will explicitly focus on 9 of these 18 questions over the next 2 years, using common scenarios and alternative operational concepts such as the Joint Operations Concept (JOpsC).