By Jim Garamone, DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON -- The new National Defense Strategy has paved
the way for the most extensive revision of the joint force since the
Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said
in a recent interview.
The changes will ensure that planning, force management and
decision-making are made “at the speed of relevance,” Marine Corps Gen. Joe
Dunford said.
The chairman is a key part of these revisions, being named
by Defense Secretary James N. Mattis as the global integrator for the joint
force. The secretary’s memorandum detailing the chairman to the job calls on
him to be “responsible for assisting in strategic planning and direction of the
armed forces to ensure the effective conduct of operations.”
Dunford -- and his successors -- must work to speed senior
leaders’ decision-making, integrate operations worldwide and deliver forces
capable of competing and winning against any possible adversary.
That the speed of war has accelerated is a given. Actions in
one part of the world are felt almost instantaneously around the globe. The
cyber world is now a realm of combat and permeates all other realms. A video of
a riot in Peshawar, Pakistan, may spark a response anywhere from Nigeria or the
Philippines to Moscow or Beijing.
Changing Nature, Character of War
The inclusion of space and cyber realms as domains of
warfare means the battlefield has expanded from orbit to the digital world, and
has changed the character of war. As reflected in the recently signed Joint Concept
for Integrated Campaigning, the old paradigm of “at war” or “at peace” has
shifted, defense officials have said. Russian and Chinese military thinkers
have “gone to school” on the United States and devised strategies to achieve
their objectives short of open conflict, officials said.
The Russians and Chinese are playing a long game to threaten
the international, rules-based order that has been so successful at maintaining
peace since World War II, defense officials said. And they are doing this with
actions below the threshold of armed conflict. They use information operations,
troop movements, proxy fighters, propaganda, diplomacy, economic pressures and
threats to coerce countries.
The speed of war has accelerated, and the U.S. military is
changing to get ahead of this development. Time is a precious commodity to
defense and national leaders. They need the best intelligence and information
and they need it quickly.
When Dunford first took office he spoke about buying more
time for leaders to study options and make decisions.
He believes he has found the way to buy this time and global
integration is key.
“When I think global integration, I think about it in terms
of integrated plans -- global plans instead of regional plans,” Dunford said.
“I think in terms of decision-making by the secretary of defense -- decisions
about prioritization, allocation of resources primarily in a conflict.”
Joint Force Integration
Given the realities of conflict today, Dunford is committed
to improving integration of the joint force ensuring senior leaders are able to
make decisions at, what he calls, “the speed of relevance.”
To ensure the U.S. military’s competitive advantage, Dunford
has laid out four pillars of global integration: planning, decision-making,
force management and force design. The effects of the changes across these four
pillars will be felt throughout the joint force.
“Those are the four main areas that, at the end of the day,
I thought our integration needed to be improved [to compete in today’s
strategic environment],” the chairman said.
The department has always done global integration, but the
changes to the speed of war and the changed character of war means that
integration “needs to be done in a much more aggressive way,” Dunford said.
All this builds from the National Defense Strategy, which
identifies great power competition with Russia and China as the main threats,
with Iran, North Korea and violent extremism viewed as other threats to
America, its allies and partner nations.
Military officials took those priorities and changed the
force allocation process. “In the past, when you had conflict and you assumed
it was going to be isolated to a given theater, combatant commanders from the
bottom up identified all capabilities and capacities that they would need and
then we would sort of cross-level across the combatant commands,” Dunford said.
Accelerated Decision-Making, Flexibility
The new defense strategy emphasizes accelerated
decision-making and flexibility to reflect today’s changed security
environment, the chairman said.
“We feed that decision-making from the top down, then get
bottom-up refinement from the combatant commanders and deploy the force,”
Dunford said. “But we deploy the force in a way that is consistent with what I
refer to as the “boxer’s stance”-- meaning you get the best posture for what
you believe is the most likely problem set, while preserving your ability to
respond to the unexpected.
“Again, it’s speeding up decisions,” he continued. “It’s
speeding up response by making sure that your global posture is aligned against
your strategic priorities.”
And it is not just for today’s battles. An important part of
integration is about the future. As the global integrator looks at the global
posture, he is looking at the plans for today, but he also must assess what
will be needed tomorrow, Dunford said.
When the chairman talks about shaping the force of the
future, he talks about integrating strategy, concepts and assessments to
develop a force that can fight and win against any adversary.
The process begins by examining the capabilities available
today and the kinds of investments the services make in the joint force. “We
then have to compare our trajectory against our adversaries and provide a
rigorous assessment that looks across the joint force to determine the
capabilities and capacities that each service will need 5, 10, 20 years down
the road,” he said.
Changing Strategy
This is a departure from past practices. When the United
States had overwhelming military advantage and a much larger force size, it was
reasonable to allow the services to develop capabilities and then figure how to
integrate them later.
“With peer competitors in an era of great power competition,
you’ve got to be much more deliberate in capability development and
specifically benchmark that against the best intelligence you have about the
path of capability development of your adversary, informed by what you want to
do in the strategic environment you expect to do it in, against the adversary
you expect to see,” Dunford said.
Any conflict risks becoming trans-regional and all domain --
land, sea, air, space and cyber -- a departure from the past when potential
conflicts could be considered limited to only a regional problem.
Regional conflicts may still be possible, but in all
likelihood any conflict would quickly expand. The expansion of cyber
capabilities and the dangers of missile proliferation change the calculus. Add
to that nations working on nuclear technologies and the threat morphs quickly
from a regional problem to a global threat -- any conflict has the potential of
being trans-regional, immediately.
As global integrator, the chairman will have to interact not
only with the U.S. commander for a regional area, such as the commander of U.S.
Forces Korea, but also the U.S. combatant commander. He further will have to
interact with U.S. Northern Command for missile defense of the United States, U.S.
Cyber Command to counter any cyberattack and U.S. Strategic Command for
deterrence against nuclear threats.
This means the department must speed up the decision cycle.
“Part of it is identifying those decisions that have to be made by the
secretary and properly frame those,” Dunford said. “Left of conflict, you have
to have a common understanding with your combatant commanders. You have to
develop the ability to implicitly communicate. You do that in exercises,
particularly in exercises where the secretary participates. And you rehearse
similar scenarios.”
Joint Staff, Combatant Command Process Changes
This means significant process changes in the Joint Staff
and the combatant commands, the chairman said.
There are still regional plans, he said, but they are built
and informed by global campaign plans, which provide a framework for planning
an all-domain, trans-regional approach to the challenges outlined in the
National Defense Strategy.
Korea is just one example, Dunford said. “If we have a plan
for Korea, we also have a supporting plan for all the other combatant
commanders,” the chairman said, noting that these plans will outline the
specific tasks commanders must accomplish, and the resources they would have.
This will enable the military to “quickly transition from
where we are today to actually making Korea the main effort, and we can quickly
transition the rest of the globe because there is going to be an immediate
reprioritization and reallocation of resources to support the fight,” he said.
Global Exercises Remain Important
Transregional exercises involving multiple combatant
commands are important for this process. Combined, joint exercises provide
opportunities for senior leaders to train at the strategic level in the same
way units train at the tactical level -- providing the “reps and sets” required
to improve competencies, develop implicit communication and identify risk, the
chairman said.
“You can’t anticipate what is going to happen in a war, but
you can try as best you can to replicate what you believe will happen in war
and basically identify how you will frame those decisions,” Dunford said.
“So to make decisions faster, what is required?” he asked.
“One is intelligence and information, and the other is a process that frames
the elements of key decisions and quickly gives those to the secretary so he
can see all the decisions he has to make in context.”
Military leaders must have a shared vision of the
battlefield, the threats and the capabilities available. This type of
integration among military commands will allow the secretary to make decisions
at the speed of relevance, the chairman said.
The joint force began using exercises specifically to test
the principles of global integration more than a year ago, officials said.
Planners tailored scenarios to be intentionally transregional and all-domain,
with the principals -- the secretary, the chairman and the combatant commanders
-- all participating. “By going through these reps we are seeing the kinds of
decisions the secretary would have to make in war,” Dunford said. “By
developing global plans, we’re framing the problem globally that is unlikely to
be isolated to a given region.”
Lessons from these exercises are driving changes throughout
planning, decision-making and force management processes, the chairman said.
One key lesson is that in today’s environment, where demand outpaces supply,
decisions at the global level rely on leaders having absolute fidelity on
resources and capabilities including levels of personnel and equipment
readiness. Yet, until recently, the joint force still relied on largely analog
-- and slow -- processes to identify trade-offs and opportunity costs.
Innovation was required to provide senior leaders with the fidelity necessary
to employ the force at the speed required of today’s fight.
“That’s why we’ve started working with Defense Innovation
Unit-Experimental,” the chairman said. The public-private partnership to
accelerate commercial innovation for national defense has allowed the Joint
Staff to leverage artificial intelligence and advanced analytics.
“We now have the ability to track the major force elements that
are distributed around the world to identify where they are, what they are
capable of, what their level of readiness is,” he said. While the military has
always done this type of analysis, the difference is that in the past this
process would have taken weeks -- today it takes seconds.
Cross-Functional Teams
On the Joint Staff, the continental staff structure -- the
J-1, J-2, J-3 etc. -- will remain in place. Below those there are now
cross-functional teams set up last year where the integration of staff
functions takes place. “It depends of the problem set who is on the
cross-functional teams,” Dunford said. “We figure out who all the stakeholders
are and they get representation on the team.”
The appointment as global integrator doesn’t change any authorities
for the Joint Staff, but it does change responsibilities, officials said. For
the chairman it really comes down to acting on the secretary’s strategy.
“We say to [the secretary], ‘Here is our understanding of
your strategy. Here’s the capabilities and capacities we have in the inventory.
Here’s our recommendations for posturing those forces against your priorities,
and here is our appreciation of risk associated with the posture we have just
developed,’” Dunford said.
All this builds on the lessons learned since the 1980s and
the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, he said.
Senior leaders have to be engaged on the front end of a
problem and throughout the process, the chairman said. “We can’t have processes
that are absent senior leader direction and engagement, and then expect it to
meet strategic requirements and priorities on the backside,” he said. “The
secretary’s engagement early on and making sure we are benchmarking what we are
doing and the processes against his strategy is really critical.”
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