The U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and U.S Northern Command (NORTHCOM) has begun planning for this year’s experimentation campaign for homeland defense and military support of civilian authorities, with a focus on five key areas.
The five focus areas for Noble Resolve this year are information sharing, maritime domain awareness, counter-weapons of mass destruction (WMD), natural disasters and mass population movement. Noble Resolve is sponsored by JFCOM in support of NORTHCOM, which as the lead role for the U.S. military in homeland defense and supporting civilian agencies in responding to natural or man-made disasters.
JFCOM, which is based in Suffolk, Va., is focused on experimentation rather than military exercises.
“One of the nice things about an experiment versus an exercise is we can work with more leading edge concepts, process changes, things that perhaps are not quite right and ready for exercises and we can look at whether they are viable, whether a particular process change yields a better result than the previous method,” Air Force Col. Gene Taylor, the JFCOM Noble Resolve lead, tells TR2. JFCOM will use technologies in its experiments at times but typically those that are mature enough to demonstrate capabilities rather than “leading edge experimentation,” he adds.
This year JFCOM and NORTHCOM will partner with the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM) with participation from the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard Bureau and National Guard organizations from several states.
For the counter-WMD work, JFCOM will be working with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to help deliver six or seven technologies to be brought before PACOM in a “workshop” format that will help the command decide which ones might best suit the purposes for further experimentation. JFCOM is already discussing with PACOM possible limited user experiments with the technologies in 2009, Taylor says. Those experiments would help PACOM better understand how those “technologies actually impact their ability to carry out a mission,” he adds.
JFCOM will also be helping PACOM in the area of command and control. PACOM is establishing a new organizational construct and Noble Resolve will explore various command and control structures that will help identify where to put a new Joint Task Force into their command and control structure, Taylor says.
In the area of Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA), JFCOM will be helping NORTHCOM evaluate information sharing as part of some new concepts for operations that were issued last summer. One of the concepts involves having enterprise hubs for MDA in key areas such as cargo, vessels and people. The enterprise hubs are organizations that are functionally aligned to facilitate information sharing in the MDA organizations, Pat Jackson, who is in the MDA Lab at JFCOM, tells TR2.
In Noble Resolve 2008 JFCOM will evaluate the enterprise hub aspect, specifically the cargo hub, which is led by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Jackson says. JFCOM will be “evaluating the people, processes, policy and technology between two of the primary agencies, [CBP and NORTHCOM], to determine where they can be optimized, where are the impediments, and what possible solution areas we could address and then experiment if we made these changes with this technology, or if this organizational alignment was different, would this benefit,” he says. “We’re looking specifically at the DoD relationship to CBP and how they can optimize that.”
The MDA experimentation campaign could last up to two years, Jackson says. In practical terms JFCOM will conduct limited objective experiments that bring the various senior individuals who operate in the MDA environment together in one room. At that point various scenarios are run through in a very structured, facilitated environment taking a broad national view, Jackson says. “What are the policy impediments? What are the legal impediments? Basic concepts. In the end technology should just be an enabler of these things. That’s why I emphasize that its policy, people, processes and then technology.”