By Ann Roosevelt
Multinational partnerships and progress on specific projects that would provide solutions to military problems are the key outcomes expected from the Concept Development and Experimentation Conference (CD&E) held this week in Oslo, Norway, according to an officer at U.S. Joint Forces Command.
“This work can’t be done in isolation,” Rear Adm. Dan Davenport, director of Joint Concept Development and Experimentation for U.S. Joint Forces Command, said in a teleconference Nov. 17. Our partners are particularly critical. We have to have the right perspectives involved in the solution development and the expertise. Any participants in those kind of future operations we’re dealing with so we have a wide range of partners that we work with in each of our experimentation projects.”
Partnering starts for JFCOM with the services and combatant commands establishing an enterprise approach “to collectively and coherently focus our efforts on meeting DoDs biggest challenges.”
JFCOM also partners with other government agencies, industry and academia in the United States. Another important area is in the area of international partners because future joint operations will be done with coalition partners of some sort.
“The key is we need to have solutions that work for everyone that will be involved in those operations for all the players, so it’s important to get the different expertise, perspectives and requirements incorporated throughout the experiment to make sure we generate those kind of solutions,” Davenport said.
Headquarters, Supreme Allied Command Transformation in coordination with JFCOM and the Norwegian Defense Staff co hosted the Nov. 17-18 CD&E conference in Oslo, Norway. It is the eighth such event. There are about 240 participants from 33 nations plus NATO. Also attending were representatives from U.S. Special Operations Command and U.S. Strategic Command, the Joint Staff and service representatives.
The conference aims to share best practices and successes. It also aims to build partnerships and also to collectively address the largest common challenges facing the armed forces, Davenport said.
The conference focused on three major areas: dealing with irregular adversaries and terror networks, strategic communication, and finally, military support to stabilization and reconstruction. Working groups defined the problems then began work on solutions and develop partnerships to continue working on the problems after the conference concluded.
“We can’t expect that we will solve these kind of problems in a two-day conference, so what we hope to do is build those partnerships and continue that work once we leave here,” Davenport said.
Each country participating in the conference decides which groups it will participate in depending on their particular need, and how far they take that after the conference concludes.
The CD&E conference participants run the gamut from very high-end mission capable nations with a lot of experience in the area to countries attending because they are interested, to see what it’s all about, and the value of making such an investment.
“Countries keep coming back” to the conference, Davenport said. “Several now are developing their own expertise and capability.” Such nations have seen the value of concept development and experimentation for their own needs and have started to build their own capability.
The concept development and experimentation work provides solutions to current operational problems and potential future problems posed by the services and combatant commands. For those who develop concepts and then evaluate them in experiments, the goal is to see if they are the potential solutions.
Solutions could be technical, but could also involve doctrine, materiel, organization, or policy, so the goal is to provide a complete solution set.
“The key to getting this right is to clearly define the problem up front,” Davenport said. CD&E then becomes for DoD a source of innovation and focus early on to try and solve problems.