The U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) is moving toward solutions to prevent destabilization around the world by developing the desired capabilities to help the United States build partnership capacity, an official said.

“The work we’re doing now–fleshing out, is transitioning from the big ideas to a set of capabilities created in the real world to execute the conceptual approach,” Dave Ozolek, deputy director of JFCOM’s Joint Concept Development and Experimentation Directorate (J-9), Jan. 23 told Defense Daily.

This is done through experiments such as Unified Quest, the Army’s Title 10 annual war game, and the Marine’s Joint Urban Warrior, both later in the spring, said Ozolek, who is also executive director of experimentation at JFCOM.

The broad conceptual work on how to prevent destabilization grew from the previous three years of focus on stability, transition and reconstruction in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters. This was focused on how to restore stability once it has fallen apart, thinking through how to conduct operations and the correct approaches to use.

Also, the driver in part was a 2006 memorandum from Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, who set stability operations as a major military mission, where the military must work as one element of a government team. More recently, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has articulated the need for building partners on the local and regional level, while improving interagency capabilities, to marry U.S. military and economic might with interacting with influential people and governments elsewhere to head off instability.

The focus in JFCOM on restoring stability is transitioning to preventing instability. Looking beyond the immediate operational theaters, J-9 began to see an equal requirement to think about how to prevent destabilization from occurring, which led to cooperative security engagement.

“The enemy can be everywhere; we can’t be everywhere,” Ozolek said. “He gravitates to where we’re weakest, and out of reach of the rule of law and legitimate governments.”

Strategic success does not come just from restoring stability, he said, because the adversary can simply move to another area, an unstable area or an area where he can create instability.

Thus, last year, working with U.S. European Command, J-9 began developing concepts to prevent destabilization.

One of the first beneficiaries would be U.S. African Command (AFRICOM), after work to develop the intellectual underpinning on how to go about conducting operations in Africa. This meant supporting developing concepts of operations, and all the doctrine, organization, training, leadership, materiel, personnel and facilities that must go with it.

Within the broader concept of cooperative security engagement, there are four conceptual elements. The first is building partner capacity. “If we can’t be everywhere but the threat can, what we need is strong partners everywhere,” Ozolek said.

Part of this effort will be a focus of Unified Quest, where the Army’s emerging ideas on what its contribution to building partnership capacity can be, such as the theater Military Advisory Assistance Group (MAAG).

A second conceptual element is influence–how to achieve the right influence in a theater of operations. Taking two approaches, there is strategic communication, or how to go about achieving the right type of influence. “It’s one thing to have compelling words, it’s another to back them up with actions,” he said. Another approach is humanitarian assistance.

The third pillar is access. This is more than physical military access, but access to the legitimate government, social and economic arenas, interacting with the right partners within a region.

The fourth pillar is strengthening regional approaches. For example, assisting the African Union, or working with the Organization of American States (OAS).

“It is really working at the regional level to build not individual partnership capacity, but collective partners’ capacity,” he said.

The idea is unified action, applying military capability in an integrated approach with other elements of power and instruments of power.

While the concepts see tighter integration with other elements of national power, JFCOM is internally becoming closer to its other elements, such as J-7, the training side.

J-7 ensures the training of joint units about to deploy focuses on operational situations likely to be encountered. It also works to capture best practices and leverage emerging ideas from exercises and experiments. Directorates working together can provide access to the latest thinking, as in the mission rehearsal exercise for the next Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa (Defense Daily, Jan. 22).

“Over last year, a strong reciprocal relationship,” has grown in the command, Ozolek said.

“One of toughest parts of concept work is defining the problem properly,” he said. Once the central idea is sharply focused, then it must be reduced “to a level of elegance so it can be explained easily,” and receive community support. Then approaches to actually deliver capabilities must be worked out. One example is working with the Army MAAG and the Marine’s Mobile Training Teams.

The initial work concerning AFRICOM has now spread initial work with U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Pacific Command. The goal is to ensure that what comes out of the work will be globally and regionally applicable.

However, JFCOM does not work in a military vacuum. The command works with interagency partners, principally the Department of State’s coordinator for the Office of Reconstruction and Stabilization, which leads the interagency community in addressing instability problems.

A major effort in this area will come in Multinational Experiment 5, where the coordinator’s office will bring in counterparts from the international community. In June, there will be a senior leader review on progress chaired not by the Finnish military, but the Finnish development and diplomatic communities.

DoD has come to the strategic realization over the last few years that it can’t solve complex problems with military force alone, and alone, neither can the development nor diplomatic communities. All sides have “matured enough to put aside parochial characteristics of the past,” Ozolek said. All are working to solve today’s problems and preclude the next generation of problems.

“We’re seeing tectonic shifts how to work among ourselves,” he said. Eleven years ago, Ozolek said he was in the military working on a country team in Hungary. Essentially the team was working to build the capability of the Hungarian military to be an effective contributor to NATO, trying to deconflict the different agencies in the embassy.

“We’re well beyond that now,” he said. “We’re not satisfied with simple deconfliction, but on how to integrate the effort.”

Everyone has begun to recognize “there are three legs to this stool: what we call the three D’s: defense, development and diplomacy,” Ozolek said. There’s serious work being done in all three areas.