The new Army Operating Concept (AOC) is the bedrock for developing the functional concepts that will lead to how the service conducts operations in the future as part of the joint force and with partners, said the director of the Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Concept Development and Learning Directorate (CDLD).
“It’s really about casting a vision and then manifesting a vision,” said Brig. Gen. Christopher McPadden, CDLD director. The CDLD is part of the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) at the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
“The AOC is a living plan that will manifest over the years,” he said. “It helps gain the initial, collective, cohesive view under how the Army thinks about operating in the future.”
As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has often said, McPadden said, “the intellectual leads the physical”–thus developing capabilities for the future Army of 2025 and beyond has been waiting for the AOC.
That’s part of what the CDLD does: integrates learning and develops the Army’s vision of future conflict and the conduct of future joint land operations. All the intellectual work feeds into the development of concepts and capabilities across the Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership & Education, Personnel, and Facilities (DOTMLPF) to ensure the Army adapts and remains prepared to accomplish its missions in a joint, interagency, intergovernmental and multinational environment.
Technology is an important part of it, McPadden said. “We don’t want a fair fight.” The goal is for the best ready, trained and equipped soldiers, so that “when they show up—game over.” Also important are the human dimension and risk.
The process aims to enable “all stakeholders to have a collective, cohesive, comprehensive understanding of what it is we’re trying to achieve…pragmatic, integrated, collaborative solutions,” McPadden said.
Now that the AOC is out, TRADOC’s eight Centers of Excellence (COE) take on the 20 warfighting challenges, and any sub questions and learning demands that might correlate to AOC capabilities.
Warfighting challenges get at those enduring first order problems. They are viewed through a number of lenses such as threats, missions, technology, historical insights and lessons learned.
“What they must do is take capabilities and turn them into questions,” he said. And the centers can’t just whip out an answer. They must provide a collaborative, integrated answer, which must include another center if the question overlaps. For example, the Maneuver Center of Excellence might work with another center, such as the Maneuver Support COE, or the Fires COE in doing their work.
The first five warfighting challenges now under study are: to develop situational understanding, shape the security environment, provide security force assistance, adapt the institutional Army and counter WMD.
The COEs will present their strategies and interim solutions for five challenges each quarter. “Every year we’ll go through all 20,” and they will progress up the ladder for a decision on whether to be implemented, he said.
The challenge is for the COEs to provide focused and sustained collaboration across the Army with all the stakeholders.
This is the “living plan” part of the AOC. The “collaboration and integration enables the Army to get to integrated solutions.”
The questions are answered with “a plan, an interim solution strategy, and will have an integrated learning plan,” he said. “That plan and strategy will convey near, and mid and far term solutions.”
They will address opportunities, or gaps that have been identified.
“The more proactively aggressive you are in planning, the less likely you are to be surprised,” he said. This is something McPadden knows intimately, having worked in plans offices in several joint and operational assignments before going to ARCIC CDLD.
The Army Campaign of Learning integrates learning plans with all the COE’s and the plans are executed to get at a collective, cohesive understanding of the Army as a force. This is where potential solutions are assessed, via such things as experiments, wargames, and the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE).
To make it clear, McPadden said he once heard a doctoral board member describe how a physics grad student should defend their dissertation. The board would first establish the “edge of the known,” then the student’s job was to take the board “board beyond edge of the known.” It is CDLD’s job to push the Army beyond the edge of the known to prepare better for the future.
As it comes together, the goal is integrated and collaborative DOTMILPF solutions for the near, mid and far term.
Manifesting Force 2025 and Beyond processes that are being innovatively addressed will make decisions about solutions, which are then fed, to the degree possible, into Army processes, such as the Program Objective Memorandum (POM). Timing is important, so the service must be proactive and aggressively offer solutions that can be brought in to processes to fit budget cycles, he said.
“We have the premier all-volunteer force in the world and want to keep it that way,” McPadden said.