The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff yesterday issued Strategic Direction to the Joint Force, saying he expects “a new valuation of risk” as the joint force of 2020 is developed.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey said, “Today’s troubled political economy is elevating the relevance of cost and reality of financial risk. Discontinuous change, such as the Arab Spring, and systemic competition over nonrenewable resources are upending conventional geo-political wisdom. Expected economic trends and unexpected global events invite us to re-think the military’s role in mitigating the risk to our Nation.”
Such calculations must be part of developing the joint force of 2020, one of the four focus areas Dempsey outlined in an October letter to guide the services in navigating the military’s transition to the future. The focus areas are, first, to achieve national objectives in current conflicts, develop the joint force of 2020, recommit to the profession of arms; and keeping faith with the military family.
The Strategic Direction contains Dempsey’s early thoughts on how to achieve those things: “I will put the weight of my personal effort behind realizing these critical efforts.”
Developing the joint force needed in 2020 “is a non-negotiable imperative,” he wrote, and the goal should be a “versatile, responsive and decisive joint force” that is affordable.
Harking to ideas Dempsey has held for some time and began implementing while commander of Army Training and Doctrine Command and as Army Chief of Staff, developing the joint force means “Building and presenting forces that can be molded to context—not just by adding and subtracting but by leaders combining capabilities in innovative ways.”
This points directly to interdependence, described some years ago as the step services take beyond interoperability, where services rely on each other to achieve objectives and “create capabilities that do not exist except when combined.”
Key efforts the Strategic Direction highlights in developing the joint force of 2020 include pioneering new ways to combine and use capabilities such as cyber, special forces and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. These are also in line with the Strategic Guidance released by the White House in early January (Defense Daily, Jan 9).
The services also need to examine their organizations and other changes to “better leverage game-changing capabilities,” the direction said.
As Dempsey has said in the past, jointness has to be driven “deeper, sooner in capability development, operational planning and leader development.” However, this does not mean eliminating overlapping capabilities across the services but to identify and reduce such capabilities.
Force readiness must be preserved, the 16-page pamphlet said, choosing a smaller, well trained and equipped force over a large force that can’t afford world class readiness.
The services must also move quickly toward joint information and simulation networks that support secure and agile command and control
All of this must be achieved by being affordable “in every way possible.”
The Strategic Direction can be found here: http://www.jcs.mil/