By Ann Roosevelt
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va.— There’s no easy answer for the military working to develop and provide a balanced joint force for an era of persistent conflict, according to the commander of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.
“There will be no silver bullet solution to the complex problems of the future,” Army Gen. Martin Dempsey said at the AFCEA International and U.S. Naval Institute‘s co-sponsored Joint Warfighting 09 Conference here Monday. The conference is also made possible with the cooperation of U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), NDIA and AFCEA chapters.
Dempsey last week attended the Army’s annual Title 10 wargame Unified Quest 09, co-sponsored by TRADOC, U.S. Special Operations Command and JFCOM. Later this month, he will participate in the coming JFCOM experiment based on the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations (CCJO), the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-signed discussion of how the future joint force will fight.
The CCJO provides a way to approach a balanced joint force capability as desired by Defense Secretary Robert Gates as he formulates the department’s budget and provides program guidance.
Such wargames, Dempsey said, “help me frame where I want to help the Army, and for that matter, the Joint Force, move into the future.”
TRADOC has often been described as the architect of the Army.
Additionally, forums such as the Joint Warfighting Conference are “absolutely decisive in framing our thoughts on the future,” he said.
While leaders can’t expect to predict the future, the question is how to get close enough.
For example, Dempsey said the past seven years have informed Gates’ thinking on what balance is, and its companion attributes, versatility and adaptability.
The more the military anticipates the possibilities, the less it will have to improvise in conflict, Dempsey said. Anticipation is informed by the intellectual rigor of recent efforts such as the JFCOM Joint Operating Environment (JOE) and the CCJO. To this will be added leaders’ personal experience. Other factors include the outcomes and lessons of recent conflicts such as Lebanon, Georgia, Gaza, all of which offer a clear signal about the operational environment of the future–a future even more complex than today requiring the military to become “more comfortable with complexity.”
At TRADOC, Dempsey said, his number one priority is leader development. The challenge is to develop leaders able to adapt to unique conditions.
The future is likely to be an array of threats that defy simple categorization, such as conventional, unconventional, regular or irregular conflict, he said. The future is likely to be marked by hybrid war, a decentralized and networked war that blurs the distinction between categories.
The Army has expressed its versatility by reorganizing into modular brigades that Dempsey is “confident” can operate across the full spectrum of conflict.
For leaders and junior officers, there are new efforts to provide them with a greater appreciation of the operational art. The Army is working on incorporating campaign design into doctrine. Campaign design is a problem-framing methodology that allows leaders to understand the problem, before trying to solve the problems developing options through the more traditional service planning.
Innovation is adding complexity to training with the Joint Training Counter IED Operations and Intelligence Center, a TRADOC-JIEDDO effort that takes real time data from combat, moves it into training scenarios to replicate the density of information available in theater.
Dempsey said a few years ago his training scenarios had seen complexity added with some 2,500 injections of information and intelligence. However, last month, there were some 1.2 million injections into training scenarios.
Meanwhile, training aims at developing leaders with the skills to deal with uncertainty, decentralization and the ability to transition easily between combat to stability operations, irregular warfare or reconstruction and also deal with different missions simultaneously.
At the same time soldiers and leaders must not neglect their traditional skills, becoming masters of such skills as their personal weapons, the individual and small unit skills that provide the foundation of lethality and versatility that will be required for the emerging joint, interagency and multinational environment.