By Ann Roosevelt
Meeting in Rome, U.S. and NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) representatives at the 2009 Concept Development and Experimentation (CD&E) conference promoted understanding, partnering opportunities and moving forward on areas of concern.
Some 300 participants took on some of the “toughest challenges,” Rear Adm. Dan Davenport, director of Joint Concept Development and Experimentation at U.S. Joint Forces Command, said in recent roundtable.
Participants from 30 nations: 21 NATO nations, seven Partnership for Peace nations and two from the Pacific, met Nov. 16-19, addressing four specific areas relevant to current and future operations and common to NATO and the participating nations. The problems were: countering hybrid threats, security force assistance, strategic communication and deterring non-state actors.
“This is an important event for us,” Davenport said. “It’s one of the more significant partnership efforts that we have between Joint Forces Command and ACT in the area of concept development and experimentation.”
Rear Adm. Christian Canova, deputy assistant chief of staff Future Capabilities, Research and Technology, NATO ACT, said it has been a productive partnership for several years. “It’s a unique opportunity for us to engage not only the NATO nations but also outside…the traditional area of nations to get good ideas from everywhere.”
The conference helps solidify partnerships and their concept development and experimentation program in nations that face the same basic problems U.S. military forces face in dealing with the future.
“Joint concept development and experimentation is all about developing and testing and validating solutions for joint warfighters,” Davenport said.
Since the United States always operates with partners and must do so effectively, such CD&E efforts are important.
“Our solutions are better as a result of the collaboration with our multi-national partners and NATO, and we’re also able to share solutions and successes that we each have to improve the ability for each nation to advance against these challenges and to avoid reinventing things that are already been done by our friends,” Davenport said.
As important as the workshop objectives and outcomes, is “developing a common intellectual foundation for understanding that will be applied to CD&E work across all of the nations,” he said.
Canova said, “We share the same definition and the same process, we, the 28 nations of NATO, of the concept development and experimentation process.”
NATO also shares with the United States similar future security environment concerns, Canova said, that can be found in its Multiple Futures Project Report.
JFCOM wrote a Joint Operating Environment document. Both documents describe trends that are likely to be of concern to military forces in the future.
However, Canova said, the JFCOM JOE perspective “is that of a single nation and national interest. From the alliance perspective, while some of the threats are common with the United States, some of the interests might be different.”
Davenport said the workshops were designed to produce specific input to a planned event. For example, the non-state actor workshop is developing material and some of the key ideas that will lead into the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Joint Operating Concept for Deterrence Operations. STRATCOM personnel in charge of that concept development are part of the workshop.
Additionally, results from the Strategic Communication workshop will feed directly into the concept and capability work planned for JFCOM’s Multinational Experiment Six, in which both United States and NATO participate.
Canova said the strategic communication workshop is important because NATO is engaged in many areas, and it is most important to “link and synchronize” the commander and operation with higher-level government and diplomatic officials.
“Aligning the strategic narrative across the government and across the coalition is particularly important and then within that strategic narrative, the military can provide its specific contribution,” Davenport said.
An early insight from the workshop, he said, was the need to “embed strategic communication in every aspect of operations,” and nest it within the whole of government effort.
The most challenging part of the future is the complexity and uncertainty, the high rate of change, the officers agreed.
Canova said complexity is a main challenge particularly reaching a common understanding and sharing among NATO’s 28 nations.
The problems identified and discussed in the workshops might apply equally to current and future operations, Davenport said. If the conference comes up with a new solution or idea with value and utility for current operations, JFCOM would transition it quickly to get it into the hands of the joint force.
“The intent on U.S. side is to take challenges that don’t have answers, develop concepts to address them, validate them through experiments and exercises and, as soon as possible, get them into doctrine which guides current operations,” he said.