By Ann Roosevelt
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va.— U.S. Joint Forces Command’s (USJFCOM) Joint Irregular Warfare Center (JIWC) reaches into all areas of the command to ensure the joint force is as effective in irregular warfare as it is in conventional, nuclear or other kinds of warfare, the center director said.
The guidance is to “work with urgency to collaborate and synchronize” efforts to integrate and institutionalize IW in JFCOM’s of concept development, training, capabilities development and fielding, and doctrine, James O’Connell told Defense Daily at the Joint Warfighting 09 conference here co sponsored by AFCEA and the U.S. Naval Institute in coordination with USJFCOM.
All these efforts are to make IW a core competency for the joint forces the command provides to the combatant commanders.
“What’s happening out on the front lines is they’re doing what needs to be done,” O’Connell said. The interagency personnel, the USAID personnel, the State Department personnel are teaming and doing a good job.
“Our responsibility right now is to capture those best practices of what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan with those Provincial Reconstruction Teams, with all those ad hoc relationships that have been borne out of necessity on the battlefield and then institutionalize those best practices,” he said. “The closer you get to the Beltway, the harder it gets. Because you’ll do what it takes on a battlefield to make it work. You have a lot of incentive.”
A close partner in the work is U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), he said. USJFCOM Commander Marine Gen. James Mattis told O’Connell to “partner with USSOCOM [let there be] no light between you, locked at the hip.”
SOCOM focuses on special operations forces, while JIWC works on the general-purpose forces. Part of the work is to “understand each-other’s issues,” O’Connell said.
The Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept (IW JOC) is just one area where the two are teaming, now writing version 2. Version 1.0 came out in 2007, and the rewrite is because “we want to make it more general-purpose force applicable.”
The JIWC is a streamlined operation–about 55 or so at any one time–leveraging existing resources and job positions, O’Connell said.
USJFCOM created the center in June 2008, with the goal of providing combatant commanders with forces proficient in irregular warfare as a core capability (Defense Daily, June 19).
Many of its tasks were specifically set out in Mattis’ Irregular Warfare Vision released in March.
Irregular warfare–in any of its variously named forms–is the most likely form of conflict in the future, according to the USJFCOM Joint Operating Environment (JOE) December 2008 document that laid out the problems of the future.
How joint forces would operate in solving such problems was laid out by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations document released in January.
Considering IW, the center came up with five shortfalls for the general purpose forces that need to be addressed: first, to do better in the “battle for the narrative,” which the joint force has to get right, O’Connell said. The enemy can react to events swiftly with propaganda and lies, while it takes the joint force longer to get at the truth and then get it out. Policies and authorities must be examined to enable the force to more quickly counter the enemy.
A second shortfall is in the ability to deeply understand the population, where the joint force is, or will be, operating. This is important because the United States often considers itself riding in on a white horse to help, while the rest of the world doesn’t see it that way at all.
Then there is a need to deeply understand the adversary, he said. Thus, there needs to be much more realism injected into understanding the adversary.
There’s also a need to minimize the joint force footprint as it moves out of Iraq and Afghanistan into the rest of the world to deal with conflict, O’Connell said. If a large American presence isn’t wanted, then joint distributed operations must be done correctly, if they are not necessarily in country but offshore or elsewhere.
Fifth, the foundation of everything, policy and education must be right, including incentives for junior officers, he said. A Defense Science Board study is examining military education to make sure it’s relevant. USJFCOM co-sponsors that effort. The JIWC is also working in the Quadrennial Defense Review process to ensure the right demand signals are sent.
JIWC also responds to JFCOM tasking set out in the December 2008 DoD directive 3000.07 on irregular warfare that establishes policy and assigns responsibilities for DoD irregular warfare conduct and IW capability development.
Among the USJFCOM-specific tasks, JIWC will be assisting in the submission of an annual assessment of the general purpose force’s “proficiency and readiness” for irregular warfare to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For the assessment, JIWC and SOCOM each will use the same methodology and format, he said.
Additionally, JIWC has put in a number of issue papers for the Quadrennial Defense Review and is part of the IW working group.
What’s happening is that the general-purpose forces are going to start picking up some of the capacities and capabilities that SOF has had for years, he said. SOF now has a limited ability to do everything desired because of its limited numbers and the cost to train and field personnel.
“What we need to do as a military is those things that can be done by the general purpose force that are applicable–like building partnership relationships, running a range, teaching basic marksmanship to our partner nations we’re going to start to train,” O’Connell said.
Even though the Marines and the Army have been doing this sort of thing for decades, DoD now wants to increase that significantly.
What will happen is that as requests come from combatant commanders, SOCOM will take a look, and if it’s a historic relationship or a special operations force, they’ll take the work. But those not uniquely SOF will be sent to USJFCOM regional global force managers who will look at what general-purpose force can do and pass it on to the Marines, Army or Navy.
As a former special operator, “what I was frustrated with was how long it took us to recognize that irregular warfare was important,” he said. But two days after arriving at JFCOM, he was in Mattis’ office and received “exactly the guidance I wanted.”
“What I’m motivated by is our support by our senior leaders,” O’Connell said. They realize how important IW is in an operating environment of persistent conflict in the future.
The JIWC “chips away at the gaps,” working to institutionalize IW through the doctrine, organization, training and education leader development, and materiel process. O’Connell said. “I just need more time in the day.”