By Ann Roosevelt
U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) is creating a National Program For Small Unit Excellence in response to the demands of the Afghanistan strategy that emphasizes small high- performing ground units, and how the future joint force will operate, a command official said.
“We feel a very, very strong moral obligation,” to raise the small unit standard of excellence, Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya, commander of the Joint Warfighting Center (JWC) at JFCOM, said at a recent Pentagon roundtable.
The new National Program for Small Unit Excellence acknowledges that considering the complexities of the environment and the way the joint force will fight in future conflicts, “there is a great need for decentralization of command and control at the lowest capable level of empowerment of decision making at the small unit level and small units who are completely adaptable to aggregate against conventional threats and seamlessly disaggregate against irregular or hybrid threats,” Kamiya said.
While current forces have a good foundation of adaptability, the new program is looking at ways to improve how dispersed units have an effect, a presence, beyond their size, he said.
At the May Joint Warfighting Conference, JFCOM Commander, Marine Gen. James Mattis, said, “We are going to have to take small units and make them much more capable as joint users. No Army squad on the ground should not be able to draw down joint ISR. They should all be able to get joint fires overhead, whether it be a Navy plane or an Army helicopter or a NATO nation’s F/A-18. Whatever it is, we have got to be able to make high performing small units that include joint intel and fires because we are going to disperse them more widely.”
Kamiya said, in Iraq and Afghanistan, small units have sustained 89 percent of all those killed in action. Additionally, the preponderance of the data shows that from 1950 to the present, four of five killed in action have been infantry, and half of those have been trying to find the enemy.
As well, the Afghanistan strategy relies on small, high-performing ground units, to include rifle squads and platoons and special operations personnel.
Raising the bar on small units has to be “nested” with the Department of Homeland Security, which would be the portal to law enforcement and the wider national first responder community, Kamiya said. “We’re very, very hopeful that this partnership we have with the Department of Homeland Security will result in benefits both to the military and to the first responder community.”
There’s a strong operational demand for highly skilled and prepared tactical small units conducting distributed operations, said Kamiya, who saw it first hand during a year spent in Afghanistan commanding Combined Joint Task Force 76 from March 2005 to February 2006.
“Jointness is occurring at lower and lower levels,” he said. “The capabilities that young squad leaders and platoon leaders and company commanders have at their disposal today were unthinkable during my formative years in the military.”
These considerations are not solely for the military, but a growing part of the complexities first responders face.
The demands on small units are growing due to the nature of irregular or hybrid war in which small units operate in and among populations, something the special operations forces have always done.
JFCOM Deputy Commander Vice Adm. Robert Harward said at the May conference, “We’re working to develop small, highly skilled, not specialized units, which are adaptive and flexible, where we invest in individuals, as we’ve done in the SOF community. We’re doing that now with general purpose forces to have the flexibility to operate in all these realms.”
Both Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, and Mattis have written and testified about the requirement for high-performing small units.
The program concept was born in late March, followed by the designation of a small number of JWC personnel to start setting up the organization. Additionally, a series of mini- conferences were held, culminating with a Small Unit Excellence Conference April 28-20.
The mini-forums drew nationally recognized experts from conference co-sponsor DHS, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force and academia. Experts from multiple disciplines examined such things as in extremis leadership and decision-making, resiliency–and the science behind such areas.
Among conference speakers was University of Southern California Football Coach Pete Carroll, who drew analogies between military small units and the physical, intellectual and skills needed by football players to be an effective national championship team. He also drew attention to the fact that the team and special teams consist of about 11 people– close to the size of an infantry squad or a special forces ODA team. Putting small unit excellence in a different context really opened a lot of eyes, Kamiya said.
The conference generated 400 ideas that, in turn, generated four priority focus areas where the program “must” exert intellectual and resource energy to solve, and work is under way on all of those areas, he said.
- Cross-community integration: identifying activities across the board, correlating and rationalizing them, and develop shared knowledge and understanding at forums with published outcomes, and identify agreed upon gaps and work to close them.
For example, nobody knew about an Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) Study on Adaptability, or a West Point Study on small unit leadership, but now the wider community is aware of both.
- Collaborative tools and knowledge management: assess web-based technology that allow cross-community collaboration and a centralized or connected data/knowledge repository, and provide it to the community by the end of fiscal year 2010.
Here, the program is studying a U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) tool known as Starfish, a knowledge management tool that might potentially be a building block for further work.
- Assessment and Measurement: assess research on psychological and physical stimuli, and technologies, test technologies to see how they could improve small unit immersive training, objectively measure effectiveness and quantify return on investment, and prepare to transition capabilities to where they’re most needed starting in FY ’11.
- Spotlight studies on group behavior, assess existing research, identify gaps and prioritize program sponsorship to fill those gaps.
In this area, Army Training and Doctrine Command is conducting a cognitive performance group study of redeployed 101st soldiers, and OSD is doing a collaborative study with the Australian army on complex adaptive systems.
As JFCOM is the joint force integrator, Kamiya said, “I would hope, that given the dots that ought to be connected across the entire community and disciplines, given the body of knowledge that will be able to be added to the body of knowledge already existing in the services and across academia and the sciences that it will provide enough of a compelling argument to cause change and adaptation across the community in how we cultivate and develop our small units.”
Such knowledge would be translated to a concept that is tested and validated and then transitioned and flowed into the framework of doctrine, organization, training, leader development, materiel, personmnel and facilities.
It’s a continual cycle of informing and adaptation, Kamiya said. “I see the program as an enabler vice a competitor for resources or whatever…It’s not about ownership, it’s about shared knowledge and understanding.”