By Ann Roosevelt
The U.S. Joint Forces Command’s (JFCOM) Joint Center for Operational Analysis (JCOA) produces lessons learned and recommendations for change to inform the joint force and combatant commanders and make them more effective, according to the center director.
“We try to take those things we glean from operations, turn them into actionable items based on our analysis, and feed them back into a system to make change,” Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Crutchfield, director, Joint Center for Operational Analysis, told Defense Daily in an interview. “The study is just a catalyst for getting things changed.”
JCOA’s work was noted in a discussion of the analytic underpinnings for Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ fiscal year 2010 program decisions earlier this month. At the April 6 Pentagon briefing, Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said analytic work inside the Defense Department “starts to get at what Joint Forces Command has developed as a robust lessons-learned system, taking those lessons learned, putting them in an analytic framework and then working with them.”
Crutchfield said JCOA’s mission is to collect and analyze data, draw lessons learned and move that product to the warfighter through the joint doctrine, organizations, training, material, leader development, personnel and facilities systems, or DTLOM-PF.
JCOA’s studies cover all levels of war–tactical, operational, and strategic levels.
“Right now, most of our focus is in the CENTCOM [area of operations] AOR in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Crutchfield said. The priority is shifting to Afghanistan.
Once the data is collected, the analysis done and lessons learned disseminated, JCOA has a process to get things out to the services.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) tasked JFCOM as the lead for joint lessons learned: to conduct studies, disseminate them and make recommendations–or, as Crutchfield paraphrased the most recent instructions–to “gather, aggregate and disseminate key joint observations, findings and recommendations.” The study itself comes from the field commanders.
Within JFCOM, commander Marine Gen. James Mattis tapped JCOA as the organizational body to do that work.
U.S. Central Command is one of JCOA’s biggest customers. In fact, Crutchfield said, he was only on the job three weeks when he led a study in Iraq, “The Joint Tactical Environment,” for Army Gen. David Petraeus, then-commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq.
JCOA supports all the combatant commanders. This week, Crutchfield dispatched a team to U.S. Southern Command, at the commander’s request, to do a Haiti Stabilization Study.
JCOA’s engagement division is proactive in getting the studies out.
“In some cases the engagement division folks will take the study to someone we think might be interested, and that organization may never have heard of JCOA or never heard of the study,” Crutchfield said. It’s a push versus a pull system.
When JCOA is fully staffed, there are about 130 people working in five divisions: Studies and Analysis, Engagement, Rear Support, Knowledge and Information Fusion Exchange, and Support, he said.
Here’s an example of how it works: Petraeus asked JCOA to do a study on the Sadr City fight in Iraq. At that time, Petraeus’ order was to stop the rockets being fired into the Green Zone. The commanders used a technique that, until then, the military had not done much, pushing assets normally controlled at corps or division level, down to the tactical level to brigade or battalion for use. That’s what happened in the Sadr City fight, he said. “Petraeus wanted to know how they did it and how they were successful.”
Petraeus asked that the study focus on four areas: joint command and control, joint fires, joint Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance–meaning UAVs, and joint airspace command and control, he said.
The study team looked at how commanders on the ground pushed assets to a lower levels and how effective it was. “We came out with all sorts of lessons learned from that, which by the way, many of which are being used today to train folks that are getting ready to go to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Crutchfield said.
Crutchfield briefed the study to Petraeus, who then told him to get the study out to anyone that would find value in it, plus some specific areas: all the combat training centers, the service components and others. Then Crutchfield hit the road, with additional stops at U.S. European Command and U.S. African Command.
To get things changed, over the past four studies or so, JCOA has used a technique it thinks is successful to get things into joint doctrine and training, he said.
JCOA took a spreadsheet, and put the DOTLM PF acronym across the top. Down the left axis, “from a study we would write down the specific recommendations we were making from a study so we could visualize it,” Crutchfield said. Those with no time to read a study, could look at the spreadsheet, perhaps see a recommendation that said, “this should go into mission readiness exercises at NTC,” go across and put a red “X” in the column under the “T” for training. Thus, a trainer at the NTC could look down the “T” column and see all the things JCOA recommended for training.
“I have no authority to make any service make the change we recommend,” he said. “Because of the reputation of JCOA, a lot of the recommendations are used, but not in every case.”
What is important is to work together, he said. If JCOA shows a combatant commander or a service a study, that commander and that service can make changes.
Mattis, as JFCOM commander, can direct JFCOM staff to make changes in areas he is responsible for. For example, Mattis can direct JFCOM’s J-7, joint training, to make a change so that when any service component comes to that training, they’ll get that change.
In May, the Joint Forces Staff College starts new electives that will include JCOA. Mattis directed JCOA studies and recommendations be included by the college, to make sure the professional education includes lessons learned.
The JCOA personnel will present studies as part of an eight-week elective. “It hasn’t been done before,” he said. The topics will be based on the college curriculum and based on studies JCOA has done.
The first elective will use four of the largest current studies, including the Joint Tactical Environment.
Another study will be the just-released Comprehensive Approach to Iraq (CAI), done for Petraeus and Army Gen. Ray Odierno, he said. This study, done a year or so ago, looked at the concept used by Petraeus, Odierno, and Amb. Ryan Crocker for the whole-of-government approach to solving the problems in Iraq. The work focused on the techniques used. The lessons learned concerned how the military and non-DoD agencies worked together to solve problems.
JCOA prefers what Crutchfield calls “active collection,” meaning teams are in the field in close proximity to the event being studied. However, that is not always possible.
For example, JCOA did a study on the second Lebanon war. “We were not in Lebanon and we were not in Israel to conduct the study,” he said, so the team took information that came out of the conflict, analyzed it and came up with what they thought came out of the conflict.
Not every study is done in a far-flung theater. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, JCOA went south to look at how the DoD and non-DoD interagency process performed.
Past JCOA studies are on file, in classified and unclassified versions.
JCOA only came into being in 2003 at the behest of the Secretary of Defense and the invitation of the U.S. Central Command commander to observe joint force performance during the invasion of Iraq.
JCOA is making its mark, exemplified in this anecdote Crutchfield related: A JCOA employee sat next to a soldier on a recent airplane trip. When he explained where he worked, “the soldier just lit up and said, you know I use your material all the time.”
The organization exists to support the warfighter, Crutchfield said. “What these folks do here every day, it does save lives, I believe that to be true.”