Armed Forces Joint Warfighting Essay Contest, 2nd Prize Winner
In the beginning, joint warfare was simply getting the services to work together. Now, in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom, joint warfare has become “coherent”—where all land, sea and air elements can be integrated fully. Taking advantage of this kind of coordination will make our forces deadlier than ever.
The race to Baghdad is over and Saddam Hussein's statues have been converted to scrap. Masterful planning and heroic execution by the warriors of U.S. Central Command led to the fall of the regime in three weeks, and the race to explain the success of Operation Iraqi Freedom has begun. Undoubtedly, some will claim that a new paradigm best explains U.S. methods. Others will invent buzzwords to describe the methods they believe have been most responsible for the victory. What this war and our recent military experience really suggest, however, is that our true silver bullet is coherent joint warfare.
In 1996, Marine General John Sheehan defined coherent joint warfare as the highest level of joint force integration. At that time, joint operations had progressed from "specialized" joint operations (the mere participation of multiple services) to "synergistic" joint operations (where the various components support each other). Today, we have reached the point where "joint forces will . . . be thoroughly integrated to fully exploit the synergism of land, sea, and air combat capabilities."
The first factor driving the adoption of coherent joint warfare is that the elements of joint military power have come of age. Today's joint commander has five functional elements he can direct against an enemy: land, air, and maritime power, and special and information operations. The first three elements are relatively familiar, but after centuries of development for land and maritime power and decades for air power, they have demonstrated that revolutionary improvements in effectiveness remain possible. In the short period since Operation Desert Storm, air power has increased its ability to strike with stealth and precision. Land power can operate at a higher tempo over a greater battle space than a decade ago. Maritime power has increased its ability to project power from the sea, an invaluable characteristic when basing rights are limited or unavailable. The two other elements, however, have gained prominence only recently.
After the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, special operations reached a new level of organization, capabilities, and effectiveness. With a parent unified command overseeing all special operations forces and a special operations command at each of the geographic combatant commands, this element now is firmly embedded within U.S. joint military power. Special operations have played significant supporting and independent roles in every recent U.S. military operation.
Information operations are the fifth and latest addition to the U.S. arsenal, and their organizational development has not been as complete. Although information operations consist of multiple pillars, only one (psychological operations) is represented as a functional command within the joint-force structure. Yet, information and psychological operations still have played major supporting roles in recent U.S. military operations. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, Deputy Director of U.S. Central Command Army Brigadier General Vincent Brooks acknowledged the importance of this new fifth element. "I should add that the power of information has been key throughout this operation," he said, "and it is truly having the effect of saving lives—of the Iraqi people and military units who are choosing not to fight and die for a doomed regime." Information operations' significant limitation is that although some of their aspects (such as the number of leaflets dropped) are easily quantifiable, others (such as their effects on enemy morale) resist easy measurement. Despite this limitation, the need for this element in the future is clear.
Coherent joint warfare could not be achieved without the organization, technology, and people that enable joint commanders to synchronize the five elements. Harnessing these elements into five functional components, the Joint Land, Maritime, Air, and Special Operations Combatant Commands, along with the Joint Psychological Operations Task Force, and placing these forces under a single joint commander with the command-and-control tools and infrastructure to see the entire battlefield, has resulted in the birth of coherent joint warfare. As General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently observed, it has allowed joint operations to jump from a simple "deconfliction" mode to "a mode of integrating them and applying the effects on the battlefield."
A second factor driving the adoption of coherent joint warfare is our continually evolving concept of our enemies. "It will be difficult to judge what may be of value to leaders of another culture," writes retired Army Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege. "It is also difficult to predict whether they will submit or how long it will take." Although our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets now have an unprecedented ability to locate and identify physical assets, the ability to determine intentions, value structures, and psychological thresholds has not kept pace. Therefore, U.S. joint planners should not expect to locate a single enemy center of gravity that allows the application of concentrated force to win a war quickly. Because of this complexity, a better approach is to apply military power precisely against a range of targets that defines an enemy's system as a whole.
If we accept the inability to find a single center of gravity, an enemy might be better described as a collection of several critical target sets. These target sets can represent both the capabilities an enemy might use and the resources he needs or values. In a military campaign, we should attempt to deprive an enemy of as many of these target sets as possible to force him into submission.
Furthermore, the physical destruction of a target set is not the only possible method to remove it from an enemy's grasp. For example, an enemy's civilian population could be a target set. The desired effects on civilians might be to isolate, contain, or secure them to prevent support to enemy forces or interference with friendly operations. Ethnic minorities or civil infrastructure within an enemy state also could be critical target sets; we might wish to secure them from possible attack and exploitation.
If our enemies are viewed as having a more complex structure consisting of many target sets, perhaps they also should be expected to demonstrate a far simpler response when force is used against them. Our enemies have shown a remarkable ability to adjust to the effects of limited uses of force and tend to ignore "graduated" applications of force intended as political signals. In fact, the U.S. experience suggests that in limited wars, an enemy rarely submits without the United States demonstrating at least the capability (if not the willingness) to escalate military action to threaten the survival of an enemy regime. Simply put, to get an enemy's attention, a big stick usually works better than a small one. The Korean and Vietnam Wars, although fought for "limited" aims, required years of brutal fighting, expenditure of vast resources, and the threat of nuclear escalation during the earlier war and two major strategic bombing campaigns at the end of the latter war before each was brought to a conclusion.
NATO's military action to end Serbian oppression in Kosovo is a recent example of an opponent's ability to resist a strategy of limited force for limited aims. Before the war, U.S. national leaders apparently expected "a quickie, a short war" of three or four days. Instead, the conflict dragged on for months. Ultimately, despite the claim of David Halberstam and other observers that the war was a "singular victory for the use of modern airpower," many other factors contributed to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's decision to submit to NATO's demands. For instance, NATO air power enabled the Kosovo Liberation Army, a non-NATO element of land power, to threaten Serbian forces in the province by providing an air shield that forced the dispersion of Serbian armored units. Halberstam also notes that Milosevic knew of NATO's belated decision to prepare and commit ground troops to achieve final victory and that "it affected his final decision." In the end, Kosovo certainly was a demonstration of the precise destruction air power can unleash. It is fair to speculate, however, that an earlier commitment to the application of joint military power might have shortened the war significantly by providing a greater threat to Milosevic's multiple critical target sets. The implication for joint operations is that, to defeat an enemy, the maximum joint military pressure possible should be applied to as many of an enemy's critical target sets as rapidly as possible.
A final factor driving the adoption of coherent joint warfare is the weakness of warfighting models that rely on a single service or limited joint concept. Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan provides recent evidence of this factor. Some observers have claimed that Afghanistan demonstrates a superior paradigm of war, an "Afghan Model" that relies exclusively on air power and special operations forces. Although these two forms of military power, in conjunction with more conventional land power provided by the Northern Alliance and other allied Afghan forces, were instrumental in bringing about the downfall of the Taliban, they have proved insufficient to end the campaign in Afghanistan. After allowing significant al Qaeda elements to escape after the battles at Tora Bora, conventional U.S. land power was necessary to isolate the enemy and bring him to battle in the Shah-e-kot Valley during Operation Anaconda.
At Tora Bora, the enemy exploited the weakness of a concept based on U.S. air power and special operations forces alone. More generally, attempts to declare one service or one model as the best and only approach to U.S. warfare suffer from two defects. First, every war is different, and conditions within a war also can change rapidly. Air power and special operations proved capable of toppling the Taliban regime, but they were insufficient to prosecute the next phase by themselves. Second, adoption of a single model commits us to a single template for the employment of our military forces. Such a template can be identified easily and ultimately countered by an adaptive enemy. Even an opponent with little more than rocketpropelled grenades and small arms such as Mohammad Farah Aideed managed to develop a response to Task Force Ranger's operational template in Somalia.
These three factors that highlight the need for coherent joint warfare also suggest three principles for its application. The first principle is that the United States has a package of five main elements of joint military power that can be applied in any conflict. Each has unique strengths and weaknesses. The component commands that control each element must be flexible and ready to operate either independently or synergistically. When they operate independently, they will do so because their specific . capabilities are individually optimized to defeat an enemy vulnerability or achieve a desired effect. When they operate synergistically, their joint action will create either new vulnerabilities in the enemy system or enhanced effects on a specific target set.
The second principle for the joint war fighter is that an enemy's single most important center of gravity will be impossible to discern. An enemy's leadership, military forces and capabilities, and physical and moral support bases will contain many critical target sets. Furthermore, each of these target sets will have vulnerabilities that can change rapidly as the campaign progresses. The objectives of a joint campaign might require different effects on each of the critical targets. As a result, the enemy's critical target sets must be reassessed continually to determine which joint element can both best exploit the target's vulnerability and achieve the desired effects.
The third principle is that the optimal joint campaign will apply as many of the elements against as many of the enemy's vulnerable critical targets as possible in the shortest period. Throughout the campaign, as vulnerabilities change, the mode of attack also might change. The only pattern an enemy will recognize is the certainty that his weaknesses will be exposed and any reaction on his part ultimately will be futile.
To make coherent joint warfare a reality, a planning method will provide the "how." A variety of methods exist, ranging from the Army's campaign planning to the Air Force's effects-based operations, as well as more unconventional approaches such as the systems approach. None of these methods, however, fully satisfies the goal of coherent joint warfare planning: to synchronize joint elements in a coherent campaign without infringing on the individual component's own planning methods to best apply its combat power.
The planning methods behind Operation Iraqi Freedom have not been revealed fully. The public comments of General Tommy Franks and his operations staff, however, suggest the possible outline of a method to plan coherent joint warfare effectively. From their comments, implementing coherent joint warfare seems to be based on knowing yourself and the enemy, building the "mosaic" of appropriate forces, and choosing the proper timing.
Sun Tzu's oft quoted dictum of "know yourself and know the enemy" provides the first step in the method behind planning coherent joint warfare. In terms of self-knowledge, a joint planner must understand the national objectives from which his military objectives are derived and the capabilities and limitations of each element of the joint force. In terms of the enemy, a planner must identify an enemy's critical target sets and current vulnerabilities. Finally, a planner must determine the desired effects that a joint campaign must achieve against each target set.
Building the mosaic is the next step in the joint campaign plan. The mosaic can be conceived of as a matrix that defines the role of each of the elements of joint military power against each enemy critical target set. Each element is assigned a main or supporting role and a specific task based on the capabilities of its force, the desired effect, and sequencing. Most important, the mosaic remains a flexible construct that is expected to change as conditions evolve and new enemy vulnerabilities appear.
Choosing the timing for the application of each element against a designated target set is the final step in the process. Sequential operations in which one element creates a vulnerability for another to exploit are one option. Simultaneous operations conducted by two or more elements are another option, one that can put an enemy on the horns of a dilemma. The timeline is a constantly evolving document, one that is adjusted whenever new enemy vulnerabilities appear.
By following the coherent joint warfare approach, a relentless tempo of operations against an enemy can be created. Although one or more of the individual elements may take an "operational pause" because of logistical, weather, or other considerations, the other elements of joint military power will be able to continue the assault against the same or different target sets. Coherent joint warfare allows no rest or breathing space for an opponent.
One of the major strengths of today's joint warfare is that it executes many of the concepts that military theorists and analysts have conceived over the years. Joint elements swarm an enemy system, attacking vulnerabilities using the methods of maneuver warfare or the indirect approach. Coherent joint warfare gets inside an enemy's decision cycle through the relentless pace and unpredictable nature of operations. Coherent operations achieve shock and awe—not only by firepower, but also by the unfolding mosaic of operations that renders an enemy unable to understand the pattern that steadily eliminates his capabilities, resources, and options.
Coherent joint warfare is the U.S. military's silver bullet, but it is not magic. Developing the capability to conduct this type of warfare involved years of effort from the entire military. Executing it is a complex task requiring highly trained military forces. Sustaining such forces in peacetime will require constant commitment. Few, if any, of our future enemies will be able to produce a similar total package of skilled warriors, flexible organizations, and advanced technology. As long as the United States continues to employ coherent joint warfare, its foes always will be at a significant disadvantage.
Major Lwin is a psychological operations officer. Currently, he is a student at the 34th Singapore Command and Staff College Course. Following graduation he will serve on the staff of U.S. Pacific Command. He previously won 1st Honorable Mention in the 1997 Joint Warfighting Essay Contest.