Imagine for a moment you are a non-commissioned officer (NCO) leading your team through an exercise alongside a partner-nation unit. You came to the host country eager to learn about its culture and history, and ready to explore how you can work together during a conflict. Throughout the exercise, you had entertaining broken-English conversations with your counterparts when pauses between drills allowed. As the exercise wraps up, senior leaders praise your team for properly demonstrating the United States’ commitment to its partners and for building military cohesion that will be paramount if the two sides ever face a common enemy.
You enjoyed your time, learned about a foreign culture, and made your team more proficient in their craft. But in reflecting on the experience, you cannot help but think that you did not become that interoperable with the partner unit. In fact, it is a little concerning to think about how a combined team would perform if you really went to war. Questions arise on your trip back to home station: What were your partners really doing while you focused on your team’s tasks? How much do your gearsets and skillsets complement theirs? Your reflections also remind you how little you really knew about the country beforehand—and how little you know about it still.
A Strategic Imperative
Leaders at all levels of command must understand the importance of bilateral and multilateral training and exercises. The U.S. National Security Strategy affirms that “alliances and partnerships around the world are our most important strategic asset and an indispensable element contributing to international peace and stability.” This means the Sea Services have a responsibility to figure out how to get the most from their interactions with foreign counterparts. Building on that idea, the National Defense Strategy identifies alliances and partnerships as a “center of gravity” for countering threats to the rules-based international order. These two documents clearly identify the need for lower echelons of command to integrate with ally and partner militaries to quell challengers together when they must.
The Sea Services nested those documents’ prescriptions into their own guidance. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti wrote that the Navy will “actively integrate Allies and partners into our designs to drive the tactical interoperability we need to fight effectively together” in her Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy. “Tactical interoperability” requires units at the tactical (i.e. lowest) level of war to achieve mutual organizational understanding and have ready knowledge of each other’s tactics, techniques, and procedures. The Commandant of the Marine Corps’ Planning Guidance noted that battlefield success required partners and allies be included in planning, analysis, concept development, and experimentation. While planning and concept development take place at higher echelons, analysis and experimentation at the lowest levels of command will reveal the small measures that impact tempo and close kill chains. The Commandant also called for concepts to facilitate integration and information-sharing with partners and allies, a critical component of building situational awareness before engagements.
Adjustments small and large could enhance the synergy of any exercise joining units from different nations. Among those that stand out is establishing training and readiness (T&R) standards for interoperability at lower echelons of command. Linking structured combined activities to specific unit-readiness objectives in this way would align strategic and tactical objectives and equip commanders and staffs to achieve training outcomes.
Many combined exercises take place every year that include tactical-level unit integration with partners and allies. These are the venues to refine the ways and means to achieve shared strategic objectives. However, bilateral and multilateral exercises lack structures for determining successful integration, meaning experiences like that of the hypothetical NCO above are common. This is not to imply the exercises are ineffective—they improve communication and familiarity across warfighting organizations. But these exercises should create exchanges that inspire ingenuity, integration, and cohesion. Training and readiness standards enable these exchanges at the deckplate.
Guidelines for Shared Success
Units are responsible to remain competent in their assigned mission essential tasks (METs). Training and readiness standards that range from individual to large collective actions are based on measured performance of criteria that certify a unit can accomplish its METs. OpNav Instruction 3500.38C Universal Naval Task List captures how accomplishing METs ensures units are prepared for combat, noting that “MET standards, when linked to conditions, provide a basis to plan, conduct and evaluate training events as well as military operations; serve as the basis for readiness reporting; and support the development, testing, and procurement of future weapon systems and resources.”
Lower-echelon units, such as battalions, with MET readiness-reporting requirements lack formal evaluation criteria and education objectives relative to interoperability—even when they interact closely with foreign militaries. Methods to evaluate interoperability, and benchmarks to define its progress, should be worked into the T&R standards that commanders and staff reference to create training plans and gauge their effectiveness.
T&R standards are broken down into specific components, including conditions, measurable standards of performance, and performance steps. Training events are chained progressively from the individual up to the entire unit to build on each other. For example, an individual engineer must understand basic construction techniques to enable a section to build walls as part of a battalion’s effort to construct a series of buildings. Training plans and performance-evaluation criteria are drafted with this framework in mind. As such, T&R standards communicate to a unit what it must be capable of doing to succeed in combat. Were these guidelines applied to interoperability, tactical-level commands could confidently set out to build deterrence and combat capabilities with partners and allies.
Units such as the battalions in Marine Littoral Regiments are expected to integrate and operate with partners and allies in a distributed formation. But that very arrangement removes Marines from traditional command elements that are best equipped to facilitate interoperability. Without T&R standards specifically measuring interoperability during a bilateral/multilateral exercise, there is little way to know how well Marines and sailors at the lowest levels perform crucial combat activities in cooperation with partner and ally units.
Units that regularly participate in combined training—and are expected to integrate into combined formations during combat—would significantly benefit from having lower-echelon training standards incorporated into their METs and tailored to their operational context. For example, a battalion expected to support Japan’s defense through integration with Japan Self Defense Forces should have T&R standards that require it to demonstrate that ability during regular exercises with its Japanese counterparts. Chained events could include combined-formation actions such as tactical convoys and completing sensing chains.
Know Your Friends
Individual success in combined formations would necessitate activities prior to training that would have benefits of their own. Members sometimes receive informal education about the foreign forces they will work with, but this is not codified, nor is it given the importance it deserves relative to other training and exercise objectives. Educating personnel on the cultural and organizational nuances of partners and allies ensures combined teams can quickly cooperate and avoid unintentional insensitivities or perceived arrogance. Further, showing good will spreads a positive message about the United States within the personal and professional networks of ally and partner personnel.
In addition to these soft skills, technical knowledge on the characteristics of counterparts’ equipment, capabilities and limitations, and training priorities builds shared competencies. Education on allies and partners also allows lower-rank personnel to offer criticism and share best practices that can only be uncovered through trial-and-error activities at the operator level.
There are other obstacles to consider when building training and readiness standards into a unit’s requirements with the goal of deepening interoperability. The most prominent challenge in all training and operations is communication. Getting communications equipment to function effectively requires significant practice and coordination even when working only with U.S. systems. Adding counterpart equipment to the mix is no small ask of operating forces at lower echelons. Adding another language is an even more complex challenge. Foreign language competency by U.S. servicemembers, and English proficiency by foreign counterparts, will be needed for units to integrate more fully into combined formations capable of countering adversaries.
Codifying standards of tactical integration with partners and allies for lower echelons of command bridges a gap in combat readiness. Under current plans, units are expected to operate in disaggregated formations alongside foreign militaries, but commanders and staffs are not equipped to develop training plans that will guarantee these multinational units’ ability to work together. The United States must prioritize the strategic emphasis on integrated defense via partner and ally interoperability to deter and defeat adversaries.
