With Joint Vision 2010, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili wants to bring together the services’ future organizational and conceptual efforts.
On 18 July 1996, Defense Daily carried a story that began, “A Joint Chiefs of Staff plan [Joint Vision 2010] unveiled yesterday . . . will shape military-wide doctrine and acquisitions for the next 15 years [and] will serve as a road map for industry.” The story quoted Brigadier General Robert Dees of the Joint Staff as saying that it is “a conceptual template for the future force in the 21st century.”1
As explained in a companion briefing book, the Joint Vision 2010 force, with its coherent organizational structure, materiel, and doctrine—to be activated by the 21st century military’s people and leadership with their education and training—exploiting information superiority and technological innovations, will apply dominant maneuver, precision engagement, full-dimension protection, and focused logistics to achieve full-spectrum dominance in both peacetime engagement and deterrence and conflict prevention, and also will be prepared to fight and win our nation’s wars.
That mouthful reflects a comprehensive, multifaceted effort by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili and his confreres to do something that has never been tried before—to take the U.S. military machine in all its dimensions coherently into the future.
But, given the inertia of the system by which forces are now placed in the field, and given that each service has its own ideas on how its future should look, will this vision happen? Can it happen?
The idea behind Joint Vision 2010 is not new. Long known as “combat development,” the notion that a military institution can take an amalgam of organization, doctrine, and materiel systematically into the future was formalized in the U.S. Army in October 1952, when Major General Robert M. Montague became the Deputy Chief of Army Field Forces for Combat Developments. General Montague soon produced a Combat Development Objective Guide, whose chapter titles (“Infantry Operations,” “Ground Fire Support Operations,” “Army Aviation,” and so on) became the labels of 18 horizontal lines on a floor-to-ceiling wall chart at Fort Monroe, Virginia. The chart’s vertical lines framed, chapter by chapter, the guide’s key objectives for each year out to 20 years.
The Army’s combat development structure, which was generating organizational and operational concepts and statements of materiel requirements, grew quickly. By 1962 it rated a separate three-star command, with its own experimentation activities and with subordinate agencies in most Army service schools. In 1973, the Army brought that structure into its new Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, and at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the Army’s new Combined Arms Center had a two-star general for combat developments. As the other services kept pace in their own ways, recognition grew that any combination of an organization with its doctrine and its materiel meant little without troop leadership and
training. In November 1987, the Commandant of the Marine Corps designated his three-star schools and research establishment at Quantico, Virginia, as the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. The notion that leadership and training are essential is central to General Shalikashvili’s vision.
The Army took a non-mainstream course in 1979, when General Edward C. Meyer, its new Chief of Staff, created at Fort Lewis, Washington, a High Technology Light Division test bed, double-hatting as its director the commander of the 9th Infantry Division. That commander, reporting directly to the Army’s Chief of Staff, was tasked to generate and test imaginative concepts of organization and operation—with accompanying materiel requirements—for a lighter, more mobile, still-powerful Army division. The institutional Army resisted this arrangement, and General Meyer’s successor let the experiment run down. But the effort provided an education for one Major General John Shalikashvili, who commanded the 9th Infantry Division in 1987-89.
In October 1993 General Shalikashvili became the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he saw in the Army a massive force development mechanism known as Force XXL in the Marine Corps a similar though smaller endeavor, and in the Air Force and Navy corresponding efforts. The combatant command commanders-in-chief (CinCs) were putting into practice their own original—albeit short-term—thinking; and within the Joint Staff, a drive for joint doctrine development that had begun with General Colin L. Powell was gathering steam.
But combat development addresses future doctrine—or, more accurately, future concepts—that are to meld with future materiel and organizations and evolve into future forces. And-for joint combat development, there was no machinery; the services’ organizational and conceptual efforts essentially were unguided.
Under the broad authorities granted him by the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols legislation and with the support of the Joint Chiefs and the combatant commanders, General Shalikashvili decided to bring the services’ future efforts together under Joint Vision 2010. He ordered his Director for Strategic Plans and Policy, then-Lieutenant General Wesley Clark, U.S. Army, to create the basic document.
Ideas for future operational concepts and for the materiel that would make them possible already were at large in the Pentagon in something called the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)—the brainchild of Andrew W. Marshall, Director of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The RMA looked back on the two decades before World War II, when, exploiting that era's technology, Germany created and brought to that war its Blitzkrieg land forces and the United States did the same with its carrier-oriented naval forces. Calling each of these achievements a "revolution," Mr. Marshall sponsored a broad effort in the services and in the joint establishment to understand how the technology of the 1990s could be exploited for a similar revolution in our own times.
Mr. Marshall gained an enthusiastic partner when Admiral William A. Owens became Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in early 1994. Admiral Owens believed that the products of many high-tech sensors—both existing and in development—could be combined to provide field commanders a far more complete and accurate real-time portrayal of the enemy situation than possible earlier. That idea has evolved into the information superiority component of Joint Vision 2010.
Admiral Owens possessed a powerful bureaucratic tool. As Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he also was Chairman of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC). From 1987 to 1994 the scope of the JROC had broadened somewhat and its authority had been strengthened, but with the selection of Admiral Owens as Vice Chairman, the JROC moved from a body concerned solely with acquisition—where it provided authoritative review of all major service buys—to the key staff mechanism through which the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs could address defense costs and money-saving tradeoffs within such core institutional issues as service roles and missions, while preparing the Chairman’s input to the Secretary of Defense with regard to materiel and force planning and resource allocation.
The annual Chairman’s Program Assessment, instituted in 1987 and originated for the Chairman by the Joint Staff’s Director for Force Structure, Resources, and Assessment (J-8), uses the analytical output of the JROC process. The assessment of October 1994 went far beyond its former simple endorsement of what the services had recommended. It took its place in the annual Defense Program Review as a true alternative defense program that differed from—indeed challenged in some respects—the services’ programs. And in February 1995, the Chairman's Program Recommendations, also prepared by the J-8 using results of the JROC process, came on the scene to influence the Defense Planning Guidance developed by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The clout of these two documents stems from their being the Chairman’s own considered judgment, rendered to the Secretary of Defense after taking into account all relevant input.
The pamphlet, “JROC: Planning in a Revolutionary Era,” avers that
The JROC process represents the first significant complement to the Planning, Programming, Budget System system in over three decades. . . . Goldwater-Nichols established the authority for an alternative process [and the JROC system] assumes that the senior military leadership can act as members of a corporate board devising national, cross-service, solutions. . . .
[However,] the changes represented by the new JROC process have stirred two concerns. . . . [One] is that the military services are being shunted aside by a staff and process that takes cues from the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. . . . [The other] is whether the new JROC process duplicates functions assigned to civilian offices within the Department of Defense.
The pamphlet argues that neither concern is well-founded:
[T]he JROC members are Vice Chiefs of the military services. . . . they never fully step out of their roles as service representatives. . . . [T]he test of success is whether the JROC process can generate . . . better recommendations . . . than would . . . have been the case [with the PPBS alone].
The JROC pamphlet also implies that the application of professional military judgment in competition with the judgment of civilian staffs of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in matters of resource allocation, force composition, and trade-offs is long overdue and should be welcomed by all parties.
While these innovations in force planning and resource allocation were taking place, and as the Joint Vision 2010 draft was circulated for comment, the Joint Staff’s Director for Operational Plans and Interoperability (J-7) was preparing for the Chairman the Joint Vision 2010 Implementation Plan. That plan identifies the goal for 2010 as:
- Doctrine in place
- Forces and headquarters organized, equipped, and trained to execute
- Leaders developed and educated to execute
- War plans reflecting new warfighting modes
The JROC may not be the prime venue in which such matters as these are resolved, but it is a key venue with regard to weaponry, requirements, and capabilities assessment. Decisions on weapons require judgments on where and how these weapons are to be placed in operational force structures and how their employment is to be directed.2 Resolution of deeply held service differences in doctrine call—if not for referring such matters to the JROC—at least for applying the “JROC spirit.”
Assisting JROC members will be another joint mechanism, installed in 1994: the Joint Warfighting Capabilities Assessment (JWCA). The JWCA process calls for each Joint Staff director to identify critical deficiencies and strengths in joint warfighting capabilities in his domain (see radiator chart, p. 39), establish his task group’s organization, select his methodologies and scenarios, collect and analyze data, conduct continuous assessments, and provide recommendations to the JROC. In addition to assisting the JROC’s “cross-service perspectives regarding resource distribution,” this mechanism also can generate “innovative insights as to how to build joint military capabilities”—meaning how to come up with creative solutions to problems of joint organization and doctrine.3
Combat developers long have wrestled with the question, How does future doctrine (i.e., future operational concepts) fit in the combat development process? Do concepts of employment come first, or does future and emerging technology come first, followed by doctrine?
The answer, of course, is that the two—along with their organizations—are intertwined. So General Shalikashvili, a believer in the worth of both current and future doctrine, directed the Joint Warfighting Center (JWFC) at Fort Monroe, Virginia, to develop a capstone guide for the operations of Joint Vision 2010’s forces. In September 1996, the JWFC released its first draft of “Concept for Joint Future Operations” for review and comment by the CinCs, the services, the Joint Staff directorates, the National Defense University, and the Joint Staff Historical Office, and called on each to send a representative to an action- officer working conference held in early December 1996.4
The draft’s 124 pages expand on the themes of Joint Vision 2010 and raise many questions to be addressed, but they break little new ground and provide few answers as to how Joint Vision 2010’s bold objectives are to be achieved. The draft’s chapter 8, “Operations,” is “not yet developed.” Nor is there any discussion of possible options for the future organization of joint forces, or any scenario that lays out possibilities for the organization and employment of joint forces.
Indeed, noting that “we need to explore how to develop ‘future doctrine’ within the existing doctrinal development process,” the draft asks, “should joint doctrine development lead service doctrine?” One would think that with the publication of Joint Vision 2010, future joint doctrine development already has begun to lead that of the services—as it should, with each service contributing its best, enlightened thought.
As General Shalikashvili and his doctrine-development team—with the Joint Warfighting Center as lead agent— attempt to get out in front of the services’ thinking, and as they examine ways to convert ringing doctrinal prose into operational reality in the field, they could remind us of an old-time movie cowboy galloping alongside a runaway eight-horse team that is pulling a stagecoach across the desert floor. Our hero is aiming to get on the lead horse and change the stagecoach’s direction.
But that is not the metaphor. A military institution is a living thing; it changes week by week, month by month. At work throughout the joint institution is an ingenious system of rolling distributed development, with nodes in the services’ staffs and field-development establishments, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and in the CinCs’ domains. The U.S. Atlantic Command, whose CinC is responsible for the joint training of assigned U.S.-based forces, is particularly important; twice a year at its Joint Training, Analysis, and Simulation Center in Suffolk, Virginia, it conducts joint task force exercises to try out new ideas on joint organization and operations. Every six months the JROC members, accompanied by representatives of the Joint Staff, visit each CinC to brief, to listen, and eventually to act.
In October 1996, aiming to send signals all along this distributed network, the Joint Warfighting Center began a series of seminar games in which senior officers from the Joint Staff, the services, and the CinCs are engaging in practical advanced thinking, using future scenarios across the full range of conflict.
Meanwhile the joint warfighting capabilities assessments continue. For example, the Joint Staff Director for Logistics (J-4) is using the JWCA concept to address Joint Vision 2010's challenge of focused logistics, which calls for "the fusion of information, logistics, and transportation technologies to provide rapid crisis response, to track and shift assets even while en route, and to deliver tailored logistics packages and sustainment directly at the strategic, operational, and tactical level of operations." The J-4's assessment team will develop an organizational and operational concept that runs from the deployed battalion, squadron, or ship to the sources in the United States. Their concept will interact with one developed by the J-6 for command and control, and with another developed by the J-8 for joint task forces in land and littoral operations. And these three, and others, will use the scenarios of the J-7-led seminar to examine their ideas and arrive at workable solutions.
Thus, in a distributed yet controlled fashion, Joint Vision 2010 is indeed happening. Its destination still is an imprecise vision, but the journey is taking place.
Whether that journey will succeed depends on an accommodation with Title 10, U.S. Code, which assigns each service the functions for which it must organize, train, and equip forces. For example, Joint Vision 2010 will need superb leaders—from generals and admirals to sergeants and petty officers. The services' duty is to grow those leaders, but the JCS Chairman's duty is to establish the joint frame in which they will grow.
The JROC's function is crucial, but up to now it has worked tasks less complex than those to come, such as the three highest cost acquisition programs—the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-22, and the F/A-18E/F—not to mention aircraft carriers and submarines. Now add to the JROC's plate—or to the plates of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his colleagues operating in the "JROC spirit"—such force structure and employment issues as: How many carrier battle groups, Air Force wings, Army divisions, and Marine expeditionary units should there be through 2010? How are they to be organized most efficiently into joint task forces? How they are to fight?
When a service believes that a decision that is not going its way threatens its very soul, it may be tempted to revert to survival tactics, such as appealing directly to Congress, that have served it in the past. But must a service’s soul depend on specific items of its materiel, or how it chooses to organize its fighting formations? Or does a service’s soul derive essentially from its excellence in doing what it is given to do?
If the JROC spirit continues to prevail; if the framers of the future joint operations concept stay within the law that assigns each service its basic mission; if the senior officers who embark on this fall’s seminar games can think outside the box and look beyond what is best only for their respective services; and if, despite the obstacles, future Chairmen and Vice Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are as committed to the achievement of Joint Vision 2010 as have been those of recent years, then Joint Vision 2010 can indeed happen and U.S. military professionals will have done well by our country.
1 “New Joint Warfighting Plan Also an Industry Road Map,” Defense Daily, July 18, 1996, p.87.
2 In the congressionally mandated deep-attack weapons mix study, due in January 1997, the JROC is involved in addressing not only the weapons to be built for future deep theater attack and which service will build them, but also the theater doctrines for employing that mix, so that the needs of all service battle participants are met.
3 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction 3137.01, 22 February 1996, “The Joint Warfighting Capabilities Assessment Process,” in its paragraph 7.a.2, puts the challenge to the JROC another way: “the JROC will . . . [e]nsure emphasis is placed on the needs and deficiencies of the combatant commands, while ensuring interoperability, reducing parallel and duplicative development efforts, and promoting economies of scale, where applicable.” Ominous words for a service partisan.
4 Joint Warfighting Center Memorandum, “Review of the Initial Draft Concept for Future Joint Operations,” 24 September 1996.
In 1973-76, the opening years of the U.S. Army’s doctrinal revolution, General Cushman commanded the Army Combined Arms Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and was commandant of the Army Command and General Staff College.