The Catalyst of Transformation

Joint Military Experimentation: A Long Step in a Continuous Journey

By WILLIAM F. KERNAN

Gen. William F. Kernan, former commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command, previously commanded the 101st Airborne Division and XVIII Airborne Corps, and has been a champion for innovation throughout his 35 years in the Army.

The transformation of the U.S. military has taken on increased significance. But military transformation is more than just the latest of the Pentagon's bright ideas; it is fundamental to U.S. national security--and, like the nation's security, transformation is a continuous journey, not a destination. Indeed, history is replete with nations, even the superpowers of their day, that were deposed because of their complacency.

Dealing with fundamental issues of how the U.S. military thinks, organizes, equips, and fights, transformation is the key to agilely adapt to ever-changing challenges and circumstances, evolving where appropriate, and achieving fundamental, even revolutionary, changes when and where opportunity presents itself.

The Unified Command Plan designates Joint Forces Command as the change agent for transformation. With over 1.1 million troops assigned to Joint Forces Command, the imperative for transformation is foremost in the minds of the command's senior leaders. This is evident in the past two-plus years of dedicated effort focused on meeting the immediate and future requirements of the nation's other combatant commanders to ensure that the U.S. military remains fully responsive to this century's challenges.

This effort was evaluated recently during Millennium Challenge 2002, the largest joint experiment in history, and an important milestone on the transformation journey.

Concepts and Assessments

Millennium Challenge united Joint Forces Command's transformation partners--the combatant commanders, the military services, the Defense Department, and other government agencies--to challenge the status quo and move the U.S. military forward. Millennium Challenge facilitated the exploration of 11 concepts, 27 joint initiatives, and 46 service initiatives, and also assessed 22 warfighting challenges drawn from the concerns of the regional combatant commanders.

Millennium Challenge confronted these initiatives with a robust experimental environment that incorporated a rich mix of live and simulated forces and both current and future capabilities, an aggressive and asymmetric opposing force, a new federation of 42 models and simulations, and service-training ranges in a challenging scenario based on real-world threats.

Where these concepts utilized new theories and technologies to better deal with friction, uncertainty, complexity, and other timeless aspects of warfare, Millennium Challenge amplified each aspect of the ideas under examination to expose their weaknesses and strengths.

The integrity of this experiment was paramount and, given the effort--some 13,500 troops participating in 25 separate locations across the United States--its complexity demanded close management to fulfill all of the experimental objectives.

The Essential Prerequisite

Effective transformation requires that intellectual change precede physical change. Invariably, intangibles such as ideas and training are more important than new technology to the creation of effective change--and, ultimately, to victory in combat. Therefore, at its core Millennium Challenge was about thinking differently with respect to the complex challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. Consequently, Millennium Challenge focused on Effects-Based Operations, Operational Net Assessment, Standing Joint Task Force Headquarters, and the Joint Interagency Coordination Group, which collectively provide a new vision for integrated information-age warfare.

Effects-Based Operations, an outcome-based strategic concept, provides the necessary context for warfighting doctrine and capabilities for the 21st century. Starting with the proposition postulated by Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz that warfare is the continuation of policy by other means--and recognizing the complex, adaptive nature of potential U.S. adversaries in combat scenarios where military forces are only one factor--this concept provides the intellectual framework needed to address operations from peace to war that leverage and synchronize all instruments of national power (including diplomacy, information, military, economic, and law enforcement) from the tactical to strategic levels.

An Operational Net Assessment, a comprehensive system-of-systems analysis of the political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure capabilities of potential enemies and other nations as well as U.S. forces in the region, provides actionable knowledge to decision makers and enables Effects-Based Operations.

The Standing Joint Force Headquarters, the standards-based command-and-control organization, facilitates the rapid establishment of a Joint Task Force Headquarters, enabling rapid, flexible, and decisive crisis responses. In fact, when III Corps replaced XVIII Airborne Corps in the experiment on short notice, the Standing Joint Force Headquarters aided III Corps in accomplishing in days what previous experience indicated might take weeks.

The Joint Interagency Coordination Group, an in-theater intergovernmental team, provides a critical link between policy, strategic, operational, and tactical actions. A product of previous experimentation, this initiative--currently employed by the U.S. Central, Pacific, and European Commands--was further refined during Millennium Challenge.

The Intricacies of Globalization

These 21st-century concepts focus at the strategic and operational levels, are interdependent, and challenge the status quo. They are not tactical solutions that conform to 20th-century norms while pretending to solve operational-level dilemmas. They address the intricacies of warfare in an era of information-age globalization. They are not narrow, uniform remedies to extremely diverse undertakings. Moreover, they provide the joint context for advancing how the U.S. military thinks, organizes, equips, and fights at the strategic and operational levels of warfare.

This context is critical to coherent change and an essential precursor to the development of service warfighting organizations and systems.

There was no attempt to predetermine Millennium Challenge's end state. Indeed, the value of a properly designed experiment is that discovery is independent of the outcome of the experiment--which in this instance was designed to examine new concepts and capabilities, test them in a high-stress environment, and determine their potential for further development and examination.

Subjected to development and testing in over 23 workshops and 16 limited-objective experiments, the concepts and capabilities evolved and improved dramatically over time. Furthermore, the exacting nature of the Millennium Challenge experiment identified numerous concepts and capabilities that require further development before implementation should even be considered.

Millennium Challenge was not an end state, but a comprehensive mid-course review. The real purpose of Millennium Challenge 2002--to improve the operational capabilities of the U.S. armed forces--remains a work in progress as analysts assess the myriad data points of the experiment. While many initiatives show great promise, and are already being employed by U.S. operational commanders, some require further development and others require a return to the drawing boards.

No concept or capability will be validated until ready; the warfighting needs of the nation's combatant commanders--and the lives of U.S. Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines--remain the highest priority as the U.S. military continues down the path of transformation. *