By Ann Roosevelt
The capstone future study program Unified Quest 09 (UQ09) examining the concepts and capabilities required for strategic, joint and tactical challenges the U.S. military will face 2018-2025 is under way at the Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pa., this week.
The Army, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) are co-sponsors of the yearlong series of wargames, seminars, workshops and conferences that culminate this week.
UQ09 is the Army’s annual Title 10 study, and is also the way the Army Chief of Staff explores enduring operational challenges and how operations would be conducted in the future operational environment.
Unified Quest examines questions of importance to the Army and also provides answers for the broader community.
Rebalancing
The UQ09 theme is “sustaining balance in the future force.” The year-long examinataion was to delve into how the Army can rebalance to be an agile and adaptive component of a whole-of-government approach to deal with the challenges and threats of the future.
UQ09 for the Army has a series of objectives. One example is to include identifying new operational challenges and conceptual and capability gaps to be able to revise Army concepts that will help it generate and sustain expeditionary forces. UQ09 will also identify the mix of capabilities that special operations forces and the conventional forces require and identify how to integrate them in the best way to achieve strategic agility.
It will also work to identify capabilities and the capacities required in the Army generating force to provide agility and versatility to be able to fill and sustain simultaneous force requirements for joint force commanders and the civil authorities.
Additionally, the study will determine the possible implications of emerging technologies and innovative applications of existing technologies on concepts, capabilities and future operations.
UQ09 will also identify how the military can posture itself to support or integrate the efforts of other government entities in future complex contingencies.
Also, UQ09 will identify concept and capability gaps by examining alternative futures.
Wide Participation
Participants in UQ09 include senior active and retired government and military officials, as well as interagency and multinational partners, functional experts, and embedded news media representatives. They are exploring the concepts and capabilities that enable joint operations concepts, and will examine the application of full spectrum operations in various scenarios to sustain balance in the future force.
Issues and insights from the game will be integrated across the Army.
All the services, SOCOM, and JFCOM will benefit from the knowledge gained. Another UQ09 objective is to derive insights into the further application of the Commanders Appreciation and Campaign Design (CACD) process and insights into the global challenges our forces can expect in the challenging future operational environment.
CACD was developed to help commanders better deal with complex and changing problems through developing a shared understanding to frame the problem, then creating a broad operational framework, then constantly reevaluating the solutions.
Through its experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army has developed competency against irregular adversaries, and must incorporate that knowledge as a core competency into the future. At the same time, the service must be able to conduct operations across the full spectrum of conflict. UQ09 helps the Army determine how to achieve the balance of capabilities it needs to accomplish this.