The Joint Staff has just completed a review of the three-year-old Capstone Concept for Joint Operations (CCJO), a document developed under then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen and expected to guide force development and experimentation.
“What we’re doing now is undertaking a revision of that document, under a pretty aggressive timeline,” Marine Lt. Gen. George Flynn, director of joint force development on the Joint Staff, said in a recent briefing.
The CCJO offered a way to solve problems identified in a companion document, the Joint Operating Environment (JOE), that examined current global trends to find potential areas of friction.
The CCJO incorporates the JOE describing a future operating environment rife with “uncertainty, complexity, rapid change and persistent conflict.” This results in a complex unpredictable environment, the January 2009 CCJO said (Defense Daily, Jan. 29, 2009). This will see U.S. security and prosperity linked in a global future, requiring continuous engagement and persistent presence. Such conditions lead to the requirement to conduct and sustain joint operations at global distances.
“The common theme to all these implications is creating greater adaptability and versatility across the force” to address the future,” the CCJO said.
However, one of the topics not covered in the 2009 CCJO was “the speed of which we’d have to operate,” Flynn said.
Both the CCJO and JOE were used as a basis for the recently-released Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC) released by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin Dempsey (Defense Daily, Jan. 19,23).
In an October letter to the joint force posted to his blog, Chairman’s Corner, Dempsey said, “We must look beyond our current requirements–to 2020–and develop Joint Force 2020 to provide the greatest possible number of options for our nation’s leaders and to ensure our nation remains immune from coercion.”
Flynn said the new CCJO “is designed to be a bridging document from strategy to further development of the joint doctrine that we develop…the JOAC took the existing CCJO into account when it was written.”
The JOAC also was informed by experimentation, existing publications, but awaiting release of the defense strategic guidance by the White House to ensure the concept was synchronized with it.
“As we look at CCJO, once it’s finished, we may have to go see if we have to make any changes to JOAC,” Flynn said. “Right now I don’t think so because I think the idea is that we worked on in the JOAC were the same as in the CCJO.”
The underlying document, the JOE, came up in a review of the CCJO, and the word was, “If you liked the Joint Operating environment yesterday and today you’re going to like the joint operational environment of tomorrow. They haven’t seen a lot of change,” Flynn said.