The Joint Chiefs of Staff and combatant commanders are working on a new classified strategy document that will give the defense secretary options for dealing with transregional threats that combine different domains and different styles of warfare, the military’s No. 1 officer said March 29.
Since unveiling the fiscal 2017 budget request, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford have repeated that the military must be able to counter what it sees as its top five challenges: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.
Dunford said Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that he is working with the combatant commanders and service chiefs to helm a classified strategy that takes into account all of those threats. The group of senior officials yesterday started on one of those challenges, and Dunford hopes to finalize the strategy by the end of next year.
“This is not a document being written by the staff and then subsequently sent out for comment,” he said. “We sit in, we’re framing the problem, we provide top-down guidance on each of these problem sets and pulling them together.”
A potential conflict with any of the department’s top five challenges could result in a war that is transregional, multi-domain and multi-functional, meaning that they cut across different combatant commands, different domains such as land, air or cyber, and functions such as strike, logistics or ballistic missile defense, Dunford said.
To formulate the strategy, “we basically do a net assessment of each one of these problem sets as we go through,” he said. “We’ll identify where we are in terms of our comparative advantage in these functional areas, and that will inform our efforts either for adaptation or innovation.”
One example is the area of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Even though the military has grown its ISR capabilities by 1,200 percent since 2001 and 600 percent since 2008, it only meets 35 percent of demands.
“We cannot buy our way out of this problem. We can’t buy more Predators…and think we’ll get out of the problem,” he said. “Something disruptive is necessary. Something innovative is necessary. What information do you need to make decisions, and how do we get that information is a question we’re trying to solve.”
Top military officials need to be able to provide the secretary of defense with a common operational and intelligence picture, but currently that is difficult because the secretary gets information piecemeal from each of the combatant commanders, Dunford said.
“That will be wholly unsatisfying to our future secretary of defense when has NORTHCOM (Northern Command) on the net, EUCOM (European Command) on the net, CENTCOM (Central Command) on the net, PACOM (Pacific Command) on the net, all having a conversation about what they need,” he said.
The Joint Staff can help synthesize the views of the combatant commanders into a cohesive strategy and providing broad options to the defense secretary so he or she can allocate resources effectively, he said. The Joint Staff is already starting to play more of a role in that area, such as in formulating the classified strategy document.
Carter in a matter of weeks is also slated to propose additional organizational changes—some requiring a change in statute—that would expand the responsibilities of the Joint Staff. Those will not expand the size of the Joint Staff, Dunford said.