By Ann Roosevelt
Because of high turnover and the need to train all staff, for the first time, U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) is taking part of its training to theater for Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF HOA), officials said.
“Where we’re making a significant departure from years past is we’re actually, in the spring, going to take a group of folks from here and exercise the staff in theater,” said Cmdr. Nick Mungas, lead planner of the JFCOM JCTF-HOA Mission Rehearsal Exercise (MRX). “We’ve never done that before so it’s going to be a real unique opportunity to reach the people we’ve never reached before.”
Cmdr. Tim Leonard, CJTF-HOA CJ5 (Plans), said the predominantly Navy staff is generally going into an unfamiliar environment.
“We’re a very unique organization and our mission is not always as crystal clear as other kinetic missions,” he said. CJTF HOA conducts operations in its mission area “to build partner nation capacity in order to promote regional stability, prevent conflict and protect U.S. and coalition interests,” he said, quoting from the command’s mission statement.
Newcomers understand the mission, but what they’ll learn in training is how to make it happen, he said in a teleconference Monday.
The CJTF-HOA mission can’t be done by the military alone, it needs to be part of the whole of government approach, providing the defense portion of the 3-Ds of diplomacy, development and defense. This means working with other elements of government, partner nations and international organizations, in East Africa, an area about the size of the continental United States, he said.
Most of the staff are typically on six- to 12-month rotations, thus institutional memory and long-term relationships with partner nations is difficult, and so is working out the training. “They have to come in on day one and be ready to perform,” Leonard said. The in-theater training will be the third phase of the four-part training, and the goal is to exercise the higher staff, who can provide their assessment, feedback, observation training on the entirety of the staff, Mungas said.
The JFCOM training effort planned for Djibouti is trying to reach all the people who didn’t benefit from training in the United States, or who join the command staff in January.
Training has limitations, Mungas said. The CJTF-HOA mission is unique, and challenging and the turnover rate is high. He sees less than 25 percent of the total staff in Djibouti.
The staff spends phase 1 of training at 2nd Fleet at Norfolk Navy Base, which is responsible for providing all the Navy-specific training the staff has to have before they deploy.
“One of the things we were really trying to reach this year was how can we train beyond that 25 percent to reach as much of the staff as possible,” Mungas said.
Second Fleet hosted the academic portion of the training Nov. 14-19. It consisted of about 25 presentations, some with multiple speakers, giving the big picture of the U.S. government, U.S. African Command’s (AFRICOM) component commands, and other non-government and international actors activities and interests in East Africa. That included guidance from leaders such as AFRICOM Commander William “Kip” Ward and CJTF-HOA Commander Rear Adm. Brian Losey.
This training phase provides a framework of the environment for the trainees are heading into.
Phase two is coming up at the JFCOM Joint Warfighting Center in Suffolk, Va., for two weeks in December. Here, the staff will learn the doctrine, then the HOA application, and then practice the process.
This training phase is a partnership between observer-trainers at the Joint Warfighting Center, personnel coming from Africa to assist, and some from AFRICOM to provide subject matter expertise.
The goal of the December training is for the staff to understand and be able to operate within the staff processes that “produce the commander’s engagement cycle and produce the information that he needs to make the decisions in theater as to what they’re going to do,” Mungas said.
In the final training phase next fall, JFCOM personnel will return to Africa, do some interviews, “observe what the staff is doing, provide some observations, best practices and lessons learned that we’ve seen other places and that will be significant because there will be another staff turnover, and we’ll see how they’ve progressed and what their strengths and weaknesses are at that point,” he said.
“The goal of all this and what we think we’re going to do by changing our construct is to provide more of that staff with relevant training at the time and place that’s most appropriate to achieve mission success,” Mungas said.