By Ann Roosevelt
With the release of its Irregular Warfare Vision (IW) this month, U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) has made it a command-wide priority to ensure the joint forces are as capable in IW as in other tasks across the spectrum of conflict without losing conventional and nuclear superiority, the commander said.
“My goal is to ensure the DoD is as effective in IW as it is in conventional warfare,” Marine Gen. James Mattis, commander of JFCOM and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, wrote in a memorandum accompanying his IW Vision. “We will focus on establishment of IW as a General Purpose Force core competency in order to ensure success in the full spectrum of operations of today and the future.”
The command’s IW Vision is part of the evolving series of documents and speeches shaping the military for irregular warfare in what is seen as an era of persistent conflict, says Vice Adm. Robert Harward, deputy commander of JFCOM.
Speeches and documents by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Mattis, the JFCOM-generated Joint Operating Environment released late last year, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen’s Capstone Concept for Joint Operations (CCJO) all discuss irregular warfare competency as a conventional force necessity.
Within JFCOM, the Joint Irregular Warfare Center (JWIC) will coordinate and prioritize efforts on IW-related matters, and work with the other services, DoD, joint efforts, combatant commands and the intelligence community.
For example, JFCOM will work closely with U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which has long thought about such issues and in the fall of 2007 released its initial version of an Irregular Warfare Joint Operating Concept (IW JOC).
“We are married with SOCOM, working together in a collaborative environment,” Harward, a SEAL with a lot of experience in special operations, said in a teleconference last week.
“The Joint Forces Command mission is to champion the joint cause, working with the forces to move them forward in those areas and that gives us a level of authority and responsibilities where we really have a bias for action,” he said. “We want to lead the joint forces where appropriate, collaborate openly with the services and strongly with those multi-national agencies, department, joint and the services in moving forward in this realm.”
JFCOM is partnered with SOCOM to achieve this competency under specific charter.
JFCOM’s own Special Operations Command component will be working with the JIWC on this as well, though it has a broader agenda centered on training.
JWIC Director James O’Connell said, “as far as the IW JOC version 2, SOCOM came to us and asked us to co-lead it with them and so we give…that joint force impetus, and general purpose force emphasis. One of the key goals of both USSOCOM and US JFCOM is to provide more utility for the general-purpose force, the interagency, and multinational partners than the original version 1. It’s an update with that as one of the primary goals.”
Mattis envisions IW as a “fluid effort that is mutually supportive, overlapping, and usually simultaneous in implementation.”
This leads to challenges for commanders and their forces as they balance time and resources to accomplish missions.
“This joint force must be able to conduct decentralized operations in small, high performing, network-enabled units that are capable of aggregating and disaggregating, to meet the joint force commander campaign and complex contingency requirements, across the full spectrum of war’s complexities,” the vision said.
Over the next six to 12 months, the different areas of the command will be to identify such things as best practices, work on standardization, identify joint IW-relevant capabilities and recommend priorities for development, incorporate IW-related tasks into commanders’ training, identify additional training needs, and provide joint doctrine analysis, white papers, and commanders’ handbooks.
To aid the discussions and work, JFCOM will hold a Warfighters Conference in mid-May, and in June will conduct an experiment against the CCJO to “drive out” those [concepts of operations] CONOPS and how we implement them,” Harward said.