By Ann Roosevelt
The Joint Irregular Warfare Center (JIWC), part of U.S, Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), hit the one-year mark yesterday, and has made gains in all areas, its director said.
“We have made progress on just about everything,” James O’Connell, JIWC director, said in an interview. “We’re enabling, coordinating and collaborating.”
The JIWC has grown, he said. “What’s nice about it we’ve been pretty successful at saying this is an issue, this is a gap, we need to look at this gap and then somebody will step forward and conduct a capabilities-based analysis or take it and try to solve it, so then we can shift to something else.
JFCOM established the center as a command priority to establish irregular warfare as a General Purpose Force (GPF) core competency without loosing the joint force superiority in conventional and nuclear operations (Defense Daily, March 30, June 19, 2009).
The most important and, in some ways, the most difficult effort was to champion strategic communication, O’Connell said.
Everything can be done correctly at the tactical and operational level, but “if we don’t’ have a solid information operation, strategic communication…if we don’t get that right then you’re not going to take it across the finish line. Your efforts will not be not for naught, but they will be hamstrung, he said.
Great progress has been made over the past year. The joint center for operational analysis did an exhaustive study to get the best practices and best lessons learned of what was happening in Iraq working with Army Gen. Raymond Odierno and Army Gen. David Petraeus.
It brought forward what the joint force commander needed with regard to policy, authorities and organizations, he said.
“That was a very objective study that we could use to educate and inform DoD leadership as well as the services,” O’Connell said. “Now you see a great groundswell of interest and attention put at strategic communication. You see the strategic command is doing a strategic communication-based assessment. They’ve identified nine gaps and now we’re going to fill those gaps.”
JFCOM has undertaken a joint information operations force optimization study. It will get at what forces should be doing it, what their lanes should be and what the efforts should be for information operations, he said.
“There’s also a psychological operations–psyop–capability-based assessment that talks about how we should best configure the psychological operations forces and develop them for the future,” O’Connell said.
Last year, strategic communication saw almost no movement, but discussions from the QDR highlighted the area (Defense Daily, May 20).
“Then there was a groundswell of recognition by the combatant commands and across the services: we ‘re not doing this as well as we can, and it shouldn’t be based on the personality of the commander or we should have organizations in place, we should have training place, education, and the doctrine out there to get it right. It’s not there yet, but there’s a lot of effort out there being put to that.”
“We were part of the drumbeat out there that was highlighting that there was an issue with it,” O’Connell said.
In fact, joint task force commanders have asked that strategic communication be one of the main focus areas in their mission rehearsal exercises to improve staff work, he said.
Additionally, JFCOM’s J-7 has put out a pre-doctrinal strategic communication handbook–version two, he said. “It’s the best guide out there right now for how a joint force commander should execute his strategic communication responsibilities,” O’Connell said.
Since it’s pre-doctrinal, the doctrine is not yet in place. Joint force commanders deploy, use the handbook and come back and point out what needs to be modified or changed. Then, working with all the services, it eventually becomes doctrine. That’s happening right now.
“We don’t solve problems, we participate in identifying gaps–the services have to solve the problem–we don’t’ have acquisition programs here, but we advise and assist and collaborate and enable and we try to stay in the background,” O’Connell said.