On his first day on the job, the 18th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Martin Dempsey sent a letter to the joint force pointing to key themes as his tenure kicks off.
His most important point came up front: “…I trust you to do what’s right for each other and for our country.”
“We must achieve our national objectives in the current conflicts,” he wrote in an Oct. 1 letter. That means ensuring forces have what they need to succeed.
The joint force is the “decisive force,” he said, and must remain so, but that means looking ahead as well.
“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,” his letter said.
This is a “non-negotiable imperative,” he wrote, and achieving the world’s best trained, led, and equipped force will be difficult in the current fiscal environment. But similar challenges have been surmounted in the past, and “the nation is counting on us” to do so again.
The commitment to the profession of arms must be renewed, he wrote, pushing forward in learning, understanding and promoting those things that define the profession.
This was a focus for Dempsey during his tour as commanding general of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, where “knowledge, skills, attributes and behaviors” also were important in defining the service profession.
Dempsey wrote that the joint force must “keep faith with our Military Family,” a family that includes active, guard and reserve servicemembers, wounded warriors, families and veterans, who “deserve the future they sacrificed to secure.”
The joint force, he wrote, is “powerful, versatile, responsive, and resilient. We are admired by our allies and partners, and we are dreaded by our enemies. You are our decisive advantage.”
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