By Ann Roosevelt
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va.–In the coming years, the U.S. military will not face wars with clearly defined beginnings and ends, so it must become more versatile and adaptable, according to the commander of U. S. Joint Forces Command and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation.
“This is the greatest rethinking in a century,” Marine Gen. James Mattis told the AFCEA, U.S. Naval Institute co-sponsored Joint Warfighting 09 conference here yesterday.
“We’ve got to adapt now, we’ve got to continue and accelerate,” he said. If the speed of acceleration doesn’t exceed the speed of change, then it’s like a ship going slower than a current.
“We do not have time to spare,” he said. Consider that in 1803, Great Britain hired a watchman to stand guard over the white cliffs of Dover to watch for an invading Napoleon. That position was not abolished until 1945, when Napoleon was dead for 120 years.
The Defense Department is suffering from the same problem today, he said; we’ve got to stop looking for Napoleon. And that’s what Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ program is designed to do.
The joint force will have to protect against manifest threats in the future that are not purely geographic, but involve values that will be under attack as well. These values “today remain the most radical ideas on the planet…they are still under attack today…and always, always under attack by tyrants,” he said
And, the enemy meets as do the conference attendees, he said, and it’s important to remember the nation is at war now.
This time of persistent conflict involves more than the United States, Mattis said, reminding the audience that citizens of 55 countries died on 9/11.
“We have to stay together on this,” he said. “The enemy in many cases are maniacs and believe by hurting us they can scare us.”
The challenge is how to defend the “realm of ideas” with a common community of interests.
Thus, there’s a real need for a grand strategy, he said.
The Obama administration is now working such a strategy out, something that really hasn’t changed since the Berlin Wall came down.
However, he said, no military in history has changed without clearly identifying the military problem that needs to be solved.
U.S. Joint Forces Command has set out the problem in its December 2008 Joint Operating Environment (JOE). The document is under revision for 2009. The JOE is expected to influence the Quadrennial Defense Review, help frame scenarios, and overall help the military reduce ambiguity.
While the JOE sets the problems, the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations (CCJO) spells out the way ahead for building forces to meet those threats. Both documents offer a path forward as top military leaders see it right now.
Later this month, a CCJO experiment will get under way to see if leaders got it right, Mattis said. Rigorously red-teamed, the joint force will fight three enemies: a globally networked terror threat; a peer competitor at distance; and a failed or failing state. The experiment will propose a solution to see if, in fact, the joint force can address problem.
The question is how the joint force can maintain its conventional and nuclear superiority while having the ability to check mate and defeat irregular threats.
The future is likely to be a hybrid conflict, a mix of conventional and irregular conflicts at the same time. The joint force must be adaptable and versatile to confront such threats.
The CCJO posits the force must be prepared for combat, security, engagement, and relief and reconstruction.
To achieve the balance Gates requires means a joint force with a mix of continuity and change, maintaining and sharpening conventional warfare capabilities while institutionalizing irregular warfare.
War at bottom remains immutable, unpredictable and chaotic. Lessons learned must be re-taught and institutionalized.
Mattis said he has modest expectations of predicting the future, since it hasn’t been done successfully in the past. Sitting in his office overlooking Hampton Roads, he spoke of 1809, when no one imagined a decade or so later the British would sail up and burn Washington, D.C. One hundred years later, not one person predicted that in a decade, there would be war in Europe with gas masks, airplanes and machine guns.
The point is not to correctly predict the future, but not to get it “100 percent wrong,” Mattis said. “We have to try to avoid a failure of imagination.”
Some things are already in training, such as using Campaign Design to replace Effects Based Operations.
The highest quality troops are required for an all-volunteer force who must be adaptable, have “tactical cunning and maintain their ethical balance in the most bruising conditions as possible.” This is critical, he said. The joint force must fight and protect the population no matter how the enemy chooses to fight.
Mattis sees high performing units used in small, dispersed packages that must be able to aggregate smoothly. Leadership will be critical. Preparing the joint force through training and education should mean that troops would need to adapt as little as possible to a conflict.
Surprise will remain a constant in conflict, and professional military education must adapt swiftly to changing threats if it is to be a learning organization, Mattis said. This means NCOs must get the training and education previously reserved for junior officers.