By THERESA HITCHENS
WASHINGTON: The roll out of All Domain Operation’s crucial Joint Warfighting Concept has been delayed until spring, due to pandemic-created obstacles to the large multi-service exercises needed to flesh it out, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten says.
“It’s been delayed. And there’s an easy one word answer: it’s COVID,” Hyten told me today.
“In order for a new Joint Warfighting Concept to actually reach the first level of maturity where we can publish version one, we really need to play some large war games with all the services playing — including the Space Force, and a very active ‘Red Team’– that plays real-time and looks at the different concepts and figured out what works and doesn’t work,” he explained during an event sponsored by the National Security Space Association (NSSA). “By this time we were supposed to already have done three major war games and a Globally Integrated Exercise. And we’ve only done one of them, and that one was less than satisfactory because of all the restrictions we had to put in place for COVID.”
The Joint Warfighting Concept is the strategy outlining the new American way of war known as All Domain Operations; that is, next-generation, information-based wars using enormous amounts of fast computer analysis across the land, air, sea, space and cyberspace domains. Launched in 2019 by then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a draft of the new concept as well as detailed articulations of its four sub-concepts were originally slated for completion by the end of 2020.
As Breaking D readers know, JCS Chair Gen. Mark Milley tasked the services to define three of the four sub-concepts: the Navy to flesh out the approach to joint fires; the Air Force, joint command and control; and the Army, contested logistics. Hyten said back in September the Joint Staff itself is working to conceptualize “information advantage” because no service volunteered.
“We were really driving to get something published by the end of the year,” Hyten reiterated. “But when we got to November, we really looked at it and said, ‘you know, we really need to take the time, so we’re going to make sure we continue to exercise it or game it, drive it out, and publish in the spring.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, confirmed by the Senate today, in his responses to written questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee prior to his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, said he intended to review the new warfighting approach with an eye to what follow-up work might be required.
“I will review the progress to date on this effort, to include the independent assessments of it, to determine what follow-on concept work is needed to ensure a strategy-driven and joint approach to future warfighting, and identify a timeline that ensures the overall concept is backed by solid analysis and can usefully inform future joint and Service capability investments,” he wrote.
Already, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, which Hyten oversees, is working to develop overarching requirements to enable the services and DoD to implement the Joint Warfighting Concept.
“The other thing we’re gonna publish in the spring is the requirements document for those four supporting concepts coming out of it that will drive the Joint Force and ‘building’,” Hyten said. “We have to figure out how to actually define joint requirements, which we’ve never really done effectively. We always validate service requirements, but we have to define the joint requirements for the future.”
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