Washington: Pentagon is working on an ambitious new strategy which it hopes will provide a path for technological innovation, drive major new acquisition programs, and pull the services together into a tightly knit joint force.
It’s a lot to ask of a single document, but officials insist the Joint Warfighting Concept will be ready by the end of the year.
“It’ll drive some of our investments, it is all about great power competition,” Vic Mercado, assistant secretary of defence for strategy, plans and capabilities, said last week.
The new concept is being built on the back of the 2018 National Defence Strategy, which identified China and Russia as the pacing military challenges facing the US in the near future. The Joint Warfighting Concept will take that strategy a step further and add detail to the call for operating as a joint force from space down to the tactical level on the ground.
“We have never had the ability to look 10 years in the future and project how we would fight and win a war against a great power,” Mercado added. The old way of planning for potential future conflict has revolved around updating current operational plans. The new concept will reflect the work of all the services and the Joint Staff pulling together to identify capability gaps and assign roles.
The project appears to align with calls from Indo-Pacom commander Adm. Philip Davidson to increase investments in a network of training ranges across the region where all of the armed services can train together to develop the new kind of tech-centric war the Pentagon says it wants.
In a speech delivered this past March, Davidson said he’s looking to develop an ‘Indo-Pacific Warfighting Concept’ that includes fully integrated ground forces, special operations forces, cyber, space forces all backed up by long-range fires. “For its backbone,” he said, “we need a joint — joint — network of training ranges capable of meeting the exercise, experimentation, and innovation objectives of the new warfighting concept.”
Significantly, Davidson said these forces and their systems need to be meshed together permanently, and not as “an ad-hoc joint force shaped to respond to a crisis only after it occurs.”
His plan received a warm welcome on Capitol Hill, where both the Senate and House versions of the 2021 defence spending bill included money to begin flashing out the project.
Any strategy that purports to influence future defence spending and develop new communications technologies to knit the services together will require not only the buy-in from the Office of Secretary of Defense, but all five services. Senior leaders will also have to grapple with the choices that a ballooning national debt will impose.
The Army has big ambitions for the Terrestrial Layer System, meant to detect, decrypt, and disrupt enemy communications.
