scenarios emphasized
The ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review will draw heavily on classified, country-specific scenarios for military missions, departing from a previous “infatuation” with capabilities-based planning, according to a senior defense official.
David Ochmanek, who earlier this year became deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and the head of the QDR analysis and integration cell, has been charged with reconstituting a planning capability to close the gap between the National Defense Strategy and how the department allocates its resources.
In his first interview on the job, Ochmanek told Inside the Pentagon last week that force planning requires three components: a strategy that explains what the force must be prepared to do; concrete scenarios that detail future expectations related to executing those missions; and assessments that illuminate the ability of alternative forces to achieve their missions in those scenarios.
“I think in the past our QDRs have done a good job of strategy development,” he said. “I think we wandered a bit off the farm with regard to scenarios. There was this infatuation with ‘capability-based’ planning, which I think is not the thing. And our assessments have been uneven.”
The Bush administration’s 2006 QDR report states that in 2001 DOD shifted from threat-based planning to capabilities-based planning, changing the way warfighting needs were defined and prioritized. Capabilities-based planning aimed to “identify capabilities that adversaries could employ and capabilities that could be available to the United States, then evaluate their interaction, rather than over-optimize the joint force for a limited set of threat scenarios,” the 2006 report stated.
But now the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. To inform the QDR, groups of defense officials are mulling a little over a dozen defense planning scenarios specified by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and related to irregular warfare, defeating high-end asymmetric threats, civil support at home and abroad, and global posture, Ochmanek noted. This work began in April.
“They’re out there charged with examining their issue areas, what analysis has already been done, what scenarios relate to those issue areas and what additional work can we do . . . between April and basically July, to shed more light on an assessment of the programmed force in the context of those scenarios,” he said. Members of Ochmanek’s analysis and integration cell are also involved.
Another Pentagon official said it is unclear what will become of the joint capability areas developed on the Bush administration’s watch, noting this was a source of tension between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff when officials mulled how to organize working-level analytical efforts for the QDR. Although OSD has opted to use “reality” and the defense planning scenarios to test alternative force mixes, this does not necessarily preclude JCAs being used in some way, the official opined.
“It’s just that they aren’t the organizing framework for QDR analysis,” the Pentagon official added.
Ochmanek said that with the National Defense Strategy in hand officials have been focused on “articulating scenarios, ensuring that they do indeed cover the full range of plausible challenges.” Then the focus has been on assessing scenarios using various means -- not just computer-based campaign modeling but also table-top war games.
War games have looked at future scenarios and the capability of the force envisioned for the next decade to cope with those scenarios. “And my guys have been in with the . . . high-end asymmetric [threats group] to do that, so we’re getting insights just as they are,” he said. DOD is also holding meetings in which the program analysis and evaluation directorate, the Joint Staff’s J-8 force structure, resources and assessment office and others have discussed results of analyses from the last couple of years that bear on these scenarios, he said.
“So I am a believer in scenarios, if that isn’t already apparent,” Ochmanek said. “That hasn’t always been the case. I think you need to craft stories that capture your expectations of future challenges. If the process has integrity you need to give your adversary credit for being able to operate with the capabilities available to him competently.”
The idea is to develop “a yardstick against which to measure your force,” he said. As officials conduct table-top exercises and review past studies, the looming question is to what degree the capabilities provided by the force of record are satisfactory for meeting challenges out to 2016.
“What you want to get from that is some sense of gaps in capability and/or shortfalls in capacity which then will focus your work on how to adjust going forward,” Ochmanek said. In addition, officials are gathering ideas about programs and development projects that might provide solutions. That work is slated to culminate in June, when Ochmanek’s office must harvest the “1,000 flowers” that have bloomed and turn them into “perfume,” he said.
There is also a separate “red team” effort established by Gates, which is looking at a “smaller number” of their own scenarios, Ochmanek said, noting this team will draw on irregular warfare insights gleaned from the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (ITP, May 14, p1).
“So we have scenarios but we also have reality, right?” Ochmanek said. “And in the world of IW . . . counterinsurgency, stability operations, we have a treasure trove of experience and lessons from the last eight years since Afghanistan. So when I say there are about a dozen scenarios in there there’s also this massive thing called reality and our expectations about the future for U.S. strategy and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan going forward. So that’s a big source of insights about requirements for the IW piece of the whole thing.”
The independent red team is led by Andrew Marshall, the head of the Pentagon’s net assessment office, with assistance from U.S. Joint Forces Command chief Gen. James Mattis.
“It would be astonishing if there were no overlap between the scenarios we were looking at and the scenarios they were looking at, right?” Ochmanek said. “There are some pretty obvious things out there that can impinge on U.S. interests. And if they came in with a list that was completely from Mars it would be remarkable. And it isn’t from Mars.”
The QDR team is keeping its distance from the red team effort. Ochmanek said his boss, Kathleen Hicks, the deputy under secretary of defense for strategy, plans and forces, has been pretty clear that QDR officials should not attempt to influence the red team and should also avoid the appearance of doing so.
“So we’ve been very hands off, deliberately,” he said. “Also, you know time is a limited commodity and I don’t have a lot of time to schmooze Gen. Mattis on what I think his scenarios ought to be like.” Ochmanek said he expects these scenarios to be “sort of hybridish and so forth,” but added he is unaware of the details. In a March 11 memo to Gates, Mattis said the red team should tackle complex, hybrid threats (ITP, May 14, p1). Geoff Morrell, Gates’ spokesman, told InsideDefense.com May 13 the defense secretary drew inspiration for the red team effort from Andrew Krepinevich’s book “7 Deadly Scenarios.”
Ochmanek said the QDR team is also eying hybrid warfare, noting Gates is on the record saying the set of future challenges that DOD is concerned with differ qualitatively from traditional worries.
“And there is a blurring between irregular and conventional, that the adversaries that we face in the future won’t be shy about adopting things from the world of insurgents and terrorists that would be challenging to us,” Ochmanek added. “So our scenario suite is pretty hybridish too, so I don’t think there’s a dramatic distinction qualitatively between our set and theirs.”
Ochmanek said both scenario suites will inform the QDR, but it is not a matter of reconciling the two lists.
“I would say insights from both streams of activity are going to inform our evaluation of the future force,” he said. “It’s not like we’re going to sit down and say, OK we’ll take two from here and one from here.” All of the scenario work will be considered, he said.
There will come a time before the completion of the QDR when DOD will look at both scenario sets and draw insights from them, he added. “It’s going to happen whenever Mattis and Marshall outbrief the results of their assessment,” he said.
According to a draft Joint Staff memo, upon the completion of the QDR the Pentagon’s policy directorate will begin the development of a new lineup of defense planning scenarios via an “inclusive process” that will feature a review of the existing library by both DOD and outside experts, and will “ensure the family of scenarios is appropriately balanced to address the future threat environment” (ITP, May 14, p1). Told of the memo, Ochmanek said that “sounds right.”
“I think that everyone is comfortable with the suite of scenarios we have now in light of the red team’s effort to supplement those,” he said. “And we recognize this is not the time to get out and rebuild the engine while we’re driving down this road. We’ll drive with what we have and then, after the QDR, review the whole suite of scenarios.”
Some Pentagon officials have wondered whether the red team’s scenarios will be weighted equally in the QDR because they will be less detailed and prepared more quickly than the other scenarios. But Ochmanek insisted the red team’s work would be considered as important as the other scenario set.
“Because of the stature of the people in charge of that effort, they’re going to carry just as much weight as what those of us down in the engine room are doing,” he said.
Ochmanek is upbeat about the overall QDR effort.
“So I feel pretty strongly that the approach we’re taking is sound, that it is strategy-based,” he said. “Whether we pull it off or not you can be the judge when we get to the end.” -- Christopher J. Castelli
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