Inside Defense
Oct. 9, 2009 -- U.S. Joint Forces Command officials over the summer alerted Defense Department leaders to a raft of recently identified vulnerabilities and capability gaps so significant that command officials decided the information must be kept secret, a JFCOM official said today.
In keeping the findings of an early summer war game in Northern Virginia classified, command officials reversed an earlier decision to publish a public report on the outcome of the drill by late July. The war game set out to test the tenets of the January 2009 Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, a key document whose ideas are now making their way into emerging Marine Corps and Army warfighting doctrine.
The assumptions of the CCJO “held up very well” in the war game, JFCOM's Rear Adm. Dan Davenport asserted in a telephone call with reporters today. But he also spoke of a “depth” and quantity of vulnerabilities exposed through the war game that seemed unexpected.
In particular, the information U.S. adversaries could derive from the “combination” of vulnerabilities outlined in the war game report spurred the decision to restrict its distribution to cleared individuals with a need to know, Davenport said.
Davenport leads JFCOM's directorate for joint concept development and experimentation (J-9).
In late June, command officials forwarded an initial batch of findings and recommendations to defense officials conducting the Quadrennial Defense Review, according to Davenport. They sent the complete report when it was finished about a month later, he added.
“There is definitely a sense of urgency” at JFCOM and among DOD leaders to address the vulnerabilities outlined in the report, Davenport said. “The leaders who participated in the war game certainly had a sense of urgency that was expressed throughout the war game and since the war game,” he added.
The war game pitted friendly, or blue, forces against teams of red forces, simulated adversaries, composed of “regional subject-matter experts with broad experience in national security,” according to Davenport.
While JFCOM officials have declined to describe the three war game scenarios in detail, they have said the drill involved dealing with a state competitor, a state slipping into lawlessness, and some form of a stateless global terrorist organization.
During the drill, blue forces had to conduct missions without the flood of crucial situational awareness data normally piped via cables and satellites to the most remote places on Earth. The result was a “real impact” on blue forces, but not enough to keep them from reaching their objective, Davenport said.
The game showed communication systems must be made more “resilient and redundant” in the face of potential cyber attacks, according to Davenport. In addition, troops must receive the proper training so they can function without data networks at their constant disposal, he added.
The area of information operations also showed much need for improvement during the war game, officials have said. “We saw in the game that our forces will often be operating in areas with multiple competing narratives at play,” Davenport said today. “In the war game, red was often able to maintain the initiative in the battle of the narrative, forcing blue to be largely reactive,” he added.
Adversaries' capabilities to block U.S. forces from entering future battlefields also played a big role in the drill. “We have a fairly robust collection of recommendations and insights that we are forwarding in that area,” Davenport said.
One way of ensuring U.S. forces can access distant battlefields in the future is through “relations and agreements” with key countries worldwide, according to Davenport. But DOD also must have countermeasures for defeating anti-access capabilities when U.S. forces need to “take access,” he added.
Since the war game, J-9 officials have begun writing a series of concept papers to explain in more detail the implications of grouping major military activities into the categories "combat," "security," "engagement" and "relief and reconstruction," as is done in the CCJO, Davenport said. -- Sebastian Sprenger
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