Seminar develops Joint Operating Environment
Army News Service
By Jim Caldwell June 17, 2003
FORT MONROE, Va. (Army News Service, June 17, 2003) -- The first actions to develop a shared vision of the world's future military environment for the United States armed forces were taken at a first annual Joint Operational Environment seminar in Williamsburg cohosted by the Joint Forces Command and the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command June 3-5.
"We've been studying the OE now for the past four years, which describes the future out to 2020," said Lt. Col. Tony Huggar, Future Concepts Division chief for the TRADOC Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence.
"The intent of this first annual seminar is to take the operational environment and make it into a Joint Operational Environment that can support all of the services. We cannot accomplish this without Joint Forces Command support."
"What we were invited to do at Joint Forces Command was to partner with them so that a document that was previously somewhat Army-centric would be now relevant to all the services, as well as to a joint warfighter," said Navy Capt. Dennis Fengya, JFCOM Director of Intelligence.
The JOE provides to the services and to joint forces commanders a picture of global trends from the present out to 2020 and beyond. The JOE assessment is based on a variety of factors, including economics, politics, geography and technology. They are possible "friction points," according to Fengya.
There is a strategic and an operational JOE for actual combat operations throughout all stages. Joint forces currently engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan present two different operational environments.
"At Joint Forces Command, when we look at the operational environment we talk about the variety of factors,' Fengya said. "They would be very different for Iraq than they would be for Afghanistan. At the operational level you're talking about how you orchestrate all of the things the nation can bring to bear inside a country under the control of a joint forces commander."
The strategic JOE tracks developments that might turn into hotspots that could involve American military forces. That look at trends and factors extends more than 15 years into the future.
"The operational environment that we're shooting for out of this seminar is not going to be so specific as to be able to say in 2020 that if you fight a particular country this is what it's going to be like," Fengya said. "Nobody, I think, would take credit for being that clairvoyant.
"The kind of Joint Operational Environment that we think we're producing is one that will allow us to look at major trends in the world so that we can identify the friction points and the root causes of war and what might be the general operating conditions for our forces somewhere in the world.
"We can inform our experimentation and exercises and ask ourselves some really tough questions, such as do we have the right doctrine?"
"This will have to be updated at least annually, so if we're successful in getting the Joint Operational Environment rolling the way we'd like to, we anticipate we'll be doing this again next year and the years to come."
There will be "customers" in the services and joint service organizations for the JOE document, which will be in draft form by July 11.
Col. Bob Johnson, the Future Warfare Director for TRADOC's Deputy Chief of Staff for Doctrine, Concepts and Strategy, is one of the customers.
"One of the emerging insights coming out of Iraqi Freedom is that the work that DCSINT has already done on the operational environment is right on the mark," Johnson said. "Their description of the environment was that the enemy will not want to stand and fight you in the conventional sense. What he will want to do is attack you in those places where you are vulnerable."
The TRADOC OE said that Iraqi opposition would attack the long supply line supporting the 3rd Infantry Division's rapid advance toward Baghdad.
"That part of the environment was right," Johnson said.
The JOE serves as the basis for which training and experimentation for current and future environments is conducted. Johnson pointed out that the training goals and scenarios at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, Calif., and the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, La., were the result of the DCSINT operational environment. The JOE will soon become the important document for those activities, officials said.
The DCSINT operational environment was key to creating a scenario for Unified Quest 03, a wargame at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., in which TRADOC and JFCom were codirectors this spring. It was the first time an Army wargame took on a joint aspect. Johnson is responsible for staging the game.
Unified Quest 04 is scheduled for May 2-7, 2004. By that time, the JOE will allow all the services' operational environment products to reflect a shared view of the future.
To develop the JOE, JFCOM and TRADOC officials invited to the seminar active and retired military personnel and noted individuals in various fields of study and application.
Some of the individuals had preconceived thoughts about what may happen.
"The seriousness with which the Army has undertaken this effort to make this joint was sort of unexpected for us," said retired Rear Adm. Eric McVadon, an independent consultant on East Asia security affairs.
"What will our combat forces face in the future? There are no easy, glib answers to that. So this is truly a serious effort for the Army and the Joint Forces Command to step back and take a look at that whole situation."
Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at the National Air and Space Administration Langley Research Center, noted the depth of the seminar investigations.
"We're in the midst of a very rapid global technological set of revolutions in IT (information technology), bio (biological) and nano (nanotechnology) and these will change the operational environment tremendously. This study is, in fact, looking into these changes."
Robert Engelman, vice president of research for Population Action International, said that based on his experience, he initially thought the working groups were too large to be effective. At the end he had changed his mind.
"It's been a very impressive process," he said. "I think we're going to have a pretty good consensus of what the key trends are in each of these areas to present to the customers of this process. I think it's been very impressive."
(Jim Caldwell is a senior correspondent for TRADOC.)
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