• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Unified Quest to test future concepts, capabilities

By John Harlow
April 18, 2006

FORT MONROE, Va. (Army News Service, April 18, 2006) – Unified Quest 2006 (UQ06), the premier “wargame” and capstone event in the Army’s FY 06 Future Warfare Study Plan, is set for April 23-28 at Carlisle Barracks, Pa.

Co-sponsored by the Army and Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), UQ06 completes a yearlong study of future warfare and employs a series of seminar wargames, workshops and staff planning exercises.

Participants include senior active and retired government and military officials, as well as interagency and multinational partners, diverse functional experts and embedded media representatives.

Two teams – one representing joint interagency and multinational forces, another representing adversaries – will explore concepts and capabilities that enable joint operations. They will address four central questions:

• What are the differences between traditional and irregular war in complex environments?

• What are the challenges of exploiting our asymmetric advantage in complex environments across physical, informational and human/moral domains?

• What are the implications of addressing these challenges across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities?

• What refinements should the Army make with respect to the institution, its operational concepts and follow-on experimentation plans?

“Unified Quest evolved from a series of Army transformation wargames that were created back around the time that the Army was developing concepts for the Stryker units and the Army Modular Force,” said Col. Robert Johnson, director of the Future Warfare Study Group of the Army Capabilities Integration Center.

UQ06 will highlight joint operations with a focus on irregular warfare, strategic agility, full-spectrum operational art, generating forces, interagency plus multi-national and non-governmental operations, and homeland defense.

Exercise conditions will stem from lessons learned in Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom. Such experience, Johnson said, points to the importance of solidly trained units, solid tactical leaders and well-led Soldiers.

“The Soldiers that we need to think about developing in the future are just like the kind of Soldiers that we are developing now – folks who can one day be performing the conventional warfare mission, and then maybe an hour later switch gears and perform humanitarian or some other kind of operation,” he said.

Operating under a 2017-2020 timeframe, UQ06 will explore the Modular Force ability to rapidly deploy, employ, sustain and redeploy capabilities in geographically separated and environmentally diverse regions. It will also explore how those forces transition between different phases of an operation.

“In this kind of environment, there is so much activity occurring at so many places at the same time that the level of complexity is hard to manage by leadership,” Johnson said.

“The idea of mission command is important. The idea of units getting their intent, guidance and being resourced down to the lowest levels to take independent action is essential. As we look to the future, we see that same kind of dynamic. It is very important to have very capable small units. The good news is we are moving in that direction today,” he added.

Insights from the exercise will be integrated across military services and JFCOM.

For more information go to Unified Quest.

(Editor’s note: John Harlow writes for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.)