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Dunford: US war plans outdated, new Pentagon staff needed

Iran Press TV

Tue Dec 15, 2015 4:17PM

America's top military officer has underscored the need for reorganizing US combat commands in the Pacific and the Middle East, because the existing war plans are outdated.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford said Monday that the nature of warfare is changing and the United States requires a new staff that can coordinate military responses across regions.

"It's my assumption today that it would be very difficult for any conflict to be isolated to a region," Dunford said at a Washington, DC forum organized by the Center for a New American Security. 'Any conflict we have will be trans-regional, multi-domain and multi-functional,'

"When you think about potential adversaries in the future, I think we need to think about strategy right up front that takes into account it is in all likelihood going to be fought in that way," he noted.

As an example, the general said a military conflict with North Korea would not be confined to just the Korean Peninsula as ballistic weapons and cyber attacks would drag other nations into the war.

'If you were to talk about the Korean Peninsula some years ago, you would have thought about a conflict that we hoped to isolate on the Korean Peninsula,' he said. 'And then as the North Koreans developed ballistic missile capability, it started to affect other regional actors, such as Japan, so no longer could you hope to isolate a conflict on the peninsula.'

Gen. Dunford told the defense forum that America's current war planning and command and control structure are "not really optimized for that fight."

The statement came as the Senate Armed Services Committee and its Republican chairman, Senator John McCain, are in the process of rewriting the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, the law that established the current chain of command in the US.

"Sen. McCain is running pretty hard," the four-star general said.

Dunford also said the Joint Staff, comprised of 4,000 personnel and military advisers, need to recognize the need to cut some functions he said are no longer needed.