The large-scale combat-experimentation drill known as Millennium
Challenge 2002—which gets under way this month—is based
on the notion that inter-service and inter-agency information sharing
is key for the United States to win future wars.
The experiment is managed by the Joint Forces Command, in Suffolk,
Va., and its planning has been in the works for the past three years.
Officials in charge of MC’02 said that the idea is to better
prepare U.S. joint forces for the type of conflicts that are likely
to occur in the 2007 timeframe.
“As we learn things today about warfare in the year 2007,
we are fully prepared to take that learned activity—or that
learned response—and that technology and implement them quickly
as opposed to going into a linear developmental process,”
Lt. Gen. B.B. Bell, the commander of the III Army Corps, at Fort
Hood, Texas, told National Defense.
“We’ll pluck things from experiments that work, and
work well, and bring them aboard even perhaps earlier than 2007.”
Air Force Gen. James Smith, the head planner of Millennium Challenge
2002, said that the experiment is not meant to have an impact on
the acquisition process. “We didn’t want Millennium
Challenge to become a QDR [Quadrennial Defense Review] debate,”
he said in an interview.
If any technologies used in MC’02 turn out to be more useful
than expected, those initiatives will be forwarded to the Joint
Staff, so they can be considered for additional funding, Smith said.
For the most part, he said, the military services will use the
technologies that are available today or will be in the pipeline
during the next five years. The focus, he noted, is on “how
we can do war fighting better with what we’ve got.
“I suspect it will lead to some conclusion on where we ought
to go in the acquisition process to make sure we’re developing
interoperable systems.”
However, Smith noted that it’s natural for observers to expect
to hear about new technologies and hardware. The Millennium Challenge
exercise often is mentioned in connection with the Pentagon’s
popular buzzword, “transformation.”
“When we were talking about transformation, we were really
asking ourselves, how do we leverage the information revolution
to improve the way we do joint planning and execution,” he
said.
“I would like to be able to know more about the adversary
than he knows about himself,” Smith said. “Which means
that I got to know more than just the JIPB (Joint Intelligent Preparation
of the Battlefield), and I’ve got to understand that in the
context of the social environment, the political, the economic,
information, infrastructure.”
Since the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon has realized that it needs
to have the capacity to break down information stovepipes and understand
what is going on in the world, other than in military terms, according
to Smith.
Further, he said, “I would like to be able to integrate U.S.
national power and coalition power against that adversary.”
If information is coordinated in a coherent fashion, “where
we’re using the right tool at the right time, [we can] create
the effect that we want, pre-crisis, during the crisis, and for
the end state.”
That approach is known in military parlance as effects-based operations.
“It was very clear to us early on, that to do that level
of work, you have to have a standing organization, a standing entity
that does that full time,” said Smith. “We realized
you can’t fundamentally change the way you do military operations,
unless you focus on the interagency and look at a new way of interagency
cooperation and sharing.”
The Joint Interagency Coordination Group is the agency that was
stood up to manage the information sharing, “so we can have
an impact on these non-traditional threats before they attack our
homeland,” said Smith. “I would argue that is the core
of what this nation is wrestling with as we look at the threats
of today and the future.”
Concepts such as effects-based operations, a standing joint force
headquarters and the information coordination group are part of
the operational foundation of Millennium Challenge.
Over the past two years, the Joint Forces Command has spent about
$250 million for Millennium Challenge, according to Smith. That
number includes experiments that began two years ago, all the service-level
experiments, joint transportation, research development and evaluation,
operations and maintenance for the joint headquarters, and modeling
and simulation.
“You’ve got to add in ... a cost [for] the live forces
that would normally be absorbed as a training cost and each one
of the services have their own service experimentation,” said
Smith.
Bell was assigned as the joint task force commander. The scenario,
he explained, is “at the upper end of what we call a small
scale contingency.” All the elements of national power, he
said, could be brought to bear to defuse the crisis.
Bell described the elements of national power as “diplomatic
pressure, economic activity by the United States, its allies, the
employment of information technologies and information activities,
and a full range of national powers, in addition to military power.”
The scenario takes place in a littoral area of the world, near
the coast. The enemy is a “rogue” leader with “significant
combat power,” said Bell. “This individual is trying
to garner some influence over an area. ... His ability to gain influence
and combat power is growing almost exponentially over a period of
time and threatens local and worldwide vitality.” The United
States gets involved, because it perceives this rogue leader’s
power as a threat to the U.S. national interest.
If the crisis does not get defused in a short period of time, there
is a danger that it can spiral into a major regional war, Bell said.
“This is one of those scenarios that starts about midway up
the scale of warfare, but has the potential to escalate almost out
of control into a major war for the United States.”
One of the main goals of the Millennium Challenge experiment is
to demonstrate how effective a standing joint task force can be
for a combatant commander. Another objective is to figure out what
U.S. agencies must do to coordinate diplomatic, intelligence and
economic efforts in order to prevent the conflict from escalating
dramatically.
A joint task force is led by a three-star commander and functions
as a command and control headquarters.
The Army III Corps, from Fort Hood, Texas, has been designated
as the joint task force headquarters. The joint task force command
has also taken representatives from all the services, including
the Coast Guard, and built a task force headquarters of about 500
people. “We would then deploy into the joint area of operations
to command and control,” said Bell.
The war plan is also complemented by the interaction of the joint
forces’ headquarters with the other interagency groups and
the national government, which are working on diffusing the problems.
“If that fails, we are preparing to execute combat operations,”
Bell said.
He pointed out that the Third Corps will not remain a joint headquarters
after the experiment. “Once this mission is completed we will
return to our habitual Army Corps headquarters,” he said.
Bell also has been assigned to oversee a joint functional component
subordinate command, which consists of five elements. The Joint
Forces Maritime Component Command includes the sea services and
the Coast Guard. JFMCC is led by Vice Adm. Cobler Dawson, whose
day job is as commander of the Navy’s Second Fleet. The Joint
Forces Land Component Command is made up of Army and Marine units,
and is led by Marine Maj. Gen. Martin Berndt who in real life serves
as commander of the II Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp LeJeune,
N.C. The Joint Forces Air Component Command is headed by Lt. Gen.
Tom Hobbins, who is the commander of 12th Air Force, headquartered
at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz.
Under Bell, there is also a Joint Forces Special Operations task
force whose commander is Col. Mike Fenley, and a Joint Psychological
Operations Command, run by Army Lt. Col. Tom Evans.
“The intent is to look at the effects that we have to achieve
within a joint operational area,” Bell said. “Our first
mission is to say ‘look, before we start talking about dropping
bombs and just military power, let’s work backwards and see
what the effects are, and then see if in using some of the collaborative
tools and processes we can quickly develop a plan and then execute
it almost simultaneously,’” he explained.
One important issue in this experiment, Bell said, is the need
to give the joint task forces enough flexibility to rapidly resolve
crises relying on an effects-based approach.
“There’s a different view among the services about
what we mean by functional componency,” said Smith. “The
air component kind of sees his job intellectually as the integration
of air and space-theater wide. The ground component sees his job
to deconflict ground forces, but we’re asking them to integrate.
So we give them a technical solution for his commanding control
structure and then we ask the [joint forces land component] to integrate
marine and army into one componency as war fighting headquarters.”
Congressional Mandate
The Joint Forces Command is working under congressional mandate
to integrate service experiments, he noted. “We are looking
to integrate service capabilities into a campaign planning process
that allows for tactical execution by the functional components
and services’ headquarters,” he said. In his opinion,
joint integration occurs at the operational level, “which
in my view doesn’t compete with tactical execution.
“You sort of have to become integrated before you do an experiment
on integration, and that is what we have done to go into Millennium
Challenge execution,” he added.
One example is the Joint Fires Initiative, said Smith. The Army
and the Marine Corps have been able to draw a bridge between their
differing command and control systems—the MCS (Maneuver Control
System) and the TCO (Tactical Combat Operations) respectively—to
interoperate.
“The Army and the Marine Corps are not integrated,”
Smith told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. “If you ever
go on an exercise or an operation, look on the side of the wall,
you’ll see a map. The first line you draw is a line—the
Army stay on this side, the Marines stay on this side, because command
and control systems don’t work,” he said.
Although the doctrine to have the two services interoperate does
not exist, the concept will be forced into Millennium Challenge,
Smith said.
“We have got to have all the sensor platforms that each service
has,” he said. “We’ve got to know where the electrons
are going, who can see them and then direct fires as necessary to
achieve effects.” The organization of the war will gravitate
around functional components rather than service components.
JFCOM has been working to put together a technical solution that
allows the CINC, the Joint Task Force commander and each functional
component to have the same picture of the battlefield. That is important
to achieve time-critical targeting, Smith said.
“When you look at the future on a non-linear, non-contiguous
operations battlefield, there are no lines anymore,” he said.
“So how can you do that unless you force the integration of
the command and control systems?”
The Joint Enroute Mission Planning Rehearsal System stands out
among the technologies that JFCOM plans to recommend receive additional
funding after the Millennium Challenge experiment.
According to Smith, the J-EMPRS is an 85 percent solution. The
system cost about $280,000 and has been used on C-17 cargo aircraft,
for mission planning on the move. Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld
used during his last trip to Afghanistan.
The system can fit in a box about the size of a trunk. It has 10
workstations and comes with its own antenna. The system can connect
a commander in flight with the Joint Task Force headquarters and
the CINC, Smith explained.
“It plugs right in, and the real secret to that is all the
work that has gone into data compression technology,” Smith
said. “For some of the other command and control airplanes,
we have got to do an antenna replacement.”
The commander can come up with a mission plan and send the information
securely via Inmarsat satellite link. “It gives you about
the same computing power that is currently resident at the 18th
Airborne Corps,” Smith added.
JFCOM is experimenting with a series of technologies that “empower
us to plan simultaneously between all the echelons of command,”
Bell said. However, he added, there is also “enormous room
for misinterpretation as we echelon those plans and confusion arises.
“While I am planning at the joint task force level, the functional
component commanders can be planning, and then their subordinate
service components are planning,” he said. “At the same
time, when we begin combat operations [and] issue orders and instructions
to the components, they are almost simultaneously able to transmit
this with the tactical instructions to the subordinate units.”
Commanders and staff will not only be able to talk to each other
physically, but also inquire databases to retrieve information quickly,
said Bell. “As we are in discussion about a topical area,
we can reach out and touch a series of excellents in the military,
a series of excellents in the government, in the economic role and
even in the academic role to give us answers about important issues
that might otherwise not be narrowed or take an extraordinary amount
of time to understand.”
Bell added that those capabilities are still developmental and
not yet ready for live operations.
Bell cautioned that Millennium Challenge is about decision-making
and rapid operations and not about picking specific hardware for
services. During the live-exercise portion of Millennium Challenge,
each of the services will be able to do its own experimentation,
in parallel with the JFCOM activities.
The Army will deploy the Interim Brigade Combat Team (with its
new vehicle, the Stryker) at Fort Irwin, Calif.
“They can run three weeks of experimentation in a joint context,”
said Smith. This is “different from the way the Army would
have acquired and experimented on stuff in the past, which, we would
do in isolation and then try to get some consensus on how to bring
it into the inventory and then the doctrine associated with it.”
The IBCT, for example, can’t be viewed in isolation, said
Smith. “It does not tell the whole story,” he said.
“You got a great transformational concept in terms of the
IBCT, but you got to have also the deep attack piece and the force
entry piece to understand how it all fits together.”
Also, the IBCT does not have the same kind of firepower usually
found in a heavy corps, according to Smith. “You got to have
a joint fires infrastructure so that you can bring fires [ground,
sea or air-based] to bear, to support the IBCT.” Therefore,
he explained, the services will have to think jointly about the
fire-support issues.
At the beginning of the exercise, the Marine Corps will perform
a ship-to-objective maneuver, said Smith. Then, they will reposition
at the base formerly known as George, in Southern California and
conduct urban operations and urban warfare experimentation.
The Navy already has been active at experimentation with effects-based
operations and the joint maritime component commander concept, said
Smith. “Now, most of us not in the Navy just think that ships
float away and do their thing.” The Navy wants to figure out
how to integrate fires, intelligence and all types of sensors with
the other services in the maritime component.
The services cannot afford to be territorial any longer, said Smith.
“We’ve got to leverage each other.”
The Air Force will focus on fine-tuning its concept of a global
strike task force, which is built on “the idea of being able
to put together and package F-22s [air superiority fighters], B-2s
[long-range bombers] and a sensor capability, on short notice to
fly global distances, as an operational show stopper, a kick-down-the-door
capability if you will, to hit key strategic and operational targets,”
said Smith.
On a strategic level, the global air strike force could be complemented
by the Army’s Patriot PAC-3 air defense system, which would
be linked to Linebacker air-defense Navy destroyers and Aegis cruisers,
said Smith. “That gives you full dimensional protection in
place fairly quickly and you got a strategic level and a maritime
force that is crossing the blue line and is able to fight on arrival.”
The Air Force is also working on an air coalition operations center,
which will be at the core of how JFCOM we’ll start looking
at the multinational part of joint operations during the next couple
of years, said Smith.
Two weeks after Millennium Challenge, JFCOM will publish a so-called
quick-look report, which will include the commanders and services’
observations. Smith said that the lessons-learned report will be
available sometime in December. It will focus on the power of a
collaborative environment, the advantage that a collaborative process
creates in terms of reducing planning time and the joint fires initiatives.
“It’s going to be detailed enough to be able to show
the analysis of everything we did and the recommendations on what
things to pursue. Clearly, there’s going to be service debate
on the way ahead.”