Guiding the Transformation of U

Suggestions on Transformation of U.S. Projection Forces[1]

Paul K. Davis

Research Leader, RAND

Professor, RAND Graduate School
Santa Monica, CA

The Department of Defense (DoD) will soon be moving to implement concepts identified in the priorities for transformation expressed in the recent Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). It will need to translate the QDR’s “operational goals” and “pillars” for transformation into action plans. The key elements of that effort should be different for activities oriented toward the near-to-mid term (Era A) and the longer term (Era B). Based on lessons learned from historical transformations and past work,[2] suggestions for work on both eras are as follows.

For the Near-to-Mid Term (Era A)

Force transformation is neither recapitalization nor that plus modernization on the margin. It involves more fundamental changes. When considering aspects of transformation that could be accomplished in the near- to mid-term, it is useful to think of them as examples of pragmatic reengineering, which involves systematic efforts (including spiral development) with relatively specific goals and approach in mind. Such changes, to put it differently, can and should be “managed.” The changes may involve only portions of the force, are likely to build heavily on the legacy capabilities, and indeed may be regarded by some as too “evolutionary.” However, they will entail new technology, concept, and organization as reflected in new building blocks of capability. To guide such developments, the DoD should

· Focus on outputs in the form of future capabilities to conduct a set of specially identified military operations successfully (e.g., “intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing”). This set of operational challenges should be chosen because of their perceived future importance, the belief that capabilities to meet them will not develop without attention from the Secretary of Defense, and the belief that focusing on them would have the effect of moving developments “in the right direction” for larger transformation goals. [3] They act as militarily integrative forcing functions of joint capability and suggest obvious metrics by which to measure progress.

Given the operational challenges, the Secretary of Defense should, consistent with intentions already signaled in his speeches:

· Require the Services and Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, to present alternative programs that will include pragmatic reengineering of forces over the near to mid term, as well as address the many other considerations affecting force posture, such as force-management considerations and current-day requirements.

· Require that the alternative programs be conservatively funded to assure the long-term feasibility of related force structure and support.

If programs are conservatively budgeted, it is quite likely that transformational options will be seen as economically attractive and even necessary. This will be crucial if the defense budget is insufficient to fund full recapitalization, modernization, and transformation. The programs should explicitly allow for strategic adaptation over time and should strike a balance between the need to begin change early, with the expectation of learning and iteration, and the need to mitigate disruption at a time when U.S. forces have many current missions and a high operational tempo. By insisting on options, the Secretary would be likely to force more ambitious and transformatory concepts to rise to the top, whereas organizational conservatism might stifle them if only a single program option was demanded. The balancing of force-management, current operational, and future-threat risks would be explicitly visible to the Secretary and his management team.

Given challenges and options for addressing them (and the many other considerations that determine programs), the Department of Defense will need to assess the alternatives. For this, a substantial change is needed to the department’s apparatus and processes for analysis. The DoD should

· Develop a new analytical architecture with frameworks, metrics, and terms of reference designed for the capabilities-based planning paradigm and, within that, assessment of transformation options. [4] As part of this, the DoD should:

o Adopt a “mission-system analysis” approach to the assessment of alternatives. This would include emphasis on designing and assessing forces for flexibility, adaptiveness, and robustness. It would deemphasize traditional analyses focused on large standard scenarios and assumptions. It would instead emphasize the concept of developing capabilities within a design space covering a diversity of threat types and a wide diversity of circumstances (variations in, e.g., warning time, tactics, strategy, quality of allies, and real-world effectiveness of weapons and forces.).

o To support this analysis, create a capability for a rigorous version of war gaming that would provide the Secretary of Defense and Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff with structured assessments of capability that require human war gaming by professional officers who “think joint” and deal with issues on behalf of and in the style of future CINCs. This would require partnering uniformed officers with organizations providing continuity and analytical rigor.

o Establish regular Sec-Def contingency games as a device for estimating the real-world capabilities that will exist as a result of planned near- and mid-term actions. These would combine features of the "Dynamic Commitment" games introduced in the Joint Staff in 1996, force-employment gaming as referred to above, and follow-up experimentation and analysis to assess the validity of crucial planning assumptions made in the exercises—e.g., assumptions related to mobilization, logistics, command and control, and force-employment effectiveness. Test cases would not be known to gamers beforehand and would be designed to test flexibility, operational adaptiveness, and robustness of both emerging capabilities and the capability for rapid joint planning.

Finally, drawing on the analyses and structured gaming mentioned above, the DoD leadership should

· Assess the suitability of the building blocks implied by the proposals—particularly, the independently employable force units, concepts of operations, command and control systems, and related elements of support structure. These building blocks will largely determine the flexibility and adaptiveness of the future force.

For the Longer Term (Era B)

The aspects of transformation that involve less well-developed technology and concepts involve a special kind of research and development. The recommendations here are that the DoD should:

· Encourage great diversity of concept exploration in R&D. Dissuade continuing efforts by cost cutters to stamp out what appears to them to be redundancy when (sometimes, not always) what is being seen is a healthy and valuable competition of approaches.

· For concepts mature enough to warrant it, establish special rapid-exploration laboratories bringing together operators, technologists, and analysts to pursue mission-oriented concepts through rapid prototyping, spiral exploration (as distinct from the more familiar spiral development), and enrichment of the knowledge base. This could be accomplished by special partnering relationships among three groups, e.g., U.S. JFCOM and the Services; FFRDCs or national laboratories; and industry. The partnerships would have somewhat the character of integrated product teams in that they would be temporary, militarily rather than technically oriented, and dynamic. They would, however, apply in a pre-development context. The prototypes , for example, would not necessarily lead to an advanced development, but would instead be experiments.

· Continue DoD's efforts over the last decade (e.g., advanced concept development programs or ACDTs) to move certain promising concepts quickly from the world of R&D into the actual force, rather than bogging down in the normal acquisition system.

A recent development that should help here is that the DoD has appointed a new Director of Transformation, reporting to the Secretary of Defense.

For the Near, Mid, and Longer Terms

One issue that arises in work oriented toward both the near to mid term and the longer term is how to assess and improve DoD’s experiment programs. Two longstanding concerns are that (1) the experiment programs end up being either demonstrations or minor adjuncts to training exercises and (2) even when well conducted, the programs often fail to leave behind a definitive knowledge base. The recommendation here is that DoD should:

· Replace the very concept of a joint experimentation program with a new initiative entitled “Developing the Art and Science of Future Military Operations.”

This would constitute much more than a word change. Although experiments would continue to be a crucial component (and probably by far the most expensive), they would be seen as merely one part of an activity that would include theory, modeling and simulation attempting to reflect and extend theory, experiments for discovery, experiments for data-gathering, experiments for integration and, yes, experiments for demonstration and inspiration. This would be very different from a program that focuses almost exclusively around big experiments and preparations for them.

Lest this seem radical, it should be noted that there have been many instances over the years in which one or another of the Services focused on a new mission, worked the problem in all of its dimensions, and left behind the definitive knowledge base referred to above. Such efforts, however, were conceived more as development of a capability than of experiments alone.