America’s military branches have got each other’s backs in Iraq. More than at any other time in history, they’re pulling together — this time to win the war on terrorism.

By Eric Minton

The weapon of choice for the Iraqi insur-gency is the “roadside bomb,” known more formally as the improvised explosive device (IED). The bombs have accounted for the bulk of U.S. Army and Marine Corps casualties since the end of major combat operations in 2003. As you might expect, when the enemy develops a crippling weapon, America looks for a solution. But what many might be surprised to learn is that no single branch of military service has been given responsibility for finding the solution. Instead, all branches of the U. S. military are working together to find an answer.

“The first part of our charter from [then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz was to coordinate the multiple efforts under way in [each of] the services,” says Col. Lamont Woody, USA, deputy director of DoD’s Joint IED Defeat Task Force. “Our first chore was to go to each service to get the best folks we could possibly get and look across the department, in the laboratories, in the field, and in training centers to get an idea of current activity and protocols.” Although the Joint IED Defeat Task Force grew out of an Army initiative and still is led by the Army, the mandate was clear: Every service was to participate, bringing their individual expertise to bear from the bomb-loading Air Force to the mine-countering Navy. The results have been profound and immediate: Despite an increase in IED incidents, the rate of casualties from such incidents decreased 45 percent from April 2004 to April 2005.

America’s armed forces have reached the apex of jointness. Two decades’ worth of experience aided by the Goldwater-Nichols DoD Reorganization Act of 1986 has created an institutional framework for a military force in which the four individual services behave more like components than commands. The military now has raised a generation of joint-minded officers and NCOs. “I’ve not had a joint assignment,” says Col. Wayne Scott, USAF, director of communications and information for 12th Air Force at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Ariz. “But through various training venues or deploying to support joint operations, I’ve been taught to approach things from a joint perspective. It’s no longer how the Air Force does business, it’s how air power can be employed to serve the other services.”

Says Capt. Terry Pudas, USN-Ret., acting director of the DoD’s Office
of Force Transformation, “It’s fundamentally about culture. Joint experience is really about relationships and trust, and we’ve succeeded in creating a joint culture in the military.”

Beyond joint

“We’re at a level beyond joint,” says historian Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, USA-Ret., former commandant of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. “It’s beyond military to include diplomatic, commerce, economic, and information facets.”

As the Pentagon progresses to the “beyond joint” level, the joint culture is not as uniform as it could be, even within individual branches, where stovepipe tendencies still exist within components.

“I will say the Army among the services has been more joint than ever,” says Col. James Moentmann, USA, chief of strategic plans, concepts, and doctrine division in the Army’s G-3 office. “The Army has been doing joint operations forever. We rely on the other services to get to the fight and for some of our fires. We’re used to working with other forces.”

Scales thinks the nature of early-21st-century warfare also explains why the Army and Marine Corps — the land power forces — would be at the forefront of thinking joint, while the air and sea forces might be less so. “What we have now is joint by fiat or by the gods of war dictating that we own the global commons, so there’s no threat to our air, sea, and space — only on the ground. The culture has not been overcome because everybody has learned to embrace each other. It’s been overcome because of the dominance of the land dimension.”

Cultures, however, evolve, and though the joint culture might not be consummate, it is undoubtedly pervasive. “I would say we’ve never been better at it,” Moentmann says of cooperative efforts. “There are still stovepipe things. It’s human nature. Anytime you’re dealing with budgets there’s going to be that concern. But the trend over the past couple of years has been unprecedented cooperation.” He attributes that trend to leadership, starting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “If you want to get in trouble with our chief
of staff, signal that you’re not on board as being a joint officer.”

The primary difference in joint today from joint in the past, though, is institutional, Moentmann says. “Now the buzzword is ‘born joint.’ We’re not just deconflicting operations and not just being interoperable where we can talk to each other; there’s synergy in what we do now. Systems and training and organizations are developed from the outset to be joint.” Even the budgetary process works through jointure. “We can’t buy a piece of equipment or put a design in unless the other services have seen it.”

Joint thinking cuts across the military spectrum.

* As the Army transforms to a modular force, that force’s foundation units, the brigade combat teams (BCTs), are designed to plug into joint task forces. Even the command-level units replacing the current division structure will be capable of fusing with combined combatant headquarters, because they will not have their own organic forces.

* Based on the experience of the successful drive to Baghdad in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Air Force is increasing participation of its joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs) — the ground crews that call in targets for aircrews — in Army companies. The Air Force is looking to increase the number of JTACs to meet the increased number of combat companies in the new modular Army, while the Army is providing customized Stryker vehicles to JTACs assigned to Stryker BCTs.

* The Army’s and Marine Corps’ operations, acquisitions, and sustainment communities have formed the Army Marine Corps Board, with representatives meeting regularly to discuss initiatives in each service. “They make sure that as we develop a new radio system for our tanks, the Marine Corps benefits from that,” says Moentmann. Representatives of the Air Force and Navy have been attending meetings, too, Moentmann says.

* The Army’s Blue Force Tracker, a GPS device that registers its combat vehicles on an electronic map, has also been placed on Marine Corps and Air Force vehicles.

* The Navy is developing a force structure initiative called “sea basing” in which forward initial response units plus support, reconnaissance, and command-and-control elements will be stationed on floating communities rather than land bases in foreign countries. The Army, looking to move out of those foreign land bases, has been intimately involved in the plans.

*  The services are assigning teachers to the other branches’ schools, and some initial skills training has gone joint. “There’s a particularly strong relationship in our fires communities, the fires guys at Fort Sill [in Oklahoma] and Air Ground Operations School at Nellis [AFB in Nevada],” Moentmann says. “We’ve now initiated classes where Army fire support specialists are teaming with Air Force JTACs in their schools.”

* This past spring the Air Force hosted Joint Red Flag, one of the largest distributive exercises in the history of the U.S. military with more than 10,000 participants from the four largest services. The exercises, featured joint live air and land arms, joint tabletop scenarios, and virtual participants using simulators at 44 different sites. Such a large virtual tie-in was unprecedented.

Spirit of cooperation

From now on, though, the unprecedented will be inevitable. DoD has established the “Four Pillars of  Force Transformation.” The first is “Strengthening Joint Operations”; the fourth, “Developing Transformational Capabilities,” is wholly joint in concept. (The other two pillars are “Exploiting U.S. Intelligence Advantages” and “Concept Development and Experimentation.”)

“Everything we do, all the initiatives we undertake, are in a joint context,” says Pudas, who has been with the Office of Force Transformation since it was established in 2001.

This is not to say the individual services inevitably will or should fuse into one armed force. Pudas sees value in the services bringing their unique cultures, experiences, and mindsets to the joint table, just as successful corporations have embraced gender, ethnic, and cultural diversity to become more flexible and creative (i.e., agile in the military setting). “To a certain degree it’s good to have competition among alternatives to some of our problems,” he says. “It catalyzes a debate about alternative ways of doing things, and in the end, the hope would be [that] we’d come to the best solution, and it would be a joint solution.”

Scott witnessed this dynamic when he served as the director of communications information for Joint Red Flag’s Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC). “Everybody really wanted an understanding of how the other services approached the scenarios and challenges,” he says. “Rather than say ‘That’s not the way we do it,’ it was more of ‘How do you guys go after this?’ ” For the first time he experienced the Army’s air and missile defense command contingent colocating with his CAOC. During the exercise the Air Force feared that, because of a surface-to-air missile threat, it could not safely attack an identified target. “The Army goes, ‘No problem. If we can move this ground unit toward this area, we can take that target,’ ” Scott says. “We at 12th Air Force had never worked with that before. In the past it was all about how to strike every one of these targets from the air. Now, given a ground-based unit, we could prosecute that particular target.”

“Jointness has given us the flexibility to reach different resources each service individually might not have the operational and informational capability to gain,” says Woody. As joint as his task force might be, however, it is perhaps more significant as a harbinger of “beyond joint” in U.S. military doctrine. While the first part of the task force’s charter was to go across services for information and expertise, the second part of the charter, Woody says, “directed us to seek interagency assistance. That opened a lot of doors for us.”

The third part of the task force’s charter is to “identify innovative near-term solutions,” and for that it has extended its reach beyond the four largest military services and government agencies to commercial industry and international allies. “Our coalition partners have really been effective in helping us here,” Woody says. “Their industrial bases have started to come to us and say, ‘Here are some technologies that we’ve used.’ We’ve always had access to our coalition partners and international friends, but for this single cause we’ve seen a greater synchronization of effort and contribution.”

This is in keeping with Scales’ contention that the global war on terrorism will be decided not by a military solution but via diplomatic, commercial, economic, and information functions as well as the military. Pudas points to DoD’s stated “Force Security Challenges” which are listed as traditional challenges, irregular challenges, catastrophic challenges, and disruptive challenges. “The reality is that those [last] three challenges are not strictly confined to [DoD],” Pudas says. “They require a larger national security team to work together in a joint construct. You see manifestation of that all over the place” — including Joint Red Flag, which involved forces from Germany, England, the Netherlands, Kuwait, and Canada.

“It was challenging,” says Scott, whose CAOC included British and Canadian participants, forcing him to run two information systems, a “coalition-releasable” network and a U.S.-only one.

The higher ratio of coalition-releasable network use seems more inevitable than ironic these days. “The word I’ve been hearing in the air operations business is we are going to fight combined, always alongside allies,” Scott says. “So, we have to have that mindset going in.”