Col. Daniel Sukman, U.S. Army
The joint force lacks a unified theory of success for the strategic level to war. Recent conceptual work in the joint community is producing a joint warfighting concept and joint concept for competing, which respectively focus on battle and actions before the onset of crisis and conflict. Moreover, each service is developing theories of victory independent of each other and independent of the joint community. Conceptual production from the services includes multidomain operations and distributed maritime operations, both of which center on battles at the operational level of war; while this is necessary, it is not sufficient. Without a unified and overarching strategic approach to war, the joint force is accepting the same risk as Napoleon Bonaparte in the early nineteenth century, the Germans (twice) in the first half of the twentieth century, and to an extent, the same risk the United States took in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Current State of Strategic Concepts
In 2012, the joint staff produced the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations (CCJO). This concept provided a strategic vision for the military to become a globally integrated joint force. Under the guidance of then–Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, the CCJO recognized that the future of war would encapsulate enemies and adversaries who operate across combatant command boundaries and in all five domains (air, land, maritime, space, and cyberspace).1 The joint staff continued with the publication of the 2019 CCJO, which maintained the central idea of global integration to guide the joint force in a strategic approach. The 2019 CCJO, while still the apex of joint concepts, is insufficient, as operational-level concepts such as the Joint Warfighting Concept (JWC), the Army’s multidomain operations conceptual work, and the Marine Corps’ Force Design 2030 are now past the substance of the 2019 CCJO.
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