Joint exercise stresses info sharing, delivery: Millennium Challenge war-fighting experiment is looking ahead to 2007.

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 interagency 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 Controt 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 nor 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 nonlinear, 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."