The smart people at Joint Forces Command have published the 2010 version of the Joint Operating Environment. The JOE 2010 contains a comprehensive future review coupled with an analysis of the implications for the likely future operating environment. The document is like dessert for any military officer or anyone interested in global security issues. A few quotes from the concluding section - on such mundane matters as leadership education, acquisition process reform and the legacy personnel system:
JOE 2010 cover
This is the fundamental challenge the U.S. military will confront: providing the education so that future leaders can understand the political, strategic, historical, and cultural framework of a more complex world, as well as possess a thorough grounding in the nature of war, past, present, and future. (…) The complexity of the future suggests that the education of senior officers must not remain limited to staff and war colleges, but should extend to the world’s best graduate schools. Professional military education must impart the ability to think critically and creatively in both the conduct of military operations and acquisition and resource allocation. The Services should draw from a breadth and depth of education in a range of relevant disciplines to include history, anthropology, economics, geopolitics, cultural studies, the ‘hard’ sciences, law, and strategic communication. Their best officers should attend such programs. Officers cannot master all these disciplines, but they can and must become familiar with their implications. In other words, the educational development of America’s future military leaders must not remain confined to the school house, but must involve self-directed study and intellectual engagement by officers throughout their careers. (…)
Without a thorough and coherent reform of the acquisition processes, there is the considerable prospect an opponent could incorporate technological advances more affordably, quickly, and effectively with serious implications for future joint forces. (…)
The current personnel and leader development system has its roots in long outdated mobilization systems for mass armies in world wars. And while the United States has had an all-volunteer force for 35 years, the bureaucracy still “thinks” and “acts” from an industrial age, mobilization-based leader development paradigm. That approach continues to shape how the Services approach training and education, often confusing the two. That state of affairs must change.
