Joint Forces Command Works on Closure Plan

By Donna Miles and Army Sgt. Josh LeCappelain
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Jan. 14, 2011 - A week after President Barack Obama officially authorized Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to dissolve U.S. Joint Forces Command, the command's staff is coming up with the best way to do it without compromising critical capabilities.

"We hope that the implementation plan will be finished within the next 30 to 45 days and approved so we can begin execution," Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who took the reins of Joint Forces Command in November, told reporters this week.

The command could close within nine to 10 months, Odierno said, but making all the associated changes is more likely to take 12 to 15 months. Eliminating the command and shifting its essential functions to other commands will save the Defense Department about $400 million a year, he estimated.

Although Obama gave the official green light Jan. 6 to close the Norfolk, Va.-based command, the staff has been working on its closure plan for several months, since Gates made the recommendation in August.

"What we've done is attempted to find the core capabilities that should be left behind in Joint Forces Command," Odierno said. These include joint training, concept development and doctrine development, as well as providing troops for contingency missions around the world, he said.

Twenty-four of the command's 77 core functions are expected to be eliminated, but Odierno didn't specify which ones.

While the staff hammers out details of the plan, it's focusing on four driving goals:

-- Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of all critical functions that remain;

-- Maintain a strong collaboration with NATO's Allied Command Transformation and multinational partners in the Hampton Roads, Va., area;

-- Sustain joint advocacy and progress made in promoting jointness; and

-- Provide support to the work force during the transition.

Odierno said he expects as many as half of the command's almost 4,000 jobs in the Hampton Roads area to be eliminated. The contractor force is expected to take the biggest hit.

Odierno said he hopes to identify which positions will be affected as quickly as possible. The final plan being worked will identify "what the organization looks like [and] what positions will remain," he told reporters. "And then we will have to work through the details of who fills that position and who doesn't, and who will have to look for work in other places."

In the meantime, Odierno praised the commitment of workers who continue to contribute "great expertise and capabilities" to the command despite all the unknowns.

"That's why we want to get the decision on the implementation done, so we can start informing people what is going to happen to them," he said.

As commander of U.S. Forces Iraq before he assumed his present duties, Odierno oversaw the drawdown of U.S. forces there to 50,000 and the transition from combat to stability operations on Sept. 1.

Although eliminating a command has some similarities, Odierno said, cutting jobs -- particularly in today's economy -- weighs heavily on him.

"Things are tough these days. And now here I am, responsible for potentially 1,900 people no longer being able to be employed, or whatever the number is here," he told reporters. "That is quite a burden."

For those whose jobs are eliminated, "we are going to do everything we can to provide them assistance and help for them to move forward," he said. "What we want to try to do is to ease that burden, and we'll do that to the best of our ability."

Odierno said he plans to set up a program to help affected Defense Department civilian employees find jobs in other government organizations.

Eliminating Joint Forces Command is part of Gates' broad departmentwide effort to improve efficiency and reduce overhead so more defense dollars go directly toward military capability. Odierno said he expects belt-tightening initiatives to extend well beyond Joint Forces Command. "There is a lot more coming," he predicted.

Interjecting a moment of levity into the discussion, he quipped, "I might be unemployed as well at the end of this."

Joint warfighters hone skills at Atlantic Strike

by Casey E. Bain and Susan Hulker, Joint Fires Integration and Interoperability Team Public Affairs

AVON PARK, Fla. (AFNS) -- Joint and coalition warfighters improved their close-air support skills during an exercise led by Air Combat Command and U.S. Joint Forces Command's Joint Fires Integration and Interoperability Team Sept. 13.

Atlantic Strike 10-02 trained warfighters to find, fix, track, target, engage and assess both fixed and moving ground targets.

"Atlantic Strike is the quintessential air-to-ground training exercise that provides joint terminal attack controllers, joint fires observers and aircrews with the skills they need to effectively work together to achieve both lethal and non-lethal effects on the battlefield," said Marine Corps Maj. Jabari Reneau, the FIIT's Atlantic Strike exercise director. "This training will ultimately improve our combat effectiveness, while reducing the potential of fratricide and collateral damage during combat operations."

The exercise is to foster trust, increase confidence, and build vital relationships between key members of the air-to-ground team that will be essential to our forces' continued success today and on future battlefields, said Maj. Gen. David L. Goldfein, the director of Air Combat Command Air and Space Operations.

"Those important relationships are being forged here just like they must be on the battlefield when you can look your comrade in the eye and know you can count on each other," the general said. "That's what Atlantic Strike provides our warfighters."

More than 240 participants, CAS subject matter experts, observers and support personnel participated in the exercise, including representatives from all four U.S. services and our coalition partners from Canada and Slovenia.

"Atlantic Strike gave us an excellent opportunity to work with the U.S. military and other partners," said Canadian Forces Capt. Jonathan Cober, a forward air control cell instructor. "Our primary purpose at this exercise was the opportunity to look at the digital CAS technologies used here and to practice key air-to-ground linkages with some of our most important partners."

An added advantage of Atlantic Strike was the ability to focus on the training audience's needs.

"One of the strengths of Atlantic Strike is it is scalable and still able to focus on specific (training) objectives," General Goldfein said. "We're 100 percent focused and committed to the current fight as we keep an eye on the next threat. We know to accomplish that task we must be good joint partners, and this exercise is an example of that commitment."

The exercise improved joint air-to-ground training of Air Force and Marine Corps JTACs, Army JFO teams, the Air Support Operations Center and aircrew by incorporating intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets along with real-time, full-motion video to replicate a realistic and stressful combat environment, similar to operations in Afghanistan.

"Our primary goal was to get as many controls of live CAS aircraft as we could," said Senior Airman Benjamin Schmidt from Detachment 2, 1st Air Support Operations Squadron, Baumholder, Germany. "Atlantic Strike gave us the opportunity to work with a variety of aircraft and the entire air-to-ground kill chain just like we will in combat. This is as about as real world as it gets for us, and it will ultimately help us perform our mission downrange."

Combatant Commands Conduct Missile Exercise

By Army Sgt. Josh LeCappelain, Special to American Forces Press Service

SUFFOLK, Va - U.S. Joint Forces Command, in partnership with U.S. Strategic Command, concluded a two-day proof-of-concept missile exercise here yesterday (December 16).

"All Things Missile," which started in April 2008, is a program that consolidates integrated air- and missile-defense training solutions across all military services. The partnership works to integrate multiple missile defense systems into one device that can coordinate with all of them.

The Truth Interface Unit, or TIU, takes information from different systems during training events and disseminates it to others rapidly in a synchronized manner. Exercise trainers are able to make changes directly into TIUs, which push information to systems in the field such as the Aegis long-range surveillance and track system, the joint tactical ground station and the Army/Navy transportable radar surveillance system.

Servicemembers at command cells are able to view updated information from their computer screens, tracking changes as they happen.

The proof-of-concept exercise tested the TIU's capabilities and its initial integration with the Joint Live Virtual Construct Federation and gave participants a better idea of how to get this capability to training audiences. Previously, missile training scenarios required four separate simulations that required extensive coordination, synchronization and resources.

Pat McVay, a liaison between Joint Forces Command and Stratcom, said the partnership is making remarkable progress, noting that officials are a year ahead of schedule in getting "All Things Missile" operational. The goal is to have initial operating capability by the summer of 2011, he added.

"We determined early on that we were first going to take a lot of time to identify the problem and identify what the training requirements were and not jump to solutions, which we sometimes do too early on in the process," said McVay, noting that the ultimate goal is full integration with the JLVC Federation. "I think we have identified those training requirements, and we are here this week, at Joint Forces Command, to finalize those requirements."

Representatives from the Missile Defense Agency, U.S. Fleet Forces Command, U.S. Pacific Command and U.S. Northern Command attended the exercise to see progress first-hand and learn how they will integrate it into their organization's capabilities.

"I think this project is a perfect example of how, from a joint perspective, we're supposed to act as an enterprise," said Greg Knapp, Joint Forces Command's Joint Warfighting Center executive director. "Joint Forces Command's role is the lead for joint training in a functional role, but really what that means is we have to work with the operational requirements of combatant commanders to bring in the agencies, bring in the service components, and then make sure we all work towards common solutions."

Knapp added that finding and certifying – rather than building and developing – will bring about large savings in the project's acquisition.

McVay noted that U.S. Central Command and U.S. European Command recently became more involved in the process, as All Things Missile looks into adding follow-on capability in the air- and missile-defense areas.

'Empire Challenge' Focuses on Interopability

By Donna Miles, American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON - Taking advantage of emerging technologies to collect and analyze intelligence, then testing out better ways to get it out to warfighters who need it is the focus of a demonstration project under way in the California high desert and at sites in the United States and several other countries.

U.S. Joint Forces Command's Empire Challenge 2009 kicked off two weeks ago and continues through July 31, bringing together 1,700 participants in a live, joint and coalition ISR interoperability demonstration, Air Force Col. George J. Krakie said today during a media roundtable.

ISR is military shorthand for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

The most visual part of the demonstration is taking place at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., a hot, dusty, high-desert environment Krakie said closely resembles conditions warfighters and their equipment face in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Blue" forces are running convoy operations, and "red" forces are setting up ambushes against them, using roadside and vehicle bombs and firing mortars against bases and logistics operations. Meanwhile, airborne intelligence-gathering platforms are flying overhead: U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles and ScanEagle unmanned aircraft systems, among them.

But China Lake is just part of the demonstration.

Computer modeling and simulation and analysis is under way at Joint Forces Command's Joint Intelligence Lab in Suffolk, Va.; the Combined Air Operations Center-Experimental at Langley Air Force Base, Va.; each service's distributed common ground or surface system laboratories; and allied forces sites in Great Britain, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands.

The demonstration, so complicated that it took more than a year to plan, combines realistic combat scenarios and behind-the-scenes intelligence support. Its central purpose, explained John Kittle, the operational commander, is to improve situational awareness throughout the battlefield.

"We're focused on trying to answer the problems that warfighters have identified for us – to provide ISR solutions or improve ISR support for those problems that they are identifying today on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.

Warfighters came up with basic areas they said require more or better ISR support: irregular warfare and counter-IED operations; strike operations; and persistent surveillance across multiple domains, Kittle said. But warfighters also wanted to see improved ISR management, with a better way of sorting through, processing and distributing the massive amounts of intelligence collected.

"We cannot possibly exploit all the data that is being collected," Kittle said. "That problem is actually going to get worse as time goes on because of the new sensors and new platforms, and new collection capabilities being asked for and put on line."

Empire Challenge is working through some of those challenges in a highly realistic environment. Intelligence collected at China Lake or generated through computer modeling and simulation is fed to analysts at participating sites, who turn it around as quickly as possible.

"Although we have a lot of great technology out there, the real focus is making sure that critical ISR data collected – whether it comes from a U.S. platform or one of our coalition partners' platforms – enters into this exploitation enterprise and can get to the warfighter at the tactical edge," Krakie said.

To test this process, the demonstration is evaluating interoperability along three lines of operations, he explained. It's making sure data flows seamlessly between the five distributed common ground and surface systems – one for each service and one for U.S. Special Operations Command. It's ensuring U.S. systems are interoperable with those of allies and coalition partners. And it's making sure ISR data gets from the intelligence side of the house to the command-and-control part of the operation.

"It does no good if all this intelligence data is moving around the data world but doesn't get to the warfighter at the tactical edge," Krakie said. "So that is one of the key focuses for us during Empire Challenge."