Joint Force Quarterly 113

Joint Force Quarterly 113

(2nd Quarter, April 2024)

Taking Cues from Complexity

  • Countering Drone Defenses
  • Prioritizing History in JPME

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“The Invention of Printing,” anonymous artist, from print series Nova Reperta, design by Johannes Stradanus, circa 1590

Executive Summary

By William T. Eliason

JFQ is certainly the Chairman’s journal, but it exists solely to give voice to you and your ideas on the joint force, jointness in general, and how best to fight and win our Nation’s wars and secure the peace. For over 30 years, the best and brightest among us have sustained the dialogue within these pages, whether physical or virtual. Help us continue this great tradition by sending us your articles and adding to the growing body of knowledge that is Joint Force Quarterly.


Air Force B-52 Stratofortress leads five other aircraft in formation above aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt during routine operations in
Philippine Sea, February 24, 2024

Taking Cues From Complexity: How Complex Adaptive Systems Prepare for All-Domain Operations

By Benjamin Selzer

Because of potential increased adversary military expenditures and technological advances, the U.S. military technological advantage that has benefited American interests since the end of World War II is dwindling. To adjust to the increasingly technical global competitive arena, the joint force continues to develop the joint all-domain operations (JADO) concept, mainly adapted from the U.S.


Air Force Research Laboratory began multimillion-dollar, multiyear program in spring 2022 with BioMADE, Farmed Materials, and Goodyear
Tire and Rubber Company to develop domestic source of natural rubber from Kok-saghyz dandelion, seen here in its initial planting at Amherst
Greenhouse in Harrod, Ohio, July 28, 2022

Accelerating Transition of Biotechnology Products for Military Supply Chains

By Henry S. Gibbons and Anna M. Crumbley

Biomanufacturing, a process in which organisms and their biological systems are used to produce chemicals and biomaterials, has been a part of the military industrial base since World War I.


Marine Corps Sergeant Jacqueline Peguero-Montes, combat videographer with 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, operates SkyDio unmanned aircraft system during fire support team exercise on Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, November 29, 2023

Breaking the Shield: Countering Drone Defenses

By Zachary Kallenborn and Marcel Plichta

Unmanned systems will help save Taiwan. At least, that is what some recent war games suggest.


F-35B Lightning jets of 617 Squadron land on HMS Prince of Wales near Vest Fjorden, Arctic Circle, as part of UK-led exercise Joint Warrior, part
of wider NATO exercise Steadfast Defender, March 3, 2024

2040 Vision: Designing UK Defence for Advantage in a Competitive Age

By Peter Rowell and Joe Fossey

Some readers will have a close affinity for Scottish whisky and heroes (rebels?) such as William Wallace. We wonder if the request for us to write an article for Joint Force Quarterly was inspired by another Scottish icon, the poet Robert Burns, who wrote, “Oh, would some Power the gift give us / To see ourselves as others see us!” We are sure that we shall fall short of the literary genius of Burns, but we hope our observations will provide some of the value he describes of being seen through the eyes of others.


Inter-American Defense College staff, faculty, and students tour Gettysburg National Military Park, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, September 23,
2022, as part of master’s program academic field study offered by college.

"Study, Not Doctrine": Prioritizing History in JPME

By Thomas M. Duffy

War is inherently unpredictable, uncertain, and unquantifiable. The insights are timeless, and Carl von Clausewitz suffuses On War with these understandings, but we struggle to come to terms with the implications of those observations. The need to make predictions is seemingly irresistible, but approaches rooted in process or in generalizing about behavior fail in practice. Generic concepts of war facilitate discussion in the abstract but face challenges in accounting for variables such as ambiguity, leadership, personalities, politics, fear, confusion, violence, and friction. The commercial and budgetary attractions of characterizing techniques, technologies, weapons, or approaches to war as seeming to guarantee results can create powerful, if perverse, incentives that frequently lead to disappointing results. Ongoing military operations are understandably closely held or even deceptive.


Students with Command and General Staff College Nuclear Enterprise Course toured “Spirit of Florida” B-2 from 509th Bomb Wing, April 23, 2019,
on Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri

Getting the Best Out of Joint Warfighter Development

By Charles Davis, Jeffrey Turner, and Mary Bell

Is the Department of Defense (DOD) producing the best joint warfighters possible? During strategic competition that increasingly ebbs toward conflict, joint warfighting and joint warfighter development are more important than ever. Joint warfighter development is the catalyst necessary for the U.S. military to conduct joint operations.


Students and faculty practice complex war scenarios as part of U.S. Naval War College War Gaming Department.

Implementing the Chairman’s Guidance on Experiential Learning in PME Classrooms

By Justin Anderson and Paige P. Price

Major powers are active across all strategic domains—including space and cyberspace—and possess multiple tools of national power to realize their leadership’s core objectives. In turn, the present geopolitical competition among the United States, China, and Russia includes diplomatic, informational, military, and economic dimensions. As stated in Joint Doctrine Note 2-19, Strategy, military strategy requires employment of “the instruments of national power across a broad spectrum of competition and conflict in pursuit of objectives, in a transregional, all-domain, and multifunctional environment.” Given this present and future reality, the education of contemporary strategists should include experiential learning opportunities where participants develop multipronged national strategies within a competitive exercise environment. This type of activity could provide a stimulating, hands-on educational experience that promotes critical thinking on how to balance competing national priorities while yielding important insights into how potential adversaries seek to do the same.


Power generators and fuel tankers provided by FEMA arrive from U.S. mainland to port in San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 2, 2017, as part of
Hurricane Maria disaster relief efforts

DOD’s Need for a Transportable Energy Solution: The Promise of Nuclear Power

By Aaron Horwood, Juan Vitali, Andrew Thueme, Ruddie Ibanez, and Travis W. Knight

In the 42 days following Hurricane Maria in September 2017, the Federal Government deployed 366 generators with a combined 122-megawatt electric (MWe) capacity to Puerto Rico. This supported one-third of critical infrastructure on the island but fell far short of the ~2,400 MWe normally needed just in San Juan. This disaster highlights a profound Department of Defense (DOD) capability gap in providing large-scale transportable electrical power generation to the Defense Support of Civil Authority (DSCA) mission. This disaster should stand as a stark warning to planners as DOD refocuses on peer competition, fields ever more energy-intensive technologies, invests in forward synthetic fuel production, transitions to an all-electric ground, and addresses climate change.


Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star breaks channel through ice in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, December 30, 2023.

The Other Arctic: Competition, Cooperation, or Coexistence?

By John B. Kelley, Christopher J. Sarton, Scott A. Curtice, and Charles C. York III

In 1959, 12 countries signed the Antarctic Treaty to ensure scientific freedom and equal access for all nations of the world to the continent. Since then, the number of states acceding to the treaty has grown to 56 from all parts of the globe, with just over half—29 states—now granted “consultative” status to make decisions regarding the future protection and use of Antarctica through the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM). For over 60 years, the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) has provided the world with a peaceful and stable environment to conduct scientific inquiry, protect unique biodiversity, and promote regional tourism.


Computer-generated image from ~35,785 km altitude vantage point
of objects in geostationary orbit currently being tracked (orbital
debris makes up 95 percent of objects in image). Dots are not to
scale and represent current location of each item as of January 1,
2019.

The PPWT and Ongoing Challenges to Arms Control in Space

By Brian Britt

It was early evening in Washington, DC, on January 11, 2007, when an SC-19 ballistic missile took off from Sichuan Province in the People’s Republic of China. The missile climbed 534 miles before releasing a 600-kilogram payload that slammed into the defunct Chinese Fengyun-1C weather satellite. The test generated an estimated 35,000 pieces of orbital debris spanning 2,200 vertical miles, the largest debris-creating event to date that would threaten private, civil, and international assets in space, including the International Space Station.


Army Soldiers assigned to 5th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, experiment with Integrated
Visual Augmentation System during Project Convergence at Camp Talega, California, October 14, 2022

Mission (Command) Complete: Implications of JADC2

By Joseph M. McGiffin

As one of the fundamental warfighting functions, command and control (C2) has changed little in nature over the course of American military history: Command and control encompasses the exercise of authority, responsibility, and direction by a commander over assigned and attached forces to accomplish the mission. Command at all levels is the art of motivating and directing people and organizations into action to accomplish missions. Control is inherent in command. To control is to manage and direct forces and functions consistent with a commander’s command authority. Control of forces and functions helps commanders and staffs compute requirements, allocate means, and integrate efforts.


Honorable Douglas R. Bush, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, hosts Army Acquisition Executive
Excellence in Leadership Awards ceremony at the Pentagon, January 9, 2023

Supporting People With Policy and Platforms: The Key to Acquisition Reform

By Matthew B. Cook

During the Korean War, U.S. Air Force fighter pilots were faced with a difficult technical challenge. Russian-built MiG-15s outmatched American-made F-86 Sabres, forcing American pilots to develop superior flying tactics to bridge the technical capability gap. After the war, the Air Force established the U.S. Air Force Weapons School (Weapons School) in 1953 to train future fighter pilots on such flying tactics as well as on leadership. Next, in Vietnam, the Air Force once again realized—after sustaining tremendous fighter aircraft losses—that its pilots lacked adequate training. As a result, the Weapons School added aircraft as part of a new Aggressor squadron—along with a whole host of new training approaches.


Troops of 12th Cavalry move from beach, past splintered trees and fires caused by heavy bombardment preceding their landing on Leyte Island,
Philippine Islands

Defending an Achilles’ Heel Evolving Warfare in the Philippines, 1941–1945

By Robert S. Burrell

As Alfred Thayer Mahan stated, “The study of history lies at the foundation of all sound military conclusions and practice.”1 When we consider maritime strategy today, analysis of the Pacific War offers substantial lessons. For centuries, the Pacific has proved crucial to the global economy and as a stage for Great Power competition. In the late 19th century, European powers vied for control over rubber, oil, and minerals, as well as external markets for their domestically produced consumer goods. Mimicking the foreign policy of other imperial nations, Japan sought to revise the European-dominated regional order to better serve its own national interests. The Japanese Imperial Army began conquests in China in the 1930s and then—after Japan proposed the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1940—set its sights on Southeast Asia in the 1940s. Sea lines of communication between the Japanese home islands and their territorial expansions became imperative. In the geographic center of this ambitious Japanese strategy lay the U.S.-controlled Philippine Islands.


Cover of The New Markers of Modern Strategy

The New Makers of Modern Strategy

By Walter M. Hudson

The New Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by the prolific Hal Brands, is a monumental tome of 1,100-plus pages. Its readers may recall the 1986 version edited by Clausewitz scholar Peter Paret (itself an update of the original from 1943). Brands notes in the introduction that the church of strategy is broad, and as testimony in New Makers, a profusion of ideas, events, and facts tumble out in 45 essays, loosely connected by a handful of themes. “Foundations and Founders” starts with key historical strategic thinkers and then proceeds in a chronological sequence: “Strategy in an Age of Great- Power Rivalry” (roughly 1648–1914); “Strategy in an Age of Global War” (1914–1945); “Strategy in a Bipolar Era” (1945–1991); and “Strategy in the Post–Cold War World” (1991–present).


Cover of Beyond Ukraine

Beyond Ukraine

By Dwight “Buzz” Phillips

These are lively times for discus- sions about the future of war. After decades of conjecture about what war between two large nation-state militaries with modern ground, sea, and air capabilities might look like, we now have real data and experiences to draw on. Some trends now seem confirmed—such as the lethality of the modern battlefield for rotary-wing and fixed-wing aviation forward of the line of contact and, concurrently, the growing military value of unmanned autonomous systems. With other questions about the character of warfare, the debate has grown even fiercer—such as what the balance is between offense and defense, or what the significance and role of cyberwar- fare is. Questions about trends—in what Michael Howard calls the for- gotten dimensions of strategy—have also reappeared: What constitutes a sustainable defense industrial base, what is the value of professional armies versus citizen armies, and what causes a society to choose resistance instead of submission?


Cover of Seeking The Bomb

Seeking The Bomb

By Tobias Bernard Switzer

After nearly 80 years of scholarship on nuclear weapons, one might understandably believe that all the important issues have been addressed, if not settled. However, Vipin Narang, professor of political science at MIT, has a knack for asking and answering questions that other nuclear strategy researchers have overlooked. Whereas most academic work looks at superpowers, Narang’s book Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2014) examines how the strategic deterrence postures of non-superpower nuclear states differ from those of superpowers. And now, in his latest, Seeking the Bomb, he extracts insights from studying the various ways states pursue nuclear weapons, discovering that most would-be nuclear powers take different proliferation paths than Great Power states.