Download PDF

Understandably, there is quite a bit of confusion about the correct use of the military term campaigning. Typically, the term invokes visions of historical combat operations such as Operation Overlord (the Battle of Normandy)—operations that are massive in scale, scope, and duration. In recent years, however, the vernacular has shifted. It remains critical for the joint force to understand the history of the changes, the rationale, and the implications for strategists and planners, because awareness of the complexities of the campaign planning process has a critical bearing on the quality of the plan developed.

The Evolution of the Planning Process

Prior to the creation of the first combatant command (CCMD) theater command plan in 2010, U.S. military actions focused on contingency operations, crisis operations, and security cooperation activities. To enable joint planning to achieve campaign effects over a longer period, the Department of Defense (DOD) created theater command plans as the mechanism for organizing, integrating, and prioritizing security cooperation activities over a 5-year time horizon. In his 2008 Guidance for Employment of the Force (GEF), Secretary of Defense Robert Gates directed CCMDs to publish theater command plans. The first GEF consolidated five documents providing strategic guidance: contingency planning guidance, Global Force Management guidance, security cooperation guidance, nuclear weapons planning guidance, and global posture guidance. The GEF served as a companion document to the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, which became the Joint Strategic Campaign Plan (JSCP) in 2017.¹ The GEF provided the what and the JSCP provided the how to the CCMDs for developing and executing campaign and contingency plans. Using the strategic guidance documents of the GEF and JSCP, CCMD leaders and planners began a 2-year process to create the first theater command plans.

In the 13 years since CCMDs published the first theater command plan, the design and utility of campaign plans have matured significantly. This is to say that the term campaigning now has a broader connotation that includes combat operations and daily activities designed to shape the environment and create stability to achieve national goals. The terms campaign and campaigning, from the military’s perspective, generally refer to CCMD activities as part of a CCMD campaign plan (CCP). Daily operations, based on the CCP, must begin by determining how to access an area, which necessitates that CCP planners calculate the force posture and speed of operations necessary to achieve desired outcomes.

CCMD campaign plan development has matured alongside CCP processes, but the changing character of warfare in the 21st century presents joint planners with new challenges to consider threats and opportunities in the space, cyberspace, and cognitive domains and in the information environment over extended periods. Planners, however, do not always have the education and experience they need to provide leaders with the best advice. Military best-advice deficits are most likely when defining campaign objectives and ways and means to achieve them that extend over time horizons of 5 years or longer and in unfamiliar warfighting domains. The joint professional military education (JPME) enterprise must continue to adapt itself to ensure joint planners can develop and assess multidomain and long-range campaign plans that generate integrated and synchronized effects across all warfighting domains.

As early as 2007, JPME institutions began incorporating campaign planning concepts into their curricula even though doctrine lagged in the inclusion of campaigning concepts. Because the Joint Staff J5 and J7 informed JPME institutions that the changes were imminent, institutions were able to teach campaigning concepts years before the first published campaign plans. Two schools within the Joint Forces Staff College (JFSC), part of National Defense University, are the primary joint educators for campaign- level planning: the Joint and Combined Warfighting School (JCWS) and the Joint Advanced Warfighting School (JAWS). JCWS and JAWS educate students on how to create combatant commander (CCDR) planning guidance for the CCP, to include the initial operational approach, but students do not create a complete campaign plan.

It might seem critical that students—though the broader talent management and joint educational enterprise have admitted shortcomings—complete a campaign plan prior to occupying a joint billet, but there are other factors to consider.² One such advocate of considering such factors, Chad Pillai, asserts that the “concept behind and mechanics of developing CCPs are taught at Service and JPME programs. However, student planners are rarely given sufficient time to create a CCP entirely.”³ Fundamentally, Pillai’s assertion is correct; student planners are not given the time or instruction necessary to write a full campaign plan. But fully educating students to write a complete CCP, represented in the classroom by the full complexities of the adaptive, iterative, and recursive nature of the planning process, is not the most effective focus of JPME. Creating a full CCP and publishing the theater campaign order (the CCP’s execution mechanism) would require extensive knowledge on security cooperation activities, component organization, and operational execution beyond the scope of any single PME institution. The Defense Security Cooperation University provides education on security cooperation and employment of security cooperation activities to achieve desired strategic outcomes. Planners with a working familiarity of the campaign plan processes, like graduates from JCWS or JAWS, supported by Defense Security Cooperation University graduates, are best instilled with the knowledge neces- sary to create a complete CCP.

Beyond knowledge, completing a notional CCP and publishing a notional theater campaign order require more time and resources than currently allocated at JFSC. As part of their education, students learn how to create approaches to campaign planning. According to Congress and DOD, that level of exposure is sufficient knowledge for graduates to serve successfully on CCMD joint planning groups.⁴ The campaign writing process is so expansive with so many contributors that it is unfeasible if not wasteful to try to replicate it in full in the classroom. Because the CCP includes military-to-military training engagements and a broad spectrum of security cooperation activities, creating the notional and unclassified support documents required to support student learning would be a monumental task unworthy of limited JPME resources. Rather, the goal of JPME programs is to expose students to the strategic and operational processes, helping them understand each major contributor and intersection within the process.

To attempt to fully replicate the CCP process would also succumb to a training mindset. Jointness and the broader goal of familiarity with joint processes are achieved by bridging the educational gap, preparing officers for the CCP development process and the idiosyncratic nature of the process as it occurs within each CCMD and across the joint force. The goal of broad education and familiarization with the foundations of the art of campaign planning requires JPME students to acquire professional knowledge across four topics: related joint doctrine; design and operational arts; the strategic environment and how intelligence contributes to CCMD understanding of it in all warfighting domains; and how supporting organizations contribute to CCMD understanding of the strategic environment. Joint planners must apply their knowledge holistically, managing the contributions and the intersections to create and assess successful campaign plans.

Doctrine, Design, and Operational Art

Combatant command planners must recognize a wide range of factors and considerations as they begin the campaign design process. As the CCDR and the CCMD staff engage in design thinking to develop a CCP, a prudent starting place is joint doctrine. Joint doctrine provides a system to examine the available national strategic direction and guidance; assess the international and regional environment; articulate assumptions; identify the problems; and then seek options to address and solve those problems. Doctrine provides an invaluable theoretical framework to facilitate CCMD thinking, but rigid adherence to joint doctrine will not produce the solution the CCMD seeks.

Joint Publication (JP) 5-0, Joint Planning, outlines the seven steps of the joint planning process:

• plan initiation
• mission analysis
• course of action (COA) development
• COA analysis
• COA comparison
• COA decision
• plan or order development.

The latest versions of JP 5-0 and JP 3-0, Joint Operations, include more descriptions of how to think about and shape campaigning activities, but the joint planning process primarily focuses on contingency and crisis planning.⁵ Thinking about and applying operational design and the steps of the joint planning process to campaigning require a different way of thinking. Design think- ing is crucial to campaigning, but to their detriment, planners often shortcut the design process and start with mission analysis. If planners at the CCMD level do not invest time in the operational design process, they may create solutions or lines of effort to address the wrong problems. In 1957, Dwight D. Eisenhower stated, “Plans are nothing, but planning is everything.”⁶ Similarly, planning at the CCMD level is dangerously disconnected unless built on a foundation of operational art, and operational art begins at the intersection of design and doctrine.

JP 5-0 provides CCMD staffs a starting point and methods for applying operational art to guide thinking, design, and planning as they analyze the issues, challenges, and opportunities within their respective CCMD areas of responsibility. The goal of the staff ’s analysis is to gain a full understanding and definition of the problem within the area of responsibility. In turn, using the operational design methodology helps the CCDR and the CCMD staff generate informed options that lead to recommendations for the national security enterprise. Informed options do not require planners to have comprehensive experience; rather, planners must understand the joint operational design and planning doctrine and possess the education to apply it effectively.

JP 5-0 defines a nine-step operational design method to guide the commander and staff:

• understand the strategic direction and guidance
• understand the strategic environment (for example, policies, diplomacy, and politics) and the related contested environments
• understand the operational envi- ronment and relevant contested environments
• define the problem (create shared understanding, planning with uncertainty
• identify assumptions needed to continue planning (both strategic and operational)
• develop options (operational approach)
• identify decisions and decision points (external to the organization)
• refine the operational approach
• develop planning and assessment guidance.

Each of the nine steps denotes a framework for conceptualization that informs subsequent steps. A significant part of operational art is understanding that the process is recursive and iterative. Findings in one step may require returning to earlier steps, having revealed bias or new information that refutes a foundational assumption made during the design process.

To be effective, the CCMD staff must think widely and deeply within each of the above design steps, fully accounting for the three doctrinal levels of war: the strategic, operational, and tactical.⁸ The CCMD is entrusted to visualize the campaign from plan initiation to achieving the campaign objectives overlaying and reconciling the three levels of war with the realities of the strategic environment. Operational warfare scholar and theorist Milan Vego terms the type of thinking “bridging and interfacing.” Vego counsels that the operational-level commander must bridge and interface with both the strategic and the tactical levels to ensure a coherent and effective employment of forces and application of available resources.⁹ By bridging the strategic through the operational and tactical levels and understanding the points of interface, the CCDR creates coherence that reconciles the strategic-political objectives and the tactical actions of the forces tasked to achieve those objectives based on a common understanding. The CCMD staff—the operational linchpin between the strategic and tactical—translates the strategic aim, sets the conditions in the theater, and synthesizes the information and data necessary to effectively achieve the established aims, allowing leaders and organizations at each level to focus on their primary responsibilities.

Figure. Interaction of Policy, Strategy, and Operations With the Strategic Environment

Combatant commands create the CCP, and CCMD components execute operations to implement an overarching strategy. At the national level, policymakers observe a dynamic strategic environment and set general strategic objectives. The array of factors shaping a CCDR’s vision for a campaign plan integrates disparate visions contained in strategic guidance. Use of the term vision is not meant to suggest soothsaying, but rather the future environment’s characteristics and qualities suitable for maintenance, improvement, or achievement of U.S. strategic interests that leadership strives for. Examples of strategic guidance are the National Security Strategy (NSS), National Defense Strategy (NDS), National Military Strategy (NMS), Guidance for Employment of the Force, Joint Strategic Campaign Plan, and any number of executive orders and National Security Council–published topical strategies.

Strategic guidance comes in a variety of forms, and understanding strategic guidance is a critical step in the operational design framework because planners must know what they are trying to achieve before they can propose a process for achieving it. Effective campaign planning requires joint planners to work analytically and creatively. Although many tasks conducted at the CCMD level rely on the use of standardized routines and scientific calculations of observable physical entities, numerous other tasks depend on commander and staff inference and insight akin to artistry, especially in resource-constrained environments.

Understanding the Strategic Environment

The knowledge, skills, and abilities required of joint strategists and planners to demonstrate operational artistry are difficult to develop and resist application if doctrinal methods are taken as prescriptive, mandating specific approaches to specific problem sets.¹⁰ A skill that is more art than science requires the CCMD staff to critically evaluate the strategic environment to identify conditions, threats, opportunities, and vulnerabilities across all warfighting domains to develop creative and execute risk-managed COA recommendations.

Among the least appreciated qualities of the strategic environment is its dynamic and changing nature. The strategic environment is a system of systems. As one element in one system changes, it can generate effects across multiple systems. For instance, a change in a country’s national political leadership can suddenly affect both its military agreements with allies and its foreign trade relationships. Even the policymaker’s original desired endstate may change in response to a changing strategic environment. Policymakers constantly sense and examine domestic and foreign inputs to formulate new strategic priorities, and new priorities mean agencies must maintain the ability to adapt. In fact, in many administrations, domestic political and economic concerns often blur and obfuscate the boundaries between separate national security concerns. The notion of a separation between national security and domestic policy is fiction.

To understand the strategic environment, one should acknowledge that one’s perception of the strategic environment is always affected by human cognitive limitations and biases and thus is inherently imperfect and in some cases manipulable. Accounting for that fact of human na- ture, the development of national and DOD strategies is intended to act as the “disciplined thought process that seeks to apply a degree of rationality and linearity to an environment that may or may not be either, so that effective planning can be accomplished.”¹¹ The figure illustrates, in simplified form, the general pathways through which strategy is developed, communicated, and assessed based on feedback from the strategic environment to enable institutional learning.

The core concepts of strategic guidance serve merely as starting points in plan development and often provide more context than clarity. A close, critical reading of strategic guidance, in the context of knowledge about the strategic environment, may even reveal goals and objectives that leave room for debate, interpretation, or discord. An effective CCDR’s vision considers the malleability of strategic guidance and the dynamism of the strategic environment, setting a common understanding in an operational context of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The CCDR’s expertise in operational art and estimates of the strategic environment and operational environment anchor and frame CCMD staff dialogue on possible plan options. Much of the CCMD estimate of the strategic environment is based on intelligence information that informs the joint planning process.

The Role Intelligence Plays in the Joint Planning Process

Commanders and their staffs must make sense of the constantly changing strategic environment to identify planning assumptions; develop, analyze, and wargame courses of action; refine operational approaches; and assess the effects and outcomes of operations. Intelligence Community (IC) contributions occur in several critical phases of the operational design process and thereby support mission analysis; COA development and wargaming; and plan assessment.

Trained and certified J2 intelligence planners coordinate the work of J2 intelligence analysts and collection managers to produce assessments of the operational environment and adversary capabilities, objectives, centers of gravity, require- ments, vulnerabilities, COAs, and decisive points and to “nominate operations objectives, desired effects, and other mis- sion success criteria.”¹² As elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency, command J2s routinely integrate other defense intelligence and IC capabilities and re- sources into their analyses as they engage in the Joint Intelligence Preparation of the Operational Environment process that produces the intelligence estimate to the CCP Annex B (Intelligence).¹³

Without an understanding of the strategic environment and operational environment, effective planning is not feasible. Joint campaign planners integrate intelligence information with other information from DOD, the IC, allies, and partner nations to construct a shared understanding of the strategic environment and operational environment.¹⁴ In turn, national security policy and strategy reviews and decisions based on intelligence drive the development of strategic direction in the NSS, NDS, and NMS as well as the Unified Command Plan, Contingency Planning Guidance, and other guidance documents. In addition to indirect effects on joint planning via their influence on national and DOD strategies, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other agencies’ strategic intelligence analyses directly facilitate global and command campaign planning via the campaign intelligence estimate, a key input to CCMD planning.¹⁵

During mission analysis, planners must develop assumptions. As a general principle, the fewer the assumptions that must be made, the lower the risk of the plan. A common misconception is that assumptions are formed in a rational manner based on known unknowns; however, deeply ingrained biases stemming from time pressures, cognitive patterns, social and political acceptance, mirror imaging, and a host of other factors impinge on that process.¹⁶ Leaders and planners make assumptions, acknowledging that assumptions come with risk. The inherent risk of assumptions can be minimized through consistent intelligence, methodical challenges, and aggressive red-teaming by culturally and cognitively diverse teams.¹⁷

During COA development and wargaming, CCMD Joint Intelligence Operations Center analysts offer joint planning groups assessments on likely adversary responses to friendly actions as well as the most likely and most dangerous adversary COAs. As intelligence information gaps are identified, the J2 Joint Intelligence Operations Center manages all-source analysis and multidisciplinary collection management operations to fill them. As gaps are closed, the joint planning group may decide that it can make fewer assumptions or choose to revise options, thereby reducing risk during plan execution. During wargaming, the red-teaming process and the understanding that the strategic environment and operational environment are dynamic leads to assessments that generate branches and sequels, which are explanations of primary, secondary, and tertiary effects that develop over time because of U.S. action and adversary reaction.

Because campaigning involves the use of shaping activities in the strategic environment or operational environment, intelligence supports assessments of the effectiveness of the activities. Assessments enable commanders to validate planning facts and assumptions; determine objective achievement; assess risks and resource allocations; identify opportunities and decision points; and consider options.¹⁸ Whether cooperative, competitive, or conflictual, the ex ante logic of why the planned campaign design would be effective should be the basis for developing an assessment approach.¹⁹ Global campaign assessments and theater campaign assessments support three purposes: confirming the baseline campaign intelligence estimate, facilitating real-time monitoring of operational effects, and supporting verification of campaign progress.²⁰ As the operational environment and strategic environment change during a crisis or conflict, priority intelligence requirements, or their associated priority, can change accordingly.

Deciding what to measure, and how, is a significant cognitive challenge for assessment working groups and line of effort leads because of the complexity and number of factors that could be measured in a dynamically changing strategic environment or operational environment.²¹ Joint Intelligence Operations Center analysts help overcome the challenge by sharing their expertise about observable and measurable indicators of adversary forces’ intentions, operational status, and activity; command, control, and communications; equipment and weapons; unit and plat- form movements; and other characteristics that enable assessment of the operational environment, including social, cultural, linguistic, psychological, technical, and physical data concerning the information environment.²²

The CCMD J2 continuously updates the campaign intelligence estimate as the concept and plan are developed. Joint planning groups often need to revise assumptions, develop different options, or—in extreme cases—revise the entire operational approach. The process of revision is inherent to the recursive and iterative nature of the planning process, which is why doctrine applied prescriptively is unhelpful, if not dangerous, because it may limit planning analysis to predetermined outcomes based on assumptions that are inaccurate.

Commander’s Vision and the Collaborative Network

The synthesis of the strategic guidance, an understanding of the strategic envi- ronment, intelligence support to the CCDR and joint planning group, and assessment culminates in the CCMD strategy. Unlike a CCP, a CCMD strategy is not required by statute but is recommended by doctrine. A CCMD strategy typically considers a 5- to 15-year time horizon, links national strategy to joint operations, and helps crystalize a CCDR’s concept for a campaign plan reenvisioning. The CCMD strategy that articulates the initial ends, ways, means, risks, and priorities creates scaffolding for the development of the campaign plan vision statement. Ultimately, the CCP is considered the operationalization of the CCDR’s strategy or vision.

The CCDR’s vision is the distillation of the strategic guidance and IC estimates, reflecting the CCDR’s understanding of the strategic environment. The CCDR’s vision shapes the preliminary steps of the joint planning process and reflects the CCDR’s application of operational art. Because the CCDR’s vision evolves over time as political, informational, physical, and economic environments change, some CCDRs may provide direct visions while other CCMD planning staffs may need to discern a CCDR’s vision from the endstates of initial planning guidance or from strategic estimates.²³ The CCDR and the CCDR’s senior staff routinely exchange privileged communications with other senior officials, all of which shape a CCDR’s vision.

The iterative nature by which senior officials publish strategic guidance adds to the challenge of using it to inform a coherent, effective, and lasting vision. While the iterative publication process enables the writers to nest their guidance as a series of insets with increasing detail and fidelity of operations, activities, and interests (OA&Is), the delay in publication creates periods of slack in the planning process. As planners observe changes in the operational environment that might necessitate changes to a campaign plan, strategic guidance often lags in publication compared to the moment of observation, eroding the planner’s ability to achieve simultaneity between strategic and operational levels.

The risk during those periods is that a chasm forms between the CCDR and the appearance of updated published guidance documents—such as the NSS, NDS, and NMS—that capture the most current sense of the President’s, Secretary’s, or Chairman’s views. Because of the privileged nature of communications, the CCDR’s staff may remain isolated from readouts or politically sensitive issues that have bearing on the CCP. To decrease the possibility of a disconnect between planning and the CCDR’s vision and as a baseline for planning, CCMD planners must compare the CCMD’s current posture with current and forecasted threats.²⁴

Consideration of the CCDR’s vision, the strategic environment, and IC inputs reaffirms that planning is an adaptive process occurring in a networked, collaborative environment. All networked and collaborative environments require dialogue among senior leaders, concurrent plan development, and collaboration across strategic, operational, and tactical planning levels. Such dialogue and the CCPs that result, taking place at the nexus of the operational and strategic levels of warfare, serve as the connective tissue among military operations, strategic objectives, and U.S. national interests. The success of a campaign plan often relies on unified action to synchronize, coordinate, and integrate “the activities of governmental and nongovernmental entities with military operations to achieve unity of effort.”²⁵

For planners, integration continues through the nesting of CCPs with global campaign plans, regional campaign plans, functional campaign plans, and similar CCPs; reduces bias; facilitates global integration efforts and resources; and builds broad linkages for a holistic approach to the campaign. Planners synchronize CCP OA&Is through the application of the joint operating principles, the integration of the joint functions, and the development of interconnected campaign orders, contingency plans, and campaign sup- port plans. Joint force synchronization facilitates the identification, coordination, and integration of available capabilities, forces, and resources to maximize joint force arrangement, alignment, posture, and employment.

Unlike with contingency and crisis planning—processes that are focused outward and solving or addressing an external problem—campaign planners are primarily looking inward. Campaigning during strategic competition shapes the environment to create stability or improve the ability of the United States to achieve its strategic objectives. Campaigning is designed to favorably posture the United States, its allies, and partners. Therefore, planners must look inward to understand what the United States, its allies, and partners need. Do they need improved access? Better relationships with nations oriented toward the People’s Republic of China or the Russian Federation? Better military interoperability with Nation X? Solving the math problem of access, posture, and speed requires rich understanding of U.S., ally, and partner gaps that need to be closed to reduce risk for the CCDR and achieve strategic objectives.

The operational design process yields a deeper appreciation for the nuances of the current environment. Planners have also identified the desired environment through an analysis of strategic guidance, direction, and the CCDR’s vision. While reconciling the environment, guidance, and vision, planners determined the primary problem(s) preventing the CCMD from evolving the current environment to the desired environment and created broad approaches that the CCMD and its components could leverage to create the conditions operators need to achieve the campaign objectives. To use Vego’s terminology, planners have bridged the strategic and operational levels, creating interfaces for tactical actions.

The environment is constantly changing, and planners deepen their understanding of the environment as they conduct mission analysis. JP 5-0 lists 15 activities associated with mission analysis, including a refinement of the operational approach. Combatant command planners with previous planning experience generally understand how to conduct mission analysis, but determining the correct level of detail to include at the CCMD level can be a challenge for planners who possess primarily tactical planning experience. One of the most important jobs for the CCMD planner is taking the plethora of strategic guidance and direction available and distilling it into something useful for component planners to write supporting plans. This process is a craft that CCMD planners learn how to accomplish from experience.

COA development for a CCP, step three in the joint planning process, is unlike creating COAs for a contingency or crisis. Services have equities that planners must consider when aligning OA&Is to achieve campaign objectives. Examples of Service or functional component equities include employment of a newly developed platform or a newly created mission-essential task. These equities may likely drive part of the CCP activities regardless of the need to include those equities to achieve campaign objectives. The OA&Is can broadly align in space, time, and force to create an effect, but they are not used to create COAs in the traditional sense. CCMD campaign planners can align OA&Is to set favorable conditions for a contingency or potential humanitarian crisis, but the OA&Is are better considered as an approach to create unity of effort rather than a COA because of the sometimes-divergent equities created in the collaborative network and organizational structures of CCMDs.

Different types of COAs require different types of COA analysis. Wargaming is a critical tool for COA analysis at the CCP level, but CCP wargaming is better understood as strategic wargaming. Strategic wargaming helps planners think through different nations’ responses to OA&Is and will help determine whether the OA&Is are producing a positive or negative effect. Wargaming helps answer the question of what types of OA&Is will produce the most desirable outcomes for the United States, its allies, and partners. Planners should use the strategic wargam- ing process to determine different options and evaluate risk, but the evaluation of options can be approached as another type of wargaming or red-teaming. When planners effectively wargame options for desired CCP outcomes, they satisfy the doctrinal application of both COA analysis and COA comparison, steps five and six in the joint planning process.

Since CCMD-assigned forces or components and allocated forces execute operations directed by the CCDR, the final step of the joint planning process (publishing the order) provides the direction that components need to execute operations to create the conditions for the CCMD to achieve its campaign objectives. Broaching order development often invokes the integrated contingency plan, the primary type of plan associated with a need for myriad joint force orders. Campaigns seek to set conditions within the operational environment to achieve nationally directed objectives tied to integrated contingency plans because the campaign serves to prevent, prepare for, or mitigate the impact of a crisis that could require the implementation of an integrated contingency plan. Therefore, whether a CCDR must execute an integrated contingency plan often depends on the success of the CCMD’s campaign to maintain the desired conditions in the operational environment.

The term often used is to operationalize, which means, in Vego’s theoretical framework, to bridge and interface the strategic and tactical through an operational level. The term also connotes the intellectual activity of the planning process, bounding the activity between the objectives of the strategic level and the capabilities of the tactical. The inherent complexity of executing a CCP compels planners to consider multiple perspectives that result in numerous annexes and appendices, like the Secretary of Defense– designated integrated contingency plans. Given the numerous documents generated, it is critical that planners use orders to support the successful execution of a CCP while demonstrating strategic agility or inducing strategic or operational tempo.

Most orders adhere to the five-paragraph format.²⁶ To provide the direction and guidance that component commanders need to contribute to unity of effort, planners should bear in mind that, at the strategic level of war, writing and publication of orders are only part of a larger dialogue. Orders initiated at the strategic level become the necessary authorities required to spend money and pose the greatest risk in blood and treasure should they fail. As further noted by Army strategist Daniel Sukman, understanding the stakes at the strategic level means that flag officers require detailed thought, planning, and risk analysis on all issues from command relationships to battlefield control measures. A well-written order will highlight what risks are and are not acceptable in the commander’s intent.²⁷

Considering how critical a CCP is in helping a CCMD to achieve its strategic aims, planning is essential and, doctrinally, planning is an adaptive process that occurs in a networked, collaborative environment. It requires dialogue among senior leaders, concurrent plan development, and collaboration across strategic, operational, and tactical planning levels. The adaptive, networked, collaborative environment associated with developing a CCP does not end when the plan has been approved but continues nonstop during the execution of the plan, thereby necessitating the need for joint orders.

Principles and Purpose

Although the process is complex, there are several recurring principles that planners should internalize:

• the process is not linear
• the timing of strategic inputs (NSS, NDS, and others) is uncertain
• guidance is often ambiguous
• staffs are fragmented throughout the CCMD, and different entities do not always share information (CCDR action groups, CCDR initiative groups, J-code staff directors)
• components need guidance (operations continue even if there is no published plan)
• the process is not a checklist (see principle 1—“the process is not linear”)
• there is no true endstate.

While principles are helpful, planners must appreciate that collaboration is essential to success. Integrating efforts, objectives, and interests beyond DOD requires the involvement of a broad range of key external stakeholders early and often in the planning process and throughout execution. Such engagement increases the potential of leveraging the full complement of available authorities, capabilities, and means from multiple sectors of government, multinational partners, international organizations, and private industry. Additionally, it promotes campaign legitimacy and fosters broader ownership of the problem and the solution. Globally integrated CCPs—founded in strategic guidance and synchronized across the joint force, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational stakeholders—facilitate an integrated multidimensional, interorganizational approach that promotes unified action, fosters unity of effort, and optimizes campaign success.

Creating and updating CCPs take time. As a rule, it takes 18 to 24 months from evaluation of the previous CCP through publication of the new CCP. Doctrine attempts to provide a foundation of how to conduct the process, but operational art, “the cognitive approach used by commanders and staffs—supported by their skill, knowledge, experience, creativity, and judgment,” is not something that can be codified or taught in a publication.²⁸

JCWS and JAWS educate students on the art and science of campaign planning, but to create an effective CCP is arguably the most challenging task that planners perform. Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has stated that integrated deterrence is the only way the United States will effectively compete in the strategic environment. Campaign plans are the venue for CCMDs to incorporate integrated deterrence into daily operations. The education that graduates receive, coupled with their knowledge of security cooperation, is how DOD will answer Secretary Austin’s call to improve the way the Defense Department does its part in a whole-of-government approach to address collective security concerns.

Joint planning groups operate at the intersection of all the policymakers, senior leaders, strategic guidance, strategic environment assessments, operational environment dynamics, intelligence support, operator activities, intergovernmental elements, combined and multinational allies, and partner interests, among many other factors and relationships. The CCP development process is therefore almost impossible to teach fully. It is too multidimensional to ensure all features and processes can be learned within the limited instructional time available to JPME institutions, and each CCMD is unique in terms of its strategic environment and higher level strategic guidance. The vision of each CCDR, therefore, is unique. As a result, there are no standardized theoretical models for campaign planning suitable for JPME classroom instruction beyond what is currently taught and reality excludes their creation. Both JCWS and JAWS accept that there is inherent on-the-job learning in the first few months of each new joint assignment. The military system includes processes that allow for mission continuity and an initial familiarization period for incoming personnel.

The broader goal for JPME Phase II qualification, as it is at JCWS and JAWS, is necessarily educational, equipping students with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to learn adaptably and rapidly on the job, thereby minimizing the duration of the familiarization period through broad exposure. The qualification does so by challenging students to think critically and deeply within a doctrinal framework and then testing their mastery of classroom and independent learning in targeted immersion exercises to enable effective transfer of campaign planning knowledge into the contexts and challenges of each combatant command. JFQ

Notes

¹ Christopher D. Holmes and Francis J. Park, History of the Joint Staff Strategic Planning, 1949–2020, Special Historical Study 14 (Washington, DC: Joint History and Research Office, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2021), https://www.jcs.mil/ Portals/36/Documents/History/Dec21/ SHS_14_History%20of%20Joint%20Staff%20 Strategic%20Planning.pdf.

² Paul W. Mayberry et al., Making the Grade: Integration of Joint Professional Military Education and Talent Management in Develop- ing Joint Officers (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, May 26, 2021), https://www.rand.org/pubs/ research_reports/RRA473-1.html.

³ Chad Pillai, “Developing a Combatant Command Campaign Plan: Lessons Learned at U.S. Central Command,” Modern War Institute, June 16, 2021, https://mwi.westpoint. edu/developing-a-combatant-command- campaign-plan-lessons-learned-at-us-central- command/.

⁴ Title 10, U.S. Code, § 2155, “Joint Pro- fessional Military Education Phase II Program of Instruction,” January 3, 2022.

⁵ Joint Publication (JP) 3-0, Joint Cam- paigns and Operations (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, June 18, 2022), II-19.

⁶ Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks at the National Defense Executive Reserve Confer- ence,” November 14, 1957, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency. ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-national- defense-executive-reserve-conference.

⁷ JP 5-0, Joint Planning (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, December 1, 2020), IV-2–IV-18.

⁸ JP 1, Volume 1, Joint Warfighting (Wash- ington, DC: The Joint Staff, August 27, 2023), II-8–II-10.

⁹ Milan N. Vego, Operational Warfare (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2000).

¹⁰ Jim Mattis and Bing West, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead (New York: Random House, 2019), 183.

¹¹ Harry R. Yarger, “The Strategic Ap- praisal: The Key to Effective Strategy,” in Theory of War and Strategy, vol. 1, ed. J. Boone Bartholomees, Jr. (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College, June 2008), https://www.jstor.org/ stable/resrep12115.7.

¹² JP 2-0, Joint Intelligence (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, May 26, 2022), IV-4.

¹³ JP 2-0.

¹⁴ JP 2-0, IV-1.

¹⁵ JP 2-0. liamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 589, discusses multiple American biases in national security.

¹⁶ See Theo Farrell, “Strategic Culture and American Empire,” SAIS Review 25, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2005), https://www.jstor.org/ stable/26999268, for examples of military bias (favoring technological solutions, casualty aversion, and legal pragmatism), elite bias, and cultural bias. Colin Gray, in The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, ed. Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 589, discusses multiple American biases in national security.

¹⁷ For a similar discussion, see Jeanne M. Liedtka, “Strategic Thinking: Can It Be Taught?” Long Range Planning 31, no. 1 (1998), 120–129, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024- 6301(97)00098-8; Paul K. Van Riper, “The Identification and Education of U.S. Army Strategic Thinkers,” in Exploring Strategic Thinking: Insights to Assess, Develop, and Retain Army Strategic Thinkers, ed. Heather M.K. Wolters, Anna P. Grome, and Ryan M. Hinds (Fort Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army Research Institute, February 2013), https://ssl.armywarcollege.edu/dclm/pubs/De- veloping%20Army%20Strategic%20Thinkers.pdf.

¹⁸ JP 5-0, VI-1, VI-7.

¹⁹ Joint Concept for Integrated Campaign- ing (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, March 16, 2018).

²⁰ Joint Concept for Integrated Campaign- ing, 28. In constructing theater campaign assessments, some command planners struggle to tie campaign objectives, intermediate objectives, effects, and success criteria to the campaign plan. They attribute these challenges to their observation that campaign plans are sometimes developed in stovepipes with insuf- ficient collaboration. We argue that effective leadership of joint planning groups is necessary to ensure that theater campaign assessments are developed effectively.

²¹ Because campaign plans emphasize operations in the information environment, JP 5-0 notes that, as part of combatant command (CCMD) strategic environment and opera- tional environment assessments, combatant commands should “account for all functions and activities that impact the information envi- ronment,” VI-6.

²² JP 3-04, Information in Joint Operations (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, September 14, 2022), II-1.

²³ JP 5-0, III-4, C-1.

²⁴ Pillai, “Developing a Combatant Com- mand Campaign Plan.”

²⁵ JP 5-0, V-5.

²⁶ JP 5-0, A-1.

²⁷ Daniel Sukman, “Levels of Orders,” The Decisive Point, May 16, 2018, https://www. thedecisivepoint.org/news/2018/5/16/ levels-of-orders.

²⁸ JP 5-0, IV-1.