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Colonel Wilson C. Blythe, Jr., USA, Ph.D., is Senior Historian with the Joint History and Research Office.
The final withdrawal of troops from Iraq in December 2011 left most U.S. military leadership with the desire to shift their focus from counterinsurgency—which had achieved a position of intellectual dominance in the U.S. military during the war on terror in the late 2000s—back to conventional warfighting. The Service chiefs, who were responsible for providing forces to the combatant commanders, were some of the first to advance the position that their Services needed to get “back-to-basics”1 and address the atrophy in conventional warfighting skills.2 In contrast, the Joint Staff was occupied with a series of crises such as Libya, the Syrian civil war, and the rise of the so-called Islamic State. Moreover, the United States maintained a waning military presence in Afghanistan, and as a result, the Joint Staff was consumed by a seemingly never-ending debate over the way forward that would last until the evacuation of Kabul in August 2021.
The Joint Staff’s inevitable bias toward the present was furthered by the August 2011 disestablishment of U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM). This action transferred responsibility for concept and capability development from USJFCOM—a combatant command—to divisions within directorates of the Joint Staff—specifically the J-7 and J-8—and left the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the sole four-star advocate for the future joint force. These factors contributed to the Joint Staff, an organization traditionally focused on planning and current operations, being unable to effectively lead the joint force’s shift to warfighting against a peer enemy until the publication of the Joint Warfighting Concept in 2021. This concept was the most influential joint idea focused on conventional warfighting since before the U.S. military had become consumed by the war on terror. The concept was also the culmination of a decade-long effort to reorient the Department of Defense (DOD) toward China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).3
Initial efforts to reorient the joint force on conventional warfighting were stymied by a lack of urgency and focus. In many ways, these were either byproducts of the absence of agreement on who was America’s major military competitor or recognition of the extent that Russia and China were modernizing their forces while the United States was preoccupied with the Middle East.4
The Third Offset Strategy
Despite perfunctory actions, such as directing the Navy and Air Force to develop the AirSea Battle Concept, strategic leadership failed to take decisive action to counter the atrophy of America’s military position. One of the more notable efforts to refocus DOD on the threat posed by the Russian and Chinese militaries was the Third Offset Strategy—most closely identified with Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work. A retired U.S. Marine Corps field artillery colonel, Work had served as the Under Secretary of the Navy from 2009 to 2013, the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, and the vice president for strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.5 The Third Offset Strategy was not the first effort within DOD to view China as a military threat. Andrew Marshall, the director of the Office of Net Assessment, had warned of the potential threat posed by a rapidly modernizing PLA since 2001.6 From the time of Marshall’s warning in 2001 until the Third Offset Strategy was formulated in 2014, the military balance in the Pacific had continued to deteriorate. Chinese investments in the modernization of the PLA—especially in relation to antiaccess/area-denial capabilities such as precision munitions, air defense, and battle networks—jeopardized the joint force’s ability to project combat power and technological overmatch that the United States had become accustomed to.
The Russian military had pursued a similar path of modernization but, due to its smaller economy, had been unable to invest on the same scale as China. Despite the differences in the scale of investment, though, both countries’ modernization efforts allowed them to approach technological parity with the U.S. joint force. This was a result of the requirements of the ongoing military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and cuts to the defense budget because of sequestration under the Budget Control Act of 2011. While Congress mistakenly believed that the provisions of the Budget Control Act were too onerous ever to go into effect, fully understanding how implementation would effectively mortgage the Nation’s future military advantage was hampered by the lack of a uniformed advocate focused on the future joint force.7
When the Third Offset Strategy was formulated in 2014, the Intelligence Community had still not embraced the changed strategic landscape in which Russia and China were now competitors to the United States. Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine focused attention on the efforts by Work and others to demonstrate that Russia was an adversary of the United States and that the world had entered a new era of Great Power competition. However, the Intelligence Community’s reluctance to acknowledge China’s emergence as an adversary persisted until the end of the second Barack Obama administration.8
This acknowledgment was important because one of the central pillars of the Third Offset Strategy was that the military needed to shift its focus to confronting peer threats. Developing a strategy to compete with Russia and China was the first line of effort of the Third Offset Strategy and was intended to drive the development of future warfighting concepts and specific capabilities—technologies and organizations—for the joint force.9 This bore a closer resemblance to how the military operated during the Cold War than to its recent experience during the war on terror.10
Despite the logic of developing a strategy and operational concepts to drive the development of military capabilities, the Third Offset Strategy soon became identified with a focus on technology as the solution. This search for a technological offset to Russian and Chinese antiaccess/area-denial capabilities focused not only on the novel application of existing technologies but also on the development of advanced technologies—specifically artificial intelligence, advanced battle networks, aerial and naval unmanned systems, cyber capabilities, and machine learning. Work did not help counter accusations of technological fetishism with public remarks, such as the “third offset is simple. At its core AI and autonomy will lead to a new era of human-machine collaboration.”11 The validity of the strategy’s premise that certain technologies were critical to obtaining an operational advantage over the Russian and Chinese militaries aside, the excessive focus on technology left the Third Offset Strategy open to criticism and undermined the initiative.12
Work recognized the need for future warfighting concepts and organizational structures, but he failed to give them the emphasis that they merited—and they seemed to be no more than an afterthought. While Work observed that “technology is never, never the final answer,”13 critics were right to ask whether the push for technological innovation was meant to better enable current operational or some undefined future warfighting concepts and what formations would wield these new weapons. Failure to provide a vision of how to fight Russia and China, in the form of a future warfighting concept, left the impression that proponents of the Third Offset Strategy viewed technology as a panacea for the operational problems the joint force would face in the event of a war with either. Critics were also right to note that the diffusion of technology meant that any technological advantage would be temporary. The overemphasis on technology also left the Third Offset Strategy open to charges of technological determinism and the conflation of technology with strategy.14
Despite high-level advocacy from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the Third Offset Strategy failed to gain support throughout DOD. In 2014, when Work began advocating for the Third Offset Strategy, the joint force was not only deployed in Afghanistan but also was once again involved in a war in Iraq—this time to defeat the so-called Islamic State. The Services justifiably prioritized maintaining the readiness and force structure required to meet these open-ended commitments. The Services’ lack of enthusiasm for investing in technology—untethered to any vision of how it would be employed—was understandable given that these modernization efforts were geared to fight threats that there seemed to be little political will to acknowledge—much less confront. The Third Offset Strategy did, however, succeed in getting DOD to recognize the threat posed by Russia and China and in shifting the intellectual focus back to conventional warfighting against a peer enemy. Core ideas from the Third Offset Strategy continued to guide thinking in DOD, even after a change in Presidential administrations.15
Trump Administration National Security Documents
In January 2017, Donald Trump succeeded Barack Obama as President.The new administration published a trio of national security documents: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and the National Military Strategy. The intellectual drivers of these documents—National Security Advisor Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, USA; Secretary of Defense James Mattis; and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., USMC—were all DOD products and had either embraced or were familiar with key tenets of the Third Offset Strategy.16
While director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, McMaster had sponsored the U.S. Army’s Russian New Generation Warfare study, which explicitly warned of the threat posed by Russia and China to America’s security. Mattis did not view the Third Offset Strategy as a strategy per se but rather as a way to develop and acquire new capabilities for the joint force. Unlike Work, Mattis prioritized the development of “innovative operational concepts” to guide joint force modernization.17 Dunford understood the challenge that the modernizing Russian and Chinese militaries posed for the joint force, but his efforts to drive joint force modernization—including the development of a future warfighting concept—lagged those of the Services. Collectively, the Trump administration’s national security documents provided a realistic appreciation of the threat posed by Russian and Chinese military modernization and provided a clear focus for the joint force. What remained was the crafting of a vision on how to fight that could guide the development of the future joint force.18
Implementing the National Defense Strategy
Following the release of the Trump administration’s final national security document—the National Military Strategy—in late 2018, the focus shifted to implementation. On April 24, 2019, then acting Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist directed the establishment of four cross-Service teams to examine various strategic approaches that could be employed in the event of a future conflict with China. CNA conducted a low-fidelity war game in support of the effort. The initiative, dubbed Theories of Victory (ToV), was led by OSD-Policy.
ToV received significant support from the Service staffs and subject matter experts in future warfighting concepts and future force design from the Services. The four working groups met from May to June 2019, each producing a five-page white paper intended to inform strategic thinking on how to implement the National Defense Strategy within the senior echelons of DOD. ToV was lauded for examining the department’s efforts to prepare for the future through the prism of a specific threat and scenario. However, the gap in expertise between OSD-Policy and the Service representatives left some participants observing that ToV was akin to a Christmas tree, where each Service was able to hang its favorite ornament—in this case its preferred future force design and capabilities—with OSD unable to adjudicate or reconcile between them.
The ToV working groups failed to provide senior leaders with the necessary information to make well-informed decisions about resource allocation and trade-offs. However, the initiative did energize the department to focus on China and helped frame the problem posed to the future joint force by the PLA. Details on how to operationalize the strategic approach outlined in OSD-Policy’s work was to come from the ToV concept of operations (CONOPS), which would detail how the Services and combatant commands would achieve ToV strategic objectives. This J-7-led (Joint Force Development) endeavor was a follow-on initiative in support of OSD-Policy’s work and began in mid-July 2019.19
The ToV effort was one of the first DOD initiatives to employ the new Joint Force Operating Scenarios (JFOS), replacing the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) scenarios that were part of the Support for Strategic Analysis (SSA). (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld established the SSA process in 2002.) Prior to the SSA, each Service used its own assumptions and processes when developing force structure requirements in support of the National Defense Strategy. The lack of shared assumptions made it difficult to compare different proposed force structures.20 SSA was meant to provide a “common analytic foundation so that the Services’ force structures could be evaluated as a joint force—as it would fight,” thus allowing for a “comparison and evaluation of competing force structure options and cross-Service trade-offs.”21
SSA was led by OSD-Policy, the Joint Staff, and OSD Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE), which were collectively referred to as the tri-chairs. The Services and functional combatant commands were key stakeholders, with the geographic combatant commands often participating in the SSA process. Together, they developed joint CONOPs—essentially joint plans—to address threats identified in the National Defense Strategy within the context of specific scenarios from the DPG. Collectively, these CONOPs evaluated the force structure requirements across the joint force, thus allowing DOD senior leadership to balance risk across a range of threats within budgetary constraints. SSA products informed Service decisions about how to balance the readiness of the current force against modernization requirements. They were also to be used in the development of new operational concepts.22
Unfortunately, the lofty ambitions for SSA did not result in the variety or quality of analysis that was needed to make informed decisions regarding implementation of the National Defense Strategy. The tri-chairs believed that instead of examining a range of force structure options, the Services used SSA to justify their own programmed force structures. In addition, SSA was not being used to explore innovative warfighting concepts. For their part, the Services were wary that such analysis of alternative force structure or warfighting concepts—often referred to as excursions—would negatively impact their current budget requests. Even if the Services had been inclined to conduct these excursions, the highly detailed nature of SSA products made their use cumbersome and inflexible while also being time and labor intensive. For example, it took 1 to 2 years to build and gain approval of the detailed view for a single threat scenario, after which the CONOPS would take another 12 to 18 months to develop. The level of specificity was driven by the Services’ use of SSA products in modeling and simulation. In practice, SSA was firmly focused on today’s programmed force structure and methods of force employment. Because of this, it did not equip senior leaders with the analysis they needed to make decisions about how the joint force should fight or be structured for future fights.23
By 2017, SSA was essentially dead. In 2012, CAPE had stopped building the “detailed views” for each scenario.24 By 2015, the Joint Staff had stopped using SSA to produce joint CONOPS and retired all existing SSA CONOPS by March 2018, as they neither aligned with the 2018 National Defense Strategy nor contained accurate military objectives or enemy capabilities. As a result of SSA’s inability to provide decisionmakers with the tools they needed to make informed choices about the future, the tri-chairs abandoned it. However, this decision left DOD without an analytical process to examine future force structure and warfighting concepts. This opened the door to a return to the pre-SSA era, when the Services created their own scenarios in support of their priorities.25
Fortunately, in 2019, the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and U.S. Special Operations Command agreed to cooperate in the development of products intended to deliver what SSA had been designed to provide—analysis that was digestible by senior leaders to allow them to make informed decisions on future force structure, capability development, and future warfighting concepts. This initiative—the Joint Force Operating Scenario—was a CONOP developed by the Services and the Joint Staff. The JFOS CONOP is for a specific scenario set in a future operating environment determined by OSD-Policy and provides the basis for modeling and simulation conducted by CAPE and the Services to feed analysis that results in recommendations to senior leaders.26
Involvement in JFOS was expanded to a group of nonvoting participants that included the SSA tri-chairs; the Strategic, Cyber, Transportation commands; and National Guard Bureau. Unlike SSA, JFOS excluded the geographic combatant commands, which was crucial as they were focused on near-term threats in their specific regions. They have no appreciation for the global threat picture, which is the purview of OSD, the Joint Staff, and the Services. Furthermore, the focus of the geographic combatant commands is on how to best employ existing forces. These factors create a bias for the present, which makes the involvement of geographic combatant commands potentially detrimental to the development of the future force.27
The new JFOS process took only 6 months to publish the analysis for its initial scenario in June 2019. The shorter turnaround time made it easier to conduct excursions that tested various force structures, novel warfighting concepts, and investments in different capabilities. This made the JFOS for the Indo-Pacific region, which was under development in the summer of 2019, the ideal vehicle for transitioning from the OSD-Policy-led ToV to the Joint Staff–led ToV CONOPs. The Joint Staff ToV CONOPS evolved into the Joint Warfighting Concept.28
The Joint Warfighting Concept
After the fall 2019 Global Integrated Wargame, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper directed the development of a concept focused on defeating the PLA.29 Esper wanted a model to provide a vision of future warfighting that could guide the development of the joint force out to 2030. The new concept was to employ tools that were at least at a technology readiness level 6, meaning that they would achieve their initial operational capability by 2027. The lack of such an operational concept was a major shortcoming of the Third Offset Strategy, and without it, there was no shared vision to guide modernization efforts. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley ensured that the task of developing this concept fell to the J-7 rather than to CAPE or OSD-Policy, which had led the ToV initiative.30
The Services had already published Service future warfighting concepts, complicating the J-7’s work in developing an all-domain Joint Warfighting Concept. The Service concepts occupied the same period in the future for which the Joint Warfighting Concept was intended. This meant that the Joint Staff would be playing catchup to the Services and that the Joint Warfighting Concept would be forced to knit together the existing Services’ visions on how to conduct operations in the future. The concepts developed by the Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force were focused on the PLA. In contrast, the Army’s development of Multidomain Battle (2017) and its follow-on concept of Multidomain Operations (2018) were initially focused on Russia. This was a rational choice because an army constructed to defeat the Russian military had greater utility in a war with Iran or North Korea than one optimized to fight the PLA in the Pacific littorals. The Service concepts were developed with varying amounts of input from their counterparts in the other Services. It was the responsibility of the J-7 to make the Service concepts work in harmony to achieve a shared objective.31
In October 2020, the initial draft of the Joint Warfighting Concept was tested at the Global Integrated Wargame. The yearly event, which was dubbed Global Hunter that year, was smaller than usual due to COVID-19 restrictions. The draft concept was largely based on the work that the J-7 had done in support of the ToV initiative. The joint force failed to achieve its objectives in the war game, highlighting shortcomings in the ToV work. As a result, the J-7, under the leadership of Vice Admiral Stuart Munsch, abandoned much of the ToV-based concept work and developed a new operational approach called Expanded Maneuver. Developing the new approach required organizational adjustments to the Joint Staff, with the J-2 establishing a J-27 to support the J-7’s work on the Joint Warfighting Concept. The J-7 also partnered with OSD–Research and Engineering to validate the kill webs that were created to support the concept—this approach was much like the work undertaken by the Army’s Battlefield Development Plan that began in 2017.32
This operational approach was based on existing conceptual work on multidomain operations and network-centric warfare to create localized superiority that the joint force could exploit. There were also four supporting concepts—command and control, joint fires, contested logistics, and information advantage—nested within the Joint Warfighting Concept. Except for information advantage, which was written by a task force established out of the Joint Staff for that purpose, the development of each supporting concept was co-led by one of the Services and the Joint Staff.33
The revised Joint Warfighting Concept was signed by General Milley in March 2021; however, Munsch and his team immediately began working on a more mature version of the concept, which would be known as Joint Warfighting Concept 2.0. This was in response to the arbitrary timeline for the development and publication of the Joint Warfighting Concept 1.0. The Joint Warfighting Concept 2.0, which no longer included the four supporting concepts as their insights were incorporated into the main document, was signed by Milley in May 2021. The J-7 sought wider applicability of the new concept by examining Russia, in addition to China, during its development. The observation that the lack of joint doctrine on competition hindered the performance of the joint force prior to conflict led to the inclusion of competition in the Joint Warfighting Concept 2.0 and to the publication of the Joint Concept for Competing in February 2023. The J-7’s work on Russia was expanded and published as the Joint Warfighting Concept–Russia in May 2022. The culmination of concept development work focused on 2030 was the Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0, which synthesized the previous three versions of the Joint Warfighting Concept (1.0, 2.0., and Russia) and the Joint Concept for Competing.34
Fortunately, the 4 years of work that went into the development of the Joint Warfighting Concept did not result in a concept that was quickly forgotten like the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations: Joint Force 2030, which was published in 2019 by General Dunford. In addition to its rigorous development and the vocal support of both the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a key to the influence of the Joint Warfighting Concept was its endorsement by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III. This made the Joint Warfighting Concept a truly unifying vision of DOD future warfighting that could be used throughout the department to guide investment and the development of the future joint force.35
Conclusion
The Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0 was incorporated into doctrine with the August 2023 publication of Joint Publication 1, Volume 1, Joint Warfighting. The new doctrine was the beginning of the revision of the family of joint doctrine to implement the Joint Warfighting Concept. This was of special importance because classification made the Joint Warfighting Concept difficult to incorporate into joint
professional military education.36
The Joint Warfighting Concept also allowed the Joint Staff to drive capability development through its employment in the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC). Previously, the JROC had merely validated the development of capabilities that were proposed by the Services. This changed under Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Hyten and has continued under his successor, Admiral Christopher Grady. They focused the JROC on fulfilling the concept-required capabilities necessary to execute the Joint Warfighting Concept. This change made modernization concept-driven and positioned the Joint Warfighting Concept—and, by extension, the Joint Staff—at the center of joint force development.37
For the first time since the 2011 disestablishment of USJFCOM, the Joint Staff was able to effectively lead the development of the future joint force. The Joint Staff was able to do this by promulgating a future warfighting concept that it could use to drive the modernization of the joint force. This effort benefited from the shift in focus to conventional warfighting initiated by the Services following the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom and in recognition of the threat posed by modernized Russian and Chinese militaries that began with the Third Offset Strategy. However, the success of this initiative required the personal engagement of the leadership of the Joint Staff. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs advocated for the Joint Staff to write the concept and then personally promoted its importance, and two successive vice chairmen used the concept in existing processes, like the JROC, to ensure implementation of this future vision of joint warfighting. In many ways, the Joint Warfighting Concept can be seen as the culmination of efforts within DOD to shift its focus not just back to fighting peer enemies but also to China’s PLA. However, it remains to be seen if the Joint Staff will be able to lead future modernization efforts from the outset—or if it will continue to play catch-up to the Services. JFQ
Notes
1 John A. Tirpak, “Back to Basics,” Air & Space Forces Magazine, September 16, 2008, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/backtobasics/.
2 Jim Garamone, “Schwartz: Smaller Air Force Will Concentrate on Key Capabilities,” National Guard, February 29, 2012, https://www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article-View/Article/576172/schwartz-smaller-air-force-will-concentrate-on-key-capabilities/; Ed White, “Air Force Chief of Staff Defines Standard of Excellence,” Air Force, September 3, 2008, https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/122546/air-force-chief-of-staff-defines-standard-of-excellence/; Sara Wood, “Army Preparing for Future of Conflict, Gen. Casey Says,” Army, August 15, 2007, https://www.army.mil/article/4427/army_preparing_for_future_of_conflict_gen_casey_says; Eric Beidel, “Army Chief Gen. Casey: A Bigger Portion of the Army Now Training for Conventional War,” National Defense, May 1, 2011, https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2011/1/5/army-chief-gen-casey-a-bigger-portion-of-the-army-now-training-for-conventional-war; Greg Grant, “Army Officers Warn of Atrophy in Critical Skills,” Government Executive, May 6, 2008, https://www.govexec.com/defense/2008/05/army-officers-warn-of-atrophy-in-critical-skills/26845/; Ray Odierno, “The U.S. Army in a Time of Transition—Building a Flexible Force,” Army, June 6, 2012, https://www.army.mil/article/78563/the_u_s_army_in_a_time_of_transition_building_a_flexible_force; Raymond T. Odierno, “Odierno: Army Has Three Principle Roles—‘Prevent, Shape, Win,’” Association of the United States Army, March 8, 2017, https://www.ausa.org/articles/odierno-army-has-three-principle-roles-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%98prevent-shape-win%E2%80%99.
3 Christopher D. Holmes, Organizational Development of The Joint Chiefs of Staff 1942–2022 (Washington, DC: Joint History and Research Office, October 2022), 82–4; “Disestablishment of United States Joint Forces Command,” Federal Register, January 6, 2011, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2011/01/11/2011-590/disestablishment-of-united-states-joint-forces-command; Jason Ukman, “U.S. Joint Forces Command Formally Dissolved,” Washington Post, August 4, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/us-joint-forces-command-formally-dissolved/2011/08/04/gIQAQbzBuI_blog.html; John Liang, “JFCOM Keeps Dissolving,” Inside Defense, August 2, 2011, https://insidedefense.com/insider/jfcom-keeps-dissolving; David Stegon, “J8 Office Leaving JFCOM, Joining Joint Staff,” FedScoop, June 1, 2011, https://fedscoop.com/j8-office-leaving-jfcom-joining-joint-staff/.
4 Gian Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, 2014–2018 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2021), 18, 23, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA454-1.html; Wilson C. Blythe, Jr., et al., Unclassified Summary of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Russian New Generation Warfare Study (Fort Eustis, VA: U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 2017), https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/online-publications/documents/RNGW-Unclassified-Summary-Report.pdf?ver=2020-03-25-122734-383.
5 “Robert O. Work,” Department of Defense, https://www.defense.gov/About/Biographies/Biography/Article/602787/robert-o-work/; “Robert O. Work,” Center for a New American Security, https://www.cnas.org/people/robert-work; Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, 3, 18, 22–3.
6 Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 236, 242–3.
7 Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, 2, 22–3, 35, 43–4.
8 Bob Work, “The Third U.S. Offset Strategy and Its Implications for Partners and Allies,” Department of Defense, January 28, 2015, https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/606641/the-third-us-offset-strategy-and-its-implications-for-partners-and-allies/; Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, 34–5.
9 There were five lines of effort developed as part of the Third Offset Strategy: strategy, operational concepts, encourage innovation, war-gaming, information management. Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, 39–40.
10 Work consciously chose to base the Third Offset Strategy on an imagined history of the First and Second offsets. In his telling, during “the early 1950s, during the First Offset, the United States used tactical and strategic nuclear weapons to offset the Soviet bloc’s quantitative conventional advantage. In the Second Offset, from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s, the United States used a combination of technologies, including precision-guided strike and stealth, to offset once more the Warsaw Pact’s numerical superiority, specifically by neutralizing the second echelon of a hypothetical invasion.” See Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, 1; see also Gentile et al., ix, x, 2, 5, 6, 7, 37.
11 Work quotation from Joshua Pavluk and August Cole, “From Strategy to Execution: Accelerating the Third Offset,” War on the Rocks, June 8, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/06/from-strategy-to-execution-accelerating-the-third-offset/.
12 Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, ix, x, 1, 2, 3, 4, 35, 38; Bob Work, “Army War College Strategy Conference,” Department of Defense, April 8, 2015, https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/606661/army-war-college-strategy-conference/.
13 Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, 35.
14 Gentile et al., ix, x, 3, 4; Work, “Army War College Strategy Conference”; Kevin Benson, “Extending the Second Offset and Multi-Domain Battle,” The Strategy Bridge, November 29, 2016, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2016/11/29/extending-the-second-offset-and-multi-domain-battle.
15 Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, x, xi, 40, 49, 50, 72.
16 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: The White House, December 2017), https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf; Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America: Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, January 2018), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1045785.pdf; Description of the National Military Strategy 2018 (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, 2018), https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Publications/UNCLASS_2018_National_Military_Strategy_Description.pdf; Aaron Mehta, “National Defense Strategy Released With Clear Priority: Stay Ahead of Russia and China,” Defense News, January 19, 2018, https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2018/01/19/national-defense-strategy-released-with-clear-priority-stay-ahead-of-russia-and-china/.
17 Description of the National Military Strategy 2018.
18 National Security Strategy of the United States of America; Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy; Description of the National Military Strategy 2018; Gentile et al., A History of the Third Offset, 65–6; H.R. McMaster, Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 1; Blythe et al., Unclassified Summary of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Russian New Generation Warfare Study.
19 Joint and Army Concepts Division, Directorate of Concepts, Futures and Concepts Center, Army Futures Command, Implementing the National Defense Strategy (NDS) Executive Summary, July 8, 2019; Joint and Army Concepts Division, Directorate of Concepts, Futures and Concepts Center, Army Futures Command, “JACD Support to National Defense Strategy (NDS) Implementation Projects,” July 19, 2019.
20 Leo Spaeder et al., “Joint Force Operating Scenarios: Improving Analysis and Oversight of Force Development,” War on the Rocks, March 19, 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/03/joint-force-operating-scenarios-improving-analysis-and-oversight-of-force-development/.
21 Government Accountability Office (GAO), Defense Strategy: Revised Analytic Approach Needed to Support Force Structure Decision Making, GAO-19-385 (Washington, DC: GAO, March 2019), 19, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-385.pdf.
22 Spaeder et al., “Joint Force Operating Scenarios”; GAO, Defense Strategy, 9–10.
23 Spaeder et al., “Joint Force Operating Scenarios”; GAO, Defense Strategy, 13–9, 23.
24 Produced by OSD Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, the “Detailed View” was the most comprehensive product of Support for Strategic Analysis and contained a refined estimate of the numbers and types of units needed to support the concept of operations. It was developed to support the Services’ analytic processes.
25 Spaeder et al., “Joint Force Operating Scenarios”; GAO, Defense Strategy, 14–5.
26 C. Travis Reese, “Are You Ready for This? Properly Defining Joint Readiness,” Center for International Maritime Security, May 4, 2022, https://cimsec.org/are-you-ready-for-this-properly-defining-joint-readiness/; Spaeder et al., “Joint Force Operating Scenarios.”
27 Spaeder et al., “Joint Force Operating Scenarios”; Reese, “Are You Ready For This?”
28 Spaeder et al., “Joint Force Operating Scenarios”; Joint and Army Concepts Division, Directorate of Concepts, Futures and Concepts Center, Army Futures Command, Implementing the National Defense Strategy (NDS) Executive Summary; Reese, “Are You Ready For This?”; Joint and Army Concepts Division, Directorate of Concepts, Futures and Concepts Center, Army Futures Command, “JACD Support to National Defense Strategy (NDS) Implementation Projects.”
29 Esper served as Secretary of Defense from July 23, 2019, to November 9, 2020. Mattis left the position on December 31, 2018.
30 Stuart B. Munsch, interview by Christian Fearer and Ryan Peeks, February 2, 2021, and May 26, 2021, at the Joint History and Research Office, Washington, DC; Tara Copp, “‘It Failed Miserably’: After Wargaming Loss, Joint Chiefs Are Overhauling How the U.S. Military Will Fight,” Defense One, July 26, 2021, https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserably-after-wargaming-loss-joint-chiefs-are-overhauling-how-us-military-will-fight/184050/; Technology Readiness Levels in the Department of Defense (DoD), Defense Acquisition Guidebook (2010), https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/404585.pdf; Statement of General Mark A. Milley, USA, 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense Budget Hearing, House Armed Services Committee, 116th Cong., 2nd sess., February 26, 2020, https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110584/witnesses/HHRG-116-AS00-Wstate-MilleyM-20200226.pdf.
31 Thomas A. Walsh and Alexandra L. Huber, “A Symphony of Capabilities: How the Joint Warfighting Concept Guides Service Force Design and Development,” Joint Force Quarterly 111 (4th Quarter 2023), 5–6, 14, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/jfq/jfq-111/jfq-111_4-15_Walsh-Huber.pdf.
32 Brett Tingley, “Joint Chiefs Seek a New Warfighting Paradigm After Devastating Losses in Classified Wargames,” The War Zone, July 27, 2021, https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41712/joint-chiefs-seek-a-new-warfighting-paradigm-after-devastating-losses-in-classified-wargames; Walsh and Huber, “A Symphony of Capabilities,” 14; Munsch, interview. The best unclassified discussions of the tenets of the Joint Warfighting Concept are found in Mark A. Milley, “Strategic Inflection Point: The Most Historically Significant and Fundamental Change in the Character of War Is Happening Now—While the Future Is Clouded in Mist and Uncertainty,” Joint Force Quarterly 110 (3rd Quarter 2023), 6–15, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/3447159/strategic-inflection-point-the-most-historically-significant-and-fundamental-ch/; and Walsh and Huber, “A Symphony of Capabilities.” For more on the Battlefield Development Plan, see Wilson C. Blythe, Jr., et al., “The Battlefield Development Plan: A Holistic Campaign Assessment to Inform the Army Modernization Enterprise,” Military Review, July–August 2020, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/July-August-2020/Blythe-BDP/.
33 The co-leads for each concept were command and control—Air Force and Joint Staff J-6; joint fires—Navy and Joint Staff J-8; and contested logistics—Army and Joint Staff J-4.
34 Christopher D. Holmes and Francis J. Park, History of Joint Staff Strategic Planning, 1949–2023 (Washington, DC: Joint History and Research Office, 2024), 53, https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/History/Dec21/SHS_14_History%20of%20Joint%20Staff%20Strategic%20Planning.pdf; Munsch, interview; Joint Concept for Competing (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, February 10, 2023), https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23698400/20230213-joint-concept-for-competing-signed.pdf; Jon Harper, “U.S. Military Publishes New Joint Warfighting Doctrine,” DefenseScoop, September 13, 2023, https://defensescoop.com/2023/09/13/us-military-publishes-new-joint-warfighting-doctrine/.
35 Austin became Secretary of Defense on January 22, 2021. Munsch, interview; Milley, “Strategic Inflection Point,” 9; Christopher W. Grady, “Sharpening Our Competitive Edge: Honing Our Warfighting Capabilities Through the Joint Warfighting Concept,” Joint Force Quarterly 111 (4th Quarter 2023), 17, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/3569518/sharpening-our-competitive-edge-honing-our-warfighting-capabilities-through-the/; James L. Cook, “The Importance of Joint Concepts for the Joint Planner,” Joint Force Quarterly 99 (4th Quarter 2020), 99, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/2421455/the-importance-of-joint-concepts-for-the-planner/.
36 Harper, “U.S. Military Publishes New Joint Warfighting Doctrine.”
37 Holmes and Park, History of Joint Staff Strategic Planning, 53; Munsch, interview; Grady, “Sharpening Our Competitive Edge,” 16, 18; Milley, “Strategic Inflection Point,” 12; Cook, “The Importance of Joint Concepts for the Joint Planner,” 99.