Foreword
While U.S. Joint Forces Command's Joint Operating Environment (JOE) in no way constitutes U.S. Government policy and must necessarily be speculative in nature, it seeks to provide the Joint Force an intellectual foundation upon which we will construct the concepts to guide our future force development. We will likely not call the future exactly right, but we must think through the nature of continuity and change in strategic trends to discern their military implications to avoid being completely wrong. These implications serve to influence the concepts that drive our services' adaptations to the environments within which they will operate, adaptations that are essential if our leaders are to have the fewest regrets when future crises strike.
In our guardian role for our nation, it is natural that we in the military focus more on possible security challenges and threats than we do on emerging opportunities. From economic trends to climate change and vulnerability to cyber attack, we outline those trends that remind us we must stay alert to what is changing in the world if we intend to create a military as relevant and capable as we possess today. There is a strong note of urgency in our efforts to balance the force for the uncertainties that lie ahead. The JOE gives focus to those efforts which must also embrace the opportunities that are inherent in the world we imperfectly foresee.
Every military force in history that has successfully adapted to the changing character of war and the evolving threats it faced did so by sharply defining the operational problems it had to solve. With the JOE helping to frame future security problems and highlighting their military implications, the Chairman's companion document, Capstone Concept for Joint Operations (CCJO), answers the problems we have defined, stating how the Joint Force will operate. Taken together, these documents will drive the concept development and experimentation that will, in turn, drive our evolutionary adaptation, while guarding against any single preclusive view of future war. None of us have a sufficiently clear crystal ball to predict fully the changing kaleidoscope of future conflicts that hover over the horizon, even as current fights, possible adversaries' nascent capabilities, and other factors intersect.
We will update the JOE in a year or two, once we have a sufficiently different understanding to make a new edition worthwhile. If you have ideas for improving our assessment of the future security environment and the problems our military must solve to provide relevant defense for our country and like-minded nations, please forward them to J-5 (Strategy), Joint Forces Command.
J.N. Mattis
General, U.S. Marines
Commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command
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Joint Operating Environment 2010 -- Full Document
Comments
I found this paragraph (pg 52 of JOE 2010) to be reductionist in the extreme. You can't on one hand claim that Salafists, Al Qaeda, Levantine militants, and the Taliban have enough regard for logic to pursue local goals as local groups yet be bound by common and transnational idealogy, yet in the very next sentence claim that they are driven by "nihilistic rage". Nihilists don't believe in anything and have nothing in their philsophy that allows for embracing anyone for any reason. It comes across as sensationalist writing (which unfortunately found its way into a document being passed around the DoD and championed as forward thinking (MUCH of this document is very enlightening), but to gloss over what often gets called the most important issue of the last 50 years (terrorism) into a few blurbs better suited for a campaign podium is less than impressive. Defeating extremist idealogy will take much more than conveniently labeling anyone who is of Arabic descent and is openly resistant of US foreign policy as a terrorist.
N.B. The JOE 2010 also quotes a very astute comment by UBL regarding strategic communications:
"Todays world is of public opinion and the fates of nations are determined through its pressure.
Once the tools for building public opinion are obtained, everything that you asked for can be
done. - Usama Bin Laden"
Karl Rove or James Carville could have as easily written those words. Hard to brush off a comment that accurate as the words of a violent nihilist.
"We now face a similar, but even more radical ideology that directly threatens the foundation of western secular
society. Al Qaeda terrorists, violent militants in the Levant, radical Salafist groups in the Horn of Africa, and
the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan are all examples of local groups pursuing local interests, but tied
together by a common, transnational, and violent ideology. These groups are driven by an uncompromising,
nihilistic rage at the modern world, and accept no middle ground or compromise in pursuing their version of
the truth. Their goal is to force this truth on the rest of the worlds population."
That's a very good document of its type. Nothing particularly new here, but the key points are well articulated, logically connected, and the "so what?" implications are fairly obvious.
I think the zinger that caught my attention most was "The PLA has more students in American graduate schools than do the US Armed Forces".
This JOE doesn't seek to predict specific futures, nor should it. The "conventional wisdom" future, or even the most "statistically likely" future if one were to misapply ORSA processes to future forecasting, will always turn out to not be the future you actually get.
The value in presenting a range of possible future conditions that can combine in infinite ways to bring you the future you actually get lies in decreasing the shock of surprise when the world suddenly changes. These changes always seem inevitable in retrospect, but how we react when the unexpected actually arrives depends in large part on how well we were aware of the possibilites that led to that surprise. We tend to believe that the future will slowly and progressively evolve according to the linear way we prefer to think in, but "black swans" such as the sudden collapse of the USSR and 9/11 show that we somehow collectively miss these sea changes until they actually occur.
The flip side to that is that we, to some degree, determine how the future comes to pass according to the choices we make or do not make. In the military, the question is how do we profitably and effectively make such choices based on our understanding of what we label the JOE. Focusing solely on the technological and organizational aspects, how German military leaders chose to use tanks, planes, and radio made a great deal of difference compared to how French military leaders used the same things in 1940. The difference was in the disparate understandings of the possibilities of the combinations.
All in all, a very good document, not just in terms of content but in terms of style. Style is as important as content, because nobody gets good content if they find it difficult to understand due to bad style.