The Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act of 1986 aimed to integrate service capabilities and strengthen Department of Defense (DoD) joint elements. It also designated the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the principal military adviser to the president, National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense. The act established the position of vice chairman and streamlined the operational chain of command from the president to the Secretary of Defense to the unified commanders and made the unified commanders fully responsible for accomplishing the missions of their commands. As part of the implementation of Goldwater-Nichols, three significant roles were assigned to the then United States Atlantic Command (USACOM) in 1993: Joint Force Provider, Joint Force Trainer, and Joint Force Integrator. The goal of assigning these roles was to provide a foundation to formulate and conduct Joint Operations throughout all levels of conflict that would have the focused attention of a Commander in Chief (CINC). USACOM was redesignated as the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) on 1 October 1999.

The evolution of Joint Vision 2010/2020 has focused the DoD on four strategic pillars: Dominant Maneuver, Precision Engagement, Focused Logistics, and Full Dimension Protection. These lead to Information Superiority in the battlespace. In an effort to formulate the concepts and support for future warfighting needs and capabilities, the role of DoD-wide Joint Experimentation was assigned by the President to USJFCOM in 1999.

MITRE’s Role
The MITRE Corporation has been a contributor in different roles at USJFCOM (previously USACOM) since 1980, when MITRE was asked to establish operating locations at most of the CINC locations throughout the world. Our engineers were involved with developing concepts, designing and engineering network infrastructure based on what is known today as "Internet Technology," and assisting the intelligence community in establishing automated intelligence production capabilities. Today, we operate offices at the Unified CINC locations, as well as other client locations throughout the world.

The Challenge of Joint Force Integration
The role of Joint Force Integration has been defined by USJFCOM as a "collection of activities whose purpose is the synergistic blending of doctrine, organization, training, material, leadership, personnel and facilities (DOTMLPF) from the different Military Services to improve interoperability and enhance joint capabilities." The supporting principles are: Future Oriented, Fully Interoperable, Functional Across the Entire Spectrum of Conflict, and Enhanced Competitive Advantage. One of the key factors in achieving the goal of a fully integrated joint force that supports various levels of conflict is the development of a successful Joint Experimentation Program.

MITRE was an original member of the Joint Experimentation Strategic Concepts Team formed in 1998. Since the needs of the USJFCOM team required skills that MITRE could offer, strategic partnerships were formed across the company to draw on Command, Control, Communications, Computer, and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) operational, functional, and technical skills. As the role of Joint Experimentation evolves, MITRE expertise and the ability to reach back into the corporation are key elements to our providing C4ISR-based systems engineering skills.

Joint Experimentation Program
The Joint Experimentation Program is a "concept-based" experimentation program. Promising new concepts are developed and examined through a rigorous experimentation campaign. At present, USJFCOM is actively working five concepts: Rapid Decisive Operations (RDO), Attack Operations Against Critical Mobile Targets, Adaptive Joint Command and Control, Joint Interactive Planning, and Common Relevant Operational Picture. RDO is our overarching "integrating concept," while the others are considered to be "functional concepts," as each enables RDO. While MITRE is supporting the concept development and experimentation programs for each of the concepts, MITRE is the co-lead on the latter three, referred to as the Information Superiority-Command & Control (IS-C2) concepts.

RDO Concept
The essence of RDO is to conduct rapid, simultaneous, and parallel operations aimed at destroying the coherence of the enemy’s military capability through an early, direct, and distributed attack against his critical assets. The objective is to rapidly coerce the enemy to do our will.

RDO pulls together the best features of the Services’ programs as well as competing private sector ideas to examine alternative operational concepts focused on bringing future conflicts to quick closure. The operational concepts under consideration offer potential improvements in the ability of the Joint Force Commander to generate rapid and decisive outcomes in small-scale contingencies.

IS-C2 Vision
To prepare for the demands of future warfighting, the U.S. military is undergoing an unprecedented transformation fueled, in large part, by the rapid advances in information technology.

Future lighter, smaller, more mobile forces will require proportionally smaller C2 headquarters in theater that employ information technology to provide reachback to supporting staffs and world class experts distributed worldwide. The need to operate inside an adversary’s decision cycle will require that planning and execution transition from the current serial hierarchical process to a more parallel, collaborative process. The need for unity of effort to ensure the rapid and decisive accomplishment of the desired effects when and where needed will require superior shared battlespace awareness and a common understanding of the commander’s intent and the current operational plan. Joint forces of the future will be seamlessly interoperable because they will operate from common, shared data that will provide the right information, at the right time, in the right format. Real-time information sharing will enable combat identification and the reduction of fratricide. Multimedia display technologies will be used to ensure that the information is readily recognized and understood by the warfighter.

Information technology will provide tools for course of action analysis that will shorten planning times and allow dynamic, continuous plan modification during execution. These same tools will support realistic mission rehearsal and training. Commanders will use collaboration tools to confer with other commanders, their distributed staffs, and subject matter experts for planning and battle management.

Information superiority requires not only the acquisition of information but that the information be kept secure from attack by our adversary. Thus, information assurance must be a key element of any IS-C2 concept. Conversely, we must be able to share critical information with coalition partners and selected non-governmental agencies. Multi-level security tools will be employed to ensure that appropriate information, and only appropriate information, is released when needed. All of these capabilities will be supported by a worldwide information infrastructure that will provide seamless, secure, transparent connectivity.

Experimentation Strategy
The three IS-C2 concepts described above have the potential to transform significantly the way future U.S. forces will do command and control. In order to mature our IS-C2 concepts, MITRE has assisted the Joint Experimentation Program with the development of a rigorous experimentation campaign guided by a strategy that provides a roadmap from ideas to refined military capabilities and DOTMLPF recommendations. Through a series of spiral events, experimentation results are used to further develop and refine the concepts under study. As shown in Figure 1, systematic progression of experimentation activities begins with exploratory or discovery experiments that lead to better understanding of the concepts, issues, and scientific hypotheses. These are followed by confirmatory experiments that seek to test the hypotheses, and finish with demonstrations of enhanced military capabilities.

Figure 1. Nature of "spiral" experimentation.

The Experimentation Strategy incorporates events that span the spectrum of experimentation venues: seminars, workshops, wargames, controlled laboratory experiments, analytical studies, constructive simulations, virtual (man-in-the-loop) simulations, and live simulations. In addition, real operations like Kosovo frequently provide a great opportunity to examine specific concepts in operation.

Figure 2 illustrates considerations for venue selection. Venues at the base of the hierarchy are lower cost and will usually offer greater scientific control and reproducibility. However, they generally have little operational credibility. On the other hand, virtual simulations, live events, and real operations have much greater operational credibility and greater cost, but usually cannot be controlled sufficiently to be considered very rigorous or scientific.

The mix of venues compensates for the shortfalls of individual venues and supports the spiral approach for concept development. In the early stages, the venues will tend to be at the lower end of the hierarchy. The spiral concept suggests that experiment strategies should start with simple, relatively inexpensive, low-fidelity experiments when there is little knowledge, and increase complexity and fidelity with more resource-intensive virtual and live simulations as our knowledge matures and the concept is refined. The experiment strategy should take immature concepts, mature them through experiments, and turn them into demonstrated capabilities.

Figure 2. Considerations for venue selection.

Major Experiments
Four of our major experiments to date are outlined below:

(1) RDO Wargame—Conducted May–June 2000, this was a modeling and simulation-supported wargame with an active opposing force. Participants examined a baseline and three alternatives for conducting RDO. The wargame highlighted the need to focus future experiments on reorganizing the RDO C2 organization to better support effects-based operations.

(2) Millennium Challenge 2000—From August through mid-September 2000, USJFCOM conducted the first in a series of live joint experiments in concert with the four military services to explore concepts that may shape how DoD conducts business in the future. MITRE was a contributor in the design and preparation of this joint experiment, the main focus of which was on exploring the IS-C2 concepts. An overarching joint context for the four service experiments allowed the Joint Experimentation Program to work with each of the services to examine the IS-C2 joint concepts. These experiments examined how a robust, joint information environment, coupled with the use of collaborative tools, increases shared battlespace awareness and concurrent, parallel crisis action planning to support more timely and effective decision making.

(3) Attack Operations Virtual Simulation—From August through October 2000, this virtual simulation experiment focused on the “battle management (decide)” portion of the attack operations chain (detect, decide, deliver). The Joint Semi-Automated Forces model was used to simulate participants in a proposed new Time Critical Targets Cell. The experiment used the MITRE-developed After Action Reporting System to collect data and provide quick-look reports. It also used various constructive simulations, including the MITRE-supported Pegasus Federation and a “quick and dirty” model developed by MITRE using EXTEND, a dynamic modeling software application.

(4) Unified Vision 2001—In May 2001, this virtual simulation explored the RDO concept, focusing upon the structure of the Joint Task Force organization, the conduct of an Operational Net Assessment, and the production of an Effects Tasking Order.

Conclusion
Joint Experimentation is one of the key ingredients for the Joint Integration role of USJFCOM. The joint concepts being developed and explored by the Joint Experimentation program offer the potential to significantly transform the way future U.S. forces accomplish their missions, and MITRE is playing a key role in this activity.

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For more information, please contact Joseph Jackson using the employee directory.

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