Building our Military for the Future

By MG Paul E Vallely (RET)

To shape the future force, we must grow leaders who can truly out-think and out innovate adversaries while gaining trust, understanding, and cooperation from our partners in an ever-more complex and dynamic environment. The enduring challenges we face and the whole-of-nation approaches they require demand leaders that have the qualities of flexibility, agility, and adaptability, and the ability to build unique teams of teams to accomplish missions. We must think and engage more broadly about the civil-military continuum and the commitments embedded within. Just as our Service members commit to the Nation when they volunteer to serve, we incur an equally binding pledge to return them to society as better citizens. We must safeguard Service members’ pay and benefits, provide family support, and care for our wounded warriors. We will place increased emphasis on helping our Service members master the challenging upheavals of returning home from war and transitioning out of the military back to civilian life.

Through the power of their example, the success of our veterans can inspire young Americans to serve. In all these endeavors, we must constantly reinforce our connection to U.S. values and society. We will maintain the trust and confidence of our elected leaders and the public by providing frank, professional military advice; being good stewards of public resources; and vigorously executing lawful orders. The military’s adherence to the ideals comprised in our Constitution is a profound example for other nations. We will continue to affirm the foundational values in our oath: civilian control of the military remains a core principle of our Republic and we will preserve it. We will remain an apolitical institution and sustain this position at all costs.

Our focus on leadership, not

simply power, necessitates.

that we emphasize us

values and our people as

much as our platforms and

capabilities.

An all-volunteer force must represent the country it defends. We will strengthen our commitment to the values of merit and competency to build our warfighters. Our senior leaderships must continue to build and train our leaders at the military academies. We must instill the values and traditions of Duty, Honor and Country. We benefit immensely from the different perspectives, and linguistic and cultural skills of all Americans. We will develop leaders who can operate in interagency and multinational environments and providing liaison to other U.S. agencies, allies, and partners.

Our leaders are the strongest advocate for our Nation’s commitment to caring for our wounded veterans and their families. We will build greater resilience into our Service members and their families from the first day they enter the military. But we must balance this commitment by better managing the increased costs of health care. We will focus on early preventive actions to diminish the tragic risks of suicide, traumatic brain injury, substance abuse, homelessness, domestic violence, and other challenges. We must work to end the stigma that prevents our service members, veterans, and their families from seeking help early, and simplify the number and complexity of programs we currently offer to help. This is a difficult, vexing, and complex problem that only leadership can reverse. To do so, we will tap into the capabilities of other government agencies and civil organizations (community, state, and national) to improve care for veterans. We must focus on and expand those programs that work best and eliminate those that do not perform. While we must and will do more, we can only effectively move forward by establishing care that includes public and private partnerships.

We must carefully review legacy personnel systems, particularly whether we have the appropriate balance between uniformed, civilian, and contract professionals, and active and reserve components. The emerging war-fighting domain of cyberspace requires special attention in this regard. The Reserve component, too, is essential as it provides strategic and operational depth to the Joint Force. In turn, preserving it as an accessible, operational force also requires sustained attention.

We have made significant progress in the readiness of our reserve component, and this will remain a key focus area. The missions we undertake are growing more diverse as we work more with our civilian counterparts. In turn, the skills and experiences of our Reserve and National Guard forces have become ever more relevant. To capitalize on the progress made, we must continue to utilize the Reserve Component and National Guard in an operational capacity as a trained, equipped, ready, and available force for routine, predictable deployments.

Capabilities and Readiness

Both our Nation and military will face increased budget pressures and we cannot assume an increase in the defense budget. As we adjust to these pressures, we must not become a hollow force with a large force structure lacking the readiness, training, and modern equipment it needs. Instead, we will maintain a whole, Joint Force that retains quality people, sustains, and develops the right capabilities, and maintains a sustainable tempo to effectively mitigate operational, institutional, force management, and future challenges risk. We must continue to maintain our margin of technological superiority and ensure our Nation’s industrial base is able to field the capabilities and capacity necessary for our forces to succeed in any contingency. At the same time, we will pursue deliberate acquisition process improvements and selective force modernization with the cost-effective introduction of new equipment and technology.

Capabilities

Our strategy, forged in war, is focused on fielding modular, adaptive, general-purpose forces that can be employed in the full range of military operations. Joint Forces will improve their ability to surge on short notice, deploy agile command and control systems, and be increasingly interoperable with other U.S. government agencies. Forces will operate with an aptitude for precise and discriminate action and increasingly possess security force assistance expertise. Joint Forces must become more expeditionary in nature and will require a smaller logistical footprint in part by reducing large fuel and energy demands. Additionally, Joint Forces must train and exercise in degraded air, sea, cyber, and space environments. The Joint Force must ensure access, freedom of maneuver, and the ability to project power globally through all domains: Land – Joint Forces will be capable of full spectrum operations and be organized to provide a versatile mix of tailorable and networked organizations operating on a sustainable rotational cycle.

Our strategy, forged in war,

is focused on fielding.

modular, adaptive, general

purpose forces that can be

employed in the full range of

Military Operations

Maritime – Joint forces will include an appropriate mix of small, mission tailored and large, mission capable units, formations, and platforms. This will provide the ability to conduct the full range of naval operations across the spectrum of maritime environments.

Air – Joint Forces will perform full spectrum operations to secure, maintain, and assure unhindered domain access, global strike, rapid global mobility, globally integrated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), command and control, and retain the ability to project power into distant, anti-access environments.

Air/Space – Joint Forces will pursue resilient architectures, space situational awareness, provide options for self-defense and reconstitution, maintain symmetric and asymmetric capabilities to deter adversaries, and train for operations in space-degraded environments.

Cyberspace – Joint Forces will secure the ‘.mil’ domain, requiring a resilient DoD cyberspace architecture that employs a combination of detection, deterrence, denial, and multi-layered defense. We will improve our cyberspace capabilities so they can often achieve significant and proportionate effects with less cost and lower collateral impact. Joint nuclear forces will continue to support strategic stability through maintenance of an assured second-strike capability. We will ensure our nuclear forces remain effective, safe, and secure. We will retain sufficient nuclear force structure to hedge against unexpected geopolitical change, technological advances , and operational vulnerabilities. Joint special operations forces will remain decentralized and flexible, have regional expertise, and maintain a wide range of capabilities to support our Nation’s counter-terrorism efforts and other missions that require their unique attributes. We will increase enablers critical for the success of special operations forces. In today’s knowledge-based environment, the weight of operational efforts is increasingly prioritized not only by the assignment of forces, but also by the allocation of force structure.

The ability to create precise, desirable effects with a smaller force and a lighter logistical footprint critical. Much of our inventory in ammunition and weapons systems have been depleted severally as a result of the Israel/Hamas/Gaza conflict and supplying Ukraine in the Russian-Ukraine conflict. Across all domains, we must improve sharing, processing, analysis, and dissemination of information to better support decision makers. We will make our command and control more survivable and resilient through redundancy and improve human intelligence capabilities. To do so, we must change our mindset from simply increasing the density of ISR capabilities to evaluating our methodologies for employing and integrating ISR assets. Joint Force processes must efficiently employ and allocate all ISR assets from across the Services and strengthen the linkage between ISR and cyberspace operations where they leverage each other or operate in the same space. No other military can match the Joint Force’s strike, logistics, strategic mobility, planning, and command and control capabilities. We will explore joint operational concepts leveraging mobile and more survivable bases, sea-borne mobility, and innovative uses of space. We will maintain this superiority and the capacity to extend these competitive advantages to others – our unique capabilities amplify their efforts. Lending these niche capabilities to partners, or surging them in times of crisis, is the right partnering investment, and builds long-lasting goodwill. Readiness – Readiness, too, must remain a top priority, as our forces, systems, and capabilities will continue to be under extraordinary stress.

Warfighting Readiness is the ability to provide and integrate capabilities required by Combatant Commanders to execute their assigned missions. Readiness is essential to prepare the strategic depth to conduct full-spectrum operations, which will be degraded by any sustained combat. Short term efforts to improve readiness will be focusing on resetting equipment and reconstituting units, in some cases–most notably rotational and overseas forces–this will be in stride. As we reset, we will conduct more full-spectrum joint, combined, interagency, and multinational training, exercises and experimentation. Forward presence and engagement will take on greater importance during this time. Long-term modernization efforts will improve readiness by developing essential weapon system capabilities and capacity to outpace emerging threats. A further degradation of readiness for the full range of military operations would undermine our ability to fulfill our national defense objectives – an unacceptable risk. We will develop more effective ways to assess joint and unit readiness that emphasize “joint” capabilities and concepts. While accounting for missions that require continual readiness, we must develop strategic concepts that measure joint readiness across the services to deter conflict and respond promptly during contingencies. We will streamline the requirements-to capabilities process, synchronizing force-providers with warfighting force unified commanders.

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