Rob,

Taking you up on your offer of a discussion, this is a subject near and dear to my heart (and not to mention my paycheck). Safely pseudonymous, here I go.

I think you made a very well articulated case as to why JFCOM is important and what sort of personal leadership challenges, what kind of leader it would take, to be a good and effective commander at JFCOM. I don’t have much to add to that, but I would like to share my personal observations about the problems we have internally, the challenges we face and some specific things the new commander needs to fix if he is going to be successful.

JFCOM was created to fill a real need in the Armed Forces. If JFCOM was done away with tomorrow, it would have to be re-invented, and would be re-invented de facto by the services and the COCOM's, only on a piecemeal and disjointed manner. So while there are of course those who wish to do away with that "worthless" command, they are mistaken and would simply find something like a new JFCOM eventually arising to fill the void left by the old one.

It's a saying around here that the military is trained and equipped by the services, but we fight wars joint. The war we are in now, and certainly the wars we will face in the years to come, require effective and thorough cooperation and interoperability between forces fielded by the services (and indeed beyond, all instruments of national power), in other words, we require "Jointness." The regional COCOM's are not the right organizations to inculcate, foster and train this jointness; they are too focused on the 50 meter targets of their daily missions. Therefore we need a command that can foster "jointness" - develop and promulgate Joint doctrine, develop and field Joint interoperable equipment, particularly command and control systems (or at least strongly influence their development in the right direction by the services), and train the force to fight joint.

But JFCOM has not always been up to its high calling, for many reasons, some its own fault and others the fault of wider circumstances in DOD and the government as a whole about which it can do little.

A lot of good ideas and concepts are born out of JFCOM, often after careful consideration and analysis of lessons learned by the troops in the field, that are useful even needful for the armed forces at large, but fail on the external ambitions and parochialism of the services and sometimes the COCOMs. There is not much the Commander JFCOM can do about this, but be a good advocate and sell the right thing to do to his four star peers.

A lot of good ideas and concepts are born out of JFCOM but fail on the internal ambitions and Byzantine organizational culture. Also, bad ideas and concepts are also sometimes born out of this, and are promoted and foisted upon the services and COCOMs. Sometimes. These things, Commander JFCOM can do a lot to fix, and here are the things he needs to tackle, as I see them.

Our incoming Commander needs to fix:

* Internal communications - horizontal (cross directorate) and vertical (from the directorates up to the commander) communications are usually very poor in JFCOM. The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, or the heads of the hydra never bother to talk to each other. This has the effect of isolating the JFCOM directorates from each other, and prevents the command from working effectively as a whole. It also keeps the commander in the dark about what is going on inside his own command (this is often the case inside directorates, too). If General Mattis doesn't know what is going on inside JFCOM and what JFCOM is doing to and with the rest of DOD, he can't lead JFCOM to live up to its mission.

* Internal ambitions and agendas of directorates and components - often work towards own ends at cross purposes to other JFCOM components and directorates, and even the command's own priorities and goals as set by the commander. The new commander must bring the independent operators to heel and get them working in unison with the rest of the command. Initiatives should not be pursued and funded that aren't vetted at the DCDR and CDR level, and fall in lockstep with the commander's vision.

* Institutional culture suffers from fuzzy thought and dubious ideas due to fascination with buzz words (buzz paragraphs in this place) and uncritical acceptance of the latest trendy concepts to pass through the door. Solving the problem listed right above this one will help a lot, because a lot of otherwise stupid BS gets latched on to as it seen as a vehicle to acquire funding and resources. But more than that, there is no disciplined way to think about the future and apply that to JFCOM's activities. There is no overarching vision that informs the way the command's directorates do business, across the board. This leaves everyone free to experiment, and there is no rigorous intellectual process to consider and vett ideas, no "sanity check" to separate the wise concepts from the hare-brained schemes.

In my opinion, we need an overarching, strategic vision to guide the efforts of each of our directorates, particularly the big ones - J7, J8, J9. A commander who is both a strong leader and a strong intellectual like General Mattis seems to be just what we need.

Of course, we are manned by the services, and the doctrine and systems we develop must be accepted by them, so good luck with the overarching strategic visions. Never said the commander's job was going to be easy.

* Reduce internal bureaucracy, it is impossible for JFCOM to promote 'agility' if it is itself clumsy. My personal experiences with the JFCOM staff process were traumatic, it was long and painful to get major projects through all the staff wickets before we could get them released to the COCOM customer. And the processes we have imposed on our customers to get help from us (and here I am writing about my particular competency, JNTC), sometimes turn what should be easy and effective fixes into drawn out, inconclusive efforts that satisfy no one.

Everything, including our bureaucracy and how it is constituted and how it operates, should be as simple as is absolutely possible (except where it might put me out of work ). If General Mattis fixes all of the other things, but the JFCOM internal bureaucracy remains a hopeless mess, his best intentions will be stymied.

General Mattis has a big job ahead of him, but it is an important one. DOD needs JFCOM, and needs it to function right. If he can be a success, in ways his past several predecessors weren't IMO, he can leave a much more significant and lasting mark on the DOD than if he had become a regional COCOM commander, or even CMC. I am guardedly hopeful, he is an outstanding personality and intellect, and has real character, unlike so many featureless and generic GO/FO's we have today - if anyone can succeed at this task, it must be him. Let's wish him the best of luck and pray for his success.