Joint Operational Access Concept discussion

[pvebber]

Reposted from RFI section above:

The "Joint Operational Access Concept"was recently released:

Link

It's been the subject of a fair amount of criticism, some of it deserved, some not.

It adds as a central idea "cross domain synergy" as a compliment to the Capstone Concept for Joint operations central idea of "joint synergy".

What is the difference? Some say there really is none, others treat "cross domain" as 'magic pixie dust" to solve problems.

To me its a subtle distinction. Where "domain = service" (i.e air = Air Force, Sea = Navy, and Land = Army) then Cross-service (joint) = cross-domain.

The part where discussion can gets interesting is when you start too include the "new domaains". The Joint Capability Areas effectively treat a wider array of "domains" then are "officially recognized":

Land, Underground, Sea, Undersea, Air, Space, Cyber, and the Electromagnetic Spectrum.

These are called out as "environments" within which interaction with the adversary can occur. The difference between an "environment" and a "domain" seems more budgetary, than operational, but that may be overly cynical on my part.

Each of the services now have requirements and responsibilities, to some extent in far more than their "home" domain. Cyber is great example as all the services have cyber capabilities and are struggling to operationalize them - particularly given the tension between tittle X (ten) and Title L (50) - military operations vs national covert operations.

How do you go from "domain = service" to "services = many domains" in the joint construct? Operational C2 today at the serivce = domain level is so time consuming that it struggles to meet required decision-making time requirements. Added a host of new coordination requirements will slow it down even more.(true?)

So does that mean, as the Army did with combined arms, a need to push coordination decisions down to lower levels? I think yes, and that the Navy and Air Force can learn a lot from what the Army (and USMC) have gone through pushing "decision-making with operational implications" lower down the chain.

Unfortunately the Air-Sea Battle construct (a sub-concept under the JOAC) seems to driving the Maritime Operations Center and Air Operations Center into a combined Mega Operations Center with a tremendously expanded span of command into all the "domains".

I'm convinced this will result in an unwieldy command leviathan that has no chance of keeping up with the tempo of operations required to succeed at the "access task". Others disagree.

Thoughts?