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to the HASC Hearing [2h 38 min]
STATEMENT BY
ADMIRAL EDMUND P. GIAMBASTIANI, JR.
COMMANDER
UNITED STATES JOINT FORCES COMMAND
AND
SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER
TRANSFORMATION (NATO)
BEFORE THE
HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
OCTOBER 2, 2003
Mr.
Chairman, distinguished Members of the
Committee, I am honored to testify on the
Joint Lessons Learned collected from
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM and to share some of
the insights obtained.
After I took over as Commander,
U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) in October
2002, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and I conducted extensive discussions
on how to significantly improve the
collection and implementation of joint
lessons learned. Shortly afterwards in
January and February, 2003, Joint Forces
Command established a Joint Lessons Learned
(JLL) team of subject matter experts to
observe, collect and analyze lessons learned
from contingency operations at the joint
operational level. We focused on military
issues, not on the civilian side. We
subsequently deployed the team to the U.S.
Central Command (CENTCOM) area of
responsibility. Today, I am here to report
on the insights we gained on the Major
Combat Operations phase of Operation IRAQI
FREEDOM (OIF), which was conducted from 18
March to 1 May of 2003.
From the beginning, we understood that our
mission was pathbreaking. The Army, Navy,
Air Force, and Marine Corps all have long
experience in forming similar teams to
capture service-specific lessons from
operations and translating those lessons
into new approaches and innovative
capabilities for each of the services.
Now, for the first time, our
defense leadership has instituted a joint
lessons learned team for the express purpose
of gathering joint operational insights on a
comprehensive scale and in real time.
Because our Lessons Learned
team focused on joint operations, we did not
employ the typical systems-assessment
approach appropriate for analyzing a
specific platform or weapons system, but
rather concentrated on the issues that
mattered most to the joint warfighter, in
this case the Combatant Commander conducting
Operation Iraqi Freedom. Taken as a whole,
we examined how well service and special
operations force warfighting systems and
methods actually worked together as a
coherent joint team, including operations
with other U.S. Federal agencies and with
our coalition partners.
We had over 30 members of my staff
embedded throughout CENTCOM and its
component headquarters, with extensive reach
back and analysis capability on call here in
the United States at my headquarters and
warfighting centers of excellence. We were
there before operations started and followed
the entire campaign in real time. We had
complete access to all commanders and their
staffs for all operations, at all levels.
General Franks set the tone and welcomed
this team with open arms. That, in my
experience, is unprecedented. The team was
guided in their collection and assessment by
a newly promoted brigadier general and by a
man I call JFCOM's "senior" senior mentor,
retired Army General Gary Luck, a former
joint warfighting commander himself. General
Luck's judgment as senior mentor proved
indispensable to both the team and to
General Franks.
The team's mission was to observe
processes, collect data, interview
participants, assist and enable operations
where possible, and provide feedback to
General Franks in real time. The team
conducted hundreds of interviews, collecting
gigabytes of data. We also worked closely
with our Service counterparts, and leveraged
their tactical level insights. At the
conclusion of major combat operations, the
team began to codify and assess their data
into draft preliminary conclusions. We
shared our methods and insights with an
independent group of respected scholars and
analysts led by Dr. Eliot Cohen of Johns
Hopkins University to obtain the objective
review essential to producing a useful
report.
As we considered our preliminary
insights, we concluded that one overarching
theme summarizes the results of the joint
transformation that has occurred since
Desert Storm: what we have come to
characterize as the competing notions of
Overwhelming Force versus Overmatching
Power.
As an example, in Desert Storm,
our military thinking was to field
Overwhelming Force to ensure victory.
Certainly, this entails fielding
well-trained and well-equipped forces, which
is as important today as it was back then.
However, the emphasis was on numbers as
befits a traditional, attrition-based
campaign. What our observations in Operation
IRAQI FREEDOM tell us is that there is
another approach to modern warfare. We like
to describe this new approach as the
employment of Overmatching Power.
Under this construct, the emphasis
is no longer just on numbers-which remain
important-but rather on harnessing all the
capabilities that our Services and Special
Operations Forces bring to the battlespace
in a coherently joint way. Advances in
technologies, coupled with innovative
warfighting concepts joined together by a
new joint culture, are enabling a level of
coherent military operations that we have
never been able to achieve before. The
difference in approach characterized as
Overmatching Power is based on the combined
output of new ways of joint warfighting,
greater integration of conventional and
special operations forces, and the use of
old and emerging capabilities by new
concepts of operations - all integrated
through new and more powerful schemes of
joint training. The emphasis now is on the
effectiveness of joint capabilities employed
at times and places of our choosing to
achieve strategic effects. General Franks
later remarked on this level of jointness,
saying "Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was the most
joint and combined operation in American
history."
The
insights and perspectives gained from
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM emphasize four
attributes of the Overmatching Power theme
that we think are the keys to military
success in the 21st Century, and which
should continue to guide our joint
transformation. The four attributes are:
Knowledge, Speed, Precision, and Lethality.
In the area of Knowledge,
for example, we used three times the number
of Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar
System (JSTARS) hours in Operation IRAQI
FREEDOM as compared to Desert Storm. The
JSTARS system of OIF used increased
satellite capabilities and was connected to
new communications links that vastly
improved our forces' knowledge of enemy
dispositions before and during operations.
What this means at the operational level of
war is that we could acquire more
information more quickly with a smaller
footprint: over 3200 sorties in Desert
Storm; fewer than 1700 in Operation IRAQI
FREEDOM. Put another way, we had three times
the information output with about half the
sorties.
As for Speed, our
forces closed into the area of operations in
less than three months as opposed to seven
months in Desert Storm. Similar to our
advancement in methods and capabilities for
"Knowledge acquisition," we also reduced our
logistical footprint while increasing the
overall throughput because of changes in
methods and capabilities. We used less than
half the number of ships to support our
logistics campaign in Operation IRAQI
FREEDOM as in Desert Storm. Equally
important, the increase in
"knowledge-centric" capabilities noted
earlier allowed for increased speed of
maneuver. We had over 40 times the bandwidth
capability of Desert Storm, which allowed
our forces to range more rapidly over the
whole of Iraq in order to achieve a far more
complex mission: defeat and change a regime.
On Precision, one of
the top lessons learned-and acted upon- was
not just the precision of weapon systems,
impressive as that was, but how information
capabilities allowed for "precision
decision-making." Again using Desert Storm
as an example, we had about 30 Special
Forces teams working missions separate from
the conventional force 12 years ago. In
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, we deployed over
three times as many Special Forces teams,
many of whom were closely wedded to our
conventional forces. In several cases, these
Special Forces teams played instrumental
roles in merging the capabilities of both
ground and air forces. We not only had
precision munitions launched from air and
ground but also "precision decisions" to
further direct our smart weapons by the
combination of Special Forces and
Conventional forces working jointly, armed
with new capabilities. The result is that we
were able to achieve our campaign objectives
using approximately one seventh of the air
ordnance expended in Desert Storm - and over
2/3 of the ordnance we delivered in
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was precision
guided. Such unprecedented precision allows
us to craft an acceptable military response
to enemies embedded among innocent civilians
and reduces the infrastructure damage by an
order of magnitude.
These new capabilities also
greatly increased our overall Lethality.
Whereas in Desert Storm only about 10% of
our air-ground operations were integrated,
that figure jumped to the high 90th
percentile in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM-an
unprecedented transformation. Advances in
technology and training, meanwhile, affected
our ability to decrease our air signature
while significantly increasing lethality. It
took an average of four aircraft to kill one
target in Desert Storm, whereas in Operation
IRAQI FREEDOM just one aircraft could kill
about four targets. Similar "economies of
innovation" occurred on the ground, where
the total artillery batteries employed
dropped by a substantial margin in Operation
IRAQI FREEDOM
The fundamental point is that
our traditional military planning and
perhaps our entire approach to warfare have
shifted. The main change, from our
perspective, is that we are moving away from
employing Service-centric forces that must
be de-conflicted on the battlefield to
achieve victories of attrition to a
well-trained, integrated joint force that
can enter the battlespace quickly and
conduct decisive operations with both
operational and strategic effects. Joint
Force Commanders today tell me that they
don't care where a capability comes from so
long as it meets their warfighting needs.
They also tell me that "it's not the plan,
it's the planning." They understand that the
ability to plan and adapt to changing
circumstances and fleeting opportunities is
the key to rapid victory in the modern
battlespace. General Tommy Franks and his
staff practiced and trained to these
standards.
Essential to the power of
adaptive planning and execution is our
ability to conduct large scale, vertical and
horizontal collaboration. Frankly, this
collaboration is on a scale that dwarfs any
extant commercial application. In today's
collaborative environment, every level of
command-throughout the entire force and
including coalition partners-is
electronically linked to the Combatant
Commander's decision-making process.
Subordinate commanders and staffs understand
the context behind key changes across the
battlespace and are fully aware of changes
in the commander's intent to guide their
actions during specific missions. In short,
the entire joint force is acutely sensitive
to any nuances that occur in the battlespace
and are highly adaptive to changes, seizing
opportunities as they arise or preventing
mishaps before they occur.
Just a few weeks ago, we
received an observation from a pilot in
Afghanistan that seemed to crystallize the
effectiveness of our collaborative
environment. After an enemy column was
identified on the move, the pilot recounted
how the real time, internet-style chat
network in his plane enabled him to
collaborate with forces on the ground,
planners at CENTCOM HQ and a sister
squadron. While gunships moved in stride
toward the target guided by satellite
communications, planners at CENTCOM HQ
simultaneously confirmed the coordinates and
approved the strike while ground commanders
verified that "Blue" forces were clear of
the area. In the space of 30 minutes from
the time the enemy was detected, the column
was destroyed. Upon reflection, the pilot
gave this insight-and I quote: "Its amazing
how fast we can clobber these guys when
everyone is on the same sheet of music." Mr.
Chairman, distinguished Members of the
Committee, with your support, our
transforming joint force dominates the
modern battlespace because we are acquiring
the tools to operate on the "same sheet of
music," around the clock, around the
world.
To sum up: if you know more
and fight together as a joint and combined
team, you can act with greater precision,
you can rapidly plan and adapt to fluid
situations and you can move about the
battlespace with far greater effect than was
possible in the past. In short, the whole of
the joint force operating together
coherently is now greater than the sum of
our separate Service capabilities.
Certainly, we all understand
that every conflict is different. We are
also very careful not to base our
conclusions solely on the capabilities of a
weakened or less than capable enemy.
Nevertheless, there is no
question that a remarkable shift has
occurred in the way the Joint Force operates
and this shift leverages on:
Knowledge-Speed-Precision-Lethality.
Before I share with you our
detailed findings, I want to emphasize the
standard against which we chose to measure
our effectiveness. Elite forces are elite
because they have high standards and they
enforce them. Growing up as I did in the
Navy's nuclear submarine force, this trait
is almost part of my genetic makeup. Like
many military systems and operations,
operating a submarine, underwater in mid
ocean with a nuclear reactor and nuclear
weapons, requires the highest standards and
unimpeachable integrity. Inspection reports
for even the best-run submarines record
scores of deficiencies - because we have
high standards in the Navy and we enforce
them. The same is true of our elite warriors
in the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and
Special Operating Forces.
This mentality of what I call
ruthless objectivity shaped our assessment
of operational lessons learned from
Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. As a result, we
organized our report into three comparative
categories of capabilities that are clear
"winners" as well as those that needed
improvement and those that fell short of our
expectations. We listed under each category
the key areas that proved most significant.
The categories are as follows:
1. Capabilities
that reached new levels of performance and
need to be sustained
Joint Integration and
Adaptive Planning
Joint Force Synergy
Special Operations and
Special Operations-Conventional Integration
2. Capabilities
that demonstrated considerable effectiveness
but need enhancement
Urban Operations
Information Operations
Intelligence, Surveillance
and Reconnaissance
3. Capabilities
that fell short of expectations or requiring
new initiatives to redress shortfalls.
Battle Damage Assessment
Fratricide Prevention
Deployment Planning and
Execution Reserve Mobilization
Coalition Information Sharing
I will be glad to address
these specific categories and the
capabilities they contain in a discussion
with the Committee, some of which may
require a classified discussion in a closed
hearing.
Beyond the previously
discussed issues associated with the
categories noted above, we have also
determined three general insights to future
concepts that require our continued
examination and experimentation to define
and clarify. These insights to future
concepts include:
1.
The Emerging
Battlespace
2.
Knowledge-Enabled Warfare
3.
Effects-Based
Operations
Joint Lessons
Learned Way Ahead
Although the formal Joint
Lessons Learned report on Major Combat
Operations is currently being drafted, Joint
Forces Command is already turning its
preliminary impressions into focused
recommendations that are being vetted
extensively with our partners in the joint,
interagency and multinational communities.
In summary, Joint Forces
Command, in close partnership with the
Services, Defense Agencies, Combatant
Commanders, the Office of the Secretary of
Defense, the Joint Staff and the Interagency
and Multinational communities, is working to
turn "lessons learned" into "lessons acted
upon." As appropriate, we intend to work
collectively to make comprehensive changes
to our doctrinal approaches and tactics; to
streamline our organizations; to establish
new and innovative training methods and
systems; to create new educational
curriculums to develop new skills for a new
era; to develop a shared understanding of
the future fight; and, acquire the right
capabilities at the right time for the right
reasons. These actions, we believe, will
help ensure an ever-transforming dominant
joint force.
Mr. Chairman, distinguished
members of the Committee, thank you again
for the opportunity to testify today, and
for your continuing support for all the men
and women of our Armed Forces. I look
forward to answering your questions.
