The Security Environment That Is Shaping The Joint Force 2025 ( Jf25 )

The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) examines “the national defense strategy and priorities”, and “sets a long-term course for the DoD”. The QDR "assesses the threats and challenges that the nation faces, while seeking to re-balance DoD‘s strategies, capabilities, and forces to address today‘s conflicts and tomorrow's threats." The QDR is required by Congress every four years and is produced by the Secretary of Defense (SecDef). The three pillars that the 2014 QDR rests on are: protect the homeland; build security globally; and project power and win decisively. One of the ways that the US armed forces support the QDR is through the application of airpower. Airpower is “the ability to project military power or influence through the

With Trump’s election this year, his rhetoric of “Making America Great Again” and therefore revitalizing our military will soon become a reality. Trump has formally requested a reappropriation of funds; around $54 Billion, towards the US military. Part of Trump’s campaign promises had to do with making the military more robust; ensuring America’s title of militarily strongest in the world. In order to achieve this goal. Trump’s federal government has the option of many different aspects of the military to focus on. Of these, funding weapons of mass destruction, cyber security, and further military research and development prove themselves as most relevant in the contemporary military.

While a commander’s staff conducts planning at any level, whether it is strategic, operational, or tactical, the importance of identifying both theirs and the adversary’s center of gravity (COG) is a critical part of the planning process. Three factors should be carefully analyzed in order to gain a full understanding of the COG; they are critical capabilities, critical requirements and critical vulnerabilities (U.S. Office of the CJCS 11 August 2011, III-24). Although a COG can be attacked directly, the indirect approach which seeks to destroy or neutralize the COG by attacking an adversary’s critical vulnerabilities can be a more efficient use of available resources. The United States Marine Corps’ Warfighting publication MCDP 1 draws a direct correlation between a COG and its critical vulnerability by stating, “we should focus our efforts against a critical vulnerability, a vulnerability that, if exploited, will do the most significant damage to the enemy 's ability to resist us” (United States Marine Corps 1997, 47). The Marine Corps favors the indirect approach to defeating an adversary’s COG because the functions assigned to them by the Department of Defense (DoD) require expeditionary operations and expeditionary forces typically are limited in size, assets, and resources driving them to target an adversary’s critical vulnerabilities.

General Dempsey’s NMS underscored strategic challenges to the Joint Staff in rebalancing the JF of 2025 to meet the national security directives in an austere fiscal environment. General Dempsey highlighted strategic imperatives to protect and advance U.S national interests, apply contrasting approaches to state threats (China, Russia) verses non-state threats (ISIL), and adjusting to prolonged campaigns in an unpredictable strategic environment with limited resources.4 The CCJO emphasized enduring proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), rise of competitor states, violent extremism, regional instabilities, transnational crime and competition for resources.5 Furthermore, advancements in mobile technology and social media allow middleweight

The United States military has never been as weak as it is under Barack Obama. In a time where the world is getting more dangerous every day, whether it is the growing threat of ISIS, Russia or North Korea, the current president insists on continuously making cuts to the military. According to an independent panel appointed by the pentagon and congress, “the shrinking U.S. armed forces, which are being downsized to fit that strategy and budget cuts, is a serious strategic misstep on the part of the United States and is inadequate given the future strategic and operational environment.” This essentially means that these cuts are weakening the military so much, that it will be ineffective to deal with global threats.

should adjust its priorities and spending to address the changing nature of threats in the world: What all these potential adversaries—from terrorist cells to rogue nations to rising powers—have in common is that they have learned that it is unwise to confront the United States directly on conventional military terms. The United States cannot take its current dominance for granted and needs to invest in the programs, platforms, and personnel that will ensure that dominance's persistence. But it is also important to keep some perspective. As much as the U.S. Navy has shrunk since the end of the Cold War, for example, in terms of tonnage, its battle fleet is still larger than the next 13 navies combined—and 11 of those 13 navies are U.S. allies or partners." (Staff,

As Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford emphasized in his February 26, 2015 statement to the house subcommittee on defense, “The challenges of the future operating environment will demand that our Nation maintains a force-in-readiness that is capable of global response.” Given today's fiscally constrained environment, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) continues to experiment with new tactics, techniques, and procedures to enable mission efficiency and improve combat effectiveness. Recognizing the gap between traditional crisis response capacity and demand, geographic combatant commanders (GCC) require alternative and creative solutions to traditional employment challenges. The Expeditionary Force 21 concept is one way the Marine Corps is answering that challenge. Expeditionary Force 21 is the USMC’s vision and response to threats in the contemporary environment while observing the limitations of

Arctic: Command and control and freedom of navigation in the Arctic region are two factors that will affect the operational environment for Joint Force 2025. Currently eight countries (including five members of NATO, two close allies, and Russia) lay claim to the Arctic region and its territorial waters spread across three continents (Heritage Foundation, 78). With Russia’s exclusive economic zone claim to the entire region, the Arctic has the possibility to be even more contentious than the South China Sea.

The days of unilateral and conventional battles are history. The Army of yesterday is no longer adequate to deter and defeat our nation’s enemies. Rather, the Army needs to adapt to meet the global challenges of today, and the complexity of hybrid threats. Former Army Chief of Staff, General Ray Odierno stated, “The Army is probably the most flexible, adaptable organization across all the services”. In conjunction with that claim, the Army is implementing the regionally aligned forces (RAF) concept. Through the implementation of the regionally aligned forces concept, our nation’s Army will become a versatile, adaptable and globally ready force. Although the RAF concept is thoroughly sound, it is doomed to fail during its implementation.

“As we transition, we will change how we organize, man, equip and train our force to be more responsive…so we can better enable the Joint Force of 2020” (Odierno, 2015, p. NA). This is an important statement because it not only highlights necessity for change, but signals the importance

In 2009, Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) convinced the President (POTUS) and Congress to truncate the F22 program, leaving the U.S. Air Force (USAF) with less than 190 operational 5th Generation air to air and air to ground combatants, this number of operational F22 was well short of the 381 the USAF estimated they needed to meet mission requirements. (AWC 1/ site) Robert Gates terminated the F22 production because of its low return on investments (ROI) for the U.S. taxpayer caused by the change in the U.S. Security and Strategic Environments and the obsolescent nature of the U.S. Department of Defense acquisition and development process leading to very expensive and marginally effective aircraft, which simply was not worth the investment. This essay will explore how the actual cost, including opportunity cost, of F22 capabilities were too expensive and unnecessary in today’s security and strategic environments. It will also expose the obsolete and probably corrupt nature of the Department of Defense weapons procurement process and Secretary Gates attempts to change this process.

The foreign policy strengths for the privatized combat role includes policy flexibility, force agility, and reduced political barriers. Policy flexibility is defined as the variety of options available and the scope in which they can be applied. The resulting collection of choices which may be mapped and compared to other choices can be referred to as the option space. In the case of the military, some of the policy options available can include mission types and the variety of roles from non-combat to combat. Force agility is defined as an armed force’s scalability, physical mobility, and adaptability. Force agility is mostly understood as a tactical level capability but the potential to provide agile capabilities can

The way of reconsidering our defense budget ought to start with recognition that the financial catastrophe and collapse that started in 2007 has changed the context in which, every federal rule should be evaluated. In the area of national security, it is a development as significant as the end of the Cold War and the happenings of 11 September 2001. For the reason that it, and the wider unstable course of globalization that transmit and enlarged it, stand seriously on the preservation of the American national power. Looking back just two or three decades from now, America's economic power and authority is less certain these days than just four years back as is the outlook of our greatest national security asset, our very powerful national security tool: the US dollar.

The Cold War had split the world in two halves and had broken traditional concepts of power. Therefore, it was possible for USSR to be a military superpower and at the same time an economic dwarf. Contrastingly, Japan was an economic giant and militarily irrelevant. The post-Cold War world changes these patterns. On the one hand, the victor of the Cold War (USA) is still the world’s leading superpower, however, its relative military power is steadily diminishing and without a clearly defined enemy, the voices calling for cuts on the US military spending are getting louder. The ISIS and the post 9/11 terrorist threat are merely slowing down this process.

For over 60 years the Forward Deployed Naval Forces (FDNF) in Japan has served as a cornerstone for executing U.S. Maritime Strategies in Asia. From the strategies of Deterrence, Power Projection, and Crisis Response, to the strategies of Littoral Operations and