The Air Force became the latest service to roll out a new operating concept for the future when Chief of Staff Gen. David W. Allvin unveiled the service’s Force Design last fall. But the Air Force is hardly the only service with a Force Design, and a pressing question for military and civilian leadership is how to stitch them all together.
“We’re all seeing the same threats from the PRC as the pacing threat, and we’re all attempting to modernize to meet that threat,” Commandant of the Marines Corps Gen. Eric Smith said Jan. 15 when he was asked about the Marines’ future efforts to counter the People’s Republic of China.
“We’re all doing it slightly different ways, but the theme is the same—that we have to have longer range, we have to have lower signature, we have to have more lethality, we have to be more distributed and more dispersed,” Smith told reporters at Defense Writers Group event.
Allvin’s Force Design envisions a future in which the Air Force can no longer operate with impunity and must tailor its capabilities to China’s growing capability to target U.S. bases and command centers throughout the Pacific. The service says that its Force Design will be upgraded based on “a continuous cycle of wargaming, modeling and simulation, and strategic assessments.”
“The PRC’s ever-growing capacity of increasingly capable long-range fires—such as ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and attack unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—continues to expand the range and density with which they can threaten friendly forces,” the Air Force’s unclassified summary of its Force Design states. “The character of war has changed—the combination of network-enabled long-range fires, and mass quantities of agile short-range systems, challenges our preferred way of war. The Air Force must transform from what it is today to what it needs to be to compete.”
The Marines’ Force Design, which was made public by their former commandant four years ago, also makes the case for overhauling the military. But it is far more detailed than the one put forward by the Air Force and spells out which weapons the Corps plans to add and which ones leaders contend they no longer need.
Under the Marines’ concept, small units equipped with anti-ship missiles and drones would move from island to island to try to bottle up China’s naval fleet. The Marine plan to fund the transformation with offsetting cuts, which entailed getting rid of all the tanks, eliminating bridging companies, and upping missile batteries. The Marine plan is well underway, though Smith said it has been hindered by delays in acquiring the amphibious warfare ships the Marines need.
“We are going to be in the first island chain,” said Smith, referring to the stretch of territory from Japan to Taiwan, the northern Philippines, and the South China Sea. “What Force Design was all about was creative thinking about the way forward, about the next war, not fighting the last one, because the next war with the PRC is not going to be, if it goes there, is not going to be like any war we fought before.”
The Army, which has touted its new “multi-domain” task forces, and the Navy, which has developed its “Navigation Plan,” have also developed future war plans with China in mind. But while the services seem to agree about the threat, it is less clear how the various visions will work in practice, though the military leaders acknowledge this is vital. “Our success depends on purposeful integration of the Air Force with the Joint Force, Allies, and partners,” the Air Force Force Design summary notes.
To harmonize the disparate service initiatives, the Joint Chiefs of Staff has a classified Joint Warfighting Concept. It also has a Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), which is led by the Vice Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Christopher Grady, and is supposed to establish future requirements for the entire military.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Army Gen. Mark A. Milley thought something more was needed, such as a new “Joint Futures” command, organization, or office that would spur the service’s disparate future war efforts and bring them together. “That organization will help drive these concepts, but also the technologies and describing the operational environment that we’re moving into,” Milley said in June 2023.
Smith suggested that the current system is working for now. “The JWC is something that we all have to fit under, something we all have to contribute to,” said Smith. “We do that through joint wargames, and those are run by the Joint Staff run out of the Pentagon, so we do see how they all fit together.” Joint exercises, he said, also plan a role.
The idea, Smith said, is to put “together the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps, and at the end of that, we do a hot wash and we scrub and see, ‘How did we fit together? Where do we overlap? Where do we maybe have a little bit too much, maybe not enough?’”