Rewriting Jointness

US Joint Forces Command is getting away from using the term “interdependency” to articulate the US military’s vision for jointness and instead prefers to use “a comprehensive approach.”” Interdependency was “overused” and “taken to extreme,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Charles Shugg, commander of JFCOM’s Joint Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center of Excellence, said during a presentation at the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement’s Sensor-to-Shooter conference April 1 in Arlington, Va. Taken to the extreme, Shugg said, in the sense that people were viewing interdependency as meaning that everyone had to be dependent on everyone else. That’s “going the wrong way,” he said. Conversely the command believes that speaking in terms of a comprehensive approach implies reducing redundancy while still having more than one way to provide “the same effect” with connected yet independent systems, he said. A nice example of a model for the comprehensive approach is the nuclear triad, he said. No leg of the triad is dependent on another to be successful.