Joint exercise stresses info sharing, delivery: Millennium Challenge war-fighting experiment is looking ahead to 2007.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

The large-scale combat-experimentation drill known as Millennium Challenge 2002--which gets under way this month--is based on the notion that inter-service and interagency information sharing is key for the United States to win future wars.

The experiment is managed by the Joint Forces Command, in Suffolk, Va., and its planning has been in the works for the past three years. Officials in charge of MC'02 said that the idea is to better prepare U.S. joint forces for the type of conflicts that are likely to occur in the 2007 timeframe.

"As we learn things today about warfare in the year 2007, we are fully prepared to take that learned activity--or that learned response--and that technology and implement them quickly as opposed to going into a linear developmental process," Lt. Gen. B.B. Bell, the commander of the III Army Corps, at Fort Hood, Texas, told National Defense.

"We'll pluck things from experiments that work, and work well, and bring them aboard even perhaps earlier than 2007."

Air Force Gen. James Smith, the head planner of Millennium Challenge 2002, said that the experiment is not meant to have an impact on the acquisition process. "We didn't want Millennium Challenge to become a QDR [Quadrennial Defense Review] debate," he said in an interview.

If any technologies used in MC'02 turn out to be more useful than expected, those initiatives will be forwarded to the Joint Staff, so they can be considered for additional funding, Smith said.

For the most part, he said, the military services will use the technologies that are available today or will be in the pipeline during the next five years. The focus, he noted, is on "how we can do war fighting better with what we've got.

"I suspect it will lead to some conclusion on where we ought to go in the acquisition process to make sure we're developing interoperable systems.

However, Smith noted that it's natural for observers to expect to hear about new technologies and hardware. The Millennium Challenge exercise often is mentioned in connection with the Pentagon's popular buzzword, "transformation."

"When we were talking about transformation, we were really asking ourselves, how do we leverage the information revolution to improve the way we do joint planning and execution," he said.

"I would like to be able to know more about the adversary than he knows about himself," Smith said. "Which means that I got to know more than just the JIPB (Joint Intelligent Preparation of the Battlefield), and I've got to understand that in the context of the social environment, the political, the economic, information, infrastructure."

Since the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon has realized that it needs to have the capacity to break down information stovepipes and understand what is going on in the world, other than in military terms, according to Smith.

Further, he said, "I would like to be able to integrate U.S. national power and coalition power against that adversary." If information is coordinated in a coherent fashion, "where we're using the right tool at the right time, [we can] create the effect that we want, pre-crisis, during the crisis, and for the end state."

That approach is known in military parlance as effects-based operations.

"It was very clear to us early on, that to do that level of work, you have to have a standing organization, a standing entity that does that full time," said Smith. "We realized you can't fundamentally change the way you do military operations, unless you focus on the interagency and look at a new way of interagency cooperation and sharing."

The Joint Interagency Coordination Group is the agency that was stood up to manage the information sharing, "so we can have an impact on these non-traditional threats before they attack...