USJFCOM steps up efforts to organize combined ops.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

The U.S. Joint Forces Command is placing new emphasis on helping unified combatant commanders find better ways to organize multi-service units.

The United States has nine unified combatant commands, which are composed of forces from more than one service. Most are responsible for U.S. military operations in specific regions of the world. Their commanders frequently assemble combined units, called joint task forces, whenever they need a mixture of soldiers, airmen, sailors or Marines to perform a particular mission.

In recent months, for example, U.S. Central Command chief Army Gen. Tommy Franks set up one such force in Afghanistan to oversee most U.S. operations there and another one on the Horn of Africa to coordinate anti-terrorist activities in that region.

Also, in November, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, Army Gen. James T. Hill, consolidated the troops supervising al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into a single joint task force.

Combatant commanders typically establish joint task forces to provide an on-the-scene command-and-control structure in sensitive operations and to give themselves more time to devote to the rest of their sprawling regions, explained Army Col. Arthur M. Bartell, deputy joint force trainer at USJFCOM's Joint Warfighting Center, in Suffolk, Va.

The problem with joint task forces, however, is that they are complicated to set up, according to Army Maj. Gen. Dean Cash, the command's director of joint concept development. First, the force must be assembled, with units selected to accomplish the mission at hand, he told a Pentagon news briefing. Once that is done, the JTF commander then must build his or her staff.

That process can involve "a long lead time," Cash said. It is made more difficult, he said, by the fact that units from different services seldom share the same training or equipment.

To streamline the effort, USJFCOM is testing a concept for a standing joint force headquarters that the Pentagon plans to have embedded in the staff of every combatant commander by fiscal year 2005, Bartell told National Defense.

"The standing joint force headquarters is essentially a command-and-control element, not a separate unit," Bartell said. "It does what joint force headquarters have always done, but it does it better, more efficiently."

The SJFHQ is a team of operational planners and information command-and-control specialists, Bartell said. When the combatant commander decides to launch a JTE the SJFHQ's lob is to help make it happen with a minimum of confusion and delays.

When a JTF is established, the SJFHQ takes over as its...