December 02, 2016
Why the Trump Administration Should Adopt a Mission-Oriented Combatant Command Structure
It’s often said that to determine someone’s priorities, take a look at how they spend their time and their money. Organizations are no different. Glancing at an organizational chart does not just reveal reporting relationships – it depicts the organization’s focus. In the U.S. military, the combatant commands organize time (planning) and money (resources). They currently reflect an immediate post-Cold War institutional shift toward a regional orientation that does not match modern needs. Chairman Dunford argued this spring that future “conflicts are very quickly going to spread across multiple combatant commanders, geographic boundaries and functions” and the current planning process is muddled and does not prioritize threats. The Unified Command Plan (UCP) should be updated to reflect the priorities of the U.S. military by disbanding the geographic combatant commands and replacing them with mission-oriented commands.
Read the full article at The National Interest.
More from CNAS
-
Why There Are No Game-Changing Weapons for Ukraine
Germany has become the second-biggest contributor of military aid to Ukraine after the United States, but you wouldn’t know it by following the debate in Berlin. In a replay o...
By Franz-Stefan Gady
-
To Avoid AI Catastrophes, We Must Think Smaller
These incidents are not theoretical, nor are they projections of long-term dangers; rather, these AI tools are already presenting tangible threats to individual health and wel...
By Josh Wallin
-
For Replicator to Work, the Pentagon Needs to Directly Help with Production
Today’s innovation ecosystem alone cannot achieve the necessary production scale, especially for the less commercially viable classes of systems relevant in the Indo-Pacific....
By Andrew Metrick
-
Sharper: Campaigning and the National Defense Strategy
The United States faces the unprecedented challenge of simultaneously deterring large-scale conventional aggression by two nuclear-armed powers while also managing other threa...
By Philip Sheers, Molly Campbell & Anna Pederson