The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently released a document which will help drive future joint capabilities. It's called the "Capstone Concept for Joint Operations" version 3.0, and it's a very, very interesting read. (Side note: isn't it cute how the Joint Staff gives documents version numbers as if they were computer programs?)
"The CCJO discusses broad national security challenges that likely will require the employment of the joint forces," said Navy Rear Adm. Dan W. Davenport, director, joint concept development & experimentation for USJFCOM. "We'll use this document to guide the study, development, experimentation and evaluation of joint concepts and capabilities."
The national security challenges addressed in the CCJO include: winning the nation's wars; deterring potential adversaries; developing cooperative security; defending the homeland; and responding to civil crises.
These challenges form the context for exploring how the joint force will operate in the future. The CCJO states that, "Above all, joint forces in the future will need to be able to apply combat power in more varied, measured and discriminate ways than ever before."
CCJO describes the operational art of employing the future joint force as the arranging and balancing of operations to meet the specific situation, with continuous assessment and adaptation as needed to produce the desired results.
The document talks about conventional and irregular war (p. 8), but it dropped the use of the terms "catastrophic" and "disruptive", the other two forms of expected future threats identified in Rumsfeld era-documents. Another thing that caught my eye was that this concept actually endorses the Boyd "OODA loop" idea (see bottom of page 12, footnote 14), which has been largely absent from formal military concepts outside of the Marine Corps. Bad side, the document echos the popular rhetoric on "terrorist WMDs" (p. 4):
The potential proliferation among a growing roster of states and nonstate actors of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, is particularly dangerous, and could significantly complicate any future U.S. use of military force. Nuclear weapons will remain one potentially existential threat to the Nation.
Well, I guess I can't argue with the nuclear part too much, but I still don't see any "growing roster of... nonstate actors" when it comes to WMDs. At least they don't use the term "rogue nation" anywhere. I know you may be tempted to think this is just another Pentagonese document, filling a space on a bookshelf and not worth much else, but take a read, especially you Clausewitz types. I think you'll enjoy it - it has some distinct differences from the old regime and it reads well.
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