Joint Force 2025 Research Paper

The volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous future operating environment of Joint Force 2025 demands adaptive people, optimized technology, and modernized procurement processes. First and foremost, to ensure adaptive Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines the military must create and utilize modern and effective talent management as its most critical capability. Secondly, continuing advances in technology including artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing, and man-machine interfacing require optimized use of technology to defeat our adversaries. Finally, to support both talent management and acquire optimized technology, the legacy procurement processes of the Department of Defense must be modernized and streamlined. The CJCS, General

Optimized application of this technology represents the second critical capability of Joint Force 2025. The term exponential embodies a difficult concept to grasp, but author Tom Friedman illuminated it when he compared how the automobile industry would look if it improved at the same rate as information technology. If the pace of change was the same, then the modern version of a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle “would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents.” For Joint Force 2025, this rapid progress means that “technology evolution also includes the application of more capable advancements in smaller, more complex, integrated systems. Nano robotics, “smart dust”, and swarming Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are all part of this evolving category.” Rapid improvement of information technology empowers our adversaries and non-state actors and threatens traditional U.S. technological superiority. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work noted that “our forces face the very real possibility of arriving in a future combat theater and finding themselves facing an arsenal of advanced, disruptive technologies that could turn our previous technological advantage on its head.” Potential disadvantages of attempted development of optimal technologies include the fact that the services may choose incorrectly and pursue technologies and ideas that do not develop in productive ways. Cancelled Army systems such as the Future Combat System cost over one billion dollars and did not result in the breakthrough technologies sought. However, the advantages of successful innovation, including increased combat effectives and reduced casualties, far exceed the risks. The danger of cheap, easily acquired, advanced technologies captures the operational risk and future challenges