Page 18 - Williams Foundation Integrated Force Design Seminar

Designing the Integrated Force: How to Define and Meet the Challenge?

integration. Could you describe the approach used in the seminar, which might anticipate how this
would be done in practice?

Blackburn: The hypotheses were put together as a set of questions to give a focus for the discussion, and each
of the presenters were asked to do two things.

One was to talk about their particular area and how it's going to be a part of integrated force, but secondly,
just test the hypotheses, or propose other ones if they thought they were better.
If we can agree a simple list of hypotheses, then we've got a really good starting point upon which to design
the force. If we can't, we end up having an argument right down in the technical detail levels.

That was the intent.

The other different thing about this seminar was that I was able to meet with the three service representatives
and the joint staff together to discuss what we were trying to achieve, what the hypotheses were, what the
question sets were, and so the presentations you saw from the three services and from the VCDF here, were
not people just coming into a seminar and giving their separate views.

They actually set down as a team and discussed it, to make sure the way they were looking at the problem
and what they were going to present was coordinated, and to some degree integrated.
This normally doesn't happen at seminars. People get invited, and they all come up with a set of PowerPoint
slides that usually their staff has produced for them, and they all give the standard story.

This didn't happen in this case.

Question: For sure, what you usually get is what Piaget referred to as parallel play?

Blackburn: That is right and we wanted here was serious consideration of how we might actually design an
integrated joint force to get the full combat effects which force modernization could deliver.

In this case, we chose one stars to make the presentations.

Why did we do that?

When you get three stars, or senior officers, making presentations, everyone sits there and listens, but the folks
who actually have to design the future force and lead the teams that are doing it are the one stars and the
colonels, the O-6s.

You can see very strongly each of our service chiefs have a very strong future focus. Our Chief of Navy and
the materials which he's been writing, our Chief of Air Force talking about the change in the whole way of
culture we have to do this, and our Chief of Army driving his force forward.

When you've got 240 people in the audience, and these are by and large, apart from the industry folks, O-
7s, one stars and below, they collectively are the ones that are going to have to do the hard work on doing
the design under the guidance of the senior officers.

What we were trying to do for the 240 people in that room was have a conversation at peer level. In other
words, it's peer-to-peer conversation. We as a team are going to have to address this.
That's why we decided not to ask the service chiefs to speak. At the conferences, we'll get the service chiefs,
because they think it's important to have the head of the organization speak. We think it's important to have a
Second Line of Defense

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