HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The Pentagon’s Joint Requirements Oversight Council is set to begin an assessment of the U.S. military’s integrated air-and-missile defense capability gaps as part of a larger effort to develop a joint war-fighting concept and defense strategy, Gen. John Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Aug. 11 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium.
The JROC, which serves as an oversight body on the development of new capabilities and acquisition efforts, approved strategic directives July 1 that will help speed up the acquisition system for four key “force supporting” areas identified as critical to the joint war-fighting concept in development.
Those four focus areas are information advantage, joint command-and-control, fires and contested logistics.
The JROC will be conducting an industry day next month, Hyten said, to brief the four strategic directives within the joint war-fighting concept.
Now, he added, the JROC will focus on an IAMD joint concept, which will include a deep dive into current requirements and capabilities and an effort to identify gaps.
The effort to review capability gaps will run through the fall, according to Hyten.
“We do have one significant challenge, a challenge that gives us difficulty in fully fulfilling what we need to do as a JROC,” he added, “and that is we don’t have really good campaign-level modeling across all domains including space and cyber, which shows how all these things fit together across the board.”
To address that problem, Hyten said he has also signed a requirements document calling for the Pentagon to build these campaign models “so that we can look at how these things play together,” and “see how all those pieces work together.”
Additionally, the IAMD strategic directive will feed into the new administration’s Missile Defense Review.
While the previous administration’s Missile Defense Review, Nuclear Posture Review and National Defense Strategy were conducted separately, Hyten said this time the MDR and the Nuclear Posture Review will be an integrated part of the National Defense Strategy.
“I think that’s the most important piece of the puzzle because in the past the Nuclear Posture Review has been separate from the Missile Defense Review, and it was very difficult to align them together for a singular message,” Hyten said. “My desire is to do an integrated review.”
The JROC will work to align all of its strategic directives, to include IAMD, with the development of the new National Defense Strategy, he said.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
