The U S Department Of Defense S Planning Process

This report describes the current defense planning process used by the U.S. Department of Defense, with a focus on how scenarios are developed and employed to support defense planning.

This is the pilot in a series of reports on strategic planning conducted within the U.S. Department of Defense. It focuses on the strategic planning responsibilities of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because planning at that level provides the critical nexus between the strategic direction provided by the National Command Authorities and its implementation by the unified combatant commands and military departments. The authors' thorough understanding of the statutory requirements for strategic planning and the interactions between the Chairman's complex strategic planning process and other key DOD planning systems enables them to explicate today's strategic planning challenges and offer insightful recommendations. Strategic planning in the post-Cold War era has proven to be exceptionally problematic. The plethora of national and international tensions that the east-west confrontation of the Cold War in large measure subdued combine now to create a world replete with diverse challenges to U.S. interests. Equally disturbing is the fact that these challenges are not as clearly defined and easily articulated as was the monolithic Soviet threat. The authors point out that the Cold War provided inherent stability in U.S. strategic planning and that the basic elements of a strategic military plan evolved over time. They go on to argue that the elimination of the National Military Strategy Document and the abandonment of the Base Case Global Family of Operation Plans amounted to recision of the Chairman's strategic plan, and that nothing has been developed to take its place.

Strategic planning is a challenging, but necessary, endeavor for any organization, small or large. For the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) it is a sacred responsibility to the Nation. President Eisenhower said in 1958, ?No military task is of greater importance than the development of strategic plans which relate our revolutionary new weapons and force deployments to national security objectives.? In spite of its attention to strategic planning, DoD has not enjoyed great success in this area. For example, in 1985, a congressional staff report characterized DoD? s strategic planning in the following manner: Inattention to strategic planning has led to numerous deficiencies, including a lack of clarity of DoD? s strategic goals. The stated goals are vague and ambiguous. In an organization as large as DoD, the clear articulation of overall strategic goals can play an important role in achieving a coordinated effort toward these goals by the various components and individuals within them. Clarity of goals can enhance unity and integration. DoD loses the benefit of this unifying mechanism through its failure to clarify its strategic goals. To correct this probli and other strategic planning deficiencies, DoD needs to establish and maintain a well-designed and highly interactive strategic planning process. Following up on this staff finding, Congress, in the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 (GNA), prescribed for DoD a hierarchical process for strategic direction, strategic planning, and contingency planning for the U.S. Armed Forces. This process was designed to improve strategic planning by harmonizing strategic direction and planning with the development of defense programs that would enable DoD to achieve its strategic goals. It was also designed to integrate and rationalize the strategic and operational planning conducted by the combatant Commanders-in-Chief (CINCs). To these ends, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) was assigned key and specific responsibilities. Since passage of the GNA, which is now codified in Title 10, United States Code (10 USC), the JCS and then the Chairman have developed, impliented, and revised specific processes for fulfilling most of these statutory responsibilities.

Defence Planning as Strategic Fact provides and elaborates on an "upstream" focus on the variegated organizational, political and conceptual practices of military, civilian administrative and political leaderships involved in defence planning, offering an important security and strategic studies supplement to the traditional "downstream" focus on the use of force. The book enables the reader to engage with the role of ideas in defence planning, of organizational processes and biases, path dependencies and administrative dynamics under the pressures of continuously changing domestic and international constraints. The chapters show how defence planning must be seen as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies – that it is a strategic fact of its own which merits particular practical and scholarly attention. As defence planning creates the conditions behind every peace upheld or broken and every war won or lost, Defence Planning as Strategic Fact will be of great use to scholars of defence studies, strategic studies, and military studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Defence Studies.