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Information operations as a core competency
Joint Force Quarterly, Dec, 2004 by Christopher J. Lamb
A Trained and Educated Career Workforce
In the past, each service developed specialists in information disciplines to meet service-specific requirements. There was little attention to integrating IO on the joint level. In addition, the increasingly complex technology associated with EW, PSYOP, and CNO tended to isolate the specialists who practiced these disciplines, hindering integration of core IO capabilities. However, the five capabilities are increasingly interdependent, as noted above. For maximum effect, they must be integrated in plans and operations by a set of professionals who understand all five disciplines. Accordingly, the IO roadmap endorses professional information forces with supporting training and education.
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* An IO career force composed of planners and capability specialists should be established to provide combatant commanders a cadre of experts who can assist with integrating information into deliberate and contingency plans. Secondly, the career force designation will allow capability specialists to explore other core capabilities so they can better integrate them into operations. The career force will break cultural norms. Isolated communities of core capability personnel will have to think of themselves as part of the larger IO community.
* The career force includes the designation of service and joint billets to provide IO opportunities up to senior executive or flag level. This should ensure that experts occupy key jobs on combatant commander and other staffs. To address the persistent but not well documented problem of poor promotion and retention of core capability professionals, the roadmap mandates actions to monitor accession, retention, and promotion in the career force. Once documented and understood, these deficiencies can be corrected.
* Joint and service training should be aligned to support the career force. A roadmap survey of existing joint and service training revealed widely divergent approaches to IO and insufficient appreciation of it in the most junior and senior officer ranks. There was consensus that officers should be introduced to IO earlier (O-4s and below) and again as general officers responsible for integrating IO with the other warfighting disciplines.
* Joint Forces Staff College is assigned the lead for joint training and has been given additional resources to develop a standardized joint IO curriculum on the field grade and general/flag levels, including preparing and presenting an expanded joint information planner's course. The college is encouraged to collaborate with service schools to integrate joint IO into curricula.
* A DOD Center of Excellence will present graduate-level, full-spectrum IO core and specialty programs and support joint doctrine development through analysis and research. The private sector is creating technologies and techniques central to several core capability areas. It is critical that the Department have a center of expertise that can stay abreast of these developments and help the military absorb ideas that will improve information capabilities. The Center of Excellence will encourage development of innovative IO concepts and tools and help introduce them for use in experiments and exercises.
