News From USJFCOM: Newsmakers Profile: Jay Burdon and Ken Rome


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Newsmakers Profile: Jay Burdon and Ken Rome

With the intent to raise awareness of USJFCOM's continuing efforts, this is part of a series of profiles, allowing command subject matter experts to highlight priorities, challenges, and solution paths for the future in their field. The executive director for force generation and the Global Force Management (GFM) Processes & Resources Division chief recently sat down to discuss how U.S. Joint Forces Command works the joint force providing and GFM missions.

By Susy Dodson
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(NORFOLK, Va. - April 27, 2009) -- Military commanders need soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to accomplish the missions assigned to them.

Prior to 2004, each combatant commander who owned forces sourced his own units to fill a supported combatant commander’s particular mission requirement. This time-consuming, stove-piped process worked well during peace time, but with the increased mission requirements of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the process now is stretched to its breaking point.

Enter U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Operations, Planning, Logistics and Engineering Directorate (J3/4). The J3/4 outlined a concept to manage forces on a global level. They put the concept to paper and, working with the Joint Staff, submitted a plan of action to the secretary of Defense in 2004. Within 10 months, the secretary signed the global force management concept into existence, tasking USJFCOM to oversee the process for sourcing conventional joint forces.

Kenneth Rome, executive director for force generation, and Jay Burdon, Global Force Management (GFM) Processes & Resources Division chief, recently sat down to discuss how the command works the joint force providing and GFM missions.

Q: Why do we have the global force management system?
A: Burdon: I think simplistically, global force management is the application of limited assets to seemingly unlimited requirements. In this case, the assets are DoD [Department of Defense] forces and the requirements are the geographic combatant commander’s warfighting needs.

A: Rome: Think of it like a bank account. When there’s lots of money in the bank you don’t worry about writing a few checks, but as you get down to the lower end of your money available, then each check becomes more important to make sure you have the funds to cover it. That’s essentially where we find ourselves. Force management was [designed] to balance the risks and options of using the force across the globe for many different combatant commands at one time.

Q: How has global force management evolved from concept to what global force management is today?
A: Rome: Initially Jay had a team that did a whole lot of stubby pencil work on getting an agreement on the process and getting it briefed to all the senior leaders who had a say in it. Ultimately, the Secretary of Defense approved it back in 2004. Of course there was lots of work to do to make that happen.

A: Burdon: Before we had global force management, there was no written process on how the Department of the Defense determined which force was tasked to meet which requirement. It was a very inefficient and ad hoc approach to identifying the most ready and most capable force to meet a combatant commander’s requirement.

Q: What were your expectations and goals in the early stages of global force management?
A: Rome: The guidance from the Secretary of Defense at the time was to establish a process that would have one organization consider the force requirements from all combatant commanders and develop sourcing options from a global pool of available forces that would best meet the needs of the requesting combatant commander.

A: Burdon: The earliest expectations for global force management, from my perspective, was to create and codify a process for validating a COCOM requirement at the strategic level. In some fashion prioritizing then assigning that requirement to a specific force provider, who performed as an honest broker with authority over a global pool of available forces, to create one stop shopping for conventional warfighting force sourcing recommendations.

A: Rome: As far as goals, I think our goal is also to continue to improve the process so that we automate that as much as possible. You’re not going to take the human and the subjective decisions out of the process. Automation will allow the decision makers to have more time to consider the decisions.

Q: Where do global force management and joint force provision meet? Are they the same? If not, what’s the difference between them?
A: Burdon: Joint force providing is a subset of global force management.

A: Rome: Global force management is the alignment of force assignment, apportionment and allocation. Assignment reflects where the services provide permanently or on a fairly permanent basis, forces to each combatant command. For example the U.S. forces that are on the Korean peninsula are assigned to the commander, U.S. Pacific Command. He owns them, has combatant command authority over them all the time. Allocation is the temporary transfer of forces from one combatant commander (supporting COCOM) to another (supported COCOM) in order to meet operational needs. This temporary allocation of a force must be approved by the SECDEF and it is executed with a deployment order. Apportionment of forces is the identification of specific forces for planning purposes and may or may not be in concert with the assignment of forces.

Q: Gen. Mattis, in his statement to the House Armed Services Committee on March 18 talked about the establishment of a global response force. Can you explain the global response force (GRF) and how it fits into the global force management process?
A: Rome: The global response force is essentially a designation of selected forces that are ready for deployment or very nearly ready for deployment and could respond to emergency or contingency on short notice. Each of the units designated in the global response force has a ready to deploy timeline and most of them are on call to respond within 96 hours, essentially a 911 force

Q: This is part of the global force management (or under it)?
A: Rome: It’s part of the global force. One of the priorities we’ve been given is to keep forces on a rapid response basis, so there are a number of forces with specific capabilities that we’ve been told you should have designated and identified to be ready to respond quickly.

Q: Do they fall under Joint Forces Command or the COCOMs?
A: Rome: Both. A large number of them are under Joint Forces Command because USJFCOM owns most of the conventional forces, but since they do come from all over, they can fall under the command authority of any combatant commander.

Q: How do enabling capabilities like those provided by the Joint Enabling Capabilities Command (JECC) figure into this effort?
A: Rome: The JECC elements are a subset of the global response force. There are provisions for requesting the JECC elements laid out in the GRF execute order.

Here’s a great example, a few years ago there was an earthquake in Pakistan and the combatant commander of Central Command in that case, needed to get some disaster response moving quickly. Specifically, he needed a communication element to support the admiral who was designated as the joint task force (JTF) commander.

Through the JECC process we were able to deploy some JCSE [Joint Communication Support Element] elements on short notice and sent them forward to meet the JTF commanders’ needs. We also sent some public affairs from JPASE [Joint Public Affairs Support Element] forward to help him out. That allowed the JTF commander to stand up his JTF quickly and help the people who were devastated by this earthquake.

Q: What is the Force Management Improvement Project (FMIP) and how has it enhanced global force management?
A: Burdon: We initiated the FMIP effort to formally review the joint force providing process and identify/assess opportunities for near-term, high payoff improvements to efficiency and effectiveness.

Within the first 12 months the FMIP effort, utilizing a full representation of the user community, identified the need for a web based requirements generation, validation, force provider assignment and archiving tool. [We] successfully developed and fielded that capability to significantly improve the efficiency of the force providing process.

The joint capabilities requirements manager (JCRM) tool provides the first consolidated data base of force requirements and is now the designated tool for submitting all force requirements into the GFM process.

The success of this and other FMIP efforts resulted in an expansion of the FMIP tasking by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to create an enduring capability to assess the processes across the entire global force management enterprise to include adaptive planning, joint force providing, joint deployment, joint force employment, joint force redeployment and force reset and generation and execute a continuous process improvement function of those processes.

Q: Is there a process or system in place to identify coalition assets (people) to support efforts in joint operations? Is it part of the global force management process?
A: Burdon: Not currently. We don’t have the visibility over coalition forces or any type of authority or responsibility for those coalition forces to be able to offer them up as possible sourcing solutions.

A: Rome: I would add that we have been able to work with our military representative to NATO to help get their requests for U.S. forces to support the NATO missions aligned with our submission.

Q: What is the future of global force management?
A: Rome: We’ll always be looking to improve the processes, tools, policy and culture of global force management. We’ll work to improve the visibility of data that gives us information on force availability and readiness. That’s the whole purpose, to be proactive, to give the secretary of Defense options and identify for him the range of available options, and the specific recommendation(s) from commander USJFCOM as his “honest broker,” the conventional joint force provider.