USJFCOM: Leading the U.S. Military Transformation


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U.S. Joint Forces Command, U.S. Strategic Command develop new partnership

U.S. Joint Forces Command and U.S. Strategic Command are working together on an "All Things Missile" initiative designed to consolidate air and missile defense training solutions across the services.

By Susy Dodson
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(NORFOLK, Va. - May 6, 2009) -- The Joint Warfighting Center (JWFC) at U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) is partnering with the Joint Exercises and Training Directorate (J7) at U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) to develop a program that consolidates integrated air and missile defense training solutions across all military services.

Pat McVay, the director of USSTRATCOM J7, said this partnership, will lead the effort called "All Things Missile" (ATM) to build on their current mission of providing global deterrence capabilities and aligning Defense Department efforts to combat the threat of weapons of mass destruction world wide.

"Right now, we have a somewhat disjointed capability to train multiple mission areas - missile warning, missile defense and feeder missile warnings. Separate capabilities were developed over different periods of time," McVay said.

McVay emphasized that ATM is in the requirements development stage and, at this point, the goal is to identify requirements and establish a program to solidify training capability.

Gregory Knapp, USJFCOM JWFC executive director, said the command will work with USSTRATCOM to define needed operational architecture, training requirements, a solutions process, and modeling and simulation.

"We'll go into… what is actually required to create a distributed training environment to certain training audiences, to train to certain tasks," Knapp said. "In the end what [US]STRATCOM and [US]JFCOM will be able to do will simulate any training audience against the ATM task set and train whenever we need wherever we need."

According to Knapp, ATM is one of several programs for the joint community to undertake.

"It's really the joint integrated level of training, the operational level, where you really stretch end-to-end and the fact that we now have a training environment where we can have a common problem set, simulate a very diverse and distributed [environment] to the training audience allows us to really make sure our end-to-end processes are fully understood and we're ready for any task that comes up," Knapp said.

McVay said the ATM community of interest is on an aggressive timeline. Its next step is to agree on training requirements then move toward technical requirements with a fully operational capability by the summer of 2011.

"We've spent a lot of time developing partnerships with [U.S] Joint Forces Command, [U.S] Northern Command, [U.S] Pacific Command, Missile Defense Agency and all the services," McVay said. "This is important and I think it's going to provide a tremendous capability once we get it done and it's going to have some tremendous operational value."

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