News From USJFCOM: Newsmaker Profile: Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Crutchfield, JCOA Director, and Danish Army Brig Gen. Jørgen Hansen-Nord, JALLC Commander


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Newsmakers Profile: Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Crutchfield, JCOA Director, and Danish Army Brig Gen. Jørgen Hansen-Nord, JALLC Commander

USJFCOM's Joint Center for Operational Analysis (JCOA) in Suffolk, Va., and NATO's Allied Command Transformation's Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre (JALLC) in Monsanto, Portugal, have been working together, harvesting the best ideas from both U.S. and coalition forces. USJFCOM Public Affairs' Jacob Boyer recently sat down with JCOA's Director, Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Crutchfield, and Danish Army Brig Gen. Jørgen Hansen-Nord, the recently departed JALLC commander, to discuss the evolution of this relationship.

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By Jacob Boyer
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(SUFFOLK, Va. - March 26, 2010) -- After U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and NATO's Allied Command Transformation (ACT) went from being commanded by a single U.S. general officer in 2009 to each being commanded by an American and a French general officer, respectively, both USJFCOM's Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis and ACT's French Air Force Gen. Stéphane Abrial looked for opportunities to continue and expand areas where the two commands shared mutual benefits.

One key area was sharing lessons learned between U.S. and NATO, harvesting the best ideas from both U.S. and coalition forces.

USJFCOM's Joint Center for Operational Analysis (JCOA) here and ACT's Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre (JALLC) in Monsanto, Portugal, worked together closely in the past and recently realized new economies according to each organizations' leaders.

Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Crutchfield, JCOA director, and Danish Army Brig Gen. Jørgen Hansen-Nord, JALLC commander, sat down recently to discuss the evolution of this relationship. This month, Hansen-Nord is transitioning from JALLC to NATO Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium, to serve as the director of capability management.

Hansen-Nord: Our relationship has improved considerably over the last two years, not only because of a personal relationship, but the institutional relationship, the kinds of resources and the emphasis Gen. Mattis put on this. He not only said that we would coordinate and cooperate, but he also allocated resources, especially through JCOA, to support us. That's a huge, huge effort and benefit for us. My staff and I benefit on a daily basis, but it goes much farther than that because, through us, NATO's 28 nations benefit from what you do in the U.S. That's a tremendous support to NATO. Not everybody realizes this. Whenever we get to go out together and have discussions, whenever I brief around the world, I always mention the U.S. support to NATO through JCOA.

Interviewer: Can you go a little more in depth into how the two organizations work together?

Crutchfield: The two organizations are nearly identical. We do the same thing. That makes it so much easier. Jørgen's organization - JALLC - does it from the NATO standpoint. JCOA is for U.S. forces joint lessons learned. Because of the charter that I have, and because the United States is part of the NATO alliance, it only makes sense that what I do is shared through what Jørgen does. We have a common interest.

That's a professional thing. Jørgen mentioned the personal side of it, too. We're great friends and we've developed a relationship over the past two years. More important than that, I believe the two of us - through his leadership and through mine - have established a way that is procedural between the two organizations to work together. No matter who's sitting in these two seats, it will continue to improve and strengthen. That's very important to point out.

How do the sharing of lessons learned benefits us? One of the things we still wrestle with is making sure that when the U.S. has lessons learned, or any country in the alliance has lessons learned, they can't be classified so that only a select few or only one nation can benefit. We fight together. We're fighting and dying together. I don't care what flag you wear on your shoulder, we are fighting and dying together, so it only makes sense that we share information to prevent relearning or not learning the same lessons. So we've got to get better as a coalition at sharing information amongst ourselves so we're not learning and relearning the same things.

Hansen-Nord: Having to relearn. Having to pay the price of relearning.

Crutchfield: It's paid in blood in some cases. It's that important.

Hansen-Nord: We are both professionals. We have been there. But we also have the very strong leadership of Gen. Mattis, who most certainly has been there, has seen what it takes and has seen the cost of not looking into lessons learned by others who went before. He's very strong in conveying that he doesn't want any commander moving into theater without having looked into what his predecessor experienced and learned. That commander doesn't need to relearn the bad experience. He needs to learn the good experience, because lessons learned are not just about making mistakes, they're also about what works and focusing on what works.

Crutchfield: I want to point out a few things that the two organizations are doing that are examples of that focus. Number one: We resourced a permanent liaison officer (LNO) to JALLC positioned in JCOA. There's only one reason for that LNO to exist. He does one thing: Act as Gen. Hansen-Nord's liaison officer inside JCOA. It is strictly sourced and paid for, and the function of that position is to be the JCOA LNO to JALLC. That paid huge dividends.

Hansen-Nord: We have a representative paid for by the U.S. into JCOA and we use him as a liaison into U.S. Joint Forces Command. We are in touch with him almost daily. My analysts and project teams coordinate with him. They share whatever we have with him and ask him questions like: "Do you have anything from the U.S. that is releasable to NATO in this particular area that we can benefit from?" This is a two-way street. I don't do anything at all that I cannot share with the U.S. because I am NATO and the U.S. is part of the ownership of NATO.

Interviewer: Are you at the point where you can look at each other's databases?

Crutchfield: A point that may go unnoticed is that a lot of times people think, "What is JCOA sharing with NATO?" That's how we think. We think that we have all the ideas, but we don't. I can tell you for a fact that I get just as much out of JALLC. In fact, I take his lessons and we are now putting them through U.S. channels to get them out to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. That needs to be highlighted: It is a two-way street, not a one-way street.

Another way that our organizations are strengthening our work and our resolve to work together is through the number of joint studies that we're doing. I say "joint" in the sense that I'm not talking about an afterthought. I'm not talking about JALLC doing a study and giving it to us to say, "What do you think?" I'm talking about a study that was developed from the ground up with the two organizations working together. In all cases since I've been here, JALLC is in the lead if it's a NATO-focused study, and it should be that way. I should provide support to him. Likewise, if I am doing a U.S. lessons learned study and I would like to have someone give me a different perspective on it, he would do the same for me, especially in Afghanistan. Since I've been here, we have done several studies.

Hansen-Nord: We went to Afghanistan together in late September, but before that we went to brief the NATO Military Committee. We took a considerable number of questions from them and they were surprised and really appreciative of the fact that we could go there, stand before them, and say, "This is what we do. This is not what we just talk about. This is what we do on a daily basis." The Military Committee - the military representatives from all 28 nations - said, "Wow. We need to do more of this."

Then the two of us went to Afghanistan together to kick off a study we released three or four weeks ago on the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) lessons learned process: How does it work? How does ISAF do its lessons learned process? How does the process actually work? We did that together as a joint team because it is quite important. We went to ISAF together and said, "We are coming your way, and this is what we want to do and why we need to do it."

Crutchfield: It was a JALLC-led study and it was built from the ground up. We provided the support that JALLC needed and it worked well. That's not the first time we've done that. That's the most recent one. We're talking about another ISAF command and control study that hasn't kicked off yet. We're just in the planning phases of it now. I will provide the same amount of support for that.

Hansen-Nord: We're lining it up. It's in the works. It's actually progressing already. We've had a series of video-teleconferences with ISAF, SHAPE and ACT. It's lined up, and we'll have a deployment to Afghanistan for six to eight weeks this spring. Your guys who are in Afghanistan will be members of the team there. It's not just talk, talk, talk. It actually happens.

Crutchfield: The third way I think this partnership works and is strengthening is in how we give back to organizations - no matter what country they're from - our ideas and sharing of lessons learned. That is done through a couple of ways. One: JALLC sponsors and hosts a NATO lessons learned conference every year. U.S. lessons learned agencies and directorates are a part of that. JALLC invites them and they come. Of course, JCOA is a big part of that. The year before last, I went. On the reverse side of that, JCOA also sponsored a joint lessons learned conference here. JALLC was a very big part of the structure of that. I think those are the three things that we have both tried to do in the time that we have been in charge of our organizations. I believe that there is much more left to do.

Hansen-Nord: As far as products are concerned, I have been authorized to and do release all my analysis reports. They go directly to member nations through official channels. I make sure that JCOA gets the copy directly from me to have access to what I do. You also have a link to the NATO database, and we have a link to yours. It's quite practical. There's a lot of hands on.

Interviewer: Is there anything you can point to that's made its way back? Something you've discovered in lessons learned that you can see in the field that the coalition is doing or continuing to do?

Crutchfield: I will tell you about one in the process of moving forward. That is ISAF lessons learned. I know NATO and ISAF are using some of the ideas in the report. I know that, because I have people there forward telling me this. They're in the process now of developing some of the ideas that came out of that report on how to structure NATO and ISAF lessons learned in Afghanistan, both internally to the country - sharing amongst the regions - and also sharing lessons learned in the country and getting them back to the member nations to train formations before they come into country. I do know they're doing that and I do know a lot of it came from that study.

Hansen-Nord: It works this way: You have the initial phase in which you formulate a requirement. You have a problem you want somebody to look into because the problem is too big for you, so you call in the experts. Our organizations are the experts. We look at the really difficult issues that the commands out there cannot solve themselves. These are critical, difficult, complicated issues that take a long time to analyze. We go and analyze it. We spend a lot of resources at really digging into the root causes of problems. We come up with reports that recommend what to do and what to fix. These aren't "remember to fill up your magazine" types of recommendations. We're looking at doctrine, command and control issues, and procedures. At the operational and joint level, that's what we're looking at. You don't normally fix that day-to-day. It takes a lot of time.

When we hand over our report recommendations, then comes the really challenging part, which is the staffing and approval of our recommendations and actually putting our recommendations into action. We have seen that increase to where the process now works as intended.

Recommendations, even though they are difficult, we agree, decide and implement. That implementation is actually well under way in a very systematic way. ACT and SHAPE take our recommendations on our projects. Maybe 95 percent of our recommendations in NATO are being implemented now. Some of them are easy to spot. Some of them take long iterations.

I'll tell you that our support to the training of ISAF - we support training of the ISAF headquarters, the ISAF Joint Command three-star headquarters, the regional commands and the provincial reconstruction teams - over the last 2 1/2 years working with the training institutions has been much, much better. We have a more focused training regime in place today than we had 2 1/2 years ago. That benefits all of our colleagues who have to go into theater. We keep monitoring, analyzing and improving from iteration to iteration. There's a lot of improvement going on.

But how tangible is an adjustment of doctrine? You can take a technical or tactical issue and you can see change today or tomorrow. But when you're looking at doctrine or strategy or concepts, the changes may not seem very tangible but they can have far-reaching implications.

Crutchfield: That's a very good point. Speaking for JCOA, one of the hardest things for us to do is measure the effectiveness of the work we do. It's very difficult. I think General Hansen-Nord is absolutely right. I do not believe for one minute that the work we do is not being used and is not valuable. It's sometimes hard to measure the tangible aspects of it, though. I do know there are things out there that will lead us to believe that the work that we did was important. There are also things out there that will lead us to believe that if we hadn't done the work, those things wouldn't have changed. But it is very difficult to measure everything across the board. Some things are easier to measure than others.

I'll give you an example of one that is very easy to measure: training. Any time that we make recommendations to training, it's very easy to see, because they either put it in the training or they don't put it in the training. It's very easy to measure. There have been things that have come out of both JALLC and JCOA reports in training that I know for a fact have been used. One example is the JCOA study, Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan. That is in the USJFCOM Joint Warfighting Center mission rehearsal exercise training. The study's findings were used in the 101st Airborne Division's training. I can see it, so I can measure it.

Going back to what General Hansen-Nord said, I don't think for one minute that just because we can't see it and touch it, that it is not valuable, because I know that it is.

Interviewer: Are lessons being implemented into training at the NATO Joint Warfare Centre in Stavanger, Norway?

Hansen-Nord: We support every training event for ISAF with an analysis capability. We do not analyze the training. We analyze the effect of the training. You can analyze a training event - "Was this a good event?" - but that's not my business. I analyze the long-term effect of the training. That's where we make recommendations: "You need to include this," "you need to make sure these procedures are taught" or "you need to bring in experts from this particular field." That is the way we improve training.

Interviewer: How often are you in contact with people in the field, including Afghanistan?

Hansen-Nord: On a daily basis. Tony and I both have liaison officers at ISAF.

Crutchfield: I have three people in Afghanistan, and one of them sits right there with the JALLC LNO to ISAF. Once a week, I have a staff call with them. But every day, my organization is in contact with them.

Hansen-Nord: Our guys are there and they interact on a daily basis. My guy interacts with ISAF headquarters because he is in the headquarters, making sure they understand what we do, which is quite important in a staff headquarters because personnel rotate every six, nine or 12 months, whereas you and I go out there year after year after year. My guy relays to the headquarters and also provides reachback to our resources, enlisting whatever the headquarters needs: analytical or research support. We provide that by reachback, directly or indirectly through JCOA. The network really supports our colleagues out there in the battlefield.

I think if you were to look at that in another perspective, we present a very good business case of how we work together. It really works.

Interviewer: What's next as far as projects together?

Crutchfield: The command and control project is really the five-meter target. That's a big project for ISAF. That is a JALLC study that General Hansen-Nord's team is putting together. I'll support that, because it's ISAF and NATO and we provide the support there. For studies, that's what's next.

What I believe that's still left to do is build a joint coalition lessons learned community of interest. That is where all the organizations, from top to bottom, from every U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine lessons learned entity, all the lessons learned organizations of coalition nations, JCOA, and JALLC, come together as a community of interest on a whole, worldwide. Let's say Afghanistan's not the priority anymore. The community of interest idea shouldn't go away because we don't have ISAF one day. I think that's where we need to go. We need to develop that community of interest. The best way I describe it is a NATO lessons learned community of interest that exists whether we're at war or at peace.

I don't think that exists now. I think we share all the things that we do, but I believe it needs to be solidified more and I don't think we're there yet.

Hansen-Nord: We are not. I like your phrase, but we call it the lessons learned "network." There are a lot of guys out there - staff officers who have been posted to lessons learned staff positions - and most of them have very little background or training in the lessons learned area. That is not optimal. What we've done over the last year-and-a-half or so is establish a lessons learned staff officer course in Sweden that we offer to all NATO headquarters and commands, NATO member nations and NATO partner nations.

This is a five-day intensive course taking the staff officer and giving him a deeper understanding of what he's supposed to do and what the tools of the trade are: "This is how the process works," "This is your role. This is how we're going to do it. Look out for these traps and benefits. We ran this course with headquarters activity in the lead and analyst and teacher support from JCOA, JALLC and the Joint Warfare Centre. That is a community of interest effort to build a much better basis for making the lessons learned process work.

We had three iterations of the course last year with 76 officers going through it, and it's improving from iteration to iteration. We're going to have three more courses this year. The ambition is to run three courses a year to support our colleagues so they actually get the tools of the trade. That is a great enterprise.

Then we built a network of everybody we can identify out there in nations, headquarters and staffs: "You are a lessons learned type. Come to us because we can help you." That is the initial state of the community of interest.

Crutchfield: That's where I think we need to continue to improve. If I could look out a few years, that's where I would like to see us. I think these efforts are going to help us get there.

Hansen-Nord: Lessons learned is hard work. It takes a lot of work and command attention to actually make the decisions and implement the changes. I feel, having worked in the area since 2007, that there is a growing appetite. There's a growing understanding of the need. Everyone is saying, "We need to learn the lessons."

Now the hard work is how to actually do it. Earlier this month I established we call the JALLC Advisory and Training Team, which is a small team that is dedicated full-time to travel to NATO headquarters, commands, entities, centers of excellence, nations - wherever they need our support - and help them understand the process. We help them establish their own organizations, processes and tools, or whatever it takes to strengthen our community. This is a dedicated effort to help our colleagues out there who need that support.

One thing that we alluded to: Lessons learned is not all ISAF. ISAF is one operation, but we should be careful and look out for "presentism." Everything that we learn in ISAF does not apply to the next operation. It does not necessarily apply to the long-term concepts and doctrine. We need to learn from the operations that will make life easier for our colleagues in the field now, but we should also learn the right lessons for the longer term. Because the only thing we know for sure is the next operation is going to be different. It's not going to be ISAF all over again. ISAF is not Iraq. It's going to be a new environment with new complicating situations and issues. Everything is going to change. We must make sure that we learn the right things for ISAF and the right things for the longer term.

Crutchfield: I couldn't agree with that more, and that's what I was trying to point out. Whether it's ISAF or some other command structure from some other operation in the future, this community of interest would exist no matter what operation is going on. This community would work.

Hansen-Nord: There's a challenge here because you cannot always just deliver today's news, good or bad. When you are a strategic commander like Gen. Mattis or Gen. Abrial, you have the understanding that these lessons are important for ISAF today and tomorrow, but you also have to look out into the future - five, 10, 15, 20 years. What are the priorities going to be? Those commanders are responsible for looking that far into the future and making sure we learn the right lessons and develop the right concepts.

Luckily, we've had Gen. Mattis and Gen. Abrial, who have had the same understanding and the same vision for the longer term. They cannot afford to just focus on today. I think we're in good hands. It's difficult when you have the need to support today and tomorrow but also the need to look into the future and make sure we learn the right lessons that we apply in five or 10 years' time. It's not easy, but as I always say to my staff, "If it were an easy task, I would not have picked you to do it."

Interviewer: Is there anything else you'd like to say?

Hansen-Nord: We are really dedicated. It makes it so much more fun when our work makes a difference for our colleagues out there and the work that they do. When we have the pleasure of having such a close relationship and friendship between us, it speaks volumes of the dedication we have to doing this work.

Crutchfield: I would wrap it up by echoing what my friend is saying and show you something that will highlight what I want to say. [gestures to a picture of a military family at the beginning of a deployment] I don't know who this family is, but you can see that it could be any soldier, sailor, airman or Marine from the U.S. or any other country, with his baby and his wife with a worried look on her face. I put this picture here and wrote the caption: "This is why we're here." We're here to make sure that he gets back to that wife and that baby so that baby will have a future with a father. For everything I do, this picture focuses me on why this work is important and why what both of our organizations do is important. This picture sums it up for me.

Hansen-Nord: I agree. I fully remind my staff on a daily basis that they are not my staff, they are my colleagues. We are a JALLC family. I tell them every day: "Whatever you do, there is no alternative to quality. Don't settle for mediocrity. That doesn't work." There is no alternative to quality because our colleagues out there depend on you.

Crutchfield: It's not about us. It's not about me. It's about that service member and his family. I'm not trying to be dramatic. I really honestly feel that way.

As a general officer once said: "Don't forget that your importance to the war effort has nothing to do with your proximity to the battlefield." I tell my staff that daily. It makes sense. We're not in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa or elsewhere all the time. The important work that we do to support any of those operations has nothing to do with our proximity or those positions. You can't lose sight of that. I believe what we do is really important.