Military experimentation effort slow to get off the ground

The armed forces haven't adopted a single idea from the Defense Department's premier program for developing new warfighting concepts since the program was created four years ago, according to a new report from the General Accounting Office.

"Nearly four years after the program was established, only three recommendations have flowed from the joint experimentation program and none of them have been approved," GAO auditors said in the report, "Military Transformation: Actions Needed to Better Manage DoD's Joint Experimentation Program" (GAO-02-856).

The Pentagon created the Joint Forces Command to oversee the experimentation program, which seeks to develop joint warfighting concepts and test their effectiveness in military exercises, such as the recently completed Millennium Challenge 2002. Defense has always explored warfighting concepts through such experiments, but the launch of the Joint Forces Command marked an attempt to eliminate duplicate efforts, better share information and move new ideas to the field more quickly.

GAO found the recommendations made by the Joint Forces Command had not been acted on because of a lack of clear guidance about how those proposals should be submitted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which has the final say on whether they are implemented. Defense officials told the auditors they are working on such guidance.

The report also found a "lack of strategic planning" at the Joint Forces Command. For example, the command keeps track of the number of experiments it conducts, but does not measure how useful they are.

"Establishing a meaningful joint experimentation performance measure…would provide congressional and DoD leadership a better assessment of the program's contribution and progress toward achieving transformation," the report said.

GAO did find that Joint Forces Command has been successful in getting input from all of the military services and Defense agencies as it experiments with new concepts.

Defense officials did not refute any of the GAO's findings, saying the department is "aggressively pursuing actions to transform our military forces" and that joint experimentation will be a part of that process.