12 August 2021

US Joint Requirements Oversight Council working on IAMD directive

by Ashley Roque

The US Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) is moving ahead with creating a revised joint warfighting concept, dubbed ‘expanded manoeuvre', and its next strategic directive will provide the services with a unified integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) vision, according to Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General John Hyten.

The four-star general, set to retire in November, spoke on 11 August at the annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium, and said that now that the JROC has approved a strategic directive for four areas – joint fires, contested logistics, joint all-domain command and control (JADC2), and information advantage – it will devise one for IAMD.

“As you look at the portfolio of integrated air and missile defence, and see where the JROC has identified gaps and capabilities … you'll find out that we have not [done that],” Gen Hyten told the audience. “And because we have not, the services actually do the best they can to identify where the gaps are … but we never give the overarching structure … to plug into.”

To help craft such a structure, the JROC will conduct a capability gap assessment examining everything in the IAMD portfolio across the services, in anticipation of completing this work by mid-December. However, the JROC will be challenged to do so since there is a lack of “good campaign level modelling across all domains, including space and cyber, that show how all these things fit together across the board”, Gen Hyten said. The JROC has signed a requirements document for such campaign model so that it can look at how offensive and defensive capabilities can “play together”.