Foreign Disclosure of Tactics: An Enabler to More Effective Coalition Operations
Abstract
The United States' National Defense Strategy is a global one. From a military perspective, the United States has come full circle since World War II and is once again relying on coalition partners to bring capability and legitimacy to operations around the world. The United States has made great strides in the last 15 years to improve its support of coalition partners, and to increase their capability with Foreign Military Sales. The perceived interoperability gained by these efforts however, is diminished by the U.S. forces' inability to disclose platform Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP). The failure to disclose these TTP helps to create a situation of nonstandard operations, engenders a lack of trust, and mitigates unity of effort between coalition partners and the United States. An Aviation Tactics Release/Cross Functional Team (ATR/CFT) would allow the Navy to release tactics to allies at a regional level and it would relieve local pressure on Combatant Commanders (COCOMs) to make rash judgment calls on disclosure questions that arise. The ATR/CFT could easily be scaled to start as a prototype addressing only Naval Aviation issues or it could be expanded quickly to address all three major communities in the Navy. The benefits to the COCOM and/or joint task force/multinational forces commander are many: standardized and controlled disclosure of TTP, increased interoperability between the United States and coalition forces, and ease of planning for exercises and contingency operations. Operational commanders at every level must embrace this concept, support the reengineering of the Navy and other service disclosure processes, and put the disclosure question at the front when developing new lessons learned or TTP.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 17, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA463751
Entities
People
- Roy C. Undersander
Organizations
- Naval War College