Small Wars Journal

General Dunford: U.S. Commands, War Plans Outdated

Wed, 12/16/2015 - 2:11pm

General Dunford: U.S. Commands, War Plans Outdated by Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times

The nation's top military officer said on Monday that the Pentagon will revamp combat commands for the "fight of the future" because current "old plans" take too long to execute.

After two months as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford provided the first detailed look at his agenda as the chief military adviser to the president.

At the "top of my inbox," he said, is reorganizing combat commands such as in the Pacific, which is a check on China, and the Middle East, which is leading the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The reason: He said a war with North Korea, for example, would not be confined to the Korean Peninsula because weapons such as ballistic missiles and cyberattacks would propel the fighting into other nations.

"Our current planning, our organization construct, and our command and control is not really optimized for that fight," he told a defense conference hosted by the Center for a New American Security, which is led by Michele Flournoy, a possible secretary of defense in a Hillary Clinton administration…

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