Unified Commanders Stress Collaboration, Cooperation

By Daisy R. Khalifa, Special Correspondent

Unified commanders from U.S. Joint Forces Command, U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Northern Command declared an operational shift for their commands that today rely heavily on intergovernmental, interagency and international partnerships in order to effectively execute their missions, during a panel discussion at the Sea-Air-Space Exposition May 5.

“We in the Department of Defense have learned how to operate in a joint environment,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Glenn F. Spears, deputy commander, U.S. Southern Command, (SOUTHCOM), which conducts military operations and promotes security throughout 16 million square miles of Latin America and the Caribbean.

“We’ve learned how to operate in a combined U.S. and partner nation environment which includes the interagency, nongovernmental organizations and even reaching out to public and private organizations,” he said.

“The COCOMS [combatant commanders] are cooperating and collaborating better than any time that they have ever done in the past,” added Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, deputy commander, U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), which was created in 2003 to focus on homeland protection, with oversight of Canada, the United States and Mexico.

Vice Adm. Robert S. Harward Jr., deputy commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command, concurred with his fellow panelists as he described the cooperative nature of his command’s complex mission of training and enabling joint warfighters.

“There is a big shift in a lot of organizations, some of which are having problems evolving into this new world, where we need to be flat, we need to be connected, where we are staying ahead and inside a real loop of our enemies, whoever that may be, be it the Taliban, the drug cartels or transnational criminal elements.”

The three panelists discussed the respective command missions while stating their shared concerns over topics such as cyber security, the $100 billion drug trade in the United States and new means of U.S. support for Mexico’s government in its war against powerful drug cartels.

Blum said the deputy directors of the COCOMS get together about once every seven to 10 days via video or teleconference to generate a list of three to five “no kidding, unanimous consent, red-line” issues that are fundamentally important to all the COCOMS to ensure these issues are not overlooked by the secretary of Defense.

Spears described SOUTHCOM oversight, highlighting the region’s overarching problems of poverty, the more than 100,000 gang members that live in Latin American and Caribbean countries and the “No. 1 challenge,” the drug trade that “fuels the misery” in the region. He cited examples of how SOUTHCOM operates through interagency and international partnerships to meet the challenges faced in the region.

“We partner with the nations and the regions, we build their capacity so that they can participate in peacekeeping operations, so that they can improve their air space and maritime domain awareness over their own sovereign territory, so that they can respond to natural disasters, humanitarian requirements within their own territory and not have to depend on the United States to do so,” Spears said.

Blum said NORTHCOM is focused on the protection and security of five domains: the land domain, and communities in which Americans live; the maritime domain, or navigable waterways; the air domain; the space domain, for which NORTHCOM is responsible for missile defense; and the cyber domain, which he said is “a very big area that we worry about.”

“We are absolutely dependent on interagency [cooperation],” said Blum. “We have to work as a team of teams in support of whomever has the lead, while at the same time being a kinetic combatant command when it comes to interdicting on the high seas or in the air, on the land or in missile defense.”

Underscoring the cooperative efforts of the commands, Harward said of Joint Forces Command: “We are very much a supporting command, in addition to the primary missions set of training and enabling joint warfighters on how to execute ... we do the full cradle to grave of a joint organization.”

The panelists focused on cyber security and progress with supporting Mexico. Blum talked about mutual and proactive efforts between the Mexican government, and he said NORTHCOM is focused on working with Mexico.

“We are now outreaching with Mexico in ways that never seemed possible before,” he said.

On cyber-security, Blum noted, "There is no question someone has really got to pay attention to cyber, that is a very huge vulnerability for all of us, not only in the Department of Defense, but in government, the private sector and private life. If we don’t get ahead of this quickly, we will be, unfortunately, too far behind it.”

Added Spears, “Cyber is a domain that we as a nation must protect equally as we have to protect our sovereign states. We’re being attacked every single day in the cyber domain.”