Joint Leadership: Leading in a Joint & Combined Organization
Joint Leadership: Leading in a Joint & Combined Organization
Ted G. Roberts | 2020
Abstract
U.S. military officers typically serve in their respective service and career field specialty and become tactical experts. Army Infantry officers know ground combat tactics and small unit leadership. Navy Surface Warfare Officers (SWOs) know how to run a ship and conduct surface warfare operations. Air Force pilots know how to fly their aircraft and have become experts in aerial combat. Marines and Space Force operators know their respective services and career specialties. Once these officers reach the field grade level (Majors-Colonel), they often find themselves assigned to work in a Joint (multi-service) or a Combined (multi-nation) headquarters organization with minimal preparation to work and lead at the Operational and Strategic levels.
The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act levied a requirement that all officers must become Joint Qualified Officers (JQOs) before they are eligible for promotion to the senior executive levels (General and Flag Officers). Becoming a JQO requires officers serve in a joint duty assignment for two to three years and complete Joint Professional Military Education Level II (JPME II). Ideally, officers would attend JPME II en route to their joint assignment or early in their joint tours. However, many officers don’t attend until late in their tour or even after they have completed their joint assignment and returned to their respective service. Those that do attend JPME II will gain valuable instruction on strategy development and the Joint Planning Process, but they receive almost no instruction on how to lead officers from other services or nations. They receive no formal training on the diverse rating systems from other services.
This book seeks to address these shortfalls. It will help officers assigned to a joint or combined organization gain some insight into the different service cultures, understand joint organizations and multi-service perspectives, and learn about the joint or combined environment they will enter. It will provide a primer to how strategy is developed in joint organizations, how that strategy fits in to the larger national strategy, and build initial understanding of the Joint Planning Process. Finally, this book will help prepare the officer to lead in a joint and combined organization, and how leading mid-level officers from other services at an operational-level headquarters differs from leading junior personnel at the tactical level in their own service and functional area. The reader will finally learn about the very different appraisal systems and forms each of the services uses to rate on their officers and understand some basic rules, both written and unwritten, that guide how to fairly and accurately rate an officer from each of the military services. The book concludes with a basic checklist and recommended reading list that officers notified of their assignment to a joint organization can use as a starting point to help them prepare and succeed in this new environment.