Time to Blow Up JCIDS
Today's jointness-industrial complex actively harms our national security
Good intentions are not enough in defense. Results are what matter, and they are exposed with cold-blooded clarity on the battlefield.
DoD’s obsession with “jointness” is a perfect example of good intentions triumphing over good outcomes. Bill Greenwalt and Dan Patt, two of our favorite authors on defense reform, have a new paper for the Hudson Institute about how the push for jointness has produced bureaucracy at the expense of innovation and lethality. They call for eliminating the lowest circle of jointness hell: the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, or JCIDS.
No more half measures, time for root and branch reform:
The DoD needs to burn it down to its smoldering foundations and let it vanish into history, not quietly retired but deliberately, decisively erased. In this new era of strategic competition—when speed, agility, and bold conceptual leaps are the lifeblood of national security—the US military can’t afford even the illusion of potential JCIDS reform. No new KPP, no revised membership, no inspired PowerPoint deck or new formatting appendix can salvage it. JCIDS is beyond redemption, and the only responsible course is to put it out of its misery, carve it from the DoD’s body, bury it, and salt the ground so that nothing resembling it ever grows back. Now is the time for courage, not to fix JCIDS but to kill it.
Boom. Read the whole thing.
The push for a “joint” force came after Operation Eagle Claw, the Iranian hostage rescue mission that ended in fiery catastrophe at Desert One. The disaster happened, in part, because the services were busier jockeying for position and prestige than in planning the mission. The need for better coordination and standardization—for jointness—was never more apparent. Eight U.S. servicemen paid for the lesson with their lives.
Fast forward a half-century, and DoD has developed a jointness-industrial complex of immense size and sterling intentions. JCIDS is the centerpiece of this complex. JCIDS exists to ensure that capabilities produced by the services advance the “joint” force and U.S. strategy rather than parochial interests, and that those capabilities are interoperable across the services.
But what about results? In practice, JCIDS has added another layer of complexity and delay onto a procurement process that is already interminably slow. Greenwalt and Patt find it takes 852 days, on average, for JCIDS to validate a joint requirement. That’s 2.5 years of bureaucratic wrangling before a program has entered the PPBE process (which takes another 3 years, for those keeping score).
Perhaps this delay would be more forgivable if JCIDS was delivering the jointness it promised, but it isn’t. As is so often the case, bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy—not action, and certainly not innovation. Greenwalt and Patt write that JCIDS has devolved into a paper-pushing and box-checking exercise, destroying some of the best officers of a generation:
Instead of dynamic strategic analysis, we find a system obsessed with document formatting and bureaucratic procedure. It has reduced the Joint Staff gatekeeper—theoretically in a position to shape the future of American military capability—to measuring margins and scrutinizing font sizes. According to appendix C in the JCIDS manual, this coveted O-6 position focuses primarily on ensuring submissions meet administrative requirements before entering an endless cycle of staffing and validation.
Incumbents and insiders weaponize this “hidden curriculum of requirements” against upstarts that don’t know how to play the game. Projects can be delayed by months by a single adverse comment:
By emphasizing formatting details over strategic thinking, JCIDS arms any participant in the process with a convenient veto point. Didn’t like a new concept for a swarm of drones? Point out a missed reference in the architecture framework or quibble over a KPP threshold. Concerned that a disruptive technology might divert funding from your favored legacy system? Submit a critical comment that triggers another 100-day adjudication cycle.
Despite these delays, proposals usually limp along to validation, for essentially political reasons. The services need each other to validate their proposals, so there is a strong incentive to go along to get along: “Service officers participating in joint reviews hesitate to reject sister service proposals, anticipating future reciprocity needs. This creates a mutual validation society in which everything becomes important and therefore nothing truly is.“
Perhaps worst of all, JCIDS’ legalism often comes at the expense of technical feasibility: “With no dedicated technical assessment capability within the Joint Staff and no incentive to constrain requirements to achievable parameters, the process validates performance specifications that engineering analysis would quickly reveal as impossible.” In other words, the quest for a “joint” force has in fact produced requirements for planes that don’t fly and guns that don’t shoot.
DoD and Congress are well aware of JCIDS’ shortcomings. The paper documents more than ten efforts at reform, supplemented with quotes from a host of vice chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “[JCIDS] has been gamed to death,” General Cartwright said. “We’re going to throw it away.” But no one has.
Throwing away JCIDS is an idea whose time has finally come. In its place, Greenwalt and Patt propose a “Joint Operational Acceleration Pathway” (JOAP), driven not by rigid technical requirements but by “operational imperatives,” “concise statements of critical warfighting challenges identified by combatant commands and backed by DoD leadership.” These operational imperatives would be executed by an organization tasked with rapid analysis, prototyping, and iteration, in coordination with the services. Successful capabilities would then receive a surge of funding from a “Joint Acceleration Reserve” for further development and scaling.
The great virtue of this proposal is that it is built around real-world action, rather than paper-generation and beard-stroking. Combatant commands would arm the acquisitions force with brief descriptions of problems to be solved, and the acquisitions force would respond with prototypes and operational experiments rather than endless PowerPoints. Properly empowering the combatant commands would introduce a much needed approximation of market forces, which would in turn break the DoD’s monopsony and make the DoD a better buyer in the process.
True jointness isn’t about requirements or process, it’s about creating a feedback loop between warfighters and innovators that allows for rapid iteration and improvements of our capabilities. The jointness-industrial complex has manifestly failed to create those virtuous cycles. It’s time to “burn it down” and start over.