Adapting 21st Century Change: A New Framework for Defining Military Capabilities

The US military must embrace new ways of shaping change in the emerging new era or it will fail to effectively advance military capabilities and attain the goals of Joint Vision 2010. Our research outlines a way of applying several proven management methodologies, using an objective-oriented framework and experimentation, to increase the effectiveness of military operations. A new Joint Mission Framework, an adaptation of RAND's strategy-to-tasks construct, plays a key integrating role in this new approach. Its output-based perspective is an intuitive one, facilitating advancement of military capability across the spectrum of joint military operations.