Winning Future Conflicts: Designing A Framework to Assess and Evaluate the Efficacy of Joint Warfighting Concepts

The Joint Warfighting Concept under development aims to address how the Joint Force will overcome the future military challenges and provide a joint focal point to align Service development. Typically, the assessment and evaluation of a joint concept help ensure its proposed approach can overcome the envisioned military challenge. Determining a joint concepts efficacy means exploring the ways it mitigates risk to generate a favorable outcome both plausibly and robustly. However, there is no commonly accepted framework for assessing or evaluating the efficacy of joint concepts. Without an established framework, determining efficacy remains informal and implicit, meaning fraught with self-imposed risks. The research indicates that the consequence of informal, implicit assessment and evaluation of a concept risks misshaping the development and design of the future Joint Force. Given the challenges of the current and projected security environment, falling short of delivering an efficacious concept introduces undue operational risk to the Joint Force with strategic implications of political, social, and international risk.