The Pentagon's No. 2 uniformed military officer has launched a campaign to identify the “most pressing military needs” of U.S. forces, an effort that is expected to produce a short list of new, high-priority weapon system requirements and set in motion an unprecedented top-down process for determining what combat capabilities the Defense Department buys.

Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is distilling the list of new requirements along with the service vice chiefs of staff, who collectively constitute the Joint Requirements Oversight Council -- the Pentagon's high commission for determining what new weapon systems the U.S. military needs. Unlike most requirements the JROC considers, the new batch being advanced by Giambastiani is not the result of needs identified by the military services -- they have been culled in recent months from shortfalls in capabilities articulated by combatant commanders.

This new process could result in combatant commanders having unprecedented influence in the coming months over the shape of the Defense Department's new six-year spending plan, a domain that has largely been controlled by the military service chiefs.

On Feb. 2 the council approved Giambastiani's classified plan for a new “way forward.”

In an exclusive April 12 interview with InsideDefense.com to discuss his efforts to chart a new course for the JROC, Giambastiani said he intends to work hard to closely link the new requirements to the planning and budget process now under way to construct the fiscal year 2008 to 2013 program objective memoranda.

“It strikes me that this is going to enhance the leverage of the combatant commanders. I don't see how it couldn't,” said Clark Murdock, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Giambastiani has warned that Pentagon leaders face “difficult choices” this summer in constructing the FY-08 POM. A further harbinger of difficulty came in early April in the form of fiscal guidance for that six-year period from Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England who advised the military services to expect billions of dollars less than previously planned, according to Pentagon officials.

Giambastiani said that more cuts, like the recent force structure reductions to the Air Force B-52 fleet, which is being slashed by nearly half, are in the offing.

“We're not messing around,” Giambastiani said.

Before assuming his current Pentagon post, Giambastiani was commander for three years of U.S. Joint Forces Command. A major part of his portfolio in that post required him to support the development and integration of joint capabilities to meet present and future operational needs of U.S. forces. This required focusing on areas where U.S. forces operate that require high levels of cooperation, such as command and control, logistics and establishing joint task force headquarters.

During that time, Giambastiani and his staff attempted to introduce a number of change proposals through the Pentagon acquisition system and were frustrated by the relatively new process for generating requirements, the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System introduced in 2003. The process is what the JROC uses to sort through and evaluate requirements.

“I spent three years trying to blast my way through the system as a combatant commander,” he said. “I felt the process was much too bureaucratic; it was too labor intensive. And it didn't discriminate in a way that made sense between something that, say, was worth $100,000 and something that was worth $100 million. It took the same amount of effort to get something through either one of those.”

Now that he is in charge, Giambastiani is working to institute a number of changes. Among these is an effort for more transparency in the debate over requirements. While previous JROC chairmen have on occasion included combatant commanders in on meetings, Giambastiani has extended a standing invitation for such participation. “We've made it routine,” he said. Of the 21 JROC meetings that he has chaired, combatant commanders have attended 17.

To foster such participation, Giambastiani does not require busy combatant commanders to travel to Washington; they can now participate by video teleconference.

Regular participation of senior Pentagon civilians from the acquisition and resources communities continues, Giambastiani said. Deliberations have extended beyond the Defense Department, as necessary, to include relevant constituents. For instance, during last fall's debate over the requirement for the highly classified Future Imagery Architecture program, representatives from the office of the director of national intelligence participated in JROC discussions.  

The main thrust of the changes Giambastiani is introducing, however, aim to allow the JROC to discriminate between low-priority, low-cost issues and what he says are the “most pressing military needs.”

This effort is designed around what he calls a new “capability gap analysis.”

Earlier this year, Giambastiani directed the Joint Staff to synthesize into a single assessment a range of reports from combatant commanders that deal with shortcomings of the current force. Among the documents that fed into this assessment were wish lists for new capabilities that each of the combatant commanders delivered to the Pentagon in January.

The Joint Staff itemized the needs identified in these “Integrated Priority Lists” into categories managed by the eight standing JROC functional capability boards. These panels, each headed by a one-star flag officer, also assess capability gaps identified in the Joint Quarterly Readiness Reviews submitted every three months by combatant commanders to the Pentagon; the Joint Urgent Operational Needs requested by combatant commanders; capability gaps identified by the military services; and lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan.

From these, the Joint Staff produced two classified, oversize briefing charts that cataloged U.S. military capability shortfalls across the eight areas through which the JROC manages requirements.

Armed with these two charts, which Giambastiani said captured the most multidimensional analysis of capability gaps articulated by front-line military forces assembled to date, the admiral took the JROC on a two-day road trip last month to meet with all the combatant commanders.

“What we're trying to do is mine all the work they do year round. And then show them what we thought they were telling us. And then ask them to critique us. So this is a very important part of making this trip,” he said.

While previous JROC chairmen led the panel on visits around the world to each of the combatant commanders on what participants say was a grueling schedule, Giambastiani has taken a different approach.

On March 27, he led the service vice chiefs from the Pentagon to the Ohio headquarters of U.S. Transportation Command. Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz, head of that command, and Adm. Timothy Keating of U.S. Northern Command, Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright of U.S. Strategic Command, and Air Force Gen. Lance Smith of U.S. Joint Forces Command met with the JROC to discuss their various capability gaps.

The following day, the JROC convened in Florida, at U.S. Special Operations Command headquarters to continue discussions about capability shortfalls with Gen. Bryan Brown, head of that command, as well as Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, Marine Corps Gen. James Jones of U.S. European Command, Adm. William Fallon, head of U.S. Pacific Command, and Army Gen. Bantz Craddock of U.S. Southern Command.

From these deliberations, the JROC is continuing to knead the identified capability gaps with the aim of soon yielding a new agenda.  

“We take the capability gaps and keep necking them down into the most pressing military issues,” he said.

How many "most pressing issues" are there?

“We have gone through a series of presentations to neck it down. I'm not going to quote you numbers. This isn't a huge number of issues,” he said. “We're getting this down to a manageable group.”

Once complete, Giambastiani said this list will focus high-level deliberations over resources and program needs.

“We will try to focus our executive attentions and those of the functional capability boards on the more pressing issues. And we will allow the [JROC supporting staff] to deal with the less pressing issues, or the less complex issues in a more rote fashion,” he said.

As the JROC focuses its energy on a handful of pressing requirements for front-line forces, it is in a new position to influence senior Defense Department civilians.

“You can't just look at the JROC by itself,” Giambastiani said. “The JROC is a significant military feeder into the Deputies Advisory Working Group.” Giambastiani co-leads the latter panel with Deputy Defense Secretary England. The panel, created last summer under a different name to guide the Quadrennial Defense Review and established as a permanent group earlier this month, includes the service vice chiefs as well as many influential Pentagon civilian executives.

“We created the DAWG because we needed a mechanism to take those military capability areas and force them into the process where they would be dealt with by program and budget and we could get senior military and civilian leadership buy-in to move forward,” Giambastiani said.

England, the admiral noted, is uniquely empowered -- along with the defense secretary -- to issue the most significant documents that give shape to the Pentagon's weapon systems plans and long-term budget, including the Strategic Planning Guidance, the Joint Planning Guidance and program decision memoranda that direct investments of the military services.

The collaboration between the JROC and the DAWG “gives us much better transparency; it educates and brings to a level of debate and discussion something that we just haven't had,” he said.