Apportion Everything

If the United States is to provide viable options to its civilian leaders, it must change the way it organizes and employs its military power. Its current construct revolves around functional specialization where services provide self-contained and vertically integrated capabilities. While successful in the past, this framework produces duplications of capabilities and artificially restricts the ability of combatant commanders to provide a variety of alternatives to civilian leaders, regardless of whether the opponents are conventional military enemies or unorthodox, asymmetric adversaries. This monograph presents and assesses an alternative framework for organization and employment of joint forces. It is a construct for command, control, and employment of joint forces that is flexible and adaptive. The underlying premise, apportionment, applies to any joint unit, force or capability. By apportioning packages or sub-units of capabilities to functional component commanders who integrate those capabilities to achieve operational and strategic effects, commanders can produce more flexible and adaptive options for civilian leaders than are possible with the current approach.. Supporting evidence for the claim comes from a feasibility, acceptability, and suitability analysis of the proposed construct which simultaneously entails comparing and contrasting the alternative with the current method.