Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 121

USEUCOM

USNORTHCOM

U.S. European Command

U.S. Northern Command

USCENTCOM
U.S. Central Command

USSOUTHCOM
U.S. Southern Command

USAFRICOM

USPACOM

U.S. Pacific Command

U.S. Africa Command

(Graphic courtesy of Wikipedia)

Figure. Unified Combatant Command Areas of Responsibility

Advantages of
Assigning Forces
Lt. Col. Heather Reed, U.S. Army

T

he Department of Defense (DOD) has traditionally looked to save money through reform
and efficiencies in procurement. With the pressure it now faces from shrinking budgets, the time has
come to look beyond a narrowly focused, materiel-centric approach to effective management of forces. One
solution is to reform the DOD process for distributing
forces to combatant commands: global force management
(GFM). This article demonstrates that by using GFM
to assign forces to combatant commands (CCMDs,
depicted in the figure), the DOD could manage forces
more effectively within reduced budgets while balancing
the interests of the services and the combatant commands. In addition, the DOD would meet the intent

MILITARY REVIEW  May-June 2016

of the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense
Reorganization Act of 1986 to “place clear responsibility
on the commanders of the unified and specified commands for the accomplishment of missions assigned to
those commands and ensure the authority of those commanders is fully commensurate with that responsibility.”1
The first section of this article gives a brief explanation of the key elements of GFM—allocation, apportionment, and assignment. It includes a discussion of administrative control (ADCON) in relation to assignment.
The next section provides recommendations on how to
assign the force. The third section applies those recommendations to show why assigning forces to CCMDs
would be beneficial to accomplishing the DOD’s mission.

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