Military Review English Edition November-December 2013 | Page 10

(C. Todd Lopez)

Sgt. 1st Class Grady Hyatt, with U.S. Army Africa, leads an after-action review with soldiers of the Ghana Army. Hyatt was
in Africa as part of the Army’s “regionally aligned forces” concept, meant to pair Army units with combatant commanders
worldwide.

A third challenge is the difficulty in establishing interorganizational unity of effort in a region.
Many organizations tend to act unilaterally;
collaboration in a region is often casual, and, at
times, arbitrary. A regionally aligned headquarters can facilitate unity of effort among these
organizations by creating venues, which enable
collaboration, especially in information fusion
and integrated planning. While the lead federal
agency in Phase 0 is often the Department of
State, the regionally aligned force can assist the
Department of State in the region by providing
the planning capacity inherent in the headquarters. This interagency coordination should not
be reserved for deployments only, but should
occur routinely at home station. Again, this will
require an Army push to incorporate the right
players into this network.
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The Army, at the Department of the Army headquarters and the Army service component command
level, also has a responsibility to the combatant
commander to explain what the regionally aligned
force brings to the table. The Army service component should also authorize discussion directly
between the regionally aligned force and the combatant command to build relationships at both the
action officer and commander level.
An additional challenge is that very little “juice”
comes with regional alignment; it currently does
not trigger additional resources of people, money,
or equipment. The Army should therefore develop
a force generation model for regionally aligned
headquarters, which addresses personnel manning,
additional resources (funding and equipment),
and training requirements and opportunities. As an
example, additional travel funds are required for
November-December 2013

• MILITARY REVIEW