The last decade has seen the combatant commands significantly assisted by trend-setting DOD processes including grouping strategic guidance publications within the Guidance for Employment of the Force, the Secretary's In-Progress Reviews of campaign and contingency plans, and the requirement for geographic combatant commands to develop campaign plans for steady-state activities within theaters. Gaps remain that could retard global and theater campaign planning and compromise security cooperation (SC) efforts with partners. As part of a proposed methodology to help planners make difficult SC and other choices, planners must contemplate how planning and executing operations will impact partners through unintended consequences including promoting the security instrument far ahead of other essential institutions and ruining host nation economies by bequeathing fiscally unsustainable apparatuses.

Operational synergy has been evident through over a decade of continuous combat, but junior officers have been engaging in essentially joint tours and exercises at the tactical level without formal joint professional military education (JPME). CJCS provides JPME guidance through such policy documents as the Officer Professional Military Education Policy, but with more junior officers engaged in tactical planning and executing joint operations, the synergy evident with commanders and joint planners because of required joint education must now be duplicated with junior officers at the tactical level. The JPME gap between higher and junior officers can be closed using low impact solutions and can yield substantial benefits and foster a tactical understanding of joint force employment at the tactical level.

It is widely conceded that hearing those who are least like us is most helpful in broadening our thinking, and that is so at the institutional level including the military. It is also understood that promoting diversity largely depends on having enough believers among the ranks of those who can make things happen. To give minority and women's views sufficient weight, current leaders must act to ensure wider minority/women's presence on faculties of military schools. There is scant likelihood that quality female faculty will be enticed to senior academic posts if candidates believe they will be marginalized. For these voices to be heard, Congress, Boards of Visitors, and other influential parties must monitor rates of progress toward attaining diversity mileposts.