Planning for Stability Operations: The Use of Capabilities-Based Approaches

Since the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Department of Defense has placed a high priority on institutionalizing capabilities-based planning. In an era of uncertainty, such an approach is helpful for optimizing forces across a broad range of mission sets and within fiscal constraints. Although the department has made some progress in inculcating a capabilities-based culture, it continues to search for a conceptual framework that can drive capabilities-centric force planning, deployment, and posture.

The conduct of stability operations is a mission area with particular promise for the application of capabilities-based planning. Department of Defense Directive 3000.05, "Military Support for Security, Stabilization, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations," requires components to give such operations priority comparable to that of combat operations. It also assigns the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the responsibility to "identify stability operations capabilities and assess their development." Yet there is no agreed definition of capabilities-based planning, no framework for its use in force development, and no approach to developing outcome metrics to gauge progress. Those within the Defense Department charged with tracking progress on the directive's implementation have underscored their inability to assess the state of stability operations capabilities development because the joint and interagency community does not yet have a framework for conducting such assessments.

Recognizing these analytic deficiencies and their real world ramifications, the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Transformation and Resources tasked CSIS withdeveloping a capabilities-based framework to generate generic capability packages for future stability operations. The study was conducted from March 2007 through August 2007, and this report delineates CSIS's findings and recommendations.