Joint Interagency, Intergovernmental, and Multinational (JIIM): Challenges in the Geographic Combatant Commands

The following collection of articles focus on U.S. joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational (JIIM) activities, challenges, issues, and operations in the six U.S. geographic combatant commands (GCCs). Today, stability operations in Afghanistan and Iraq rightfully receive the lion’s share of attention, priority, and media coverage. There are, however, many other challenges, potential dangers, and future threats in the other five GCCs that merit attention and continuous observation and evaluation. The GCCs operate in challenging and complex environments, tackling a vast array of JIIM challenges and issues each day. The intent of the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) is to illustrate some of the current challenges in this newsletter and highlight operations at the strategic or theater levels. This newsletter contains three overview JIIM articles. The remaining articles highlight challenges or issues specific to one of the GCCs; several were written by the GCC commanders. These articles cover a wide range of issues with the specific intent of informing the reader and sharing challenges, best practices, and lessons learned. The articles should not be considered all inclusive. Topics • Building partnership capacity. • Full-spectrum operations. • Planning for potentially failing states. • Integrating civilian and military activities. • JIIM exercises and training. • Drug and human trafficking. • Piracy. • Transnational threats. • Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats. • Disaster response. • Homeland security. • Establishing professional relationships. The articles in this newsletter — drawn from recent issues of professional journals or CALL and other joint archives and websites — were selected to capture current, relevant, JIIM articles that will inform Soldiers and leaders on challenges and issues and provide a useful document for personnel assigned to JIIM positions in the future. Many JIIM challenges are unique to a particular geographic region; others are shared challenges. If there is an overriding priority or theme to this collection, it is certainly the goal of building partnership capacity. This appears to be the top priority in each of the GCCs.