The nature of war remains a contest of wills, but how war is fought is constantly changing.

The United States military recently published a new blueprint, called the Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0, or JWC, that marks a paradigm shift in how it will prepare to fight the war of tomorrow.

This past weekend, the Wyoming National Guard held a Joint Leadership Conference aimed to prepare its leaders for large-scale combat operations that will implement the concepts and strategies outlined in the JWC.

The United States today faces complex challenges on a global scale, including the resurgence of a great power competition with China, rogue states pursuing nuclear capabilities, and violent extremist organizations bent on sowing chaos and disorder. At the same time, rapidly evolving technologies are changing military tactics and strategies at an increasingly accelerated pace.

The JWC is written with the philosophy that those who most effectively capitalize on these changes create the greatest advantages in battle. It also outlines how the United States military – Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, and Space Force – will integrate capabilities and synchronize planning in an effort to remain fluid in an ever-evolving landscape.

The keynote speakers at the Joint Leadership Conference in Cheyenne spoke to these concepts and strategies.

The list of speakers included Major General Jerry Prochaska, Director, J-7, for the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C., retired Lieutenant General Jon Jensen, former Director for the Army National Guard, Brigadier General Maurizio D. Calabrese, Director of Intelligence and Information for North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Air Force veteran and a Fortune 100 Company Director Shawn Dawley, and U.S. Army veteran Dr. Joe Ross, President of HigherEchelon, a human and organizational performance consulting firm.

Governor Mark Gordon also spoke to the more than 600 senior ranking Soldiers and Airmen in attendance. A cohort of Tunisians from Wyoming’s State Partnership Program were also in the audience.

Prochaska kicked off the second day of the conference with a talk on the emerging technology the U.S. military seeks to leverage for future competition and conflict.

“A.I. is a gamer changer,” Prochaska said, referencing in particular Joint Lessons Learned Information System, or JLLIS, an automated knowledge management system used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“There’s over 800,000 events in there going back to World War II,” Prochaska said. “If I ask it a good question, it can scour all of that data, and within a few minutes, it can give you a reasonable answer. Five years ago, it would have taken 30 analysts a month to answer a question if I wanted a great answer.”

Prochaska also emphasized how the U.S. military, especially the National Guard, needs to be open to adopting new technology and innovation created by private industry.

“We have people working for Microsoft,” Prochaska said. “How can we know how they’re thinking about the electromagnetic spectrum today? Well, here is somebody that does that for a living for a trillion-dollar company. Bring that in. We have to think differently.”

Jensen focused his talk on how JWC will begin to integrate all military services into a single force, enabling them to work together more effectively.

“The understanding of joint warfighting before was this,” Jensen said. “If you were the Navy, you wanted to know how the other services supported you. Now, that’s flipped. If you’re the Navy, you’re telling the other services, ‘Hey, this is how I’m going to support you.’ Now it’s really about, how can my service truly support the joint force and the joint warfighting concept?”

To make sense of their operating environments, U.S. military forces must have the capability to fuse information from sensors across multiple domains – including space, air, land, and sea – and make that information unilaterally available for decision-makers and leaders, no matter what branch they serve in.

In addition to information advantage, JWC focuses on command and control, joint fires, the ability to win in contested logistics, and expanded maneuver.

Dawley, who was one of the last speakers at the Joint Leadership Conference, brought home the message that what matters most, in the final analysis, is leadership.

“These amazing men and women have been blessed and privileged to lead the Soldiers and Airmen of the Wyoming National Guard,” Dawley said, looking around the auditorium packed with NCOs and officers. “There’s going to be times where the moment may feel overwhelming, but if you are in this position, it is because the people around you believe you are ready, you are capable, and you are worthy of the title you hold.”

Dawley’s closing remarks conjured a story from long ago. A child from a tribe of hunter-gatherers lays a bird’s nest at the feet of her elders. A rock appears in her hand, then another in the other hand, but the rock is black, shiny, and smooth, a type of rock the elders had never seen before. The child strikes them together until a thin ribbon of smoke rises from the bird’s nest.

“Fire comes forth,” Dawley said. “Something you have never seen before. You do not know what this is, but you do know your world has just changed forever. When you look up, you realize nobody else in the tribe is looking at that fire. They are looking at the leaders. They want to know, what does this mean? What do we do? Change is coming. Change is here.”

JWC makes it clear the leaders of the United States military must know how to wield the fire faster and better than any foe, all while working more interdependently.