Articulating the tactical to strategic realtionships to the Inter-Agency and others

[Rob Thornton]

I did this up to help some of the Inter-Agency and Academic folks I’ve been working with recently to help understand military planning and execution culture. First, I know that to many on the SWC some of this is pretty straight forward. This is not meant to be presented as something new, just as a way to think about relationships. I apologize up front for a busy slide, but it sort of bridges a gap between a culture that uses .ppt that is usually light on content due to an audience with a like culture and one that uses text to articulate and clarify nuances, and as such uses text.

In a recent conference I was at some very smart folks were giving a very good presentation on how to think about Rule of Law as it related to post conflict environments, or transitional governments. This presentation was part of a larger discussion about all aspect of Rule of Law hosted by NDU (hat tip to them for sponsoring a very good event!). The focus was on “tools of implementation”, but the broader audience was mostly lawyers of various flavors, and some IA folks who’d worked in RoL in various capacities, there were few planners in the audience. I asked one of the presenters if they could articulate what they were trying to come across into a campaign objective, they had a little trouble with that. Later, another green suiter also remarked that he was having trouble packaging the various presentations into something that a planner could use.

It struck me how the DoD planning culture is one the rest of the IA is reasonably unaccustomed to. Although on reflection it makes sense they don’t think about things the way we do, but when we were all in the same room it is easy to take for granted. I got the feeling they really did not understand the way we identify levels of war, or how we seek to nest purposes and identify linkages and disconnects. I also don’t think the majority of the people in the room understand the role fog, friction and chance play in desynchronizing actions, and diffusing unity of command and unity of effort. Most have not had the types of experiences where trying to move 170 men in 20 vehicles out of an assembly area at 0200 to move 20 kilometers on time schedule under NVDs, let alone the challenges of trying to conduct complex movements in an interactive environment against a cunning enemy. I got the feeling that most of them considered that if the plan was right at the outset, it would implement itself to a great degree. I also don’t think they understand that many times the guy who writes the plan is not the implementer and that even if that guy is around, he won’t be for long. At the JTF or GCC level, you might get an Army planner who understands life on the ground pretty well one time, but you might get a C-130 pilot the next who inherits influence on a ground plan, or works in J-3 or J-5 and gets tagged to update the plan. Even if you account for the friction that comes from an unstable, interactive, non-linear combat environment, you also have to account for the ones we self induce on ourselves for various reasons.

Anyway, I put this together to help facilitate discussion. None of the bubbles are meant to be written in stone, you could fill them with whatever you needed to, these are just examples – what is important is that starting with the strategic ends (whatever policy determines them to be), the campaign objectives, LOOs/LOEs and tactical actions make sense in relation. I took a little different approach in my examples of strategic ends by laying out ones in the blue bubble as they applied specifically to the U.S, the green bubble as they applied to the HN and regional partners, and the red bubble as they applied to the enemy’s objectives as we perceived them. The campaign objectives to the left are fairly straight forward. The operations column to the left of the campaign objectives are split. The upper half (yellow) are meant to get folks to think about regional and international operations that support theater LOOs and LOEs – they are extra- theater to some regard. The bottom half (purple) are ones pursued by operational CDRs in theater. I labeled each with a D,I,M or E in order to foster some thought about relationships – they should not be seen exclusive to each other in any sense, they are meant to be interdependent. Also, it was brought to my attention that labeling them must be caveated with that although on IA member might be better suited to do a particular function over another, DoD 3000.05 clearly indicates that DoD must be prepared to do those function when required, but when other more appropriate agencies are unable. It was also brought up that this could be mixing means with ways, a worthwhile comment to consider – but also worth considering in the context of the relationship between means and way – e.g. what may look good in the plan may mean making some hard choices with regard to resources in order to implement it, and of course it must always be considered against the conditions as they are during implementation, not necessarily as they were when the plan was wrote.

Finally, the tactical actions also sort of lay out according to a DIME construct – the guys on the ground are the ones making it happen, and they touch things as they go through execution, and have to deal with the consequences of operational and strategic short falls. This last bit is very important to remember I think because the frictions that occur at the tactical level are the most human ones and the most subject to non-linearity. If you think of the bubbles as gears with sprockets, you figure out real quick that they don’t always turn in the direction they were intended to in the plan, or at the speed the plan said they would for an infinite number of reasons. This is where leadership comes makes a difference in the implantation, and goes back to the requirement to articulate objectives in a manner that provides direction while retaining some flexibility to account for the way things play out on the ground in order to meet the strategic end. Last point I’d like to bring up is that the open parentheticals were used to show how aggregates of each column interact with the aggregates of each column, it is not a unidirectional flow once the plan goes into implementation – at that point its kind of two way sausage machine – however – the quality that goes in determines the quality that comes out.

I know we have a wide variety of thought here on the SWC, and that we also have a readership who may not have thought about some of this before so I wanted to put it out there. I certainly welcome thoughts and feed back. In no way did I mean to imply that somehow because the lawyers, academics and IA folk that may not understand some of this are in anyway inferior, they just have a different set of experiences, and as we move forward together to address the many challenges ahead, we are learning a great deal about each other. I’ve come away from the last few week with a head full of new knowledge and thoughts thanks to their expertise in many areas, I just want to help them understand us a little better as well. Again thanks to NDU for sponsoring a great event last week.
Best, Rob