Simplifying the Garrison Planning Process Steve Griffin

While managing two separate wars over the past seven years, the U. S. Army is in anew kind of officer-development struggle. The good news is that the Army can address this struggle with a simplified planning system for junior staff officers. Situation Both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced the Army, particularly the company-grade officer corps, into a virtual personnel tailspin. Aside from a higher attrition rate, these personnel issues now result in aberrant career-development timelines for company-grade officers. These problems have also resulted in a training and development challenge that continues to puzzle newly exalted field-grade officers. Due to deployment-adjusted career timelines, junior officers receive staff billets at an earlier stage in their careers. Then, in some cases, they stay there longer than usual due to a unit’s operational tempo. Traditionally the Army has tried to train officers serving in staff positions at the mid-level captains’ career course. However, officers placed in a staff billet before attending this course may find themselves with increased duties and responsibilities but little formal training to help them perform those duties. It’s this lack of formal training and the absence of an easily learned and practiced planning system that prevents new staff officers from adequately preparing for and executing operations while in the garrison environment. If the Army developed and disseminated a simplified planning system, it would aid junior staff officers, who lack formal training and experience, to think and perform as seasoned planners while managing their garrison operations. The issue of junior company-grade officers on a battalion’s or brigade’s staff during combat operations is not, in itself, a major concern. Over the past seven years, units in combat zones accomplished their assigned missions and goals with a junior staff. However, when these inexperienced staffs redeploy, junior staff officers end up unsure how to perform their jobs effectively at their home station. Assigning company-grade officers to a unit’s staff prematurely in their career, or leaving them on staff longer than acceptable, can result in several shortcomings. One result is a staff with limited garrison exposure and thus little experience in planning the unique agglomeration of events found in a garrison setting. This is partially due to a lack of time spent in entry-level positions and the absence of formal training a newly assigned staff officer receives. Units may also lack field-grade or career course-qualified officers to train new staff officers in the art of planning. Simplifying the Garrison Planning Process by Steve Griffin 41 The lack of formal training and the absence of an easily learned and practiced planning system prevents new staff officers from adequately preparing for and executing operations while in the garrison environment. (U. S. Army photo)

However, the issue compounding all these problems is the lack of a clear system to guide those new officers in planning and executing garrison events. The lack of a system contributes to newly assigned and ineffective junior staff officers. These young officers blindly plan and execute operations without following procedures designed to ensure completeness during their preparations. This fallacious type of planning, also known to some as “satisficing,” is choosing the first option that comes to mind without any type of systematic analysis.1 The scope of experience limits many of the junior officers put into primary or even assistant staff positions. While older soldiers and officers of the pre-Sept. 11, 2001, Army might recall a more focused and structured garrison training environment, newly commissioned officers entering the fast-paced tempo of today’s operational units only experience the round-robin training, deployment and redeployment set by the Army’s still-relatively-new Army Force Generation cycle.2 The overexposure to this cycle results in what equates to only wartime experience for many of the Army’s junior officers. Often, these officers find themselves on a unit’s staff prior to redeployment from a combat zone with the duty to plan reconstitution, reset and retraining operations with little to no guidance once back at their home station. Critics of this concern argue that an officer’s experience in combat can easily translate to the garrison environment, especially since combat operations are typically more taxing. However, those with experience managing garrison operations understand that, although some parallels may be drawn, training in the garrison environment is different from operating in a combat zone. Advocates of this school of thought argue that the Army has lost the “art” of garrison training in recent years, especially since the onslaught of the most recent wars. Senior operational commanders are now attempting to teach junior leaders how to plan garrison training events by forcing them to set up events in local areas not traditionally used as training grounds. In addition to the limited experiences of their junior officers, units are also facing knowledge-management privation. Upon returning from year-long deployments, many units, regardless of organizational hierarchy, are seeing amass exodus of their senior and most experienced leaders. These personnel losses are primarily due to permanent-change-of-station and end-term-of-service moves, but accompanying those losses is the organizational knowledge that has been developed, refined and perfected during that unit’s past several years of training and deployments. Units caught up in relentless deployment cycles often fail to capture both explicit knowledge3 (“the knowledge that is easy to write down, communicate, teach and learn – the facts and rules)”4 as well as tacit knowledge5 (“the experience that enables us to do things without being able to explain how”).6 “Tacit knowledge cannot be learned from a textbook”7 but comes through experience and doing. However, the difficulty associated with capturing these types of knowledge, as well as any staff systems that might be in place, is proving to be a difficult task for many operational units. Newly commissioned officers receive a minimal amount of staff-oriented training during their basic course, amplifying the problems. Then, the arduousness of training replacement officers on previously established staff systems frustrates many senior officers. Finally, replacing commanding officers causes units to suffer a major setback. Commanders are typically the largest source of knowledge and systems-continuity within a unit. Anew commander, once in place, typically establishes anew staff system because one is absent or he/she finds the current system ineffective. Both instances are prevalent in units where senior leaders depart and take the unit’s organizational knowledge with them. Nonetheless, all these problems together remain symptoms of the true issue: the Army lacks a clear and simple procedure for new staff officers to follow during the planning and execution of garrison operations. Supporters of the Army’s current decision-making process, the military decision-making process, argue that a system is already in place. Conversely, opponents argue that the MDMP is bulky, time-consuming and manpower-intensive. More importantly, the MDMP doesn’t always fit. Garrison-type missions can range from complex, multifaceted training operations to simple, single-man events. Using the MDMP for all garrison operations would simply be overkill. Also, the MDMP is primarily taught during higher-level military educational courses, starting with the captains’ career course, so untrained and unfamiliar junior staff officers are unable to use the process. In addition to the MDMP, the Army has two other primary systems already in place to aid with planning, training and decisionmaking. The first, the scarcely known rapid decision-making and synchronization process,8 has one fundamental flaw: it requires an already established plan (or order) from which to adjust. A second flaw is that “RDSP seeks an acceptable solution, rather than an optimal (most desirable) one.”9 This is a commonly seen problem that relates to “satisficing,” discussed previously. The second system, the Eight-Step Training Model, is currently the closest solution to any other system the Army has to offer. However, even the Eight-Step Training Model – useful when planning large field-training exercises or even small-unit training events – can be lengthy and time-consuming. More importantly, this process doesn’t always “fit” either. Staff officers don’t always need all eight steps to accomplish some of the more simple events they might be managing. Furthermore, remembering all eight steps or constantly referring to a chart to ensure that one is following the process correctly can be burdensome. Planning systems The Army needs anew system. The system needs to be simple, easy to learn and train, easy to remember and, most importantly, easy to use. As GEN George C. Marshall said, “We must develop a technique and method so simple and so brief that the citizen-soldier of good common sense can readily grasp the idea.”10 This new system must be both methodical and intuitive. It needs to capture the analytical aspects necessary to compensate for a lack of experience in the user and, at the same time, allow the user to draw on any prior experience he or she might have. Finding the proper balance between these two attributes is critical, as the system can’t rely too heavily on either type of knowledge. Its analytical side must be clear, making it easily trainable and able to compensate for a potential lack of intuitive knowledge in the user. Put together, this combination of systematic analysis and intuition must result in the development of a thinking staff officer – one able to use a simple analytical system in combination with parallels from prior experiences to accomplish the various types of missions he or she might encounter in the garrison environment. Experienced staff officers develop unique systems for managing the multitude of events they encounter during their garrison time. The systems usually materialize in one of three ways:

• Adopting it from a predecessor who previously established it;

• Learning it from a supervisor or colleague in a previous job; or 42

• Accruing enough time and experience in that position to understand the full scope of their responsibilities and thus develop a unique system of their own. Some self-created systems may be better than others. One proven system, passed down through generations of successful staff officers, is the “coordinate-anticipate-verify”11 method. Staff officers regardless of rank or experience level can use this method in planning, coordinating and managing any type of garrison operation. It is especially useful for operations that don’t seem to fit into any of the other previously established Army planning systems. The previously mentioned criteria necessary to accommodate the unique needs of operations in a garrison environment fit into this method. It is simple, easy to remember, easy to follow and easily trained. To break the process down, begin with the first step. Coordinate According to Field Manual 6-0, “Staffs prepare and issue plans and orders to execute their commanders’ decisions, coordinating all necessary details.”12 Coordination is the step that most inexperienced junior staff officers think they do but in reality fail to complete adequately. This is the planning phase, the time when the assigned action officer completes his or her most important responsibility: planning the event. The Army refers to it as “synchronization,” “the arrangement of actions in time, space and purpose to produce maximum relative combat power at a decisive time and place.”13 Simply put, it means developing a viable, executable plan that isn’t just the first option that comes mind. A properly framed plan must ensure that it coincides with the commander’s intent as well as with the established end state. It must also be within the scope of the higher unit’s established concept of the operation (if available). Developing the plan takes careful consideration and might even draw from outside sources. However, it’s also only half of the first step. The other part of this step is to inform parties affected by the plan and ensure proper conveyance of pertinent concept details to those impacted parties. This occurs prior to publishing any written order and serves two purposes. The first is to give the affected parties a “heads up” that a plan is in development and could potentially require action on their part. This allows those parties to start their own planning process and enables them to begin any necessary initial movements in anticipation of an official order. The second reason for informing affected parties is to solicit feedback on the proposed plan. Although the assigned staff officer is ultimately responsible for developing a plan and getting it approved, most junior officers don’t have the insight or experience to predict all possible problems or even consider all possible methods for accomplishing a prescribed mission. Feedback from subordinate units may not only help the staff officer realize his or her planning constraints but also allow third-party input from organizations or individuals who will most likely be responsible for executing the task. Anticipate As stated in the manual, “staffs continually identify current and future problems or issues that affect mission accomplishment. Once they identify a problem, staff members analyze the actions or coordination needed to solve it.”14 As any experienced staff officer can note, few plans are perfect, and the “enemy” – in many cases Murphy’s Law15 – always gets a vote. First, the action officer must analyze and identify potential problems with the plan that may occur during both planning and execution. He or she then must develop contingency plans to overcome identified problems should they arise. Finally, the action officer should convey those potential problems to affected parties, as well as articulate the identified actions to take if they occur. This method of developing circumstantial plans not only forces the planning officer to think through the operation, but also gives him or her a starting point to adjust from if he or she must use those plans. Admittedly, identifying potential problems in any plan is not an easy task. Traditionally it takes vast amounts of experience and repetition for even senior staff officers to identify potential problems in a plan. This difficulty is even more aggrandized in junior officers who have no experience or repetition to draw from during a planning process. There are, however, techniques that may aid a planner in thinking through an operation to identify potential problems. One established method is the “premortem”16 or “crystal ball”17 technique. A hospital conducts a postmortem procedure to discover why a patient died. Various parties benefit from this: the physician, the medical community, even the patient’s friends and family. However, a postmortem doesn’t help the patient. Similarly, military officers might conduct a “postmortem,” most commonly in the form of an after-action review, to find out why an operation failed. They do this to learn what went wrong, but obviously it’s too late at that point – the mistakes have already been made. By moving a “postmortem” to the beginning of the process before execution, we can attempt to anticipate problems as well as become more realistic about the challenges and outcomes. In the “premortem” or “crystal ball” technique, the planning officer or team pretends that upon completion, the operation in question has failed. The planner or planners then write down all the reasons why it could have failed. Naturally, this method isn’t expected to be a panacea for every plan, but it can be used to prepare an action officer for potential predicaments in most plans by aiding in anticipating their problems. Verify Once the action officer identifies and plans for as many potential problems as he or she can realize, the final step is to verify. “Staffs assist their commanders by ensuring that subordinates execute their decisions. This practice allows commanders to focus on the overall operation.”18 At this point, the operation moves into the execution phase, and action occurs on the previously established plan. The action officer ensures the correct actions occur. Attending the operation personally or having a representative present in his or her place can accomplish this. The representative should either be a participant in the planning or receive a thorough briefing of the plan and necessary contingencies. Both the action officer and the representative should immediately recognize and identify problems before they happen or, at minimum, identify the initial warning signs to act quickly. Planning an event and then failing to observe it is one of the most common mistakes among junior staff officers. Often times those officers are overwhelmed by other tasks and don’t fully understand the management technique of delegation. Even the simplest of operations that don’t have a planning representative present can quickly go awry – and often times even fail. Verifying the planned execution of an event enables the action officer to provide the necessary feedback to his or her supervisors and commanders to manage their units. The “verify” step is crucial in the overall process, as it aids staff officers in painting an operational picture for their commanders. This allows com- 43 manders to focus their limited time and attention on other operations that may be in more need of it. Once senior staff officers understand the simplicity of the CAV method and decide to use it, the final phase is to train and implement it. Teaching the systematic, analytical side of this process is easy. It is only three easy-to-remember steps. Simply reading this article or receiving a quick briefing should suffice for just about any officer, regardless of rank or experience level. The simplicity of this method makes it easy to both teach and learn. Also, adding this method to a unit’s garrison standard operating procedure is fast, easy and requires little analysis. Alternatively, teaching the intuitive side of this method might be a bit more difficult. How does one quickly train experience? Both commanders and senior leaders run into this problem when attempting to train their junior staff officers. The only way to accomplish this is for commanders and supervisors to focus on exposing their junior officers to all types of operations – garrison or tactical – as much as possible. Doing this enables those junior officers to draw relevant parallels from participating in or witnessing events. Commanders must make a conscious effort to identify training events or operations that might be useful to junior staff officers and require them to participate. Gaining relevant experience doesn’t happen when sitting behind a desk. Ultimately, teaching anew staff officer, particularly one who is still junior, is easy. Many senior officers struggled with this task in the past and are not eager to repeat the same trials in the future. Compounding the problem is the lack of a systematic and easy-to-use planning tool for senior officers to teach and for junior officers to learn. By understanding the need for this type of process, and recognizing how it should be both analytically and intuitively structured, current and future leaders of the Army can capitalize on a time-proven, orderly solution. The CAV method is the answer to a habitual question plaguing generations of staff officers throughout the force. Taking the short time required to learn this system, use it and teach it to others, officers will not only improve their personal job performance but also the performance of their unit and the units around them. Steve Griffin is a former Armor officer, graduating from Auburn University’s ROTC program in May 2004. He served as platoon leader with tank, rifle and scout platoons; troop executive officer; battalion civil-military officer; and S-3 operations officer with units such as 1st Battalion, 35th Armor Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division; Troop G, 1st Cavalry Regiment (2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division Brigade Reconnaissance Troop); 2nd Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment; and 3rd Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, 170th Brigade Combat Team. He deployed to Iraq in 2006 and 2008 and holds two Bronze Star medals for those deployments. A winner of the Army’s GEN Douglas MacArthur Award for leadership, his military education includes the Armor Officer’s Basic Course, Scout Leader’s Course, Airborne School and U. S. Army Ranger School. He also holds a bachelor’s of science degree in management information systems from Auburn and is pursuing a master’s degree in security studies. He currently works as a Defense Department program manager for Syn-Tech Systems, Inc., Tallahassee, FL. Notes 1Simon, H. A. Models of Man: Social and Rational. New York: Wiley Press, 1957. 2U. S. Army Field Manual 7-0, Training for Full Spectrum Operations, Paragraph 1-4. 3Klein, Gary. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. 4Klein, Gary. Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. 5Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. 6Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. 7Orr, Julian. Sharing Knowledge, Celebrating Identity: Community Memory in a Service Culture. London: Sage Press, 1990. 8U. S. Army Field Manual-Interim 5-0.1, The Operations Process, Paragraph 4-5. 9U. S. Army Field Manual 3-90.6, The Brigade Combat Team, Paragraph 3-8. 10Bolger, Daniel. The Battle for Hunger Hill. Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1997. 11This method was first introduced to me in Summer 2009 by LTC Dan Kelley. At the time, LTC Kelley commanded 3rd Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, 170th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Baumholder, Germany. 12U. S. Army Field Manual 6-0, Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces, Paragraph D-3. 13Joint Publication 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 533. 14U. S. Army Field Manual 6-0, Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces, Paragraph D-5. 15Bloch, Arthur. Murphy’s Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong. Los Angles: Price Stern Sloan, 1978. 16Klein, Gary. Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. 17Cohen, Marvin S., Freeman, Jared T. and Thompson, Bryan B. “Training the Naturalistic Decision Maker,” Naturalistic Decision Making, eds. Zsambok, Caroline, and Klein, Gary. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Press, 1997. 18U. S. Army Field Manual 6-0, Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces, Paragraph D-4. CAV – coordinate – anticipate – verify MDMP – military decision-making process RDSP – rapid decision-making and synchronization process 44 Commanders must make a conscious effort to identify training events or operations that might be useful to junior staff officers and require them to participate. Gaining relevant experience doesn’t happen when sitting behind a desk. (U. S. Army photo) Acronym Quick-Scan