You should monitor your R&S plan to evaluate how well your assets are reporting information back to you. If your assets are not reporting quickly enough, accurately enough, or reporting the wrong information, you will need to make corrections.
At the brigade and battalion levels, many times you will find your assets may not always provide you with timely or complete information. There are many reasons for this. Most of the time it is difficult to discern what is happening on the battlefield. The company commander or platoon leader is preoccupied with fighting and winning the battle.
Nevertheless, do not accept incomplete information! If a spot report lacks the type of vehicle, number of vehicles, or direction of movement, get back on the radio and ask for it. If your scouts send back a report that does not make sense to you, ask for clarification. If you have not heard from your ground surveillance radars for an unusually long time, call them and ask for a situation report.
You should enforce negative situation reports at predetermined intervals. Too many times in the past, S2s thought no news was good news. They were content to sit in their vehicles in silence. Be aggressive! Remember, you are trying to answer your commander’s questions. You cannot, and commanders cannot do their jobs, unless incoming information is timely, accurate, and complete. Nevertheless, you must be realistic.
There is much confusion in battle, and some information will not be attainable. You cannot tie up the radio nets trying to get “perfect” reports. Some information you will have to live without.
Figure 7-1. Time phase line control.
The reporting criteria you have specified in your intelligence annex or on your R&S overlay will tell your assets how and when they are to report. As you monitor your R&S operation, you should evaluate two things:
NOTE: Sometimes reports using only size, activity, location, and time (SALT) will be more feasible and timely than the full size, activity, location, unit, time, equipment (SALUTE) report.
If your assets are not reporting per your criteria, it is simple to correct the asset; your S3 can help with this. However, you should continually assess whether or not your reporting criteria are sufficient to give you answers to your commander’s questions.
If your assets are reporting per your criteria and you are not getting the detailed information you need, you should consider modifying your reporting criteria.
For example, let us suppose you wanted A Company to report enemy motorized rifle units by number and type of vehicles and their location. Later, however, you discover that in order to answer your commander’s PIR, you must calculate the enemy rate of advance. You should modify A Company’s reporting criteria to include speed and direction of movement.
Remember, a good R&S collection plan tells the commander what he or she needs to know in time for the commander to act. Therefore, assets must report information to you quickly so you can process and relay it to the commander, S3, or FSO. It does no good to report an enemy counterattack 30 minutes after the fact. As the S2, you need to enforce timely reporting of information.
Here again, the commander and/or the S3 can help. Remember, be aggressive! The S2 must also inform the commander when information on the PIR cannot be collected or if the R&S assets have been destroyed.