The Strategist and the Planner
STEPHEN E. WRIGHT
Strategy without a plan is akin to hallucination, and a plan without strategy relies on serendipity for any possibility of success.
In a perfect world, a given planning process would serve both the strategist and the planner, and preparing either person to conduct either activity would be a straightforward process. For military strategists and planners, the Joint Operation Planning Process (JOPP) should cover, in theory, the activities of both strategy and planning, from planning initiation to execution and to the new end state that results. In fact, Joint Publication (JP) 5-0, Joint Operation Planning, places operational design activities within the JOPP under “planning initiation,” as the first step of course-of-action development and approval and subsequent plan or order development.1 In that perfect world, clear guidance including goals and objectives, desired end state(s), and interagency clarity of purpose comes from the president and the National Security Council. The real world is somewhat different.
Every time I have participated in a war game or political-military crisis-action exercise, we have always received plenty of guidance from the echelons above us and a plethora of detail regarding scenario, commander’s intent, and force availability. Every time I went into contingency or crisis-action planning, we always started from scratch. Always! In 1994, I received a call on a Saturday night around midnight from our numbered air force vice commander telling me to prepare to deploy for up to six months and that I was leaving on a plane the next day. Sunday afternoon I was in a strategy cell at Headquarters Central Air Force at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina. This response became one of many crisis-action efforts that airmen of my generation euphemistically call, collectively, “Operation Deny Holiday.”2 The U.S. Air Forces Central Command (CENTAF) commander, then Lt. Gen. John Jumper, tasked us to develop the first three days of a plan while the rest of CENTAF deployed into theater. Despite our lack of “adult leadership,” we were making great progress until a lone CENTAF lieutenant colonel looked in on us as we were working through the strategy portion of the plan and exclaimed rudely and loudly, “Strategy?!? We don’t need a [expletive] strategy! We need an ATO [air tasking order]!” Aside from having to start from scratch, strategy and planning do not always elicit insightful help.
In addition, many crises seem to catch us by surprise. Perhaps we should not be shocked, for all too often the “next” crisis occurs in a place we are not watching, as opposed to those commanding our minute attention. For example, the Arab Spring crisis of 2010 came as a surprise to many outside observers. This crisis spread across North Africa and beyond and eventually, in 2011, drew the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and coalition partners into an armed response in Libya. The United States had diverted its attention from Libya after its President Muammar Gaddafi gave up his quest for weapons of mass destruction in 2003. The nation had realigned its intelligence capabilities to the “current fights,” focusing on Iraq and Afghanistan, forgetting about Libya. When the Libyan crisis emerged in February 2011, the United States, its allies, and partners had no operational orders of battle that had been updated since 2003 or current intelligence on Libya.
So, if strategy and planning do not occur in a perfect world of clear guidance and on-demand intelligence preparation of the operational environment, how does one prepare the strategist and planner to meet the challenges of the real world? In this chapter, we will focus on linking concepts to practice. That is right, we are going to “make some sausage,” or at least see how to make strategy in a practical sense.
The organization of this chapter is a simple one, but the discussion very diverse. First, I work to help us understand ourselves and then to understand the differences between strategists and planners, recognizing that in the real world the same individuals might be both. Next, I bring together the strategist and the planner, using a figure to illustrate their development and their key elements, followed by a short conclusion. The starting point for our discussion is the same one Sun Tzu wrote of long ago as the “way to victory,” and that is to “know yourself.”3
KNOW THYSELF
In one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, by Bill Watterson, Calvin is daydreaming during geography class about an alternative, prehistoric universe. The teacher finally gets Calvin’s attention and demands that he tell the class what state he lives in. Calvin replies, “Denial.” Now, while knowing that one is living in a “state of denial” is preferable to not knowing, the strategist and planner have to see the world clearly, and that starts with a truthful understanding of herself.
So, who are the strategists and planners in the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and, more broadly, the Department of Defense (DoD)? Well, “we” are mostly male, with educational backgrounds in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The Air Force and the Department of Defense recruit almost exclusively from STEM graduates for the officer corps.4 If you took a survey of officers in a typical unit, you would find that most earned bachelor of science degrees as undergraduates. U.S. Air Force Academy graduates, even those with social science degrees (political science, for example), spend nearly two-thirds of their undergraduate degree program in core STEM coursework. Moreover, most of us STEM types are linear thinkers.
Now, before someone cries “Foul!” at being called a linear thinker, let me note that the Air Force, like the military writ large, needs many linear thinkers—we have lots of linear tasks to do. In fact, most of what the military does is linear tasking, for which linear thinking is perfectly suited. I do not mean to use the term pejoratively; rather, it simply acknowledges that we are the people who like to get things done in an orderly manner, moving from step one to step “last” in an efficient and effective manner. In addition, most of us have type A personalities—you know, the people characterized as competitive, highly work-oriented, who work with a sense of urgency, and who display a higher level of aggressiveness than other personality types.5 Truly, we are the “git ’er done” people of the world. We are the people who roll the rocks up the hills however big the rock or steep the hill—we get it done. As long as the challenges we face are ones we can resolve in a linear fashion with lots of hard work, we will be “as sound as a pound.”6
The problem is that the challenges we face in the security business are almost all “wicked problems.” As Rittel and Webber argued, “Planning problems are inherently wicked.”7 The problems they describe are societal ones—and conflict and war assuredly are societal phenomena. The Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Capstone Concept for Joint Operations: Joint Force 2020, looking to the future observes, “threats and crises grow more complex[;] . . . [they are] driven by—and in turn drive—transnational dynamics.”8 Our colleagues at the Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies have provided a key insight into the breadth of potential meanings for “wicked problems” observing, “What one author calls a wicked problem, another refers to as an ill-structured problem, a problem situation, a complex adaptive problem, a complex adaptive system, or even a mess.”9 No matter the terminology, war and warfare are highly complex activities.
While I ascribe to the idea that warfare whenever it occurs is a complex, wicked problem, I do see the potential for more issues to be and become wicked problems, due to the increased social and societal interaction enabled by the Internet and the ease of international travel. These interactions are at the core of many social and societal problems. As we contemplate budget sequestration, force structure reductions, and new threats from new technologies, we begin to realize just how “wicked” and complex the future challenges our forces meet might be. These are not the kinds of problems resolved with linear thinking.
The conundrum we face is that we are linear thinkers attempting to resolve nonlinear, abstract, wicked problems. Some might ask, “Don’t we have abstract thinkers in the military?” I answer, “Not many, and those we have, hide.” Most of us who have been military officers recall the new lieutenant in the (say) squadron who, when some new task required rolling yet another rock up another hill asked, “Why this rock; why this hill?” The typical response was to send the lieutenant to the corner. If she persisted with “why” questions, we marginalized her or, worse, showed her the door. The concern for us is this one—that lieutenant was the abstract thinker. Unfortunately, the demand for linear thinking from junior officers morphs into a demand for abstract thinking ability, especially from strategists and very senior officers, whose daily activity revolves around the wicked problems of the day. The “deaths” of our abstract thinkers result from a thousand cuts, not single strokes. For example, the title of the Air Force officer evaluation form is the “Officer Performance Report” (OPR). The Air Force structured the OPR to report on what the officer has done; not one block on the form asks about how well the officer thinks.
Who are we? By accession, activity, and evaluation we are STEM-oriented linear thinkers with strong personality tendencies toward accomplishment rather than reflection. The few exceptions to this picture are those linear thinkers also capable of, or at least comfortable with, abstract thinking; however, all of them I have ever met in the military had very strong type A personalities. In other words, these exceptions to the rule might think abstractly, but at the end of the day they knew they had to produce something. They had to “git ’er done.” So, as prospective leaders, since we may not be abstract thinkers ourselves, we must work hard to create or cultivate those people with abilities to deal with wicked, nonlinear problems, using the best abstract thinking skills and coupling them to the best accomplishment efforts in order to develop well-structured options for ill-structured problems. Perhaps even more important, we may need to protect our abstract thinkers while they transit the “linear” portions of their careers. These distinctions between linear and nonlinear (abstract) thinking are stark when we look at the strategist versus the planner.
THE STRATEGIST: COMPARED TO THE PLANNER
Building from the previous discussion, let us examine the differences between strategists and planners. At its core, the difference between the two, at least in my mind, results from the different activities and outcomes required from each. The strategist must think about context and problem definition and then use the outcomes of these efforts to frame the problem, producing the guidance that shapes what planners do. Planners, on the other hand, take framing guidance and look for solutions. Once a solution is accepted, the planners produce the detailed plans that make it possible for others to execute the option selected by leadership. In short, strategy gives focus to determining what needs to be accomplished; planning is what planners do when they know what it is that needs to be achieved. Two vignettes help illustrate these differences.
This first illustrates the difference between the drive to produce a solution and the need to understand context and the problem. So, imagine driving home after a long, challenging day at the office. We might think to ourselves, “Man, all I want is a cold beverage, dinner, some TV, and early to bed.”10 Then we open the front door. On the other side, our spouse awaits after an equally long day at home with three kids, all under the age of six. Our spouse lays into us with all the things gone awry during the day, detailing one problem after another. Now in “crisis response mode,” we respond with the fateful words, “If you had only done this or that differently, then you would not have had this or that problem.” Eureka, we think, in one fell swoop we have found the solution to our spouse’s day.
Sometime later, preparing after a cold dinner to spend the night on the sofa, we reflect on the earlier events. We realize that in our hasty default to arrive at solution we had misunderstood the context of our spouse’s agitation, completely misdiagnosed the problem, and failed to devise a conceptual framework to achieve a positive outcome. Keep in mind that we being the STEM, type A, “git ’er done” people we are, it is in our DNA to default to solution. We could no more “not default” to solution than quit breathing. However, the strategist must never determine a solution before understanding context, defining the problem, and thinking through the desired parameters for solution development.11
Another way of examining the differences between strategist and planner comes in a second vignette, from the world of architecture.12 In his book How Designers Think, Bryan Lawson describes an architectural firm in need of a new building (the problem). The firm is a medium-sized one that does both commercial and residential design and is looking to expand its market share in a community with over a million people and several other very competitive architectural businesses (the context). The company’s leadership employs three teams to develop a design for a new facility for the architectural firm itself (framing design concepts).
The first team sets to work using a functional framework for analysis. Its members look at the design challenge as one of creating the most efficient workspace possible for the employees. Their rationale is, of course, one predicated on the idea that efficiency will provide the customer the best design at the best price—in other words, the classic efficiency/effectiveness idea. Their key assumption is that in the competitive world of architectural design, the cost of doing business will be the driving factor.
The second group, however, takes a different approach; its members focus on the customer. Their design seeks to make future customers’ experience with their firm the best one possible. So, they consider every element, from the customer’s initial entry into the lobby to finding exactly the right department within the company, and so build their design from the customer’s perspective. They also think of common activity areas, like billing and drafting, placing them between the two major functional departments of the firm, commercial and residential design. They even consider how to lay out the parking lot to bring the customer to the front door efficiently. Their focus on the customer dictates the design logic for their approach, and their key assumption mimics the old adage, “The customer is always right.”
The last team takes yet another approach to the building designs. This group thinks about the competitive context in which their firm does business. They decide on an aesthetic approach to the project. Their idea is to create a visually stunning statement that would indicate the creativeness of its architects and serve to bring customers to its door. As such, their design took advantage of the site location and its surroundings, as well as making a visual statement to the community. Their key assumption is one of “form over function.”
As one considers the vignette above, there are at least three key points to take away. First, design is not about finding the “one right answer” to a problem in a given context. Wicked problems in social and societal contexts do not have single solutions. The right answers simply don’t exist—only some answers that are better than others. Second, each approach above represents a framework in the context of the firm and the problem. The firm could use any one of these approaches (or “courses of action,” in our parlance) for solution development. I highlight this point because the approach is not the solution. The solution translates, eventually, into the blueprints that a builder uses to construct the new building. What guides the development of those blueprints is the choice between functional, customer, and aesthetic perspectives. There are likely many courses of action for construction and a best one for any given building project. Finally, we can ask ourselves, “Which design framework did management choose?” One can speculate that management chose to optimize the final design, influenced by each of the others, to achieve a blended solution that the structural architects and engineers would turn into blueprints and building schedules.
This section has given us an idea of who we are and of some of the challenges we face as strategists, as well as ideas of how strategists and planners differ. In the next two sections we will examine what it is that strategists and planners do. This examination will help us to delineate the tasks between the two activities. However, one does not do strategy in some pure vacuum—the strategist does it with the purpose of achieving some larger purpose. For wicked problems, achieving something of significance requires careful planning and a well-designed course of action, with a detailed operational plan. So, as we transition to these next sections, keep in mind that the strategist and the planner are interlinked in an iterative process.
STRATEGISTS: DOING AND EDUCATING
Describing what strategists do reminds me of “job guidance” I received from a boss back in the day. I was new to my job, and he asked me if I had any questions about my duties. I told him I would simply work everything that came my way and figured he would let me know if I screwed something up. He pondered that point for a moment and then laid out his views on my duties: “Take care of everything, and do it perfectly.” This story may not convey the duties of a strategist, but it captures the expectations placed on them. For the strategist, we could rephrase to say, “Think of everything, and do it perfectly.”
The duties of the strategist are many; however, they collect around three broad activities in support of decision makers.13 First, the strategist works to develop understanding of the context surrounding a given wicked problem (or set of them). Next, the strategist works to define the problem. Lastly, the strategist develops the guidance that provides the design concept for solving a specific problem in a given context. The architecture vignette provides an example of these three elements. It almost sounds easy, does it not?
However, making coherent strategy is a tough task, as evidenced by the overabundance of poor strategy.14 An example of the kind of poor thinking that leads to poor strategy is the DoD effort directing the services to implement language programs by which all officers in the rank of O-1 and O-2 would achieve basic proficiency in a foreign language. The “office of primary responsibility” directed that implementation of this initiative occur within a seven-year time frame.15 As in this case, sometimes someone issues you a solution and demands an implementation plan in return. Often when such an initiative arrives at the strategist’s door, he has to work the issue backward to understand what strategy is in use, to understand what problem the higher headquarters is attempting to address, and in what environmental context.
Setting aside the challenges of implementation, and they were many, I offered the following assessment of this initiative to my counterparts on the Air Staff. In a general sense, I sought to understand what problem the lead office thought it was trying to solve. So, I started with a basic question: “For what problem in the USAF is this the solution?” I thought about officers in international air forces and realized that with very few exceptions these airmen, as they grew in experience and rank, increased their proficiency in English. I surmised that the same dynamic was at work with diplomats and politicians. Therefore, it seemed to me that the level of language proficiency could not be the central problem. For example, if one were to extrapolate such an issue into the future, one could ask, “Which language will be the language du jour of the next crisis?” Arabic? Pashtu? Chinese?
The second point I pondered was that of a requirement for USAF airmen to have foreign-language expertise. To highlight this issue, I posed this question to my Air Staff compatriots, “What is the international language of aviation?” The answer of course is English. The International Civil Aviation Organization within the United Nations has established that, among many other forms of guidance for aviation. So, I asked again, “For what Air Force problem is this DoD initiative the answer?” Continuing our reverse engineering of this strategy/planning guidance, let us look at the context of this initiative and its key underlying assumption.
The context primarily centered on the two wars the United States was fighting in the 2000s; DoD’s language strategy and its key assumption built from this environment. By 2005 the United States was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and neither effort was going well for U.S. forces. Many problems were occurring that illustrated a lack of cultural understanding and highlighted shortfalls in U.S. doctrine and training.16 As often happens, the “let’s do something, anything,” pressure was building, and one solution had led to the DoD initiative on language training. Continuing to work this problem in reverse, we ask ourselves, “What was the underlying assumption if the issue was culture and the solution was language?” The answer could only be that for the designers of this strategy, cultural expertise = language expertise. Poor, if not necessarily faulty, assumptions have led more than one strategist astray in the design of a strategy to solve a given problem in a given context. Here too, smart people used a flawed assumption as guidance and so developed a poor solution. I have often wondered if the “strategic corporal” needed much more language skill in Iraq or Afghanistan than “Thank you for the tea, your home is lovely,” and “Stop, or I will shoot you.”
Granted, we need language as well as culture experts (not always the same people), but no language-training course could produce either result in a few short weeks or even a few months. Years of education and training, as well as a similarly long incubation period living within the culture in question, are required to yield experts capable of shaping such environments at the individual level. In addition, in STEM disciplines we found it difficult if not impossible to “squeeze” language training into an already packed course of study.
Now, let’s return to the three tasks of the strategist and think of “how” these jobs get done, keeping in mind that sometimes the strategist starts with little or no guidance and sometimes with a solution for which he must find context, problem, and design. In the first task, we should note that leadership seldom issues context to us. Often we get problems dumped on us and solutions (if not design) issued to us, but seldom will anyone provide context.
The first step in doing strategy is to develop the context—get to know the key actors, relationships, factors, and challenges. I start by grappling with those things that make for good versus bad strategy in general and transition to issues relating to context. Under “context,” the strategist examines the strategic and operational environments and looks for the actors who foment or affect the challenges that bring about the problems of the day, as well as those who might resolve these issues. In addition, the strategist spends time looking at conflict termination, to ensure strategies focus as much on the future and the continuing advantage sought as on the initiation of the struggle.17 Finally, as the strategist looks to put concepts into practice, she explores the making of strategy using a top-down methodology. She starts at the national policy level (drawing in international policy where and when required) and works down to the operational strategy level, most often the combatant and component commander levels.
The next task of the strategist is to understand the problem (or problems) he is facing. The strategist examines problems from the perspective of the kinds of problems the strategy group is likely to face and how to define problems so the design focuses on the main issue or challenge facing the nation and the joint team. He works to understand the “wicked” nature of the social and societal challenges and the difficulty of understanding each test in its unique context. One of the most important determinations one makes in problem definition is that of causal versus symptomatic elements of the problem. In some wicked problems, the military strategist finds that the military instrument of power addresses only symptoms, not causes. The counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate this point.
Tackling wicked problems leads one to concepts like chaos, complexity, and systems dynamics. For strategy students, it is always interesting to study predictability and unpredictability in a chaotic environment. Learning how complexity multiplies in the social and societal contexts of the wicked problems with which strategists deal helps them understand the Clausewitzian adage that in war, even the simplest thing is difficult.18 Strategists typically find that using systemic approaches (operations design and others) help to refine one’s thinking about wicked challenges yet do not prescribe rules or processes for designing the guidance that leads to solution development.
This last task requires the strategist to develop a design concept that ties national/international goals and objectives to the guidance that will drive the planning process and the development and subsequent selection of a course of action. As one might guess, this effort ties the problem and its context to the mission guidance required for operational planning, as found in the Joint Operation Planning Process. The development of an operational design serves to tie strategic goals, objectives, and direction to the kinds of operational missions one expects combatant commanders and their components to accomplish—that is, as the M in the DIME (diplomacy, information, military, and economic) instruments of national power. Using a strategy-task methodology, strategists and planners link the strategic level to goals and activities at the operational and even tactical levels of operation.
There is good news and bad, however, in the development of operational design. The good news for students of strategy is that operations design is finding its niche in service and joint doctrine. For example, Air Force Doctrine Document 3-0, Operations and Planning, discusses how the USAF uses the operational design concepts in designing air operations.19 Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Operations Planning, has a chapter detailing the application of operational art and operational design in the JOPP.20 The bad news is that once “we” place a conceptual approach into doctrine it tends to become a process, then a checklist; finally it loses its connection with the original intent, to be a way to think about wicked problems, and becomes just another “cake mix” of instructions to follow and steps to perform. In short, it gets EBO’d.21
As much as I would like to, I cannot tell the new strategist how to solve the wicked problems he will face in his career as a strategist. I can promise that every problem she faces will be unique to her in terms of the problem and its context, if for no other reason than that the human element will always be new. No matter how similar a problem looks to one that occurred in the past, the context will be different, and so one must develop unique operational designs tying together context, problem, and guidance for the development of solution(s). At SAASS, our motto “From the Past, the Future” is our way of saying that the past prepares the mind but never equates to the future. Accordingly, our focus is always on teaching the strategist how to think rather than what to think. As I transition to thinking about planning, I leave you with the following thoughts by Richard Rumelt on good strategy:
The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.22
The key insight . . . is the hard-won lesson of a life-time of experience at strategy work . . . [that a] good strategy does more than urge us forward toward a goal or vision. A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect. Unfortunately, good strategy is the exception, not the rule.23
PLANNERS: DOING AND EDUCATING (AND TRAINING)
As we begin to think about what planners do, I want to clarify our lexicon a bit. I have made a clear distinction between strategists and planners. In reality, the literature, doctrine, and common usage are not nearly so clear or distinct. Similarly, the use of the term “strategy” versus “planning” in common usage lacks the sharp definition offered here. For example, the joint community discusses operational design in a separate chapter of the JOPP; however, the Joint Staff title for the publication JP 5-0 is Joint Operations Planning. So, as strategists, one of the most important tasks is to serve as the “universal translator” in the discussions of strategists and planners, strategy and planning, and Planning, which, with the capital P, most likely includes both strategy and planning activities. (Keep in mind that the one thing sure to reign supreme in a crisis-action group is confusion. Moreover, much of the confusion will be over naming conventions.)24 Now, let us turn to and examine the things that planners do.
A good planning team cuts to the heart of its efforts, asking, “What do we have to do and what do we have to do it with?” What planners imply in such a question is that someone has told them what to do and what will be available to do “it” with in response to the crisis du jour. This point illustrates a key difference between strategy and planning—strategists are not necessarily constrained in terms of ways and means; planners usually are. For example, when President Roosevelt declared “unconditional surrender” as the operational end state of military operations for World War II, the Allied powers still lacked the means with which to accomplish such a task.25 The strategy included building such capabilities and capacities.
In the real world, of course, there are no absolutes. Many of the crises the United States has faced since the end of the Cold War have been come-as-you-are events; only in the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could we say ways, means, and ends had time to evolve significantly over time. In Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya, for example, strategists had to provide their input to the planners with many of the same limitations as to ways and means that constrained the planners.26 One twist in this discussion results from recent operations in Libya, Operations Odyssey Dawn (OOD) and Unified Protector (OUP).27 In these operations, the U.S. approach to strategy and planning of “just add more,” operative and repeated in every conflict since World War II, ended. Despite repeated requests for additional forces, OOD leaders, strategists, and planners ended up “making do” for the most part with forces available within the European theater.28 This “constraint” became more apparent during OUP, as the other NATO allies carried the bulk of operations while keeping significant forces engaged in operations in Afghanistan. For the first time since World War II, the United States, its allies, and coalition partners had to plan a sequential war in a way that at times, because of limited capacities and capabilities, could only respond to the crisis of the moment. There were no “overwhelming forces” to call upon. Future strategists and planners would do well to consider whether such a condition was a “one-off” or “one to remember.”
Planners too must cover a lot of ground in the tasks they perform. In this regard, there are many “process guides.” Each of the services has its variation. For example, the Army has MDMP—the Military Decision-Making Process; the Navy its Navy Planning Process; the Marines the Marine Corps Planning Process (MCPP); and the Air Force its operations planning and execution. Each of these is a variation on theme of the joint operational planning process of the joint community. Over the years, the service and joint processes have steadily converged, such that, ostensibly, the services can talk and work together as a planning team either in a joint setting or in service component commands. However, the reality still diverges from the preferred path.
The planning world still struggles to get everyone on the same page. The Army and the Marines are the best trained in planning processes. From the earliest stages of their careers, soldiers and marines use MDMP and MCPP, respectively, as their basic mission planning schemes. No “back of the envelope” planning here; they have these processes down and use them for nearly every activity—the Air Force and the Navy, not so much. I will leave our seafaring brethren on their own and focus on the Air Force.
The Air Force loves mission planning; however, it equally loves the “county option.”29 I suspect a survey of airmen when asked who/what JOPP-A is would produce responses falling in a range from believing it to be an emerging rap group to a few recognizing it as the air variation of the joint operational planning process. We love to be different. So most airmen, when thrown into a joint setting, are unfamiliar with the process and the lexicon of joint planning. Ah, I dream of the day when the Air Force creates a system for the development of tactical expertise and opts to have such a center, or centers, use a process not unlike the JOPP/JOPP-A to train its planners not only to do mission planning but to do so in a manner compatible with the rest of the joint team.30
Planners, like strategists, must endure demands to “solve world hunger” with every operational crisis or planning task. In the main, they actually accomplish two key tasks: one, they develop solutions and work toward solution selection; and two, they build the blueprints, the plans that put forces into motion. With the commander’s design guidance (from the strategy group/cell), planners analyze the mission in light of the tasks and allocated resources and create the solution options—courses of action (COAs). Using criteria developed in the context of how the overall commander and subordinate levels of command defined success, planners evaluate the COAs using criteria developed with the commander and the strategy group.31
Once the commander selects a course of action, the hard toil of turning ideas into action begins, and planners work to produce the blueprint—the operations plan or concept plan that puts the detail into the process. This detail moves the force onto the field of battle and then sustains it through to mission completion. The various annexes in a plan provide the details, from operations to sustainment and the time-phased force deployment data to move forces, people, and equipment. A typical plan for a major operation can easily run to over a thousand pages of detail and represents a herculean effort by planners. In a twist on an old adage, “the job can’t start until the paperwork is done.”
A warning: the single most important “safety tip” I can offer you about the strategy-to-planning nexus is that the efforts of these two activities never stop, that the strategist and planner must function in an iterative way to ensure that ways and means achieve desired ends within the unique conflict context. Too often, strategists and planners fail to accomplish this iterative interaction or do it in a perfunctory manner. For example, common sense dictates keeping assumptions ever at the forefront of thought. However, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, who challenged the assumption that the Iraqis wanted “freedom,” let alone freedom as leaders in the United States understood it? Recall that it took months of growing insurgency before this basic assumption fell before the reality of an insurgency and of an Iraq of various factions holding very different views of “freedom”—an Iraq that was more factional than inclusive. An honest and iterative review of such assumptions should prevent the “rose-colored glasses” syndrome from hiding the light of unwelcome truth. As strategists and planners, we must focus on reality and not wishful thinking.
So, how does one train and educate planners? In the Air Force, the education of planners typically begins with intermediate development education (IDE).32 The Air Force begins training, however, early in a career. Aviators begin the process in pilot/navigator training, planning what events go into each flight or mission. So too for combat support officers—from technical training throughout their careers, support officers plan the efforts that support and sustain the mission. At schools like the USAF Weapons School and the Mobility Operations School, airmen receive advanced training and education in air planning and operations.
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, education in planning for most Air Force officers begins at IDE. For example, the Air Command and Staff College provides seminars in joint planning as part of the joint professional military education (JPME) requirements for joint education. The faculty also provides a planning elective that does a “deep dive” into operational planning, designed for planners at the component and combatant-commander staff levels.
There are other opportunities for planner training and education. For Air Force planners assigned to a component/combined/joint air and space operations center (C/JAOC), the 505th Command and Control Wing at Hurlburt Field, Florida, provides exceptional programs to prepare airmen for duties as air, space, and cyber planners from the tactical to the operational levels. In addition, the wing offers courses to prepare airmen for senior leadership positions in the C/JAOC.
In addition, the LeMay Center for Doctrine Development and Education provides a series of courses at the intermediate- and senior-officer levels. At the intermediate level, the center offers courses in joint air operations and contingency wartime planning, as well as information operations application. For senior leaders, it runs courses for the combined/joint air component commander, a warfighting course for joint flag officers, and executive courses in cyberspace operations and Air Force warfighter perspectives.
BRINGING TOGETHER STRATEGY AND PLANNING
The following depiction gives us “a way” to link a perspective on critical thinking to the preparation and activities of strategists and planners. I readily admit that the figure below is a composite of a lifetime of thinking about strategy and planning, as well as the influences of many others pondering these same issues. In short, the ideas here are not mine but an amalgamation of those of many other people to whom I am indebted for the education of a lifetime. The figure illustrates how one creates strategists (and planners) who can lead “big P” planning.
The most critical elements of the figure are the faculty and the budding strategist and planner. A quality faculty can create the kind of curriculum that inspires students to learn and to master concepts, abstract and specific. Of course, the clay the faculty molds—the student—must be equal to the task. The Air Force has a great record of providing superb “clay” for this task. As we follow the depiction in the figure from top to bottom, the progression should by now be familiar. The depiction, of course, is one of a “perfect world”—a world where the creation of strategy and planning begin with the development of context for a problem situation/condition, leading to the development of a design that provides creative option paths that guide critical analysis in the planning section.
Another key element in the figure is the learning and iteration loop. It is there to remind one that strategy is always about getting something done and that to accomplish anything requires one to acknowledge the real world. While the strategist works continuously to refine the design with context and problem-definition updates, he must include the real-world limitations encountered by his planner counterpart. The planner, of course, works to merge concept with reality and to get from solution options to solution selection and “blueprint” development. Through the depicted iteration loop, the planner feeds her limitations or exploitation opportunities back to the strategist so that both can balance ways, means, and ends for decision makers. Indeed, the strategist and the planner are two sides of a single coin, as strategy simply has no purpose without a plan, and a plan without a strategy is a headless vector capable of achieving purpose only through blind serendipity.
It is important to keep in mind the key challenges that the strategist or planner faces. First and foremost are the critical three: context, context, context. Getting the context correct is the most critical element in strategy and planning. Keep in mind, the strategist and planner need the context of every participant—state and nonstate actors alike—in the crisis/contingency; one cannot be satisfied with knowing only one’s own context.
The strategist must also be clear as to exactly what problem requires resolution. Recall the earlier DoD language-proficiency example and the issue it involved of identifying the real problem. As the strategist works to refine the problem statement, it is very important to determine if the problem entails issues of causation or symptoms or both. For example, one could say the United States sought to wipe out terrorism in Afghanistan by ending the al Qaeda presence there. If true, the best one could say is that the United States eliminated symptoms of terrorism—al Qaeda extremists—but not the causal factors that led to the terrorism problem that began the conflict. In addition, while it is important to distinguish causal factors from symptomatic ones, it is even more important to know the limits of the military instrument of national power in addressing either symptoms or their causal factors. The strategist works iteratively with the planner to ensure that national and military ways and means serve to meet the desired ends of national leaders.
For planners, the key challenge is to avoid “groundhog day.” As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”33 However, no matter how much a crisis today looks like one from yesteryear, each is unique to its context and the human element experiencing the current event. It is very easy to default to the past as a crutch for dealing with the complex problems of today. So, while at SAASS we say, “From the past, the future,” that is very different from “the past = the future.” The past informs us but does not dictate. In addition, knowledge of the past can let us know of pitfalls that we could avoid or anticipate better and more successful outcomes.
Another crutch is to satisfice with regard to a crisis—in other words, to build solutions based upon a set of criteria that may or not cover the entirety of the problem within its unique context. For example, I have seen many crisis simulations derail when a leader says solve for A, B, C, and D. Sure enough, all the leader gets back are answers to the four listed points. Interaction between strategists and planners helps to mitigate this tendency of human nature.
CONCLUSION
The basic premise of this chapter is that although strategy and planning are different, they are two sides of the same coin, that the former is not relevant without the latter and the latter is unguided without the former. Moreover, in addition to activity differences, the strategist and the planner are dissimilar. The former must be able to think in abstract terms that develop conceptual frameworks, the latter in more linear terms to produce solutions and the blueprints to implement them.
The development of a strategist requires the study of theory, concepts, and application in order to multiply, virtually, the experience base of each student of strategy. Strategists could never “experience” more than a handful of life-changing events in any one job, assignment, or even lifetime. However, through education one can experience hundreds, even thousands of other people’s experiences in multiple contexts with the wicked problems of their eras as the grist for learning how to grind in the intellectual mill of the mind.
At the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, our task is clear—to “educate strategists for the Air Force and the nation.” This task from Gen. Larry Welch continues to serve as true north for the school and for the Air Force as it develops both strategists and planners. As I tell thesis students at SAASS, there are many “rabbit holes” one can follow—many “bright and shiny objects” to distract—yet we must focus on the problem, wicked and complex though it may be, in whatever context surrounds it in order to design the concepts that direct energy and effort toward a successful outcome. We educate strategists.
NOTES
1. Department of Defense, Joint Operation Planning, Joint Publication 5-0 (Washington, D.C., 11 August 2011) [hereafter JP 5-0], IV-2 to IV-3, http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp5_0.pdf (accessed 11 January 2012). Chapter 4 provides the detailed explanation of the JOPP. In addition, the executive summary, xxv–xxviii, gives a brief introduction to the subject.
2. So named because the Iraqis always seemed to stir up trouble in the fall, ruining the Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday seasons.
3. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (London: Oxford University Press, 1963, 1971), 84.
4. Although the focus of recruiting is STEM, actual accessions include a variety of education backgrounds, owing in part to the demand in other endeavors for STEM graduates.
5. Saul McCloud, “Type A Personality,” Simply Psychology, 2011, http://www.simplypsychology.org/personality-a.html#sthash.2krGukbQ.dpuf (accessed 1 February 2013). Of course, the downside to people with these personalities is that they can be overbearing, stubborn, and narrow-minded in thinking and action.
6. Theatrical acknowledgments to Austin Powers in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
7. Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 160.
8. Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Capstone Concept for Joint Operations: Joint Force 2020 (Washington, D.C., 10 September 2012), 3, http://www.jcs.mil//content/files/2012–09/092812122654_CCJO_JF2020_FINAL.pdf (accessed 28 September 2012).
9. School of Advanced Military Studies [hereafter SAMS], Art of Design: Student Text, version 2.0, 119, http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/CGSC/events/sams/ArtofDesign_v2.pdf (access confirmed 1 February 2013).
10. My apologies up front for the male orientation. Mea culpa.
11. I usually convey this vignette as a “survey” question to students. Very few admit to having found themselves in this circumstance, although nearly all sheepishly look down at their notes and quietly laugh.
12. Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2005), 181–99. Lawson discusses this vignette in a chapter (11) in his book; however, I paraphrase here and adapt the storyline (and improvise a bit) in the text to highlight the differences between the strategist as designer and the planner. Lawson’s is the better prose, but I hope the reader here understands the point I am trying to convey.
13. The School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS) has taught the elements of context, problem definition, and problem framing (logic construction) since its inception. That said, our colleagues at the School of Advanced Military Studies did the work to codify these concepts with a supporting body of work. See SAMS, Art of Design, 120 (and chap. 3 for expanded concepts).
14. For a good discussion on good versus bad strategy, see Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (New York: Crown Business, 2011).
15. The author served on the Air Force team that analyzed the implications for USAF implementation of this DoD directive.
16. One can find many sources to examine that range from screed (at both ends of the extreme spectrum) to “no problem here” relating to these points. The Army published a manuscript in 2006 that provides a reflective review of this issue. See William D. Wunderle, Through the Lens of Cultural Awareness: A Primer for US Forces Deploying to Arab and Middle Eastern Countries (Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2006), 2–4. These pages summarize selected common problems and doctrine and training shortfalls.
17. “Continuing advantage” is a concept put forth by my colleague Everett C. Dolman in his book Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Space and Information Age (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 4, 18.
18. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 119.
19. U.S. Air Force, Operations and Planning, Air Force Doctrine Document 3-0 (9 November 2012), https://wwwmil.maxwell.af.mil/au/lemay/main.asp.
20. JP 5-0.
21. By “EBO’d” I am referring to the odyssey of effects-based operations from a concept in the 1990s to anathema for Gen. James Mattis at Joint Forces Command in the 2000s. Sadly, contractors at JFCOM took the original concepts and built an ossified edifice of process that completely compromised the original ideas. Similarly, “new” contractors at JFCOM attempted the same thing with operational design. Their first draft was a “how to” operations design procedures manual exceeding 250 pages in length.
22. Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, 2.
23. Ibid., 4.
24. At moments like these, I like to call things “bob.” No matter which way you spell it, you get “bob.” The circularity of naming arguments will make your head hurt, and so I offer, “bob” as a way forward. Again, please note that the sharp distinction between strategy and planning I draw here is not so clear in the real world.
25. Recall that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill announced this objective at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, just over a year after the United States entered the war. It would be a year and some before the “arsenal of democracy” began to overwhelm Germany and Japan in terms of military production.
26. One could include the initial phases of Afghanistan and Iraq as come-as-you-are events too. As secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld stated at a town hall in-theater, “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” See William Kristol, “The Defense Secretary We Have,” Washington Post, 15 December 2004, A33, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A132–2004Dec14.html (accessed 28 February 2013).
27. OOD was the U.S.-led coalition that conducted the first days of the Libyan conflict, OUP being the NATO-led coalition that carried the conflict to termination some eight months later.
28. Maj. Gen. Margaret H. Woodward, “Defending America’s Vital National Interests in Africa” (remarks at the Air Force Association’s 2011 Air & Space Conference & Technology Exposition, National Harbor, Md., 21 September 2011).
29. “County option” is a colloquialism meaning “do it however you want.” Often one finds different planning tools and methods in use by the various weapon-system planners, unguided by a standardized process. The results are often creative, if equally often hard to relate to the work of planners in the sister services.
30. One day, yes, one day, there will be a USAF Weapons School where instructors could teach these processes and students could learn, master, and propagate such teachings throughout the force. One day, one day—but I digress. In reality, Air Force planners could easily adjust mission planning to JOPP/JOPP-A and subsequently integrate it seamlessly with their joint compatriots.
31. The evaluation criteria for COA analysis are always unique to context, problem, and mission. Most criteria include strengths and weaknesses of the plan, opportunities and threats (which might drive branches or sequels in the plan), risk to the COA and probability for success, timing issues/criteria, and the ability of the plan to meet or contribute to the accomplishment of mission objectives (the ends, to include those at the national/international level), constraints and restraints, and the ways and means available to meet requirements. Keep in mind I mean this list only to be representative of criteria, not to be all-inclusive.
32. Note that in 1990, then–Chief of Staff Larry Welch chartered SAASS to develop strategists. As throughout this article, in our focus on strategy and strategists at SAASS, we try not to forget the interactive and iterative processes that must ensue between the two activities. I would be remiss if I did not note that our colleagues at Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) provide an exceptional course in operational planning, a course that we at SAASS encourage prospective applicants to our program to take advantage of while at ACSC.
33. George Santayana, Life of Reason (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 4.