The Military Decision Making Process: four words that send shivers up your shell. But MDMP is simply a methodology to understand and solve tactical problems collaboratively. An underlying theme of Part I and Part II of this series is enabling and enforcing collaboration to achieve shared situational understanding. This piece focuses on leveraging shared understanding to solve home station problem sets with the same methodology you will use in combat. MDMP is hard because we rarely use it to frame and solve dilemmas at home station. The friction and fog of war will challenge your ability to execute MDMP. We can make it easier by training ourselves and our teams to solve home station problems collaboratively via this tried and true process. In this article, we will explore three common opportunities to get your battle staff good reps at planning: annual/semi-annual training guidance, collective training events, and the weekly FRAGORD.
Receiving the Annual/Semi-Annual Training Guidance
Home station activity is the training, equipment maintenance, personnel welfare, education, and leader development events that enable us to deploy at maximum readiness. Ideally, your division will issue annual training guidance, with your brigade headquarters issuing semi-annual training guidance quickly afterward. Your battalion’s mission is a friendly-oriented objective: achieve a certain state of readiness no later than a specified DTG. Our task as a battle staff is to digest this training guidance, conduct our own analysis, receive the commander’s guidance, generate a proposed long-term training plan, receive commander’s approval, and publish the battalion’s long-term training plan.
Upon receiving your brigade’s training guidance, gather the battle staff to conduct Mission Analysis. This is a team effort. Each staff primary needs to understand the specified and implied tasks that correspond to his or her WFF. Some key, often overlooked, inputs to analyzing long-term training are:
- maintenance services
- equipment fielding
- key leader transitions
Identify constraints and limitations as well as any land, ammo, or other resources already dedicated for your unit based on your higher headquarters’ OPORDs. Record your analysis and brief it to the battalion commander. Armed with his or her guidance, develop the Course of Action: the Long-Range Training Calendar (LRTC). Wargame your LRTC with the staff. Gravitate towards friction: A CO has 50% Q2s during Table VI gunnery; that special battalion on your installation receives 90-day deployment orders and steals your urban training site; or a blizzard hits during your February PLT gunnery window. The weighted evaluation criteria in your LRTC should be “flexibility”–i.e., retraining opportunities. Once your commander approves the LRTC, prepare the OPORD: mission, intent, key tasks, end-state, tasks to subordinate units, tasks to staff, coordinating instructions, and timeline.
Preparing the battalion’s long-term training plan is a combined staff effort and a free rep at MDMP. Without each teammate’s involvement, without accounting for each of their nuanced home station variables, your LRTC will quickly fall apart.
Planning Collective Training Events
Somewhere in your LRTC you will have scheduled platoon or company collective training opportunities. You will also have resource-intensive crew or even individual training: gunnery, anti-tank weapon ranges, a Spur Ride, or Expert Infantryman Badge qualification. Twelve to eleven weeks out from these major events is the window for your battle staff to conduct your MDMP. You will probably assign your senior CPT in the S3 shop to plan major collective events. But the staff has a responsibility to support the planner during all steps of MDMP for collective training. Here is “a way”:
The Mission: Certify all PLTs in the BN by (DTG). In addition to the BN CDR’s guidance, the baseline documents that will drive your mission analysis are the TE&Os for certification and the Objective “T” Assessment matrix. Consider historical weather trends, available land and ammunition, available training aids and devices, maintenance activities, and adjacent unit activities. Identify constraints and limitations, specifically regarding ranges and training facilities. Brief your analysis to the BN CDR and receive guidance. In most cases, you should have a recommended training location already identified for BN CDR approval; you will not be able to develop the training course of action without knowing where you will train. CoA Development for training events largely falls within the realm of the S3, S2, and S4. The S3 planners develop the schedule for execution and the S4 planner develops the scheme of support. Their combined efforts generate the training event execution matrix- the “throughput”. Wargame this execution matrix and identify retraining opportunities within the event window. Planned in tandem with the scheme of execution is the actual training scenario. Leverage your S2 to create a realistic training scenario and wargame it with your S3 team to ensure that the training meets objectives and can do so in the allocated times. Bring in the S6 to validate the scheme of signal support and the S1 to confirm award criteria. Brief the final CoA to the boss for approval. Identify tasks to staff and subordinate units, write the order, and publish.
Planning home station training in this way may seem intuitive. You may have learned the hard way, having felt the burn of an IPR-gone-wrong with the Commander. But as described above, the key is total staff collaboration and structuring planning efforts as we do in combat.
The Weekly Brigade FRAGORD, aka RDSP
Nobody likes the Brigade FRAGORD. Especially not the poor captain writing it. Just as bad are the tasks that don’t (and won’t) come out in a FRAGORD, but you must execute anyway. If our response to long-term training guidance is MDMP, our response to the Brigade FRAGORD is often the Rapid Decision-making and Synchronization Process (RDSP). We conduct RDSP in combat when the conditions-friendly, enemy, environment, or civil-change to such an extent to render our current plan and its branches no longer tenable. This requires the staff to resynchronize efforts and units to adjust to the new paradigm. Most importantly, RDSP is a battle drill, typically executed on the CUOPs floor (FM 6-0). Sometimes higher headquarters’ FRAGORD has no impact on our training schedule; other times it requires wholesale RDSP on the calendar to accomplish the mission. In either case, you must review the weekly FRAGORD as a team.
Ideally, your brigade will push out a FRAGORD on a weekly basis, allowing your team to establish a battle rhythm event to review it. Upon receipt, the XO, S3, or OPS SGM gathers the entire battle staff on the CUOPs floor. Identify the tasks that apply directly to your unit. Assess the manpower (specifically leaders), equipment, resource, and time requirements to accomplish the mission. Each staff element determines their coordinating or supporting requirements for the task. Develop a quick course of action and then overlay it on the long-term (or short-term) training schedule. Determine the subordinate unit or staff element that will receive the task. Alert the battalion commander if it meets his CCIR criteria, identify risks to readiness objectives, and provide a recommendation.
Much of the time, weekly FRAGORD tasks are not news. S3s already issued verbal WARNORDs, staff cells conducted necessary coordination, and OPS sergeants majors went three rounds fighting about who finally got pinned. But as in previous sections, it is about exercising the collaborative staff processes we will use in combat. The weekly FRAGORD is a weekly rep at rapid assessment, coordination, and synchronization by your staff team.
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Our battle staff teammates too often solve problems on their own, usually with the right intentions but without consideration of their impact on the rest of the team. We must be comfortable with collaborative planning- the type of planning that builds situational awareness and allows us to understand the problem. If you conduct MDMP on your home station planning, if your team becomes comfortable with the methodology, then it will become easier to plan in combat.
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