ARMY AL&T
ALL ACCORDING TO PLAN
The digital planning tools of today prepare us for the battlefields of tomorrow.
by Michael “Reggie” Hammond, Earl Dean and Ryan Delts
Te process of creating that plan, however, is not always so elegant. Planners are tasked with both anticipating the conditions of the battlefield and rapidly revising their estimates when unexpected factors arise. Even when a plan is ready for dissemination, the process of transferring it through the chain of command and converting its contents for use in tactical systems is slow and prone to errors.
A
Since the dawn of strategy, military leaders have sought to make the planning process faster and more flexible. Te most recent push to do so in the U.S. Department of Defense, the Adaptive Planning (AP) initiative, has yet to truly take flight. Planning techniques have stalled since the millennium, relying on the same system of disorganized emails and document files, which not only serve as bottlenecks in the planning process but also bring into question how planners can harness emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Te next generation of challenges that planners are facing requires a new set of digital tools—and the Army’s Science and Technol- ogy (S&T) community is ready to provide them.
ADAPTING THE PLAN In November 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks conducted a review of Operation Plan (OPLAN) 1003, the contingency plan for the invasion of Iraq. As Robert M. Klein reviews in “Adaptive Planning: Not Your Great Grandfather’s Schlieffen Plan,” Rumsfeld and Franks discovered that the plan remained largely unchanged from the one used for the 1991 invasion of Kuwait and southern Iraq. Despite having been updated in 1998, the plan’s assumptions and strategy were still outdated. Updating the OPLAN for a second time took approximately one year and four months to complete.
https://asc.ar my.mil 41
t the core of every military operation is a plan, a careful orchestration of the move- ment of troops and materiel, the coordination of fires and the mitigation of risks—all according to the commander’s intent.
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