Stakeholder
It's not a surprise that plans sometimes fail, it's a surprise that they sometimes succeed.
If you are short on time then scroll all the way down to “Stakeholder Planning Process” and just read that. Please come back and read the rest later!
Previously
A military plan is a means to achieve a specific end. Sometimes a military plan becomes an end, in and of itself, or it becomes a means to achieve an end other than its originally intended end. This is the essence, though not the totality, of something I call “The Objective Fredericksburg Problem.”
In the last essay, we explored the tendency of plans to assume a life of their own and subsequently oppose (or at least ignore) their original purpose, which is what I call the Objective Fredericksburg Problem. In this essay, we are going to explore a corollary of the OBJ Fredericksburg Problem.
D-Day Disaster
If you’re like me, for most of your life your mental image of D-Day in WWII was something like: “It was a relatively well-done operation by brave men who fought hard and ultimately won the day. High casualties were an inevitable part of the operation, but our boys got the job done.” The reality is something much different. High casualties on D-Day were not inevitable. They were the result of a cascade of errors that were caused by the Stakeholder Corollary to the OBJ Fredericksburg Problem: the people who planned D-Day were not the same people who landed on the beach. Let’s examine a shocking disparity between the two American beaches:
US Casualties on Utah Beach: 197
US Casualties on Omaha Beach: >2,500!
Yes, the units that landed at Omaha Beach suffered ~14x more casualties than the units that landed at Utah. Those of you who have visited the Normandy Beaches, but haven’t dug into the planning process, will immediately blame the terrain. You might say, “Omaha Beach had massive bluffs that had to be scaled, and the soldiers had to cross a much larger beach. Of course, the casualties at Omaha were going to be higher.” The terrain certainly played a role in the higher casualty count at Omaha, and if the casualties were 2x or even 5x greater than Utah I would probably accept this line of argument, but a 14x difference in casualties cannot be explained by differences in terrain. No, the bulk of the disparity must be laid at the feet of the planners and commanders who made grave errors in judgment.
In his book, Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory, historian Adrian Lewis makes the compelling argument that the disaster at Omaha Beach was caused by the desire to merge two completely different approaches to amphibious assaults: the American way and the British way. In the Pacific Theater, the Americans had learned that MASSIVE amounts of firepower leveraged against a landing site was crucial to success. There was little surprise involved in the operation and no cunning was necessary. Pound the sh*t out of the beach with accurate and overwhelming naval and air power and then send in landing craft during daylight hours so ground forces can see each other and easily coordinate. Americans focused their efforts on the best beaches for landing, which were typically the most well defended. This approach was possible because America was an industrial powerhouse and could afford to use the amount of ordinance necessary to destroy robust coastal defenses. This method proved extremely effective at helping to ensure the success of amphibious operations in the Pacific theater.
The British doctrine for amphibious landing was the complete opposite. They relied on “tactical surprise” rather than firepower. Because the British were significantly more resource-constrained, they couldn’t rely on mass and firepower to reduce beach defenses, so they had to be sneaky. They preferred night landings with smaller forces in areas that were not well defended. Those troops would seize an initial foothold and begin attacking coastal defenses from the rear. As they made progress they would land more forces to exploit their advantage.
Which school of thought do you think was better: The American way or the British way? As it turns out, both schools worked out great and had great success. Neither way was better than the other, it just depended on the situation. The problem, as Lewis argues, is that the D-Day planners tried to combine the two approaches into a hybrid: achieve tactical surprise by having a short burst of massive firepower against the enemy’s strongest defenses and then immediately land a huge number of soldiers…in the daylight. The enemy would still be surprised (the primary concern of the British) and they would be reduced by firepower (the primary concern of the Americans).
It should be noted that most of the American Army veterans who had actually conducted amphibious landings in North Africa and Sicily favored the British method.
The plan for Omaha Beach was to use the VIII Air Force and their B-17 bombers to deliver a massive amount of firepower on Omaha Beach right before the landings. If they bombed too soon then the enemy wouldn’t be surprised and could shift forces towards the beach. Things had to happen in quick succession to keep the Germans off balance. The bombers had to drop their bombs and be followed closely by the landing craft. There would be no time to assess the effect of the bombers on the beach defenses and then decide whether to continue the landings.
I wonder what unknown staff officer, like Major Urqhart in the last essay, was sent packing because he was too insistent on asking inconvenient questions like, “but what if firepower doesn’t reduce the beach defenses? Won’t that mean that we will be landing massive amounts of soldiers in daylight against the enemy’s strongest positions?” Of course, our fictional heretic was probably met with the strongest of all military arguments: SHUN THE NON-BELIEVER, SHUNNNN!!!!!
Of course, our unknown staff officer foresaw exactly what would happen at Omaha Beach. As it turns out, the strategic bombers flying perpendicular to a linear defense at 20,000 feet in fog were unable to drop ANY ordinance onto the beach defenses. Prior to the operation, the Air Force had boasted about the accuracy of their bombing, but they were so concerned about fratricide with ground forces that the commander of the VIII Air Force instructed the pilots to wait an extra 30 seconds from the time they arrived above the target before dropping their bombs. They dropped something like 13,000 bombs into the fields behind the beach defenses at Omaha. I wonder if our unknown staff officer asked other smartass questions like, “if you airforce guys are so confident in your accuracy, why are you so scared of fratricide?”…
SHUNNNNN!!!!
The plan to clear the beach obstacles to make way for amphibious tanks and landing craft was also a complete sh*t show. The Army conducted a rehearsal in late April 1944, less than 6 weeks prior to the landings, that demonstrated that the current plan for clearing obstacles was almost sure to fail. The clearing of the obstacles during the rehearsal was so bad that General Gerow, the commander of the V Corps, asked that more time be allocated for engineers to clear the obstacles during the assault and said the entire plan needed to be re-examined. But in an excellent illustration of the OBJ Fredericksburg Problem Lewis writes that the “requests probably never received serious consideration because changing the time of the assault would have changed the entire conduct of the operation.” And just like General Browning from the last essay, Bradley came up with lame reasons why an earlier assault wasn’t possible. The real reason the plan couldn’t be changed was that so much time had already been spent on this plan. And there wasn’t enough time to make a new plan before the invasion had to begin.
Some wise leaders knew that the operation was unlikely to go as planned, not because there was any particular flaw in this plan, but because all plans (especially complex amphibious landings) have a way of going off the rails very quickly. Prior to the invasion of N. Africa, our favorite General George S. Patton famously said, “Never in history has the Navy landed an army at the planned time and place. If you land us anywhere within fifty miles of the Fedhala and within one week of D-Day, I’ll go ahead and win.” General Cota, who commanded the 116th Infantry Regiment on Omaha, said before the attack, “…you’re going to find confusion. The landing craft won’t be on schedule and people are going to be landed in the wrong place. Some won’t even be landed at all. The enemy will try, and will have some success, in preventing our gaining lodgement. But we must improvise, carry on, not lose our heads.” (My emphasis). Keep General Cota’s words in mind as we move into other sections.
As is often the case, bad planning for Omaha Beach was saved by small unit leaders taking the initiative to abandon trying to attack the heavily defended beach exits and instead infiltrating the lightly defended areas between the exits and attacking enemy positions from the rear. Max Hastings writes in his masterful book OVERLORD: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy “Like a trickling stream slipping between pebbles, a handful of courageous leaders and small groups of men found their way around [emphasis mine] the German strongpoints covering the beach exits, and forced a path for the American Army off the beach. The Corps plan for the attack was a failure. But the men on the hillside, spurred by their own desperation, found their own means to gain the high ground…on Omaha the failures and errors of judgment by the staff had only been redeemed by the men on the sand.”
The disaster at Omaha beach was not destiny—it didn’t have to happen the way that it did. Lewis writes, “Bradley thus deserves a greater part of the blame for the near defeat and high casualties on Omaha Beach…had Bradley accepted [Gerow’s] other recommendations, the assault would have proceeded with fewer difficulties and losses.” It also does not matter that the Army expected to take more casualties than they ended up taking. What matters is that there was a cascade of errors that were caused by bad planning assumptions. Going back to the obstacle clearance plan, there were officers who literally said that some of the bombs would drop short of the beach and that would help clear the obstacles. This was pure delusion.
The disaster at Omaha Beach highlights something I call the stakeholder corollary to the OBJ Fredericksburg Problem, and it also points out a massive flaw in the way that we typically plan and execute operations. Top-down plans inevitably contain flaws. Really, all plans inevitably contain flaws, but the real problem with top-down plans is that the flaws are harder for operators to spot.
Stakeholder
The Stakeholder Corollary states that the OBJ Fredericksburg Problem tends to be exacerbated when the planning of an operation is done by someone other than the person or unit that is conducting the operation.
Why is this so?
Imagine a brigade logistics planner preparing to support an offensive operation to seize Objective Fredericksburg. He is told to plan a primary and alternate route to conduct resupply operations, but he runs into a problem: the area where the mission is being conducted only has one usable route. There are multiple smaller routes, but he is 90% sure that none of them will support fuel trucks or wreckers. If heavy vehicles try to drive on them they will likely get stuck or won’t be able to fit through several small chokepoints. He brings this problem to the Operations Officer and says that there is only one possible route for resupply, so if anything goes wrong with the route, resupply is going to be a huge problem. The unit, he argues, should probably coordinate for aerial resupply as an alternate.
The Operations Officer, busy with 10,000 other things says, “I can’t babysit you on making the logistics plan. We’re past the deadline to request aviation support and we have to attack this objective. The Commander is going to want to know what the alternate resupply route is in case we lose the primary route. Figure it out.”
With the deadline for the plan coming up fast, and with the fact that the logistics planner has so many other things he needs to do to get ready for the operation, he takes his best guess at which side route is most likely to be able to support logistics vehicles and draws it on the map. He rationalizes this shortcut by saying to himself, “the unit probably won’t need the alternate route anyway.”
A logistics planner at the brigade headquarters has a job — to help make a plan to seize OBJ Fredericksburg, not to actually seize objective Fredericksburg. He’s not the one that is going to need ammunition or fuel on the frontline. His job is to make a logistics plan to support the brigade, and he’s done that with the constraints that he was given.
The Operations Officer is in the same position. His job isn’t to seize OBJ Fredericksburg. His job is to make a coherent plan that the Brigade Commander will approve. The most important thing is that The Plan looks good and sounds reasonable. The Plan is the focus. The Plan to seize Objective Fredericksburg is the Operation Officer’s objective. Whatever happens after The Plan is approved is of little concern to the Operations Officer or the logistics officer.
This is not an extreme or unrealistic example. Things like this happen all the time in planning. The problem is that shortcuts and little fudges usually don’t just happen once in the planning process. They can happen dozens if not hundreds of times. Most people who have worked on an operational staff know this to be the case. Everyone is always cutting a little corner here, glossing over a tiny detail there, adding or subtracting a little piece of information that might not be 100% accurate. It’s not uncommon to hear, “just put something on the slide for now and we’ll come back and fix it when we have more information,” or “The variable is really X but we need to put down Y or people will be confused.”
A minor example comes from when I was a platoon leader in Afghanistan. During the planning for an operation, I templated my machine-gun teams to be placed on a very high berm to cover some dismounted soldiers moving on the low ground. On the two-dimensional graphics that we had to submit to our higher headquarters to get the mission approved, it looked like the dismounted troops were walking in front of the machine guns, so that if the machine guns had to shoot, they would be shooting into the dismounted soldiers. But in reality, the berm was so high that the machine guns would easily shoot over the dismounted troops. (For you military folks, the dismounted troops were still outside of the surface danger zone of the MGs.; the berm was that high). On my slides, I even had a text box explaining that the MGs were shooting over the dismounted troops, not into them.
My commander told me that I could put the MG teams there in reality, but the graphics needed to change so that no one at the battalion HQ would be confused. We couldn’t have anyone thinking that we might be shooting into our own troops. After all, The Plan had to be approved. I dutifully moved the machine gun icons 200 meters to the west.
My minor example of moving the icons of MG teams doesn’t illustrate the stakeholder corollary (we’ll come back to that in a bit), it illustrates that details in The Plan are sometimes (maybe even oftentimes) made up and don’t correspond to reality. I was the one conducting the operation, so I could have my own real plan, separate from The Plan that had to be submitted for approval. That isn’t always the case.
Going back to the brigade logistics planner. He made an alternate route part of The Plan. The route will be briefed and counted on in case an alternate supply route is needed. Of course, if it is ever needed it probably won’t be usable. So what is the real plan in case the primary supply route goes down? The real plan is that smart operators will quickly find out the alternate route won’t work and then they’ll either make it work, or they will find some other way to improvise. Or, in the worst case, there will be no resupply until much later than anticipated. The problem is that the operators don’t know that the need for them to improvise is, essentially, the real plan. They are relying on The Plan, and are making what they think are real plans based on what is in the plan they have been given.
The Plan and the real plan
I first saw the difference between The Plan and the real plan when I was an ROTC cadet at Camp Mackall, North Carolina. As a cadet, I had the rare opportunity to train with officers who were going through the Special Forces Qualification Course. The officers I was with spent several days planning for a Special Reconnaissance / Direct Action mission. They prepared a very detailed brief of The Plan for their cadre of graders which discussed various aspects of the operation. Following the brief, as soon as the cadre were gone, these officers huddled around a map and made the real plan.
It’s not that there were glaring differences between The Plan and the real plan, it’s just that the real plan, to me, seemed to be about 90% of the important stuff that we didn’t discuss in briefing The Plan, but preparing The Plan took 90% of the planning time. The real plan was about figuring out what compass azimuths to follow and exactly where they were going to hide to recon the objectives, and what they would actually do if a position was compromised. When they spent days making The Plan, it felt like they were assembling a brief to satisfy their instructors. When they sat around the table making the real plan It felt like professionals planning to DO something real. They all knew the difference between The Plan and the real plan. It was unspoken, but they all knew it.
The problem with the stakeholder corollary is that when The Plan is made by someone not executing the operation, there is no distinction between The Plan and the real plan. When the operators don’t make The Plan, they don’t know which elements of The Plan are part of the real plan and which elements are made up. This tricks operators into thinking that The Plan is the real plan. Operators then base what they are actually going to do on The Plan whose flaws and risks are hidden from them. This means that all of the things they are planning to do are doomed from the start.
This is what happened at Omaha Beach. Soldiers were told that the massive aerial bombardment was going to completely level the German defenses and that they would not be meeting any stiff resistance. Most of the men didn’t know that there was a difference between The Plan and the real plan. What was the real plan? That is what was laid out by General Cota: “improvise and carry on.”
Why We Plan
One of the ironic things about planning operations is that most of the planners will quietly admit things like, “we know this whole plan is going to change as soon as we get started.” We even have sayings like, “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
Every time I have been given a class on planning, the slide show begins with the same Eisenhower quote: “plans are useless, but planning is everything.”
The quote is from a speech that President Eisenhower gave at the National Defense Executives Reserve Conference. He wasn’t talking about operational military planning at all. He was talking about national defense emergency planning and contingency planning. The executives were gathered at the conference to talk about the dynamics of American industry in the case of a national emergency.
There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.
So, the first thing you do is to take all the plans off the top shelf and throw them out the window and start once more. But if you haven’t been planning you can’t start to work, intelligently at least.
That is the reason it is so important to plan, to keep yourselves steeped in the character of the problem that you may one day be called upon to solve—or to help solve.1
Eisenhower is correct in saying that the purpose of planning for an emergency is to keep yourself “steeped in the character of the problem.” The purpose of planning for an emergency is to learn about all the relevant variables so that you can know the major inputs that will go into an operational plan once the emergency happens. But again there is a problem here. If the major operational planning is done at a high echelon, the people doing that planning are doing all kinds of learning and thinking through problems. But the people who are going to react to those problems are the people at lower echelons, so why aren’t they more involved in the planning? What is the purpose of upper echelon people making plans for lower echelon people if the purpose of planning is to learn about the environment so that you can react intelligently when things change? It’s great that upper echelon people plan and learn, but they are not the ones who need to be doing the learning. The people who need to learn about the environment and the potential problems are the lower echelon people who are actually going to execute the plan!
If the people executing the operation don’t make the plan then they are not “steeped in the character of the problem.” If operators are simply handed a plan to follow, they have missed out on the whole purpose of the planning process—which is to learn so you can react. Yes, they will do their own planning for the mission they are assigned, but that planning will be based on all of the inputs that went into the plan of which they are only a part. And again, they won’t know all of the assumptions, shortcuts, and hidden risks that went into making the higher-level plan.
So how do you fix this problem?
Stakeholder Planning Process
If you are a company commander and you are given the mission to attack to seize Bush Hill for such and such a purpose, no one is going to tell you how to seize Bush Hill. This is what we think of as Mission Command. Your higher headquarters will tell you to seize Bush Hill, but they won’t tell you how to seize Bush Hill. Boom: Mission Command accomplished! Your higher headquarters will probably even tell you why your mission is to attack to seize Bush Hill.
But there is a problem here: your company is being told what to do, but you probably didn’t get a say in that decision. You weren’t sitting in the planning room when the Operations Officer and the rest of the staff were looking at the map and deciding where the companies were going to go. As they talked and studied, they learned, which is the whole purpose of planning. There were many variables both known and unconscious that drove them to decide that your company should attack to seize Bush Hill. Some of that will make its way into The Plan, but I state again that the purpose of planning is to learn. If you, as the company commander, do not participate in the planning process at the battalion level, you are not learning the things that the battalion staff is learning. When the plan inevitably changes and your company is called to seize a different objective instead of Bush Hill, you are starting from square one. You may know the commander’s intent for the operation, but you didn’t participate in the planning process at the higher echelon.
One possible solution to the Stakeholder Corollary is the Stakeholder Planning Process. This is when a unit’s plan is made by the leaders at the next lowest echelon. In other words, the battalion’s plan is made by the company commanders and the company plan is made by the platoon leaders. I hinted at this in my essay called “Network.” When I planned for operations, my preferred method was to simply let the platoon leaders work together to make the plan for the company with my guidance and supervision. Because they did the planning, they did the learning. When things changed they didn’t need to wait for me to make a decision. They simply coordinated their actions with each other and executed. There was no difference between The Plan and the real plan. Because the platoon leaders were busy making the company plan, the squad leaders then made the platoon plans in parallel. Doing this prevented the Objective Fredericksburg Problem.
The simple idea here is that the battalion plan should be made by the company commanders under the supervision and guidance of the battalion commander. The S2 would likely begin by giving everyone a brief on the enemy situation and their likely courses of action. The company commanders would then discuss how the battalion should accomplish its mission. The role of the staff would be to listen and provide insight into what the company commanders are saying. It would be a somewhat messy process, and it would look a little chaotic and unorganized. But no more so than the way we make plans now.
The typical objection here begins with a patronizing chuckle, “Oh silly Major Caroe, that might work at the tactical level, but that simply cannot be done at the operational or strategic level.” This is an absurd objection. General Gerow was completely at the mercy of Bradley and Montgomery in making the plan for V Corps. When he tried to suggest changes to correct the horrendously flawed mine clearance plan, he was rebuffed. General Cota was the assistant division commander for the 29th Infantry Division during the planning process and pleaded for a nighttime assault to no avail. Cota ended up on Omaha Beach in the heat of the battle and personally led an attack up the bluffs in between the main German defenses. Had the Regimental commanders made the Divison plan and the Division Commanders made the corps plan, and the corps commanders made the Army plan, Omaha Beach would likely have turned out much more successfully.
Responsibility
I know that it’s a weird and uncomfortable feeling to let the planning be down by the leaders at the next lowest echelon. You are the leader! How can you abdicate your responsibility to plan and make decisions!? It feels like cheating. It feels like laziness. But when it works, it’s a damn beautiful thing. Just think about it from your subordinates’ perspective. You trust them so much that you are willing to let them work together to make the plan for the organization!? How trusted would you feel if your boss let you and your peers make the plan for the larger organziation?
A few quick notes
The Stakeholder Planning Process cannot always be used. Sometimes there just isn’t enough time. Sometimes a commander has to make and issue a plan as a matter of necessity. It’s also not a panacea. Plans will still go awry, problems will inevitably arise. I think it’s great, but it’s a messy process that can be hard to manage. It takes practice.
I don’t want to overstate my case against the typical way the Army plans and executes operations. Plenty of units are excellent at planning and executing. Failure is not the inevitable outcome for every operation under the current model. What I seek to introduce is a planning tool that I think could be helpful in a variety of circumstances.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miua.4728417.1957.001&view=1up&seq=858