by Jacob Loftice
Reporting drives military operations. It consists of developing and providing various information that guide leaders’ understanding of their formations’ capabilities, priorities, and assessed risk. Despite how common and important reporting is, it is not something all organizations or leaders do well. Here are five common-sense reporting guidelines to address reporting pitfalls from the company to general officer level.
Embrace Your Reporting Requirements
Start by understanding your higher headquarters’ reporting requirements. What is the information desired? Who is the intended audience? What decisions and actions does the information feed? Understanding the intent, formats, and distribution lists for routine reports affords you the opportunity to communicate to a broad spectrum of leaders and organizations.
Keep in mind, battle rhythm meetings are a form of routine reporting. Each has a known agenda with required inputs, and a standard audience. Unlike other forms of reporting, battle rhythm meetings have the added benefit of allowing you access to leaders, staff, and peers you may not see frequently. This is a crucial opportunity to communicate across the organization and build relationships.
As a brigade executive officer (XO), I experienced firsthand the importance of utilizing battle rhythm events to build professional relationships. Doing so facilitated effective reporting on behalf of my brigade . The installation personnel readiness review (PRR) was a routine meeting that gathered leaders from across the installation to identify personnel risks and inform manning priorities. This gave me predictable access to the other brigade XOs, the Chief of Staff, and the installation staff. At this meeting I was able to reinforce relationships, solicit and offer support, provide additional context to required reporting, and inform decisions at the general officer level. Because I recognized this opportunity, I used the PRR to emphasize the risk my brigade faced if we did not receive certain personnel within the next officer manning cycle. By understanding and leveraging the PRR reporting requirements and audience, I gained support from the commanding general to fill my Brigade’s most crucial requirements.
Be Honest and Circumspect
Reporting without appropriate transparency not only undermines trust, but inhibits a leader’s ability to make the best decisions. Leaders sometimes make suboptimal decisions because they have not received all available information. There is a temptation to obfuscate or omit anything unfavorable in reporting. I have seen this most commonly with commanders and staffs who seek to steer the leader receiving the brief towards a certain decision by removing unfavorable facts. However, by briefing bad information, reporters and subordinate units often worsen the problem.
While managing the brigade’s unit status reporting (USR), I observed battalions commonly framing personnel management issues as manning issues outside their control. For example, battalions struggling to certify the required number of fire control specialists for their fire direction centers (FDC) would inaccurately blame big-Army manning shortfalls. They presented their manning level as the cause of their uncertified FDCs but omitted sharing the gaps identified in the unit’s certification program. While the battalion determined the negative outcome they needed to address, they were not as circumspect about the matters actionable at their level.
Know Your Sources
All sources are not equal. When you receive a report from someone, consider if this is someone postured to have accurate and complete information. Many differences in reliability of information pertain to a reporter’s role within the organization. Different roles include different levels of responsibility and scope. Additionally, consider your previous experience with the person making the report.
As a battalion operations officer I worked with a battery commander who frequently reported minor maintenance concerns as catastrophic equipment issues. While he was in a good position to know if his equipment was inoperative, his eagerness to report the problem meant that he was not the best assessor of the technical issues facing his equipment. After realizing this, I began asking him more pointed questions. I also began more intentionally following up with the maintenance team to gain details on repair timelines. Over a period of a few months, he learned and provided more complete and accurate reports without any prodding from battalion.
Develop Your Information with Follow-Up Reporting
Information supports leaders’ decisions. Typically, the information contained in an initial report proves incomplete or inaccurate after a situation develops. To equip decision making, reporting does not end with the initial report. The individual or unit reporting must continue to develop information to allow leaders to make informed decisions as situations evolve. The simplest way to do that is anticipate the questions that higher headquarters will ask, and understand when information changes the situation.
For instance, you receive an initial report that a howitzer is stuck in a ditch. That is a critical piece of information, but not enough to inform subsequent decisions. Is the howitzer damaged or just stuck? If damaged, can field maintenance handle repairs? How long do we expect the howitzer to be inoperative? If simply stuck, is there a recovery asset in route to recover the howitzer? How do recovery/repair efforts impact the unit’s ability to service targets? Answers to these questions provide context lacking in the initial report and informs leaders of decisions to make and actions to take. Take the time to develop the initial report and maintain an accurate and complete picture as the situation develops.
Know Who to Tell
A critical element of reporting is not only relaying the correct information, but relaying it to the right person or organization. Once you determine who needs to know the information, package and provide it to meet that organization’s or person’s needs.
In a previous assignment I led a team that conducted security cooperation in Central America. While on this assignment, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was not approved on schedule, impeding our ability to train host nation forces. While we had no formal requirement to provide any report to host nation leadership, we recognized failure to report this to them would jeopardize our relationship. Further, not informing them would increase their interest in aligning with a US competitor.
To avoid these outcomes, we determined that the host nation’s military leadership needed to know why we had to deviate from our normal support, what support we could continue to provide, and when we expected the situation to resolve. Our higher headquarters confirmed we could continue to provide advisory support on previously donated equipment and conduct assessments of their maintenance and logistics facilities. With this information in hand we made rounds through every host nation force headquarters we could access and committed to continuing this limited support. Because we recognized the need to inform them early and with full transparency, the host nation leadership understood and responded graciously. In fact, they offered us increased access to the facilities and equipment we could support, and committed to recommencing normal training once the NDAA’s delay resolved.
Conclusion
Reporting is something every service member does. Because reporting informs decisions and actions that affect servicemembers and their families, understanding how to provide relevant and timely information through reporting matters. The guidelines above are simple, scalable, and adaptable for use from an individual informing a first line leader of an issue to a division commander updating corps on an operation. Communicating and reinforcing these guidelines improves unit reporting and trains leaders to understand how to use reporting processes to provide timely and useful information.
Jacob Loftice is a US Army Field Artillery Officer with recent experience as a brigade and battalion Operations Officer and Executive Officer. He currently serves as the Operations Officer for the Army Multi-Domain Targeting Center.
