by Tom Gaines and Micah Stedman
“Gentlemen, we have run out of money; now we have got to think.” – Winston Churchill
Somewhere out there is the perfect unit. The commander’s intent is perfectly understood by every member of this overstrength organization. Every piece of equipment is fully mission capable, and every slide in the command and staff is green. The only resourcing problem they have is too much money, so they use their excess funds to cover fellow units’ costs. One day we will find this place.
Until those orders show up in our inboxes, we need to get back to work. As staff members, our job is to gain and maintain options for the commander to run the organization and accomplish the mission. The fact that these staff positions are often likened to oarsmen chained in the galley of a Roman trireme does not diminish the absolute importance of the role staff officers play in the unit’s success. Commanders rely on staffs to be the subject matter experts within their warfighting functions and provide relevant, timely information and advice. But what is relevant? What do commanders care about, and how can you distill all the data into a way for them to make decisions?
New staff officers, especially at the field-grade level, often struggle with this question. Turning to doctrine, FM 5-0 gives the book answers of mission, commander’s intent, and staff running estimates informing the military decision-making process. Having sat through our fair share of operational planning sessions and command updates, the dearth of useful information presented by many members of the staff seems to indicate that the confusion remains.
To help alleviate this confusion, we offer a simple approach for officers and senior NCOs to frame their discussions with commanders around risk– the threats and hazards that can negatively impact the organization. What is it about the organization or operations that introduces risk to force, risk to mission, and risk to capability that the commander must understand and make decisions about? That approach looks like this:
Risk = Requirement – (Capability + Resources)
Essentially, the equation means this: the unit has a mission to perform, and to successfully complete that mission requires specific things. To meet these requirements, organizations have people and tools available to them along with a certain amount of monetary and material resources. Given fiscal realities, however, that is unlikely to cover everything. Any requirements that remain after units apply their assets represent risk which commanders must decide to accept, avoid, mitigate, or transfer. Although there are operations research systems analysts that could turn it into a quantifiable equation, this is more of a way to logically organize thoughts rather than to arrive at a mathematically precise measurement of risk. With that disclaimer, we turn our attention to each of the variables—requirement, capability, and resources—and describe how staff officers might use each to understand and describe their warfighting function to their boss.
Requirement
Guided by the commander’s mission statement, priorities, and intent, requirements are the organization’s specific needs for your staff section or warfighting function. To build an understanding of what your requirements are, start by analyzing the operational and environmental context. Next, what actions are required to accomplish the mission, and what is the effect you are looking to achieve? Given this context, what are the technical specifications for each requirement?
Starting to think about requirements broadly necessitates communication and greater situational understanding and facilitates better critical analysis of the mission and what the organization needs. Following this path prevents you from conflating a specific skill or tool (i.e. a capability) for a requirement. It also better prepares you to think creatively about alternative solutions in the event your initial plan doesn’t work.
During one of my deployments as an operations officer, my battle captain walked up to my commander and me, clearly exasperated. He had been on the phone with our higher headquarters requesting to use a predator drone currently on station near one of our areas of interest, but they denied his request. He wanted to get my commander involved to force the issue. After calming him down, we talked about what he was trying to accomplish. We had received reporting of activity around the site, and he wanted to get overhead imagery to confirm the reports. In this case, his requirement was for a single pass by a system that could take photos or video. By asking for the specific capability of the predator drone, he had unnecessarily limited his request, which they denied. Calling back our higher headquarters and articulating our requirement, they were able to reroute a different UAV that was transiting through the area and an hour later we had the imagery.
Since requirements are simply a list of things that your organization needs to be successful, they are also a list of reasons why the mission could fail. Put another way, unmet requirements are risks that you must address by applying capabilities and resources. Before moving on from outlining requirements, remember that the enemy always gets a vote. What are they likely to do, and how will that affect your mission?
Capability
Armed with a clear understanding of the requirement—what you need—it’s time to analyze what assets you have available. What skill sets and tools do you have to meet your requirements? Don’t unnecessarily constrain yourself at the beginning of this process by trying to fit capability exactly to requirement. If there is a system that is overkill or that is slightly under specification, make note of it. Depending on what else the organization is trying to accomplish, one of these other systems may end up being the best choice for a particular application as a way to free up the best choice system for use elsewhere or to quickly adapt to changing conditions. During planning for a recent deployment, the deploying team identified a network connectivity requirement for fifteen users. The best-fit capability available to them was a system that supported twenty users, but talking with the team, communications planners also highlighted the availability of a smaller package that could support five users and a larger one that could support fifty. When the size of the element unexpectedly tripled after a request from a unit already in theater, the team already knew that there was a larger system available, and switched to the fifty-user package to accommodate the change.
Start your capability allocation with organic assets you have readily available within your organization, but again, don’t limit yourself. What additional forces or systems could you request to have attached or realigned to you temporarily? What excess capability do your higher headquarters or adjacent units have, given their mission, that they can lend to you? If nothing is readily available, how much would a new system cost to procure and maintain, and do you have a mechanism to do that? Finally, what authorities do you need to employ a specific capability, and what is the lead time required to properly coordinate for its use? Moving towards a division-focused operating construct should consolidate many of these capabilities and authorities and streamline the process for task organizing them down to lower echelons, but you have to know what is available before you can ask for it.
During an after-action review of a recent training event, one of the maneuver elements talked about issues they had fitting all of the people and equipment into four vehicles and how it made it difficult to quickly move around the area at certain critical points in the operation. Had they identified that problem in their mission preparation or raised their concern when it became a challenge for them during execution, their higher headquarters would have had no problem giving them one of the four vehicles that sat unused throughout the entire event. Because the team didn’t realize what capabilities were available or reach out for assistance, they limited their ability to operate.
Organic capabilities and those that can be easily task organized to your organization should meet the majority of the requirements you need to be successful. The final step is to apply the monetary and material resources you have at your disposal to procure those things not immediately available.
(Financial) Resources
The final piece of the puzzle are the monetary and material resources the organization has at its disposal. There was a time in the not-too-distant past where units had most of the resources they needed to accomplish their mission. Congressionally allocated overseas contingency operations funding augmented budgets for deploying units throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While this additional funding has been reduced, the demand for trained units to deploy in support of national policy objectives has not. The result is that units are being asked to continue to operate on less. As field-grade staff officers, understanding budget cycles and being proactively engaged in the budget process start to become critical for success. Resourcing execution often comes in bursts based on when funds become available, so being prepared with the necessary documentation at the right time can mean the difference between you getting what you need and your organization having to go without.
It is also important to understand the different funding streams the Army uses and when it is possible to tap into other sources of funding. Creativity and an understanding of different “pots” of money is required to maintain a trained and ready force. For instance, O&M (Operations and Maintenance) funds are day-to-day funds used to keep the organization moving. Depending on your commander’s priorities, there could also be special and unique funding available. For example, a military police or ordinance unit could get additional funding to support federal law enforcement or secret service missions. Additionally, when your unit is deploying forward there is often theater provided equipment you can request to augment what you have on hand. For example, units deploying to CENTCOM can get radio systems that provide additional capability and interoperability for their assigned mission. The more you understand what the commander deems important from a resourcing perspective and what is available organically, with an adjacent unit, or across the Army enterprise the more you can point towards your mission.
Even if you are able to find additional resources elsewhere, it is still critical to view the organization’s requirements holistically. Anywhere you can gain efficiencies within your warfighting function frees up resources the organization can direct towards the commander’s priorities. The art is finding the balance between the need to champion requirements within your lane with setting the organization up for success in its most critical areas. One of the best ways to develop these efficiencies is by being intentional about when and where you choose to employ the resources you have available to you given everything you must accomplish. When done well, you are able to cover more requirements with the same amount of resources, lowering risk for your commander in the process.
Use the Language of Risk
Breaking down each of these three elements in this way lets staff officers better understand the gaps that emerge between requirements, capabilities, and resources and helps them articulate those gaps as risk to their commander and fellow staff officers. “Our mission requires X. we can provide Y. the difference between X and Y introduce Z risk to the organization.” This clear articulation of risk should be closely followed with recommended decisions commanders can take based on their overall assessment of the situation. Reducing risk comes from either decreasing the requirements placed on the organization or in bringing additional capability or resources to bear.
Finally, if you use this framework as the basis for your running estimates, it will help you determine what your commander need to know and when you need to tell them. As the situation develops bringing changes to each element, the commander’s level of risk also changes. You can then flag these changes for discussion or decision based on their assessment.
Lieutenant Colonel Tom Gaines is currently assigned as the G6 for 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne). His writing on human creativity, decision making, and technology can be found in Harvard Business Review and West Point’s Modern Warfare Institute.
Major Micah Stedman is currently assigned as the Deputy G6 for Plans for 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne).
Photo by Dave Photoz on Unsplash
