By Rich Groen
In tactical operations, effective communication remains one of the most underappreciated yet crucial competencies for field-grade leaders. At the upper echelons of operational and strategic planning, one of the most enduring communicative models is Colonel Arthur F. Lykke’s equation: Strategy = Ends + Ways + Means. While deceptively simple, Lykke’s framework gained lasting traction because it distilled the complexities of military strategy into a coherent, memorable structure that defines strategy and communicates effectively. His story’s power is no doctrinal novelty, but a clear mental model where the operational story aligns objectives, methods, and resources into a logically sequenced whole.
Field-grade officers, however, often face a different challenge. Many struggle not with knowledge, but with articulating that knowledge clearly and sequentially. Without a mechanism to “tell the story,” especially at the tactical level, conceptual alignment falters and synchronization becomes an elusive goal. Just as Lykke’s model enabled coherence at the strategic level, tactical synchronization can be achieved through an analogous storytelling approach, using a sequencing story that defines the logic of tactical execution:
“Intelligence drives Fires, Fires shape Movement and Maneuver, supported by Sustainment, secured by Protection, and guided by Command and Control.”
This mantra serves as more than a mnemonic, as it is a practical, doctrinally grounded narrative that provides commanders and staff with a logical sequence for aligning warfighting functions across planning and execution. Mirroring the structural clarity of Lykke’s model while addressing the tactical practitioner’s need for procedural logic, this mantra synchronizes actions across time, space, and purpose.
Turning Concept into Action: Synchronization as Story
Doctrine tells us what to think as individual warfighting functions, communication through storytelling shows us how to think together. Synchronization is positioned as a doctrinal imperative, central to generating combat power and achieving synchronization across domains. FM 3-0 describes clearly that forces integrate capabilities and synchronize warfighting functions to generate combat power while applying it against enemy forces. This emphasis reinforces that synchronization is not an ancillary staff function but a foundational mechanism for operational success. Despite this conceptual prominence, few tacticians offer a procedural blueprint or “how to,” leaving commanders and staffs to interpret and improvise under pressure.
For field-grade officers, that improvisation often manifests as fragmentation, these leaders rarely suffer from a lack of knowledge. Rather, they struggle to convey that knowledge in a coherent and communicable form. Staff officers operate in a cluttered ecosystem of slide shows, briefs, and matrices, rarely pausing to ask whether their narrative makes sense. The absence of a unifying mental model means that warfighting functions become stove-piped, sequencing is left to chance, and synchronization becomes aspirational rather than executable. In short, staff officers are familiar with the concepts but may not always know how to communicate them effectively.
This gap between knowing and communicating demands a tool that can both guide operational logic and express it clearly. Enter the sequencing mantra: “Intelligence drives Fires, Fires shape M2, supported by Sustainment, secured by Protection, and guided by C2.” This narrative is not a checklist. This story serves as a cognitive map, transforming doctrinal intent into tactical actions. Like Lykke’s model at the strategic level, this sequencing narrative offers clarity through structure. It defines relationships among warfighting functions, imposes a logical tempo, and provides a scaffold upon which a staff can build, communicate, and refine coherent plans. It is, in essence, a tactical-level narrative for a strategy’s framework.
Intelligence drives Fires. The story begins, intentionally, with intelligence, enabling commanders to understand the problem at hand and visualize the operational environment. But more than providing situational understanding, intelligence shapes intent. By positioning intelligence at the narrative’s start, the story reinforces that no plan begins in a vacuum. The story begins with context, reminding planners that every target nominated, every risk accepted, every maneuver conceived, must be rooted in the evolving truth of the environment. We therefore ask, “What is the enemy’s composition and disposition, their decisions, and how can we use PIR and NAIs to validate our assessments?”
Fires shape Movement and Maneuver. Next comes fires, a deliberate shaping effort with both lethal and non-lethal effects. Doctrine describes fires as creating and synchronizing effects across domains to enable action. In narrative terms, fires serve as the bridge, converting understanding into opportunity, ensuring that force ratios favor our formations. Effects as a defeat mechanism, obscure the enemy’s options and create space for maneuver to exploit. When the story is told correctly, fires are not adjuncts, but essential to set the conditions to ensure a favorable correlation of forces. From lethal and non-lethal effects, maneuver emerges as the decisive act, where forces achieve positions of relative advantage. Using this narrative logic, maneuver is then the action that fulfills the plan’s promise, imposing the commander’s will.
Supported by Sustainment, secured by Protection. Following this, the story transitions to sustainment and protection, two warfighting functions that rarely headline but always determine endurance. Sustainment extends operational reach, increases responsiveness, preserves tempo, and makes operational ideas supportable by ensuring combat power generation, classes of supplies, and medical assets are synchronized. Concurrently, Protection safeguards that momentum by mitigating risk and preserving combat power, knowing when to accept an economy of force and when to take prudent risks. Placed deliberately after maneuver, these functions remind commanders that victory must be sustained and shielded. Their positioning in the story emphasizes that no tactical win matters if it cannot be secured or followed through.
Guided through Command and Control. Lastly, C2 closes the loop, but in truth, it never left. As the connector of all warfighting functions, and in narrative form, C2 is the spine that binds the entire sequence. It ensures intelligence collection is prioritized, fires are sequenced correctly, sustainment arrives on time, and protection anticipates threats. It is not an endpoint, but the guiding intellect that enables coherence, adaptation, and synchronization throughout. Within the story, C2 serves as the narrator of the communication flow across platforms and command posts, detailing when and where decisions are made to mitigate risks or capitalize on opportunities.
Applying the Story to the Process
When applied to the operations process, this sequencing story becomes more than mental scaffolding or a planning language. During mission analysis, the story frames the problem as a collection of tasks and a system of effects, guiding staffs to ask not just “what do we know?” but “how does what we know drive what we will do?” In COA development, the narrative provides structure and clarity, allowing planners to build logic into their designs. Each function finds its place, and each action is deliberately sequenced. When briefed, the COA unfolds as a story, one that subordinate units can understand, rehearse, and execute with intent.
In COA analysis or wargaming, the narrative reveals more than decision points by developing coherence and consistency. Does intelligence provide support to targeting? How does our collection plan support detection of the enemy and assessing our effectiveness? Are the effects shaping for a purpose, and does our collection plan account for assessments? Are sustainment efforts synchronized to enable maneuver? By mapping actions to the narrative, staffs can expose gaps, test logic, and refine risk assessments without sacrificing flexibility. The sequencing story serves as the litmus test of tactical soundness when evaluating feasibility, acceptability, and suitability.
Even in execution, during synchronization and targeting battle rhythm events, the story holds, becoming a doctrinal check that asks if we are doing the right things, in the right order, for the right purpose. Rather than coordinating functions as isolated events, the narrative aligns them temporally, spatially, and functionally. Ultimately, this approach solves a deeper problem than synchronization, addressing the crisis of coherence. In an environment saturated with data, doctrine, and demand, field-grade officers don’t just need more tools, they need better stories. Narrative sequencing provides the story, which is then told through the “script” or Fighting Products by helping leaders think, plan, and communicate in ways that foster unity of effort and operational clarity.
Coherence Without Constraint
The narrative sequencing story of “Intelligence drives Fires, Fires shape Movement and Maneuver, supported by Sustainment, secured by Protection, and guided by Command and Control” does more than align warfighting functions. The story enables field-grade officers to transform complexity into a coherent solution through a communicable design, enabling commander visualization. The story provides a cognitive map that links planning to execution, transforming fragmented staff work into sequenced synchronization. In doing so, the story addresses a persistent challenge in tactical operations within the gap between conceptual understanding and communicative clarity.
However, its strength lies not in rigidity, but in adaptability. Our doctrine explicitly warns against over-synchronization, where excessive control stifles subordinate initiative and undermines mission command. When misunderstood or over-applied, the sequencing story risks becoming a prescriptive checklist, reducing dynamic operations to static formulas. To avoid this, commanders must wield the story as a guiding logic or a flexible narrative structure that enables tempo, supports mission-type orders, and empowers decentralized execution.
Effective application depends on the cognitive agility and doctrinal fluency of the staff. Synchronization requires more than doctrinal recall, demanding contextual judgment, continuous assessment, and the maturity to reorder sequences when friction, enemy adaptation, or terrain require deviation. Ultimately, the sequencing story empowers field-grade leaders to think critically, communicate clearly, and act purposefully. The narrative gives shape to doctrine, voice to the commander’s intent, and rhythm to the fight. When used with discipline and creativity, it transforms planning into purposeful storytelling. In conflict, where uncertainty is constant and clarity fleeting, a well-told operational story may be the decisive advantage that transforms synchronization and lethality from aspiration into action.
Colonel Rich Groen is the Director of the Department of Army Tactics (DTAC), US Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC). Rich is the former Squadron Commander of 1-7 CAV and 3/3SFAB, as well as a lifetime learner with a BS from the Virginia Military Institute, MS from Kansas State University, MA from King’s College London, and MMAS from Deakin University (Australia).
