Pattern for Successful Operations

Pages 127-132

  • Goal

  • Plan

  • Action

  • Support

  • Command

Goal

  • Diminish adversary's freedom of action while improving our freedom of action, so that our adversary cannot cope, while we can cope, with events/efforts as they unfold.

Plan

  • Probe and test adversary to unmask strengths, weaknesses, maneuvers, and intentions.

  • Employ a variety of measures that interweave menace-uncertainty-mistrust with tangles of ambiguity-deception-novelty as a basis to sever adversary's moral ties and disorient or twist his mental images, hence mask-distort-magnify our presence and activities.

  • Select initiative (or response) that is least expected.

  • Establish focus of main effort together with other (related) effort and pursue directions that permit many happenings, offer many branches, and threaten alternative objectives.

  • Move along paths of least resistance (to reinforce and exploit success).

  • Exploit, rather than disrupt or destroy, those differences, fractions, obsessions, etc., of adversary organism that interfere with his ability to cope with unfolding circumstances.

  • Subvert, disorient, disrupt, overload, or seize adversary's vulnerable, yet critical. connections, centers, and activities that provide cohesion and permit coherent observation-orientation-decision-action in order to dismember organism and isolate remnants for absorption or mop-up.

Action

Observe-orient-decide-act more inconspicuously, more quickly, and with more irregularity as basis to keep or gain initiative as well as shape ad shift main effort; to repeatedly and unexpectedly penetrate vulnerabilities and weaknesses exposed by that effort or other effort(s) that tie-up, divert, or drain away adversary attention (and strength) elsewhere.

Support

Superior mobile communications

  

 

 
 

to maintain cohesion of overall effort and sustain appropriate pace of operations within available resources.

Only essential logistics

  

Command

  • Decentralize, in a tactical sense, to encourage lower-level commanders to shape, direct, and take the sudden/sharp actions necessary to quickly exploit opportunities as they present themselves

  • Centralize, in a strategic sense, to establish aims, match ambitions with means/talent, sketch flexible plans, allocate resources, and shape focus of overall effort.

 

Next: Impressions