Military Review English Edition January-February 2017

DELIBERATE WAR PLANNING uniformed planners is a central driver of planning progress, process, and content. These dynamics are complicated by competing perspectives on the utility of deliberate war planning. For military planners, value-added deliberate planning starts with predetermined national strategic objectives that come from civilian officials. Such established national strategic objectives then become the goalposts toward which all efforts can be directed. As we have seen, the deliberate war planning enterprise is substantial, so clear direction is quite useful in channeling enterprise-wide effort along a relatively effective and efficient path. However, experienced military planners do appreciate that as the strategic and political environment evolves, guidance will evolve with it, requiring flexibility in planning. And, innovative planning practices can effectively cope with a finite range of policy preferences. Nevertheless, from the military’s perspective, relatively stable and clear policy guidance enables more value-added deliberate war planning. Civilian officials view war plans as mechanisms for generating decision space through development of a broad range of courses of actions with various mixes of military as well as value-added options. Such options enable high-level decisions that usually involve tradeoffs between equally important priorities. Thus, if the outcome of deliberate war planning is a broad range of options that correspond to a broad range of potential policy choices, then this buys valuable time for arriving at the optimal decision. At the practitioner level, this desire for decision space amplifies because there is the added pressure of not getting ahead of the secretary of defense or key Department of Defense undersecretaries. Neither civilian nor military perspectives are superior over the other. The most productive way to reconcile them is to have awareness and respect for the role that civil–military relationship tensions have on the process for and content of deliberate war plans. With greater awareness, both sides can achieve a better dialogue, and do so at all levels from principals to practitioners. In summary, bureaucratic politics and civil–military friction become overbearing in the absence of a guiding theory. Individual planners’ personality and talent can provide some mitigation, but to achieve a broader increase in added strategic value, a need exists for the theoretical framework that is the topic of this article. As Carl von Clausewitz advised, “So long as no acceptable MILITARY REVIEW January-February 2017 theory … of the conduct of war exists, routine methods will tend take over even at the highest levels.”15 Conceptualizing the Elements of Deliberate War Planning Utility This section offers a theoretical framework that will enable the military planning community to cope with the tensions described above, thereby adding increased strategic value to deliberate war planning. The proposed framework conceptualizes the abstract concept of planning utility into seven dimensions: military validity, strategic validity, organizational learning, organizational networking, resourcing influence, flexibility, and clarity. These dimensions can then serve as propositions to help current and future planning leaders and practitioners to assess the value that their efforts are adding. The dimensions also can aid data collection and analysis for future research oriented on historical case studies.16 Military validity. The first dimension of utility is military validity. Military validity (or invalidity) is observed when a deliberate war plan is implemented in actual war. Deliberate war plans are militarily valid if the actual operations carried out resemble the course of action described in the war plan. Conversely, if a war plan was largely abandoned at the time of need, then that would indicate it was invalid. Military validity is measured by calculating the extent to which the war plan matched the battlefield outcomes, from three perspectives: whether the planning assumptions upon which the war plan was designed were validated, whether the adversary’s anticipated course of action matched what the deliberate plan predicted, and whether the U.S. military forces actually adopted the operational approach the war plan called for. Strategic validity. The second dimension is strategic validity. As with military validity, strategic validity can only be observed when a war plan is implemented in actual war. Deliberate war plans are strategically valid if the military operations they prescribe are strategically successful. To illustrate the difference between military validity and strategic validity, the achievement of military objectives does not automatically lead to strategic victory. A good example was the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, where the achievement of the initial military objective, the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime, did not result in strategic victory. The 2003 U.S.-led invasion 31

Military Review English Edition January-February 2017 | Page 33