Plans are nothing; planning is everything

By Jay Bazzinotti on Quora?

In an early episode of “South Park” the Underpants Gnomes go around the town stealing everyone’s underpants. When finally caught and confronted they reveal why they are doing it. It’s part of a “plan” to get rich, one that has three steps. Step 1: Steal underpants. Step 2: ? Step 3: Profit. They never reveal how stealing underpants will lead to profit because they don’t know. They have a useless plan.

Any fool can make a plan. I would imagine that in WW2 the Underpants Generals would say “Step 1: Invade Europe. Step 2: ?. Step 3. Win the war!” They even executed this “plan” in Sicily, launching a major airborne attack against the Germans but without alerting American anti-aircraft assets who thought it was a major German counter-attack and shot all the planes out of the sky. They killed over 400 American soldiers. The battle failed. The Germans didn’t fire a shot. This kind of wishful thinking happens all the time. It’s good to have a goal. You cannot get anywhere without one. But the goal is not enough. You have to have a plan to accomplish that goal. In business we used to say that you cannot report a problem without proposing a solution and when reporting a problem you MUST tell what the facts are; what the facts mean; and what to do about the facts. In addition, any proposed solution or goal MUST be sufficient, feasible and realistic. Finally, any plans generated by the proposed solution must be specific to solving the problem (ignore mission creep); achievable and measurable. If any of these things is not taken into account the plan will probably fail.

In wartime people say, “Amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.” This feeds into Eisenhower’s statement and was shown in dramatic fashion in the Korean War at the Choisin Reservoir. In the book “Breakout” the author tells of a the culminating battle where the US Marines, covering for the cowardly US Army, finds itself unable to move any further as the Chinese attack en masse. Nothing can stop them. Except that preceding the attack was an artillery barrage that set a number of buildings on fire. It was an exceptionally cold night and the Chinese military failed to outfit their soldiers properly for the cold. The American military commanders, preparing for massacre, were astonished as the charging Chinese soldiers suddenly stopped to warm themselves at the buildings now burning due to the artillery barrage. The Americans escaped. The Chinese planning had been inadequate to the task. The cold weather was not a surprise. The plans for fighting in it were not properly considered.

Patton once said, “A mediocre plan executed today is better than an excellent plan executed tomorrow.” In World War 2, General Manstein had a plan to crush the Russians after the loss of Stalingrad. He realized that the battle had weakened the Russians as well as the Germans and that many positions held by the Russians were held by debilitated army groups. So he launched a surprise counterattack that destroyed three Russian armies and crippled three more and captured Kharkov in one of the most unexpected victories of all time. In Phase 3 of his ambitious plan he wanted to follow up on the remarkable German victory, in which there were only 4000 German casualties, by destroying the remaining Russian armies around Kursk. As he was ordering his armies to complete the sweep, which at that time would almost certainly have driven the Russians away and possibly forced Stalin to the bargaining table, Hitler stopped him to generate a more ambitious plan. The multi-week delay allowed the Russians the breathing room to prepare for the assault and despite extremely heavy losses, they parried the German attack and won the day. Victory had been turned into defeat by too much planning and not enough action in a timely fashion.

Again, towards the end of the war when the Russians were driving on Berlin Hitler looked at his maps and the positions of his remaining troops. The fast-moving Russians were like a dagger heading for the heart of Berlin. To Hitler the answer was simple. The Ninth Armee would come up on the flanks of the Russians while the 4th Panzer Armee would sweep down; they would meet in the middle, encircle the Russian armies and destroy them in the pocket. On paper it was a logical plan. It certainly would have been sufficient to destroy the threat; but it was neither feasible nor realistic. Hitler had long since stopped taking into account the “fighting ability” of the units on the maps. On the maps they looked like armies. In real life they were desperate rabble, manned by untrained replacements with no air power or fuel. The 9th Armee had been crushed trying to blunt the Russian assault and was trying to refit in Halbe and escape utter destruction. The 4th Panzer Armee was fighting for its life at the Frisches Haff and would eventually have to be rescued by the navy (in part) to avoid utter destruction. These “armies” were no longer capable of achieving the logical plan Hitler had conceived. The solution was niether realistic nor feasible. The plan was not achievable. Hitler tried the same thing with General Steiner’s kamfgruppe and Wenck’s 12th Armee which was even more ridiculous. Steiner couldn’t assemble two battalions of combat-capable troops or the trucks to move them and 12th Armee was a fiction, an army made up of cobbled-together burned out divisions trying to rescue 9th Armee from Halbe. But on paper the words “12th Armee” certainly looked impressive. But words don’t win battles.

In addition, as Clausewitz stated, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”. No matter how good your plan you cannot predict what the enemy will do or how he will act. He may be better than you expected, have different weapons or capabilities. His goal is to thwart your plans and he will do everything in his power to do so. That is why the Pentagon has a motto, “We must plan for an enemy’s capabilities, not his intentions.” As the Israelis are fond of saying, channeling Sun Tzu, “By deception shall you do war”, so you must look at what the enemy CAN do, not what he says he WILL do and be ready for that. In this regard Eisenhower is correct, planning is everything, particularly contingency planning. Eisenhower did not know he would win at D-Day and as a result, part of his plan included a speech explaining why the US failed and offering his resignation. It was a contingency plan.

Before WW2 the US worked up all kinds of plans on what to do under any contingency. One of the plans, called “War Plan Orange” was what to do if the Japanese attacked America. These exercises and plans are important for giving the military at least a starting point in the event of an attack. The plan contains information about the assets in place, the supplies, the enemy’s reported capabilities and predicted thrusts and so forth. They are almost always wrong but they give the military a goal to work towards and contain all the elements for building a better plan in a rapid fashion. When the enemy attacks you don’t have the luxury of sitting back and formulating a perfect plan. You have to act right now. Having contingency plans at least allow you a starting point. When my brother was assigned to the Pentagon in the 1990s his job was to formulate a plan to invade and take over France. The US has no intentions of invading France but it has a plan on how it would achieve objectives for every possible contingency. The plans are updated on a periodic basis. You must plan for the enemy’s capabilities, not his intentions if you wish to be capable of achieving your own objectives. The plan is nothing. The planning is everything.