When Being Detail Oriented Goes Wrong: QMN009

Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Monday, 6 May

(Today’s report is a 5 minute read)

BLUF: A key part of analyzing what your team needs to accomplish is determining which tasks are required for success and ranking them accordingly. It ensures that every action the team needs to take is identified and accounted for, and that priority is given to the most critical task(s).

Brady here. In Season 1 of Chappelle’s Show there was a recurring skit called “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” where we watch a narrator tell a story about someone who decides to boldly back up righteous talk with action - and ends up in a bad situation. Each tragic protagonist decides to have the courage of their convictions but takes it too far. It reminds me of a lot of professional situations, but there’s an aspect of planning and execution that really applies. It’s when you decide to keep it real about “being detail oriented” and in the process miss the point of planning and execution entirely.

Has your team ever been given a complex task, and in trying to address every tiny detail, somehow managed to miss the core, critical objective of the whole undertaking? I’ve done that, and it’s embarrassing. People call it “missing the forest for the trees” and that’s probably not a bad way to put it - the most important parts are there staring right at you but in being overanalytical and not managing your time, you fail. It’s a problem every thorough planner needs to address, and Green Berets are no exception.

A key part of analyzing what your team needs to accomplish - and an immutable part of Green Beret Mission Planning - is determining which tasks are required for success and ranking them accordingly. It ensures that every action the team needs to take is identified and accounted for, and that priority is given for those tasks which absolutely must be accomplished for a successful mission. This process really helps focus the team on the important stuff. There’s a short 3-step process for this, which I’ll lay out here.

First, when your team gets assigned a mission, you line up all the tasks specifically described in the order. These are the Specified Tasks - there may be many, there may be only one. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that mission tasks are mission oriented. A task that’s given to you that isn’t focused on the mission may be an admin requirement - and thus less important.

Next, the team needs to determine Implied Tasks. These are the tasks that aren't specified by the team’s higher headquarters, but still need to be achieved in order to be successful. A specified task often has many subtasks that would qualify as implied tasks. These might seem like no brainers, but they help outline all the preparations that need to be made, and help characterize the scope of the mission.

Finally, the team needs to filter out and prioritize the Essential Tasks - which are Specified or Implied Tasks that the team absolutely must perform in order accomplish the mission. If the team doesn’t accomplish Essential Tasks, the mission will fail. These are where you spend most of your time in planning and execution, making sure you get things right. In planning, these tasks get put into the Commander’s Intent - that part of an order that states what absolutely must get accomplished no matter what happens. Of all your team’s Essential Tasks there’s one that accomplishes the purpose of the mission - and that one is the Mission Essential Task. This task is the one in the Mission Statement around which all other things revolve.

For Green Berets, how you physically get to a mission objective is important (and can be a little complex) but just getting there isn’t the mission. I’ve spent so much time focusing on infiltration methods (parachuting, by boat or by ground) and routes that the team left little time to focus on how to get the job done once we got there. That meant the Mission Essential Task didn’t get the detail it needed and our performance on the objective suffered. If I’d prioritized the Essential Tasks up front, I could have avoided that mistake.

Being detail oriented isn’t a bad thing - lots of tasks require it. But in planning we only have a limited amount of time, and thus we want to spend that time on those things that will ensure success. Putting “first things first” early in a planning cycle will ensure that you can be detail oriented about the right things within your timeline.

A LEARNING ORGANIZATION: Russia Could Defeat U.S. Army (33 min) A glimpse into the future of warfare, and its implications for the United States and her allies in Europe. “Finally, and perhaps most important, it is instructive to understand that the U.S. Army has arguably not fought an opponent that can make it pay for poor or untimely operational or strategic decisions in over 60 years. The Russian military threat, while not as dangerous as that of the Red Army during the Cold War, possesses the ability to physically defeat and logistically exhaust the U.S. Army. Russian ground forces, as demonstrated in this paper, have fought significant battles and waged decisive sieges on a scale that vastly exceeds what U.S. Army brigade combat teams (BCTs) can experience at combat training centers. Russian generals, logisticians and other specialists have gained significant command and control, sustainment and application experience that the U.S. Army’s warfighter exercises can only marginally replicate.

“The fact that Russia has rotated 27 brigades and regiments through the Donbas while the U.S. Army possesses only 31 BCTs must not be overlooked. The Russian military, especially its ground forces and its combat experience, need to be respected. Naiveté or hubris that sweeps aside their combat experience will likely result in peril for those that meet them on future battlefields.” (BJM)

A LEARNING SURVEILLANCE: Thousands of facial recognition scans were matched against Chinese police records (3 min) Fascinating look at what an active but nascent multi-source surveillance system looks like: overlaying WiFi hits with facial recognition with government watch lists: “The system monitors the residents around at least two small housing communities in eastern Beijing, the largest of which is Liangmaqiao, known as the city’s embassy district. The system is made up of several data collection points, including cameras designed to collect facial recognition data.” Such a system with enough integrated and trained inputs could be prime for machine learning to start identifying human behaviors and patterns immediately where human analysts could take weeks to find them if at all. (KSA)

LEARNING SPACE DISASTER: Killer asteroid flattens New York in simulation exercise (2 min) A mix of hypothetical space science problem solving and large scale emergency policy. “Participants debated insurance and legal issues at length: the United States did save Denver, but accidentally destroyed New York. "In this situation, under international law, the United States, regardless of fault, as the launching state, would absolutely be liable to pay compensation," said Alissa Haddaji, coordinator of a group of 15 international space lawyers created to study those very issues.”(KSA)

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)