Time Is Your Total Capital: QMN010

Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Tuesday, 7 May

(Today’s report is a 5 minute read)

BLUF: There are benefits to loss - it can make us focus on what’s important. As leaders we’re charged with doing the most with our resources - which often amount to human talent and time. I found that effective leaders seek to use their team members unique skills wisely, and to use their time to prepare as much as possible. And in that I found a methodology that enables us to pursue those aims.

Brady here. In 2008 I came to an important realization. I’d just come home from a yearlong deployment to Iraq as a light infantry officer. I’d lived and worked on a big base in West Baghdad as a platoon leader and operations staff officer - planning and executing large (500-man) operations in cooperation with the Iraqi Army in the area. In that time I’d lost a noncommissioned officer (NCO) I’d never thought I’d lose, and once home I often tried to make sense of it. Why did Lew die and I didn’t? What did he die for? Had we done our jobs as leaders to ensure the risks he took weren’t unnecessary? The only lasting, solid truth I could find was that I had more time to live and figure this out. I felt pushed to do more with my time - to make the time I still had count for more. If I had 50 more years what could I do with them? And how could I make sure I didn’t have to wonder these things about another lost brother?

At about the same time, I was a candidate in the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC). I was learning how to be a SF Detachment Commander - a lot of which is learning how to lead operational planning on a detachment. Green Berets operate behind enemy lines and are isolated from other American forces - which means they have to figure out how to get their jobs done with little to no support. This was very different from the experience I’d just had in Iraq with an infantry battalion. So in order to be successful, the SF Regiment adopted and modified a planning methodology typically used at much higher levels to ensure teams considered every possible scenario to determine how they might achieve their goals in different ways.

The Green Beret version of the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) - called the Detachment Mission Planning Process - emphasized some important points. It required that those doing the planning also carry out the plan. It required that each member of the 12-man team have a significant role in determining how the team would accomplish its mission. It asked these team members to do work that was usually 2 or 3 levels above their pay grade - which included guys who would much rather be on the range improving their marksmanship or riding 4-wheelers through the woods, or using those skills in the mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of Iraq. Focusing the skill and experience of action-oriented Green Beret NCOs onto a rigorous planning process was a lot of what we had to learn. The process was solid and proven - detachment commanders had to make sure that detachments used it right.

The original MDMP was adapted beginning in the 1970s as a way for a staff or a commander to plan operations. It required a team perform a focused analysis of the mission and then generate, examine and compare of a few different ways to accomplish it. The commander reviewed the team’s work and their recommendations about which approach to take. The commander makes his decision, briefs the plan two levels up the chain of command, and then all the analysis gets turned into an order which he issues to his subordinate commanders. Then it gets carried out.

What this process offered a team, and a commander, was assurance. It said that the team had done its work - it knew all that could be known about the mission and had carefully considered the best way to do the job. And big picture it was a way to help ensure success for the team. It meant that time and effort and lives wouldn’t be wasted.

Looking back on Lew, and the charge I gave myself about using my time to maximum effect, I knew then in 2008 that with this Green Beret methodology, I’d learned something very valuable. At about that same time I’d come across a quote about duty from Robert Heinlein’s 1973 book Time Enough For Love - where he says that “Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few.” Considering the loss of Lew and my new focus on making the most of time for preparation, it felt like it fit.

YAHTZEE: The Real Purpose Of MDMP: Creating Solid Orders When We’re Not Patton Or Rommel (3 min) Digital Strategy Director and Former Green Beret officer Chad Storlie nails it - MDMP was originally designed to replicate genius using organizational excellence. “No amount of studying military history will make a staff officer into a great military leader. Understanding military history helps staff officers plan, but great military leaders are abysmally rare. The MDMP provides commanders, staff officers, and subordinates a workable framework to create, coordinate, and assign military tasks to a military organization that can be further coordinated, resourced, rehearsed, and war-gamed against competitors to have the greatest probability of success.” (BJM)

GASP, AND STARE INTO THE FUTURE: Rise of the Machines: Watch Boston Dynamics' SpotMini Robot Dogs Pull Truck (2 min) At this point Boston Dynamics’ side-gig is in simultaneously freaking us out and astonishing us with web videos. “The reality is that technology is, at its core, selfless. That is not some triumph of nobility, however: it's merely programming. Computers have no selves to speak of. They are machines: mindless, efficient, and indifferent to humanity.” The warfare implications seem infinite. (KSA)

GREEN BEANIES IN BUSINESS: 'They Dropped Me Off In a Jungle For Nine Months.' Now This Green Beret and Others Are Starting Companies Back Home (12 min) “Starting a business, Niebauer says, is the closest civilian proxy he can imagine to a life in Special Forces. Serving in the Green Berets "was a very entrepreneurial experience from the standpoint of they give you some resources and general guidance, but it is really up to you to make what you want out of it," says Niebauer. "There is no one telling you what to do or setting up your missions for you. And I loved that.” (BJM)

QOTD: “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ’why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’” Victor Frankl – Man’s Search For Meaning, 1946

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)