Explaining How Green Berets Plan
How some of the world’s most accomplished practitioners of sabotage, subversion, insurgency and guerrilla warfare plan their mayhem.
What’s the best way to explain the detailed planning process that’s the key practice in carrying out unconventional warfare?
Last week Zach West, Chris P, KS Anthony and I put together an article at OuterPlaces illustrating how Green Berets plan operations. We took an unconventional approach by examining a problem set in the HBO Series Game of Thrones and going through a notional abbreviated planning process. Our goal was to illustrate how the Green Beret Detachment Mission Planning process — a modified form of the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) — is used and demonstrate its outcomes. Our article ended up longer than originally expected, but I’ll give you the executive summary here.
Our aim was to determine how best to relieve Cersei Lannister’s of her command and re-focus her forces on the existential threat of the White Walkers to the north. It seems like a classic unconventional warfare (UW) situation where the Operational Detachment-Alpha (ODA) isn’t the main effort but critical to providing more forces or strategic effects for the larger conflict. We bounded ourselves to “No Dragons, No Magic, TV Only” in order to keep our courses of action (COAs) reasonable, illustrative and familiar to a wider audience. We found that a focused guerrilla warfare campaign to create a material and political strain on her military leadership while using an underground to present a suitable leadership alternative for her generals as the best option. We came up with a more conventional COA and a less conventional one as well, but a military coup achieved the intent better, and faster, than the rest.
We went through the 7-step process as much as possible — which explains the length of the piece — but took care to get a good Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) from our Intelligence Sergeant (18F) role-player KS Anthony, to make our COAs valid, and to war-game and compare them appropriately. We stressed not only the importance of the commander’s intent, but also how planning this way allows a team to plan for and react to the changes that are bound to come in such an operation. Instilling in each team member the intent and all the info and perspective needed to immediately pivot as individuals and as a team is key to success for Green Berets when done right.
You can find the article here. We’re interested to get feedback on subtopics of interest, format, ground covered, etc — so please don’t hesitate to speak up here.
Thanks to Rob Hamilton and Chris Erickson for their help on this project.
