"'No...It just isn't going according to plan.'"
-SM Stirling and David Drake, The Hammer IN Stirling & Drake, Warlord (Riverdale, NY, 2003), pp. 311-553 AT CHAPTER TEN, p. 489.
An important distinction.
In the morning, list what you expect to happen; in the evening, what did happen.
At the beginning of an academic year in a College I attended, a woman was elected unopposed as Student Union President. Within a week of her election, she had left the course. In the subsequent election, two men stood. One vote was spoiled. The remaining votes divided equally between the two candidates. For the remainder of the year, each served half the time as President and half in the newly created post of Vice-President. Thus, in one year, three candidates, all elected.
Now imagine that someone spent the first two or three weeks at the College, then went away to write a speculative account of the rest of the year.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I recall reading that one saying among soldiers runs approximately like this: "The first casualty of a battle is your PLAN." Something always either goes wrong or merely unexpectedly happens. Which has led me to the conclusion that the victor, other things being roughly equal, is usually the army or fleet which made the fewest mistakes.
As astra! Sean
Sean,
And can continually adapt to changed conditions.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Exactly. An army or fleet commander has to be able adapt to the changing facts affecting his battle. Easier said than done, of course!
Ad astra! Sean
Von Molkte the Elder, the creator of the Supreme General Staff and the architect of victory over Austria and France in the Wars of German Unification, had a saying:
"Planning is everything. The Plan is nothing."
By which he meant that planning had to be modular --bits and pieces which could be changed around and fitted into changing circumstances. You planned and war-gamed endlessly to meat different contingencies -- what if X, what if Y, what if we do A and the enemy does B, C and D?
This meant that the commander always had a plan, or part of a plan, for any given eventuality, which he (or more commonly his staff) could pull out, modify and plug in -- meaning that he didn't have to improvise at the level of detail, only at the level of overall intent.
He could decide what to do, and the means to do it -- railroad schedules, arms, food, movement orders -- would be instantly ready to his hand.
His successors forgot this, to their cost.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Planning has to be MODULAR, and not rigidly adhering to a single plan. That makes sense.
We saw something like that in the immediate aftermath of the Nine Eleven attacks in 2001. US military planning had assumed attacks would come from OUTSIDE the US, with American defenses focused on the perimeters. Command and control actually broke down for about nine hours due to planning being focused on attacks from outside, not inside the US. If Al Qaeda had been a nation, not a gang of terrorists, the harm done might have been far worse.
Ad astra! Sean
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