"I love it when a plan comes together!"
Remember the "A-Team" leader on TV? Someone would contact him for a little bit of tactical help. He would listen to the story and finally say, "You came to the right people! I think we can help you out. I've got a plan."
He would have a plan to contact the "con guy" for logistics and set-up.
He would have a plan to spring their pilot from the nut house.
He would have a plan to somehow put Mr. T to sleep so they could get him on the aircraft he was so deathly afraid of.
He would have a plan to hand build an armored assault vehicle to throw out thousands of rounds of live fire without so much as scratching anybody and rescue the subject to accomplish the mission.
If all that isn't enough, he has a plan for evading the ever pursuing Air Force fugitive police.
And he always had his cigar.
The most important part of Hannibal's plans were the contributed plans from each of his expert A-Team members.
When you plan for an action of some kind, you must keep things in perspective. In a conflict there are different scales of actions taken.
The whole picture would be an "Operation" (Operation Desert Storm)
The operation would be made up of a series of "Missions" (Our first mission is to eliminate enemy communications.)
The overall missions would be made up of "Objectives"
The level you plan at depends on how much of the entire operation you are involved with. General George Washington, down to the guy in charge of getting mail to the troops on hill #182. Everyone needs a plan.
We will start at the bottom, by starting at the top. Lets say the crap starts today and the bullets are flying and the very well prepared Patriot Generals are planning away. Orders come from "National Patriot HQ" (the top) to push the enemy out of a strategic key State. OK, how?
That's up to the State level guys who are pretty much the leaders of that State's Patriot Forces. These guys get together and plan what counties are to be cleared and in what order and generally how. They plan for overall distractions and major ambushes. They plan for enemy supply lines to be eliminated. They plan for new Constitutional Law Enforcement to maintain public safety after an area is secured.
Are these guys going to run all around the State accomplishing each mission themselves? Hell no! How can they? They need folks at the County levels to take care of the individual and unique situations for those areas. These folks know the areas and what sheriff deputies they can still trust. The county folks might be local, but counties are still a lot of area. This is where the Town or City level comes in. The tactical leaders of a town will plan according to the various Neighborhoods' attitudes, abilities, strategic locations and "priority protection zones" as well as underground contacts that know higher up contacts.
What's next? The Neighborhood level. This gives a whole new meaning to "Neighborhood Watch." And finaly, Block level.
Here we are at the bottom, which is where we will all be that day when we are caught with our pants down and the TV remote in our hands. The neighbors who you know and maybe some you don't, come to your house with a lost look in their eyes and ask, the big question.... They have seen you come home from training exercises loading and unloading tactical gear. You have been quiet but they just seem to know that you are the guy to hang with when their future is in serious peril. The question they will ask? "Do you have a plan?" "If so, what do you want us to do?" "I have an old cowboy rifle in my attic and I think Grandpa left some ammunition with it!" "I have a welder!" "We have a ham radio!" "Um, do you have a plan?"
What you say next is your decision, "Get the hell off my property before I shoot!" or "Shhhhh..... why don't you folks come in for some coffee."
When we have a new Patriot with us training in the field, I make one thing very clear. We are not training each other to follow orders, do your duty and survive. We are training each other to turn around and pass that training on to others so that they may do the same until we have saturated the population with tactically trained Patriots. When you teach someone, make them promise to pass the knowledge along to other Patriots. I like to call it the "Sergeant Factory."
Planning
Planning at all levels works generally the same. You have a problem and you have to figure out a way to deal with it. Your information on the problem came from some form of intelligence such as a Recon mission, or eye witness accounts, or good old fashioned spies. You start the plan with the objective (main action taken in the middle) and work your way backwards to the deployment and backwards further to preparation.
Ask yourselves, "What do we need to do? How are we going to do it? Who will reinforce us? What will the weather be like? Where to cache supplies? Transportation and route to objective? How will we communicate? What do we bring? How do we abort? What if someone gets hurt or killed? Which route back? What if we have prisoners? What if....?
When you have a pretty good grasp of what will happen from the beginning to the objective, start planning forward from the objective to the ultimate return from the completed task. "Which way do we return? What if we fail the objective? What if we're captured? What if base camp is overrun when we return? Then you must go back and forth over the entire plan like backing a paver over a wrinkled roadway until all the kinks and wrinkles are worked out. There is guy who was created just to F.U.B.A.R. your plans. Murphy! "Murphy's Law." This is what plan "B" is for. No no no! No you aren't smart enough to plan good enough to not need a plan "B!" Just do it and shut up! You will not only need a plan B for the entire operation, mission or objective, but you will need contingency plans for each and every leg of the overall plan.
I'm not done abusing you yet! You are not smart enough to figure the timing, logistics, tactics and everything else is going to actually work! No, not even you! Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse! And when you know you've got it all down, rehearse again!
Practice this by using this planning strategy in your everyday life. Plan A is to stop by Aunt Gabby's house to drop of a fruit basket and go. You can't go because she won't shut up, bless her heart! Plan B is pretending to have a minor emergency vibrating cell phone call that you need to answer when you want to get away from a long winded Aunt Gabby.
When planning, don't be predictable by trying to do something strictly by the book or the manual. Use the technical and common sense things from a military manual but add variety and imagination and cool stuff you saw on the movies. Try to mix US Military SOP, Native American , Arab, Asian, Partisan, Hillbilly and Home Boy Street Tactics to keep 'em guessing. Be very inconsistant and deceptive from one mission to the next.
Get everyone's opinions and ideas on a plan. As Martha Stewart says when she is planning a tactical mission, "Imput from your friends. Its a good thing."
Keep your powder dry and watch your six.
Badger
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