Operations Planning, Military Style
Sometimes in the military, it’s joked, regardless of whose military or which branch, it almost seems like the “red tape” that must be cut, the forms that must be filled out, and the hoops that must be jumped through just to relieve one’s self require a dozen people, two committees, and six weeks’ deliberation. (Better schedule Mexican night in the mess well in advance.) It’s an exaggeration, but does highlight just how much time and effort it takes to get anything done in a military environment.
Today, check out two interesting military presentations on just this subject: Planning for CATF/ESG Surgeons (3.18MB PDF), which describes in intimate detail everything that goes into planning for a military deployment, medical or otherwise, and Are We Solving the Right Problem? (7MB PDF) an otherwise uninteresting presentation filled to the brim with abbreviations, acronyms, military-ese, and just generally indecipherable to lesser humans, which makes the following illustration taken from it all the more hilarious:
(click for a larger version)
For what’s basically a throwaway gag, I have to give credit to the presentation’s author, Commander Ron Boxall for producing a highly, highly entertaining little illustration. Bravo, sir.
(DAWMS, by the way, was the Deep Attach Weapons Mix Study (481kb PDF), a 1990s look at precision-guided weapons, among other things, which did quite a bit over several years, but failed to succeed completely at much of anything, and managed to draw criticism from just about everyone, including the then-General Accounting Office.)
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