Military Review English Edition January-February 2017 | Page 29

DELIBERATE WAR PLANNING

Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War for Kosovo,
and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Doctrine and Definitions
U.S. military doctrine provides a detailed treatment
of the role of joint operational planning, but does not
adequately characterize deliberate war planning as a
distinctive subcomponent within that larger planning
construct.8 The doctrinal definition of deliberate war
planning—“a planning process for the deployment and
employment of apportioned forces and resources that
occurs in response to a hypothetical situation”—fails to
capture the essence of the discipline, as we shall see.9 The
result is a chaotic diversity of practice carried out by a disparate and distributed community of practice exposed to
influence by powerful forces that degrade strategic value.
Thus, a more precise definition that would enable objective evaluation, unity of effort, and value-adding practices is the process undertaken by multiple disparate organizations to conceptualize military options, support future U.S.
government efforts and objectives, and generate knowledge and
understanding—all oriented on assumptions-based, defined
future circumstances. This definition is superior because
it emphasizes three key value-adding concepts: deliberate planning as a mechanism for cross-organizational
connective tissue, for subordinating military activities to
a broader U.S. government campaign, and for individual
and organizational learning. The internal and external
tensions that adversely influence these value-adding concepts are addressed next.

Bureaucratic Politics:
Military-Internal Participants
The U.S. military deliberate war planning enterprise
is vast in terms of depth, breadth, and diversity. As a result, bureaucratic politics have a powerful influence on
the inputs, processes, and outcomes of deliberate war
planning. The point is not that bureaucratic politics
should be eliminated, because it will always be present
in any large-scale, multiorganizational effort. The idea
is to become aware of the role that bureaucratic politics
plays, thereby allowing the deliberate war planning
community to mitigate adverse influence where possible, as well as amplify the benefits that come from a
cross-dimensional enterprise effort.
The vast scale of the undertaking becomes apparent
by considering the aggregate effort: over six hundred
MILITARY REVIEW  January-February 2017

military professionals engage in full-time deliberate war
planning, and several thousand more are integral but
part-time contributors.10 The full timers are predominantly field grade officers in the prime of their professional careers. Beyond aggregate scale, practitioners represent
a diversity of organizations, including geographic and
functional combatant commands, service component
commands, subunified commands, and the military
services. These organizations’ interests and motivations
sometimes align but often conflict.
There are nine combatant commands whose geographic and functional roles are established by the president in the biannually updated unified command plan.11
Six combatant commands are geographically oriented
and together cover the entire globe, including the global
commons outside the sovereignty of any state. Three
functional combatant commands focus on specific military missions that cross geographic boundaries: strategic
deterrence, global distribution, and special operations.
Combatant commanders are directly responsible to the
secretary of defense for deliberate war plans. As a result,
the combatant command plans teams form and lead the
plan-specific joint planning groups within which the rest
of the community is represented and serve as honest brokers to achieve joint interdependence and unity of effort.
The problems that deliberate war plans deal with
do not typically conform to geographical or functional
boundaries, so combatant commands must collaborate
on mutual challenges. The result is an interwoven web
of supporting relationships and interactions. Because
the geographic boundaries, functional roles, and force
assignments established by the unified command plan
rarely change, each combatant command has developed
a unique philosophy and way of doing business, which
corresponds to varying regional security environments,
as well as differences in the commanders’ personalities
and the staffs’ culture. Combatant commanders with
overlapping jurisdiction for a particular future contingency scenario understandably view that scenario from
different perspectives. Furthermore, relatively constant
resource and planning prioritization establish an informal
hierarchy among combatant commands. For example,
U.S. Central Command’s stature has recently been accentuated because its area of responsibility encompasses the
Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of war.
Individual combatant commands are not monolithic organizations. They consist of a range of
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