Military Review English Edition January-February 2017 | Page 30

sub-organizations, including component command
headquarters from each of the four military services and
from U.S. Special Operations Command. Component
command headquarters serve two masters: their combatant commander and service chief. Thus, the perspectives
and motivations within a combatant command enterprise are not identical. The combatant commander and
his or her staff focus primarily on war plans that can
generate strategic outcomes and do so through joint interdependence. The service chiefs and their staffs have a
narrower, single-domain focus, and thus concentrate on
the contribution made by land, air, or sea power. This is
not to say that the services have malicious intent; they
simply have the responsibility to ensure that operations
in their domain are effective. When conflicts arise, or
when combatant commanders’ guidance is vague, the
services wield the more powerful influence because
they control resourcing.
Another important bureaucratic relationship within
combatant commands is between the “J5” strategy and
plans directorates and the “J3” operations directorates.
The J5 directorate produces and maintains deliberate
war plans on a continuous basis. If the scenario that a war
plan focuses on actually materializes, then a transition
process is triggered. During transition, the J5 directorate
transfers the relevant war plan to the J3 directorate to
form the framework for necessary military operations.
The J3 directorate must deal with the present in concrete
terms, so if the plan is not presented well, it will seem
irrelevant and be ignored, wasting the time that went
into it. The outcome of this transition process, which, as a
result of the crisis nature of such situations that generally
occur under stress, is the ultimate litmus test of the strategic value of a given war plan.
The military services are also important stakeholders
in deliberate war planning. Military services rely on war
plans to guide their readiness-generation efforts, such
as training. This is also the case with Special Operations
Command and the National Guard Bureau. In this way,
established deliberate war plans provide a common
reference point to cope with future uncertainty. However,
at some point, the military services’ use of deliberate war
plans becomes problematic. For example, when services become involved too early, they tend to introduce
nonstrategic and biasing concepts intended to establish
requirements and drive resources by reverse osmosis. At
the other end of the spectrum, when the military services
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shift focus from near-term readiness generation to
long-term defense strategy choices, deliberate war plans
become much less suitable. The Department of Defense
has a separate function called support for strategic analysis
(SSA), which provides plausible scenarios and alternative
futures for these types of uses. In practice, the uses of deliberate war plans and SSA scenarios are often mixed up.12
One implication of the size and scale of the planning
bureaucracy is the impossibility of adding value through
an elite, small group of planners. While a roundtable format comprised of handpicked planners appears on its surface to offer the greatest prospect for free-flowing ideas
and flexibility, in practice such an approach excludes the
participation of individuals and organizations the view
points and expertise of which will be vital if the scenario
covered by the war plan comes true. Thus, value-added
planning must be explicitly carried out to bridge organizational barriers and establish networks up front that will
become essential in a crisis.
Another implication is that organizational reform
to enhance the effectiveness of deliberate war planning might be part of the answer, but, in isolation, even
reform cannot eliminate the intrinsic reality of bureaucratic politics. Therefore, the operative question is how
to understand and accommodate the influence that
bureaucratic politics has on the potential strategic value
of deliberate war planning.

Bureaucratic Politics:
Interagency Stakeholders
Bureaucratic politics between the U.S. military and
other U.S. government agencies is an equally influential
determinant of any value derived from deliberate war
planning. This is the case because the military activities described in war plans are necessary, but usually
insufficient, to achieve national strategic objectives.
Some would disagree by invoking the classic example
from the European Theater during the Second World
War, where the Combined Chiefs of Staff ordered Gen.
Dwight Eisenhower to “enter the continent of Europe
and, in conjunction with the other United Nations,
undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany
and the destruction of her armed forces.”13 Eisenhower’s
mission could be (and, indeed, was) carried out with
purely military tools. However, ultimate victory relied on
the pursuit of sequential objectives that were primarily
pursued through nonmilitary tools: the reestablishment
January-February 2017  MILITARY REVIEW