"Plans that do survive first contact" Topic

So much is made of rule systems that are all over the place and back it up with some " no plan survives…" nonsense. What proportion of plans do survive ( I don't mean making minor changes along the way.
As a start I would suggest the raid on Entebbe and that band of brothers attack on the German artillery position so beloved of scenario designers. So the discussion start is this. Do most battle plans run through to success (with the main plan succeeding) or is it a waste of time planning because it all goes south anyway.

martin

Plans give a framework for the operation. Everyone gets a glimpse of how it is supposed to happen in order to make the effort to make it happen.

Do plans go astray, sure. But better to some plan than no plan.

I'm with you both, and to back Saber up, we had (maybe still have?) a saying in the Marine Corps, which is surely borrowed from someone else:

"Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable."

The concept being, you have a plan, but things are going awry. But your planning process should have encompassed the 'normal' problems (a bump plan, a no-comms plan, battle drill for various 'normal' contingencies) and have conceptual solutions for the unexpected, i.e., cross-attaching and other Inter-op issues get rehearsed over and over so a commander can immediately get the right people and right equipment to the right spot as quickly and with as little confusion as possible, even if the exact tactical problem wasn't foreseen.

V/R,
Jack

nothing goes according to plan
but that is why you need one
as a common base for changes

YouTube link

"Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable."

I think this was Eisenhower, and a sentiment I agree with 100% (very important in the business world as well). Your plan will, almost guaranteed, fail to reflect reality. But the analysis you did to create the plan in the first place will help you adjust to actual reality much quicker.

-Will

It would be interesting to see if there is a corollary between the improvement of communications and transport of troops over the centuries, with increased plan success rate.

This comment is not meant to be taken literally. The point of the comment is that any or all plans need to be flexible with built in contingencies. Like business….except deadlier.

Another notible quote one by Patton is… "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."

I can think of two right off, both having to do with cities i japan in WW II

actually
Nagasaki was a secondary target
the primary target for that mission was Kokura
but there was too much cloud cover that day

Second Battle of Bull Run for the Confederates ran pretty much to plan. On the other Hand the Little Big Horn went south for Custer really fast.

As far as we can tell, the plan for Cannae worked perfectly.

Surely most of Napoleon's plans worked. Does anybody honestly believe he was just the luckiest SOB in Europe for a couple decades in a row? He was infamous as a micromanaging control freak, he was clearly doing something with all those details he was packing in his head and his famous little trailer.

I can think of two right off, both having to do with cities i japan in WW II

actually
Nagasaki was a secondary target
the primary target for that mission was Kokura
but there was too much cloud cover that day

Exactly. The plan included a contingency for a secondary target. It worked perfectly.

I think JSchutt already hit the nail squarely on the head, and it seems most of us agree with him.

A good plan of military action isn't a one-dimensional line from A to V, it's a branching flow chart with a lot of decision points. Successful generals are usually better at planning than unsuccessful ones, good plans have better allowances for contingencies than poor ones, and good commanders are better at managing (and salvaging) a plan than are poor ones. Good wargame design should reflect this.

- Ix

Pearl Harbor seemed to work pretty well.

D-Day too, once it was rescheduled, due to weather. Granted, there were a lot of things that didn't work out as originally planned, so people had to make on the spot adjustments, but the overall event worked out far better than expected, with lower casualties.

Granted, there were a lot of things that didn't work out as originally planned

Yea, I'd actually say that D-Day is an example of almost nothing going exactly to plan but due to good planning the Allies were able to make it work anyway.

And I think that's sort of the point- almost nothing goes exactly to plan, but if your plan is a good plan then it doesn't rely on *everything goes exactly to plan* to succeed in the first place.

-Will

The benefit of devoting time to planning is gaining an understanding of your situation. Nobody in the units I served in ever expected things to go according to plan, but we were much better at reacting to the unfolding situation having gone through the planning process. A good plan gives you options, identifies and resolves flaws in the plan and gives everyone a frame of reference when you have to start winging it.

pjm

As much use as the plan itself are the steps taken to get to the plan – the 'combat appreciation' process. I have 2 1 inch thick NATO reference books on this, but to distil them, a commander is forced through an involved process, which should take a third of his available time prior to H Hour to work through:

What is my higher (2 up) commander's intent?

What are the factors – wx and environmentals, terrain, time, forces, morale (Working through all the principles of war)

What are the enemy's strengths and weaknesses, and likely actions?

What are my S&W, and what courses are open to me? Every possible approach and angle should be looked at – a cube has 6 sides – can you go in from underneath, from on top, or NESW?

What specialised help, or more information, do I need to request?

So if the plan does go south, the overall intent and all the factors are still known to all, so that other course of action can be rapidly assessed and chosen.

Things never happen as expected – I spent 15 years prior to Gulf War 1 training to plan and implement a full spectrum radio communications amphibious plan. Come my first real action – complete and total radio silence throughout! I spent the entire 'action' (if you can call it that) playing on a thermal imager so as not to fall asleep!

D-Day is a great example. The fight for the Bocage also shows the perils of focusing so much on the landings and not on the breakout. The allies ran very dangerous missions to check the composition of the beaches and then just assumed that bocage was a lot like a normal hedge.

I can think of two right off, both having to do with cities in japan in WW II

Nothing went according to plan with the Kokura mission. The pilot almost had to ditch the plane in the ocean. They ran out fuel on its one and only approach to Okinawa. It was the very definition of FUBAR. Too many things went wrong to list here. But this link sums it up pretty well.

link

Few plans survive the friction of battle. But here are a few that I think did go mostly to plan:

Austerlitz
Inchon
Trafalgar
Tsushima Straits
Chancellorsville
Operation Cobra
Operation August Storm

Of course for every successful plan there is a plan that failed. So perhaps the number of successful plans, is equal to the number of failed plans.

"Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable."

That is a paraphrase of von Moltke. He is the one who said [paraphrasing] any plan does not survive first contact. However, he was insisted on planning at all levels, quite OCD about it.

I think we need to understand the relationship between planning a battle and fighting one. It isn't that plans don't 'survive' and thus useless or von Moltke, Napoleon and other successful military men through history wouldn't have put so much effort into planning.

There was a Youtube series on the military training someone posted a link to a while back on TMP. [Don't remember where]
It began by stating that training and military organization is an attempt to enforce order on the chaos of battle, and the side who fails to maintain that order, loses. And it is the enemy who is actively attempting to create disorder. The rest is simply 'friction.'

Keegan in his book The Mask of Command noted that Wellington's plan for his attack at Assaye in India "All went exactly as forethought." [p. 146]

It was Wellington's first battle. Dispite Keegan's conclusion that all went exactly as planned, there were a number of things that held up his attack and required solutions not covered in his plan of attack. In each case, the cause was the actions of the enemy.

Even though it was his first battle, and outnumbered several times over, his troops did as commanded in every case, except where the enemy intervened. Of course, Wellington was only commanding a brigade-sized force.

Looking at any number of Wellington's battles, Rallynow's list could be doubled. We could say that any battle a general lost didn't go according to his plan.

As noted above, planning is an essential component of military operations, even if the outcome of plans is not entirely predictable. It is simply not possible to pick divisions up and fling them across the map/table.

Even the environment of a typical war game, I have generally found that players who have invested a modicum of thought to the proceedings beforehand will prevail over those who don't.

Back the OP, one obvious example is Von Moltkes (he of the 'no plan survives contact' and 'mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be rectified' etc etc) plan for the elimination of Austria in the six weeks war.

He planned to envelop and destroy the entire Austrian Army, while defeating their German Confederation Allies in detail.

He got his initial deployment correct (see quote 2 above), and despite setbacks along the way (see quote 1 above) he defeated the German Confederation in detail and enveloped and destroyed the entire Austrian Army at Koeniggratz.

Job done.

His plan to knock France out rapidly in 1870 didn't work quite so well, but mainly because France refused to surrender despite having their field armies destroyed, their capital surrounded and government fleeing. Reality caught up the following year.