When the intel dries up...contact is your sensor
“You will break the gate NLT every 72 hours”
Day 1. A good many of the leaders in my unit were very unhappy with this directive.
“What, do you just want us to go out on some bullshit mission, just to pad the OPTEMPO numbers?”
“I am gonna risk my guys out there just for some made up mission?”
Every Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) would execute a mission that took them out the gate of their Forward Operating Base (FOB) no later than every 72 hours. I deliberately sent the written orders before addressing the unit in person, and the gut reactions were telling. Plenty of team rooms met the news with a sigh of relief or an outright high five, but some of the leaders I needed most were asking whether this was real, or just theater.
June 2014, Regional Command-East, Afghanistan. Having taken command of 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) in Stuttgart, Germany, I was in Kabul 72 hours later…inserted into our ongoing and active combat for Combined Special Operations Task Force (CSOTF)-10. This was deployment #4 to Afghanistan for me and the Berg family. I had the advantage (at least I felt like it was an advantage) of coming home, serving once again in 1-10 SFG(A) where I had commanded Alpha Company and served as the Operations Officer, designing the very mission profile that I was now reassuming as Battalion Commander. I knew the guys, the unit…and I knew this area of operations in Kabul and the surrounding provinces.
There is a common sequence of events in military operations, and it usually gets summed up as “Intelligence drives operations.” Meaning, we study the enemy, the terrain, the politics and the desired outcomes…then we plan our operations to maximize our advantages inside of those constraints. The military has an endless supply of sayings, and among the most true is this one: “The enemy gets a vote.” If intel drives ops, and you are the enemy who would very much like a whole lot less “Ops,” then you choke off the intel. This was the situation I dropped back into at Camp Vose on the eastern fringe of Kabul in the summer of 2014.
Intel does drive ops. Until there is no intel, and then you have the option to sit back and wait. I have lost count of the number of times, in organizations of all sizes, that I have heard someone say, “Well, someone should do something!”
I couldn’t agree more.
Someone is you. Someone is me. No one else is coming to solve our problems.
The second half of that phrase is equally problematic, however…doing “something” simply for the sake of creating motion and the perception of action is unhelpful at best, and can even be deadly (either literally in combat, or figuratively in the board room). In the Army, when we really mean something, we take the very substantive and meaningful step of…capitalization. My refrain and frustration has long been watching leaders and organizations rapidly choose to do capital “S”, Something: we are doing a thing, and boy you better know that it is important. Never mind that there is no tangible outcome or long term plan for success…we are doing Something!
That is exactly what some of my leaders believed I had just ordered.
The answer is No.
Both parts: Break the gate every 72 hours. Execute the mission.
The first part builds and sustains a sense of urgency. You are only ever 71.9 hours away from being back out in the fray. The request for air support, the coordination with the Quick Reaction Force, the communications crypto swap…none of it can wait. Now is when you get things done, or they will not be in place to support your team when you need them.
The second part never changed. We had a mission, we still had a mission, and the desired outcomes were the same. So yes, every trip out had to move the ball forward toward a tactical or operational objective… even if it was simply setting the conditions for the next mission.
Our operational tempo went through the roof. And then the inevitable injuries and combat deaths started piling up
…on the enemy side.
We lost zero Coalition Soldiers (capital S) for the entirety of the remaining 6 months of our rotation. We 10x’d our “exposure” and were radically safer because of it. And so were all of our coalition teammates who lived on those FOBs. When the enemy voted, shifted locations or tactics, we were there to poke the beehive and then listen. Monitor. Target. Our higher tiered forces started plucking off more high value targets in our areas because we were forcing the adversary to react…and in reacting, to expose themselves.
When the intel dries up, contact becomes your sensor. Movement on a fixed clock, with a real objective every time, forced the enemy to show us what our intel no longer could. That is the difference between breaking the gate and doing capital S Something. One is motion with a purpose and a deadline; the other is motion for an audience.
Life or death may not be on the line in your boardroom or with your next product launch, but the approach remains the same. It would be awesome if we could simply sit back and just pile up market research, financial projections, consumer sentiment and on and on. While the clock ticks, someone is going to break the gate first, and it may well be your competitor.
So what does breaking the gate look like in a company? It might be a leadership team that wont allow two weeks to go by without putting the product in front of a real customer, or a sales leader who engages at least every 72 hours in a live conversation with the market. Set the clock, make every trip out count toward the objective, and then shut up and listen, because the market will tell you things your research never will.
You are the someone. I am the someone. No one is coming to solve our problem or create our success for us.
On Day 1, reading those gut reactions from men I respected, I was not 100% this was the answer. I was however, 100% that waiting was wrong. Sometimes that is all the certainty a leader gets, and it turns out to be enough to break the gate.
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