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Speaker 3Welcome back to another episode of the hip pocket series, I'm Mark Hal. And in the studio with me today, I've brought from the fires community, CW3 Horus, and from the Intel community, majors, Pecararo, and MassArt Conway. And the reason I brought them together is a trend that I've noticed, a focus on targeting targets by the BCTs, and specifically hunting targets. What I've noticed is that BCTs, in my opinion, seem to be too focused on finding and killing high payoff targets or high value targets. I've noticed units co-opting their targeting working groups, their targeting coordination boards as a means of tying into their planning process almost exclusively, as well as using that as a synchronization effort for the staff, so like that becomes the most important event of the day. I've also noticed that when units focus on developing a plan to conduct an attack or even a defense, everything else they're doing is about finding the targets and killing them. I haven't seen a lot of focus on from the Intel side of the house situational awareness. And that's really what prompted this discussion that we ended up having a bunch of CTs sitting around one day, pontificating, and I said, "Hey, have you noticed this?" And that's really where the impetus of this discussion comes from. So, I'll kick it over to you, gentlemen. Do you think that BCTs have become too focused on hunting targets?
Speaker 4So, to start off, I'll say finding, destroying, eliminating HBT's, a unit can't be too focused on that. But to answer your first thing that you brought up about balancing situational understanding with targeting and brigades, that's one thing that we see that brigades in Torbilla don't do well. They don't have a well-developed plan and they don't stick with their plan. So, here's an example that happened here. So, a brigade was in the defense. They had, they were cut, a great eagle from division, a long range high flying UAS, and they were going to use it to be able to answer their requirement, their priority intelligence requirement on whether the enemy was going to send their main effort in the north or the south. So, the gray eagle is flying, it detects it at T90, which was on their high-payoff target list within an NEI. And the battle captain and the exo and the brigade talk, they say it's on the HBTL for going to destroy it. And so, they spent to a significant time with that asset to fix it, destroy it, and assess make sure that it was destroyed, and then weather came and the gray eagle had to go off station. But then, about 30 minutes later, the brigade commander enters the talk and asks us to, "What's the enemy's doing? Have we been able to answer any PIRs?" Yeah. Well, sir, we know that there's one T90 here, however, referring to their event matrix, you know, a decision about an indicator for where the enemy is going to commit their main effort was three or more T90s in particular, NEIs. Yeah. So, the newer one was, and they destroyed it, because it was on their HBTL, but he wasn't able to answer the PIR for the commander to make a decision based off their plan for the defense, because it was so focused on destroying that particular target. Now, great, T90 was destroyed, however, by the time that S2 was able to make an assessment on where the enemy was committing the main effort to answer the brigade commander's requirement decision, they were already in the rear area on objective galaxy in the drop zone. Yeah. So, that kind of was one example that I saw where it's, they didn't have a logic for what they wanted to do with their information collection, and in execution that logic wasn't passed
Speaker 3off. Yeah. Well, I like what you said, where you say you can't be too focused, but it needs to be what I wrote down, a balanced approach, right? There's got to be some give and take, and I think what I've noticed is we get excited to do, to go after the target. And I think it's because it's like an instant gratification. If I can kill that thing, and I can see the results of it, great, whereas seeing the results of my plan work out over, it's going to take a lot longer, and it may not be the instant gratification, determining which way the enemies going is a piece of it. So getting that situation on understanding is a piece of it, so I can then react that way, but then I still have to wait and see how it goes versus, okay, I found this thing, I shot at it, fantastic, I know the thing's dead, and I feel like I did something, and I feel like I did it quickly. And I just, I think, personally, that's what I'm kind of seeing is that hole towards, let's do that, because at least, I mean, that's the sexy thing. It's the thing that we can, you know, wrap our, wrap our minds around.
Speaker 5And you could prove that that's happening, like, and I'll give you an example, it's kind of silly, right? Yeah. But if we went into a KuOps, the current operations tent, and we said, hey, do you want to use one hour of division, Greg, or to kill one tank? They're probably going to say yes or no, depending on like, if that's the unit that wants to do that right now, they're like, yeah, we should do that. Yeah, because, like you said, it's the sexy thing to do. Now, if you walked 10 yards or whatever, we go a couple of meters over into the plants tent, and we say, hey, hey, everybody in the plants tent, we're about to spend one hour of gray eagle from division to kill one tank, and they're going to look at you like, no, why? We should have the answering command of PRs. And like, if you just saying that out loud, they should almost have that reality check
Speaker 3right there. Yeah. Well, so then, I guess my question, if that's what we should be seeing, have you noticed when it transitions from, in the plants tent, the development of the Intel collection matrix, that whole, the, the plan for Intel collection, when it transitions over to KuOps or you ever seeing a shift, I, hey, I know it says this on here, but we get distracted by the, the shiny object.
Speaker 5I would say we have, okay, yeah, we have, but it really would depend on the experience level. Yeah. I think there's like a, I think we've had a couple of strong, one officers were kind of managing that, or we've had, even like one staff sergeant before, it was like, no, we're not, we're not wasting this, I said, or kind of push it off. But for the majority of the time, the vibe and current operations is, let's hunt and kill. Yeah. And we get stuck in it.
Speaker 6Yeah. I mean, I think I kind of go back to your point of, yeah, it's the cool thing to do, but it's also quiteifiable. I can, right. I can't destroy this, and I know I had an effect, but if I'm confirming a PR and a certain train feature and the enemy never goes that way, yeah, we might have confirmed that, but we've got a waste of the asset for six hours when it could have been doing something else. Yeah. And it's the question of, is, is being diverted or is it meant to go after HBT's, and that's like what we're focusing on when it should also be folks at PR, we're having
Speaker 4knowing that, I think part of that goes into units not developing a, a complete and detailed like information collection plan that really gets after, you know, the five dope use of what's collecting, where are they collecting, why are they collecting, and then how is that being reported? And that it's also, we've mentioned before that that handoff, right, does the current operations sell? Does the battle captain know this is the purpose of the collection? Yeah. This is what it's doing. And why we're in the defense during the initial phase of this defense, we need to understand what the enemy is doing in order to be able to enable the commander to make a decision. And then once you've been able to do that or after a certain period of time, or you've answered the decision, okay, now we're having this shift towards towards targeting. And you know, whatever was planned is probably not going to be executed as planned, but not going in with that logic. I think a lot of units kind of fall in that trap where it kind of for them it diverts to targeting only. Yeah.
Speaker 6Because that's what I was curious is, are we only focusing on targeting, and the PIRs aren't even being mentioned in the IC Matrix, so it's an afterthought, and that's where the start of the problem is.
Speaker 5And I agree. And I think like Major P said it in one of the other podcasts before is like, if we plan And then in our planning phase, very specific, then we've done a lot of work. So we don't have to do the work of keeping ourselves in track. Like are we, are we doing D3A or are we, you know, doing situational awareness right now? So I think that if it's in the plan, we should be able to follow it.
Speaker 6Yeah, because I think it all goes back to, you know, our start cutting our micro and our sensors. So they only have so many toys to play with now. So it's, if you only have one or two things, you can only do one or two things.
Speaker 4And then how do you prioritize that? Right. And that goes back into, you know, the plan and, you know, we're, you know, the world of limited information collection assets at the brigade level, get to be able to prioritize that. If you don't go in with a plan, and then even if you do, let's say you develop a great plan, if that's not then handed off, then it's, you know, what's easier to understand? Maybe for a battle captain or that exo sitting in the thing that, you know, the HBTL or this, you know, you know, extremely long and complicated collection plan.
Speaker 3Yeah. Well, let me, let me pose kind of two thoughts that I think are, are linked. And I think they're linked in that it's, it's kind of probably human nature, right? What may be contributing to this, one, I know sometimes we hear frustration, you know, we have got, we have gotten away from it here. But we hear frustration, the term kill contract. And here at the joint red restraining center, we do not talk about kill contracts. Like, because then what inevitably happens is, well, the division said that they were going to get rid of this thing and they didn't. And so now there's a distrust, there's frustration. So no, hey, this is, it's, it's high pay off or high value target stuff that we would like to go after. But, you know, so this is what division is going to focus on and going into other conversations about. Well, we're going to focus on it past the CFL, past the IHL in the division space, right? The division deep, we will focus on it there. But, you know, if it slips past, it slips past. But I think sometimes there's a frustration, well, division didn't get rid of this. So now we need to try and go after it. So I've seen at times where, you know, again, in the targeting cycle, we're frustrated because it's still there. We haven't gotten a report of it yet. So we, so maybe we need to go after the second one, which is kind of linked to it is, I mean, JRTC is hard. And I think maybe there's a degree of, we're frustrated because, you know, it's maybe not as easy as we thought it would be compared to, you know, how we potentially did at home station, compared to how we're doing at the CTC. So, you know, maybe we're going for a quick win or let's look for those things. Again, those quantifiable things, like you mentioned, that we can say we did the thing and we were successful in something, a rally behind, and he thoughts on that, I mean, that's just the, just kind of.
Speaker 6Yeah, I'm going into the killed contract. In real world, the enemy has a vote, he has tactics. So saying, you know, on day one, we're going to destroy 50% of the high ads. Well, the enemy's probably not going to turn on all the high ads on day one. They're going to space them out, they're going to place them throughout the battlefield. So we go in there with the mindset that we're going to affect them in such a way. But if that's not how they're employing, we may never find them. Then you're wasting time and resources.
Speaker 5Yeah, I think to go back to you, like you were saying for the satisfaction or the gratifying of like watching the BDA happen, that's just got to be a balance of the staff understanding the commander because we could, we could get after all of this. So if the commanders come to us with unobserved fires, why can't we kill that tank? Yeah. And then we go on to continue answering our now understand there's a little bit of risk in there. But, you know, maybe like maybe we catch that in that in the very last second, coming back to see if we we've destroyed it or not. And I know like that that's part of that's part of managing those things in our planning phase. Like, okay, are we going to use this asset for targeting? Because if we are, then we're not going to really, we're not going to be answering the commanders, part of your intelligence requirements. But like if we take that risk, okay, but now so we don't understand the enemy or now we even, you know, we messed up sustainment a little bit because we've down a couple rounds, you know, because we try to kill this thing with unobserved fires. So I think if you understand the staff and the commander have that agreement, you could probably alleviate some of that before they get to Torbja.
Speaker 4Yeah, and I think a lot of like as Brigida stews and collection managers don't really know how to communicate risk to the commander about the use of their limited IC assets. Yeah, you know, the ways that they can better do that is if they know themselves, know their capabilities, know what their, what, you know, what their capabilities limitations are, what their collection, know if they have a lot of UAS or not, which is, you know, what are they, what can the employee with grind collection, can they federate to the battalions, what can division help them with? Also, you know, a lack of detailed information collection planning. Yeah, you know, not doing completing all the steps of intel preparation and operational environment, not having a complete enemy koas or event matrix and event template that they can, that they then have can prioritize their limited information collection assets to be able to detect on the things that really, they really need to in order to, you know, enable the commander and make a decision or find a high payoff target in time and space. And then also part of that is also maybe there's a, there could be a lack of prioritization on answering PIRs or maybe the, the, the commander and the staff don't necessarily see those as, as the priority because when they were going through MDMP, you know, they didn't fully develop the decisions for the brigade commander to make. And so now they have, they don't have a fully flushed out decision support template and matrix and they're not really postured to answer the brigade commander's decisions because they're planning a lack that effort and focus and didn't really get to that level of complete.
Speaker 3Yeah. I like what you said there because as you were kind of kind of talking through it, it's exactly where my mind was going about the, in both of you kind of said it, where it's like, hey, the asset may be going out and maybe they see something or maybe somebody on the ground notices something, you know, what point are we passing it, you know, as opposed to it having to be a brigade asset, particularly as more and more units come here with more and more, you know, uh, uh, UAS, you know, small UAS that they use themselves. Okay, well, why can't we task that down to the battalion and say, hey, battalion, you're in the area, I need you to confirm and then you're going to go direct and send up fire mission, you know, because they've all got their own forward observers, right? And, and force fire support officers down there at the battalions. So they could run those missions up, hey, let, let brigade know, okay, brigade battalion, you've got this now, you go, I'm just trying to think, you know, when, when sometimes we're watching on the, on the TV screen, the unfoldings of the night, everybody in KuOps gets super focused on this thing that's happening, but is that the most important thing? Or is there a way that we could say that is a problem, we're going to push it here to solve it, I need everybody else still. I remember being a platoon leader in one of the things I focused on during patrols was, I saw this as my responsibility, you know, in charge of the entire patrol was like, which way were the turrets focused? And I was always cognizant to go, I don't care for taking contact from one side or the other, not every turret can face that way, because then you open yourself up. And I guess that's kind of why I've started to notice this trend and why this idea came to me of like, hey, let's talk about this. Are we, are we, you know, pivoting our guns towards the dynamic thing, the thing that's kind of fun to watch versus, whoa, are we on pace with the rest of our mission? What's going on there? Pass that problem off to somebody else, thoughts?
Speaker 6I mean, so we do have the target's life standards. That's the primary purpose of kind of doing that, the linearation of what that echelon brigade, in this case, is mostly focusing on and it's below our cutoff. So, hey, battalion, that's your fight, here is the information we have on it and trying to do that handoff, but sometimes that, you know, a shiny object does kick in where it's, well, yeah, it's not three tanks, but it's one tank, and I don't even want one tank, you know, like, look, the staff, yeah, people are not willing to let that go. They get hyper focused on that when, yeah, they need to be focused on the bigger picture.
Speaker 3Well, are there, so I'll ask the dumb question, because this is my chance to learn. But, are there targets that should be held at the brigade level, that the brigade needs to focus on, or are there ones that, because the fight is, I can understand if it's like deep out, right? If, you know, maybe, depending on how they've got everything to ask, or it's far enough out, no battalions in position to really take it, I can understand that. But when we look at that target selection, are we saying, hey, these three things, regard, you know, this thing is a brigade thing, regardless of where it's at on the battlefield, it can be super far forward, it can be in, you know, it can be close, it can be in the rear, brigades are going to focus on it versus, hey, there's another headquarters down there that can handle that.
Speaker 6What are your thoughts on that? I mean, between them, because if it's a high pay off target list, yeah, you're going to engage it in no matter where it is. I mean, it is close to battalions, you're going to clear ground at that point, because, you know, CFL usually helps delineate between what you need to clear ground, or you don't need to clear ground. If it's got a range, you might have a higher echelon division engage it and kind of keep trying to keep custody of it, because obviously something you care about, yeah, it may mean something they don't care about, might be below their high pay off target list, and you have to have that dialogue with them of, hey, I need you to engage it, even though you don't necessarily care about it.
Speaker 5Okay. I think that's important, because like, I don't want us to be thinking the targeting isn't something we should be doing, because it's absolutely pivotal. But, yeah, I think like, after you listen, after a chief's example, I think what probably is happening more often than not. Isn't it, it's either just the shiny object and nobody's rectifying that right then and there. Or like Major P said, it's an okay-ish plan. And then by the time we get to the target working group, we're not really thinking about that. This asset is gonna be looking at this in AI at this time, which we told the vision that we'll be doing. We asked for it and they said, okay, but now all the sudden shiny object happens. And now we're over here looking in Narnia for a 290 that we're gonna stare at for an hour. And we can't do that. So I think as long as you have a, if you take that plan that we've developed during plans and keep that in mind as we're in the target working group, like until and fires could probably check each other right there. - Yeah. - You know, 'cause if they stay, it's on the edge, put a way we want to kill it, until it's gonna be like, yeah, we have this asset up. - Yeah. - But maybe we should be, okay, but what's that asset supposed to be really doing? - Yeah. - And then by the time we get to the crops, there's a void shiny object if we can. -
Speaker 6Well, I think a lot of it's having this conversation, there's touch conversations with Lava or senior folks. 'Cause I think the people on the systems, they're willing, they're gonna stick the plan, that someone comes in of higher ranks and be like, "Oh, absolutely not, we're gonna destroy this." Like, yeah. And you can't really say no. Or you can be like, "Hey, sir, this is this." And they're like, okay, cool. But yeah, you're gonna destroy this. And that comes to focus. -
Speaker 3Well, and I've seen it, to be fair, I've also seen it at various echelons. It's not, yeah, I'm not saying that this is, you know, one specific rank or business. It's kind of like who's running the floor at the time and how are they reacting to things? And so, I think it could be anybody. It could be that battle captain who's been given it and they get excited. It could be the field grade in charge. It could be the commander, the Sergeant Major, Ops Sergeant Major, whoever, right? Those things can happen and I agree with you. Don't not do targeting, right? That would be bad. And don't look for those opportunities, those wins. I've just noticed, the question came about like, are we too focused on it because that seems to be what everybody gets excited about and we almost lose sight of. Well, we're really sent from as we, I wondered if we've lost sight of trying to gain and maintain situational understanding because we're hunting the shiny object. -
Speaker 4Right, and I think part of that goes back to the point that you had at the beginning about the target working groups and target coordination boards that a lot of commanders and staff see those as kind of one of one or two key meetings that happen every day. You'll have a bug in a cub and you'll have the target working group and the target coordination board. And those happen every single day without fail. And in the target working group and the target coordination board when those happen, you know, it's okay. What's the age pedal, what assets do we have? How are we gonna find these things, right? And that happens every single day. - Yeah. - Whereas a lot of units, they'll only do MDMP in Torbja, you know, four or five times, right? So they're developing a collection plan based off of a particular operation. But those may get stale. They're not necessarily updated. They may, they don't necessarily linked with the commander's decisions as those are being developed. They don't keep up with the pace of the battle. Those planning efforts don't. Whereas you have an alternate thing that's focused on collection that is being done every single day. And then, initially units won't have a information collection working group that they do every day to kind of help synchronize those things so that they go into the target working group, target coordination board or their MDMP planning sessions with, you know, this is the logic, this is the plan for how we're going to be able to enable the commander to make a decision or to, you know, remove something from the battlefield that will enable our success.
Speaker 3Right? All right, gentlemen, any parting thoughts on the topic?
Speaker 4I think just, I brought this up before, but, you know, we've identified some problems. But like, what can, particularly the Intel folks within upper gate staff? What can they do, really? And it's, you know, doing IPO correctly and completely. Yeah. Have, you know, assisting with the development within MDMP of the commander's decisions and then what they need to be able to do to help and, what question about the threat or the operational environment that they can do for that? And so they have a solid foundation for the plan of what they need to collect on. Knowing their capabilities that they have for collection, having a detailed information collection plan that is then shared with the current operations folks as they're doing it. And then keeping highlighting the importance of, you know, during this particular part of the operation, are we collecting on supportive situation understanding or for targeting? And, you know, they're able to kind of do that and have that logic. Then, you know, they're, they're not necessarily going to have assets, they're going to be taken away to focus on targeting when they really need to know, okay, where's the enemy's main effort going, or that type of thing?
Speaker 6I like it. And this, the touch on the tire work group and decision boards kind of being stuffful. I think it's part of a larger, I want to say, issue of a discussion of, commanders want to minimize meetings so they can staff can focus. Yeah. Between jumps and fighting. So those are the usually meetings that kind of survive because you have big advocates for them that are working group in the decision board. Yep. So you get the rest of staff functions like, well, this is our one chance, again, front of the commander. So yeah, it kind of gets blooded sometimes. We've seen a rotation where plans pretty much completely took it over. Yeah. And throughout it, the targeting team kind of took it back. But yeah, it comes a problem when you have multiple functions like Intel is trying to do the collection and then you get front of the commander. It's like, well, when do they have a chance to do so? And then by the way, they cap these meetings at 30 to 40 minutes when they're covering five subjects.
Speaker 3Yeah. So, no, I agree. I mean, it's, it's how do you maximize your touch points with the commander who's got to make decisions or get guidance? It becomes difficult when, you know, the enemy has a vote and things you have start stripping away at it. So I understand. I think it's all, it's all in, you know, with good intentions of why these things happen. However, as you, as you start stripping away these battle in the meetings, because every battle in the event is on there for a reason, it's super important. But as we strip away and then we try and add two, we basically say, okay, well, if everything's important and nothing's important and we over-inflate what's actually happening, and then we lose track of what we're actually trying to accomplish out of those meetings, we lose the detail. The more we stack on to those particular meetings, the less we can focus on the details that are supposed to come out of those specific meetings, and the same, like everything kind of becomes a little bit more vanilla, just, you know, bland, because now we're hitting wave tops, so we're not getting to the level of detail that we should be getting to in the Intel sync or the collection sync or the various working groups, et cetera, so, you know, fantastic point. Hey, so, gentlemen, thank you so much for coming in and indulging my question today. Really enjoy the conversation I've learned, you know, from all of y'all as I tend to do. To our audience out there, please continue to reach out and shoot us any questions that may be on your mind. I think today's episode was a perfect example of, you know, we don't always have the answer. Sometimes the question just comes and the way we get after it is by going to the subject matter experts. I do it all the time and asking the question and starting the dialogue and seeing how can we come up with solutions to make things better? This is how, this is kind of probably the best peek into how we become better coaches is by having these questions and then figuring out ways that we can apply it to the rotational units. So, as always, thank you for listening. Please reach out with your thoughts and we'll see you
Speaker 1in Torbja. - Thank you for joining us on The Crucible, the JRTC Experience.
Speaker 7The Joint Readiness Training Center is the premier crucible training experience. We prepare units to fight and win in the most complex environments against world-class opposing forces. We are America's leadership laboratory. - Again, we'd like to thank our guests for participating. This podcast was created and produced by Mr. John Maves. Executive producer is Lieutenant Colonel Drew Zabrisky. It was recorded by Captain Germain Branch and edited by Mr. Travis Boyle. Series intros were built by Chief Thomas Rich and vocals were done by Mr. Robert Chopper. Special thanks to Mr. Jeff England and the Ford Johnson Public Affairs Office. Be sure to like and follow us on social media to keep up with the latest war fighting TTPs learned through The Crucible that is the Joint Readiness Training Center. Follow us by going to HTTPS, colon/Fords/LionKTR.EE/JRTC. We'd like to thank our partners at the Center for Army Lessons Learned of the Combined Arm Center, especially the JRTC Call Observations Detachment. Be sure to follow them on social media as well. Follow them at HTTPS, colon/Fords/Fords/WWW.Army.mil/CALL. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and review us wherever you listen or watch your podcasts and be sure to stay tuned for more in the near future. the crucifold, the jail. The RTC experience is a product of the Joint Readiness Training Center.
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