Long-Range Planning by Lieutenant Colonel Alan Gropman

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1979/nov-dec/gropman.html

Perhaps the best concise document I have come across that addresses the need for long-range planning in any on-going activity.

Gropman looks at the American military institution (the Pentagon) circa 1979 and gives his thoughts about bringing the end to the in-box mentality - the idea that organizational problems are bounded by the here and now.

His thoughts are quite clear concerning the need, even in times of budgetary restrictions, to sacrifice some readiness in the present in order to be properly focused on goals in the future. The risk is that a creeping incompetence, or a pushing of problems over the planning horizon, will cause the military of tomorrow to become gradually and dangerously unprepared to fight tomorrow's battles.

Gropman argues that the planning process brings the future into the present, so that it can be addressed along with the pressing needs of today. The uncertainty of the future must be acknowledged and predicted to the best extent possible. The implications for a computer chess program are clear: failure to plan in the present, at the time we perform the evaluation of a position, can cause us to be unprepared for the future positions that arrive from beyond our search horizon. We might also fail to seize opportunities that have a (possibly calculable) chance for payoff in the future.

"By the summer of 1978, segments of all the service staffs and many officials in the Department of Defense (DOD) were lamenting the lack of the long-term view in military planning and programming. Two services organized ad hoc groups to study the benefits to be obtained from institutionalizing long-range planning within their staffs. The Air Force was first into the arena with a twenty-officer study group chartered by Secretary John C. Stetson; the Navy followed suit several months later with a smaller effort. The secretary asked his long-range planning study group to:

• examine the feasibility of adopting big business long-range planning techniques;
• recommend an institutionalized long-range planning process, should corporate long-term planning practices appear adoptable;
• offer perspectives on the future world -twenty years out -in which the Air Force will operate; and
• recommend strategy alternatives for meeting future threats and opportunities."

"Long-range planning is the systematic process of formulating objectives and developing strategy and resource allocation alternatives for reaching them."

"Intrinsic to the process is a system for dealing with the implications, in an uncertain future, of presently considered alternatives."

"Objectives formulation is axiomatic to any long-range planning process; hence, the lack of well-articulated and thoroughly understood goals is one sure sign that such a process is absent. Once objectives are established, the formal staff organization can proceed with creating strategy paths to goal satisfaction. The critical part of that process, and its real payoff, is determining the future implications of the alternatives offered by the staff."

"Organizations should plan in order to avoid, to cope with, or to beat threats; in order to exploit opportunities; and to shape the future world--always with the focus on goals. Yet without formal goal and strategy development and systematic treatment of the future consequences of strategy options, the staff and its leadership might remain tied eternally to the present and could lose the future to those who plan for it. The tyranny of the in-basket (which drives managers to focus on the present) must be overcome, and defeating that tyrant is made less likely by the fact that today's difficulties are easier to grasp than tomorrow's less well-defined ones. Future problems become more elusive yet, moreover, as one tries to project further and further."

"If the long-term view is not adopted, however, improvements will probably be always on the margin, future forces may be well prepared to fight the last war, and tomorrow may be mortgaged to today (or, even worse, to yesterday)."

Gropman recognizes that in a competitive environment, the winner in a conflict might just be the side that plans the most effectively - allocating resources, setting goals and planning for conflicts that happen not now, but tomorrow.

"Neither the Air Force nor the Defense Department has systematically defined its long-term objectives or methodically identified the long-range implications of present decisions."

"We need to establish a process that forces the future to intrude on the present, and long-range planning will accomplish this."

"Without leaders of vision, however, the military could become almost imperceptibly weaker, year by year, because of an entirely natural reluctance to accept short-term degradation in readiness in order to build for the future."

Strategic planning is difficult because resources must be allocated according to how things might develop, not according to how they exist today.

"Even with a coherent and usable set of goals to guide strategic planning, the process is still difficult because alternatives have to be evaluated in the face of uncertainty.