Acta Non Verba: The Company Operations Order
by Maj Mike Breslin
I clearly remember delivering my first operations order as a company commander. It was on my B-billet, the audience was 40 Infantry Small Unit Leader Course Sergeants, an instructor cadre of multiple tour war heroes, the battalion commander, and the regimental commander. I’m not an idiot, but I was pretty nervous! Every officer serving for more than a few years has been witness to an excellent company operations order, and probably more than a few terrible ones. I have teeth-grinding memories of receiving a terrible company commander- delivered order as a platoon commander that years later had me concerned as I prepared to deliver my first operations order as a rifle company commander. A few years after those first few ventures into delivering my own company orders, I have now delivered half a dozen company orders, multiple battalion level orders, and I’ve observed a stud crew of company commanders deliver a dozen more. My thoughts on how to do the orders process well have modified over time. I’d like to share several personal lessons learned over the past few years that I will take forward should I get an opportunity to command again. What follows is not earth shattering, but perhaps one method to make one of the numerous company command tasks a bit more efficient.
Lesson 1: A Company Orders SOP will generate tempo. I created a standardized company orders template (accompanies this article) and handed it to my platoon commanders. It was a familiar, event-based matrix order template, modified for my purposes as a 31st MEU air assault company. I prepopulated it with SOPs like lost Marine, no communication, linkup procedures, etc. We all laminated them and threw them in our packs for field training and longer-duration Division or service-directed exercises. As fresh graduates of IOC, some of the platoon commanders were a little leery at first, but over time we collectively found that our process speed while working through orders was faster since we wrote and delivered orders identically every time. Eventually the platoon commanders and the squad leaders knew what to expect, no matter the mission set. This shared process made us faster.
Faster is important to me because you must be the one to create time for your less experienced leaders to work through and rehearse their portions of your plan. Most of your squad leaders and all of your platoon commanders will be doing their job for the first time. Even if all of your subordinate element leaders are “school trained” all that means is that they have produced an order or two for a grade. They may never have worked through the full process from battalion order all the way through platoon/squad orders and execution. In order to achieve the 1/3-2/3 rule that they harp on at TBS and IOC, you have to make it happen by getting your mission, intent, and scheme of maneuver into their hands as quickly as is prudent. Our company orders SOP coupled with our Rehearsal of Concept (ROC) SOP gave me the confidence to write and issue a 70% order, because I knew that the ROC process would hammer the plan flat. More to follow on the ROC process.
Lesson 2: Make your command team OWN the company order. There is probably this tiny little bit of all of us that wants to impress our units with our big huge tactical brains. I have seen some guys attempt use the orders process as a way to try to demonstrate this, but guess what? Unless it’s truly awful, no one will remember your order, but everyone will remember your company’s performance. No one ever said, “Kilo’s Range 400 run looked like shit, but goddamn that company commander’s order was fire!” I firmly believe that the more people in your unit that you can give ownership to, and the earlier you can do it, the faster and more effective your company will be. The orders process done right can provide a venue for this training objective.
Here is a little secret; unless you are incredibly blessed, you and just about everyone around you is doing their billet for the first time. Creating a collaborative work environment for the production of the company order is another way to train each of the key players on your team what your tactical expectations are. Do you want your 1stSgt to be the casualty guy? Make him plan and brief the casualty action plan. Do you want your Company Gunny to keep the lads dripping in ammo? Make him plan and brief how he’s going to do it. Do you want a FiST leader who will build the fires packages you want without you standing over his shoulder? Make him do it. The obvious proviso is that initially you and your team won’t be fast at this process, so you have to account for the increased time as you begin to build your team’s capabilities. That said, the beauty of doing your company order as a team is that over the course of a work-up, you will create up to a dozen opportunities to talk tactics with your key leaders, outside of any leadership development or PME plan that you have insitituted. Perhaps more importantly, you are creating an environment that forces the links that lead to effective implicit communication between you and your team. I’m not a guy that quotes the pubs chapter and verse, but both MCDP 1 and MCDP 1-3 speak to the value of implicit communications between leaders and led when everything falls apart.
Here is a by-paragraph method to bring the team together to build a collaborative company order. This plan presupposes that you have already published a WARNO to enable concurrent subordinate leader planning actions:
Terrain Model Build: Every company usually has a few good Marines who find themselves stuck in a company office because they are either recovering from an injury, or they are just good enough to find themselves “promoted” to the company office. Their tactical skills have a tendency to atrophy as they get relegated to the meeting the XO and company gunny’s taskers that support training or company operations. Make these guys expert terrain model builders. It brings them into the tactical play of your plan and makes them do some infantry things.
Roll Call/Task Organization: I think you need to generate the task organization, but this is also an opportunity to empower the 1stSgt. He ensures that all attachments know who they are turning their rosters into. He can lean into this by reaching out to all attachments and ensuring that they are present for the order and subsequent ROCs.
Orientation: CLIC rep, with yourself as the back stop. Initially it will be a lot to ask a LCpl or Cpl intelligence Marine to fully understand and brief a company MCOO, but over time and training he will learn what you want to see and what is important to you as the commander.
Situation: CLIC rep/Company Commander, advice above remains the same as above. The trend I’ve seen here is the lack of understanding (initially) of the enemy to a young intelligence Marine, but again, time, training, and your leadership will fix this. In particular, I have seen repeatedly that junior 02xx types need a lot of coaching with enemy order of battle analysis. It’s one thing to know a doctrinal template, but it’s quite another to line that template against existing terrain. Six months in, he/she will be briefing most of this paragraph with no input.
Mission: This is all you. A mission is one task, and one purpose. Not trying to be insulting here, but I have seen some staggeringly bad, paragraph-long mission statements in the past three years.
Execution: Commanders Intent, SOM, Tasks, and Coordinating Instructions all belong to you, Fire support plan belongs to the FiST leader. Even if he has no idea what he’s doing yet, it’s a training opportunity for you both. He is forced to learn how to build EFSTs that support your plan, and you are forced articulate your commander’s intent for fires to explain how you want to see fire support happen, for this and subsequent operations.
Administration: 1stSgt briefs MACO, casualty care, EPW plan, etc. Done right, this can make a non-combat-arms-type 1stSgts snap into their tactical role in an infantry company. It’s really hard to pretend ignorance (oh sir, I came up in the wing) if you know that your credibility is on the line when you get up to brief. This can create opportunities for you to mentor/train your 1stSgt in this realm.
Logistics: Company Gunnery Sergeant, Ops Chief, or company police sergeant. Where is resupply coming from, what are the linkup procedures, who is authorized to release the resupply team? Again, the company gunny might be coming back to the FMF after years away on an SDA or B-Billet. Making him participate in planning and then briefing his plan will help to bust off the B-Billet rust. If he’s already a stud, bounce your CONOPs off him before you brief it; he might see something you are missing.
Signal: Company RTO. Make him plan through Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency (PACE) plans. If your company communications cage doesn’t have the equipment to build a realistic PACE plan, empower this young warfighter to go get the equipment that you need.
Command: CO briefs location and succession by phase, stage, or part.
There are dozens of variations on how to work company combat order development as a collaborative effort. The method above depended partially on the people that worked for me. As strengths and weaknesses will vary across your company HQ team, you will need to adjust. The most important thing is to use the development of the company order as a collaborative effort to train tactical thought, gain tempo, empower subordinates, and build your team.
Lesson 3: Rehearsals are more important than the company order. What we say as company commanders carries a lot of weight, and the fear of “screwing up” can be
sobering. I have seen the fear of delivering a less than perfect order freeze several commanders in their tracks. Instead of getting their plan on the street, they’re overanalyzing their words. This is a personal hang-up from painful experience. As an attached 2ndLt leading my first clear in Afghanistan, I was hand delivered a 65 page company order four hours before my platoon was scheduled to LD. That’s a company commander that failed; by the time I got that brick, there was little I could do to translate the important parts for the squad leaders. The end result was that I took 40 Marines and 20 ANA soldiers into a multi-day clear without me or any of my subordinate leaders truly understanding the commander’s intent.
Ultimately, I have come to believe that what we do is more important than what we say. Acta non verba. In this context, the “we” I refer to is your infantry company. Is it important to state the appropriate tactical task from MCDP 1-0, Annex C? Yes, it absolutely is. Is it appropriate to use doctrinal orders formats that your Marines understand? Yes, certainly. Do the EFSTs need to be doctrinally correct? Yes again.
All that said, I would posit that the time spent internally debating whether you want an “attack by fire” vs “support by fire” is far less important than communicating the plan to the lads, clearly, concisely, and quickly so subordinate leader planning and the all-important rehearsals can begin. As commanders we are pressured to create letter-perfect command philosophies, field leadership guidance, and policy letters, but I’ve found that Marines orient on action more than speeches, papers, or policies.
No matter how genius, to most Marines, an hour-long operations order will start to sound like background noise. If you can action orient/weaponize the orders process, I think you can engender deeper learning and better execution. In my experience, infantry Marines are usually kinesthetic learners, meaning that they learn how by doing. To this end, I now believe that the company order is far less important than the rehearsal of concept, and well executed squad, platoon, and company rehearsals. At the company level, what worked for me was a robust Rehearsal of Concept (ROC) SOP (template included).
I spent my Captain B-Billet time at Advanced Infantry Training Battalion-East. While there I witnessed hundreds of squad and platoon-level orders. A consistent theme that emerged for me was that a shitty order, well-rehearsed, resulted in good to above average execution far more frequently than a killer order that wasn’t rehearsed as thoroughly. As a company commander I decided early on that the my rifle company would conduct no less than three full Rehearsals of Concept (ROC) before any company level or larger event. In practice that meant, one team-delivered company order (as previously discussed) over a terrain model followed by three ROCs. For my company, it broke down like this:
-Warning Order: As soon as you have a rough idea of what your unit will be tasked to do, and a rough idea of your concept of operations, publish a Warning Order. A standardized format will facilitate tempo.
-Order: Team Delivered over a terrain model whenever you can. Remember how you executed FEXes I-III at TBS. We were all taught how right looks early in our careers, but I’ve seen countless officers seek efficiency (a PowerPoint order/Confirmation Brief) to the detriment of their Marines. Task someone (CLIC, duty squad, whoever) to build the terrain model boot top high, just like TBS. I’ve seen creative squad leaders build a terrain model from trash on an LPD, so don’t get lazy and resort to graphics or slides. Infantry Marines, as action people, need to “walk the ground” to internalize and weaponize the plan. This should take no more than one hour, which includes a post order Q&A for anyone that needs the dog walked a 3rd time.
-ROC 1: Return to the terrain model. Schedule this first ROC for after the platoon commanders have had time to issue their order. This is the “make sausage” ROC, during which sequencing issues are resolved, conditions set are codified, communications pathways are hammered down. I would usually make the XO run this ROC, with myself in overwatch. This served to make sure he understood the plan thoroughly, which is important if he is truly the number two man in the company chain of command. When possible, we would compel squad leaders and up and all attachments to attend. The planning assumption for time was that this 1st ROC would take anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours. We tried really hard to set a tone that we didn’t expect everyone to understand the plan yet; our literal purpose was to gain shared understanding, no matter how painful the first ROC was. Although I wanted the platoon leaders to brief, it was okay if I needed to coach them through friction points.
-ROC 2: Squad leaders and up, all attachments present. The XO ran this ROC as a facilitator, but the platoon commanders were now expected to be able to brief their execution steps and “walk their dog” with demonstrated understanding of the sequencing, conditions set, etc. Depending on how this ROC went, we would sometimes run through “what if” scenarios. What if suppression from 81s isn’t good? What if the communications pathway to the ship is broken? What if we take three casualties at the insert LZ? What happens if we are missing a Marine at the extract LZ? Talking through these things in a “safe” environment takes the sting out when the carefully crafted plan dissolves three minutes after LD, either due to Murphy (in training), or bad guys (combat).
-ROC 3: Team leaders and up, all attachments present. XO facilitates, squad leaders are the primary briefers. My intent for this ROC was to confirm shared understanding at the lowest level by all decision makers and action takers. For complex tactical events like movements to contact, air assaults, raids, and supported attacks, the entire success of the plan and rest on the shoulders of a 20 year old Corporal who understands the intent and end state when the plan has fallen apart.
A quick anecdote for proof that multiple rehearsals help your team win: when my company ran R400, the 81mm section utterly failed us. They were totally unable to get on target, and the attack was about to stall. A squad leader in 1st Platoon realized that we couldn’t execute one of the breaches due to lack of suppression. With no one directing him, he grabbed two M240s and a few M249s to form a composite support by fire element and started suppressing the objective that affected the breach site to set conditions for the breach to occur. This occurred in the span of less than a minute as I was running down the trench to link up with the lead trace platoon. After the debrief he told me that the several ROCs we had executed leading up to the range execution gave him a good spatial understanding of where the enemy was, where our assets were, and what the conditions set were. He saw a gap, knew that we were running behind, and made a decision enabled by a solid understanding of my intent for each phase of the attack. I have a dozen stories like this, all of which have made me a believer in the idea that the rehearsals, ROCs, or whatever TTP you come up with to practice the plan rather than talk the plan will lead you and your company to faster, more aggressive action in execution.
Conclusion: What I have attempted to do here is share some processes that worked for me to make the doctrinal company order a process that simultaneously trained junior leaders, built a solid company staff, built implicit communication into our work process, and most gained us tempo in execution. It wasn’t perfect, and we learned as we went. As I transitioned from company command to operations officer duties, I applied the same concepts, scaled up to account for a staff and more stakeholders. I found that with some modifications they worked at the battalion level as well. A Company Order Shell and Rehearsal of Concept Template have been submitted with this article. If they can’t be included due to formatting, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll gladly send them along or debate anything included above.
Maj Michael Breslin is currently serving as a faculty advisor at EWS. He can be reached at michael.breslin@usmcu.edu.