that military mission planning was needless and burdensome,” I told
them. “But I was wrong. Establishing an effective and repeatable
planning process is critical to the success of any team.”
I told them how I had learned proper mission planning and briefing
through years of trial and error and many, many mistakes and iterations
of doing it wrong. It started back in my earliest days of SEAL training.
* * *The PLO is for the boys. It was a statement often repeated in SEAL
platoons and task units when I first joined the SEAL Teams. That
statement implied that the brief for a combat mission should be designed
and developed for the SEAL operators that would execute the operation.
PLO stood for “platoon leader’s order,” a term used by SEALs since the
Vietnam era. The rest of the U.S. military called it an operations order
(OPORD). After 9/11, joint operations in close coordination with U.S.
Army, Marines, and Air Force, through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
caused SEALs to adopt the OPORD term. But by whatever name, it
meant the same thing: a mission brief. This brief laid out the specific
details of who, what, when, where, why, and how a combat operation
would be conducted. The OPORD was prepared for and given to the
SEAL operators and supporting assets who were to participate in an
operation. It was supposed to allow every member of a SEAL element
and other U.S. (or foreign allied) forces involved to understand the
overall plan, their role in the plan, what to do when things went wrong,
and how to contact help if the worst-case scenario took place. A good
plan was critical to mission accomplishment, and briefing that plan to
the troops enabled effective execution of the plan. Without successful
execution, the best-laid plans were worthless.