That is to say, when constructing the plan and its expression in the ATO, the commander can never forget that the situation is fluid, that chaos is always a close neighbor, and that terrific opportunities may arise in an instant. This is especially true in war, where aircraft move about in the battlespace in minutes or seconds, and information about new situations and alignments of forces arrive in real time and must be acted on instantly. Even though the commander must have principles to hang on to, as time passes, his objectives may become modified, and he will certainly gain more information about the reality of his situation.

To make all this more complicated: The ATO itself is like a moving train. If someone suddenly changes one element, he must consider the ripple effect on other elements. Sometimes the effect is minimal. For example, Tiger Flight is scheduled to hit target X at Y time, but new intelligence comes in that says target X has moved five kilometers north. No problem. The new target coordinates are inserted, the change is added, and the ATO is hardly affected. But suppose that Y time becomes two hours later. Then there’s a serious problem. The new time may well drastically affect the aircraft generation schedule at the base. It may well affect tanker availability. It may well affect airspace deconfliction. And it may well affect the intelligence-collection efforts associated with that strike. For these reasons, it is sometimes better to freeze the ATO early and make up for the changes in the chaos that reigns in the current operations efforts during the day of execution.

Thus, an ATO is the marshaling of available resources against a series of tasks as they are best known when the plan is created. But the day that plan is executed, there will be more information that may in fact require reordering of priorities and tasks.

That means that the old paradigm—ready, aim, fire—has changed. In modern war, you ready, fire, and then aim. The deployment and sustaining of the force, a service responsibility, is the ready; the launch of the force against a preconceived schedule is the fire; while the command and control associated with the operations is the aim. That is, one now often loads up his aircraft, puts them in the air, and then decides what target to hit, based on real-time intelligence.

The plan, again, is not a sacred document. A commander has to be prepared to change it on the fly, and he has to have machinery in place to transmit the changes instantly to the people affected by them. For this reason, during Desert Storm, ATOs were built two and a half days—no more than that—before they were put into operation (since this was the minimum time for necessary preparations). This made it hard for the planners who made ATOs, but it ensured that changes would be more easily and quickly accommodated.