Generals don’t feel like generals unless they make their presence felt. Fair enough, when they know where they are going and keep a light hand on the reins. That’s leadership. Too often, though, they don’t know where they are going, yet pretend they do (in the absence of virtue, the appearance of virtue is better than nothing); and then get the staff to plan the trip. Once the staff plan is prepared, the general will inevitably make lots of changes. General-induced changes make big ripples in the planning cycle. In our ATO planning process, we had lots of general-created tidal waves, including too many from me.

Despite the screwups, we gradually brought order to this confusion and speeded up the planning process in an orderly way that allowed humans to accommodate to them. Very early in the war, we learned to make changes early in the ATO, not by stopping the presses, but by sending change sheets directly to the units involved. We’d tell them something like: “When you get the ATO tonight, your F-16s are targeted against Target X. Disregard that and go to Target Y.” At first the new systems confused the wings, but they caught on rapidly.

After the war, the armchair generals had their say about speeding up the planning process. “We’ve got to get the ATO cycle time down,” they’d assert. “Two days is too long.” They were right, we had to speed up the process; but they were blaming the wrong villain. The two-day cycle wasn’t hurting us. You must give people some reasonable planning horizon, and two days is short but manageable. What needs to be worked on is the change cycle—the cycle of gaining intelligence about what you want to do and then implementing the required changes. In other words, we’d use the two-day plan to head the troops in the right general direction, and then we’d fine-tune as needed. For example, because the Iraqi Army units moved daily, we were never able to pinpoint their location in the two-day cycle. At first, we tried to update the ATO. But this only left the ATO in constant flux and therefore late to the customers. Instead, we put the F-16 killer scouts over the Iraqi Army, then sent forth hordes of A-10s, F-16s, and F-18s in a well-planned orderly stream. When they arrived on scene, the killer scouts pointed out targets, and the fighter-bombers dropped their loads and returned home for more.

The timeline we had shortened was the time needed to bring intelligence to the attackers. Because the killer scouts’ eyes were the intelligence collectors, the intelligence was only seconds old when the attacking aircraft acted on it.