Air University Review, November-December 1979

a new beginning

VICTOR HUGO was right: nothing in this world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. In to day's Pentagon that idea is long-range planning, for a number of sound and compelling reasons. 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.

Because the chartered examination of long-range planning processes led to a reorganization of the Air Staff and the establishment of a Deputy Director for Long-Range Planning within the Directorate of Plans, this article will concentrate on the first two tasks of Mr. Stetson's charter.

Before the first of the year, a brigadier general was selected as the new Deputy Director, and he was assigned more than thirty staff officers to assist him in this new beginning. The other services had taken interest in the ninety-day study effort and are now monitoring the activities of the new unit; so is the rest of the Air Staff because this is the first time the Headquarters has had a formally integrated, permanent organization charged with long-range planning.

Defining long-range planning turned out to be more of an effort than the study group had imagined. Planning horizons differ widely in the corporate world, and long-range planning for some business front-runners was short-term operational planning for others. Nothing esoteric or mystical was found about long-range planning nor did it yield to any common description. The working definition that the study group eventually settled on is as follows:

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).

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. Readers who cannot think of equipment purchases (or cancellations), base openings (or closings), research emphasis (or lack thereof), or personnel policies (or voids) that were made without apparent regard for the future are either inexperienced or just not thinking. In these days of seemingly ever-tighter budgets, we may no longer have the resources to recover from quantum mistakes. We need to establish a process that forces the future to intrude on the present, and long-range planning will accomplish this.

In the past, Air Force long-range planning has never been well defined and has nearly always been attempted by ad hoc groups (such as in Toward New Horizons, New Horizons II, and the more recent Long Range Capability Objectives encounters). Sometimes those in the Air Staff responsible for concept formulation took up on their own (or were assigned as an extra duty) the long-range planning function. In no case, however, were such past groups or their products tied into the formal planning apparatus, nor were they formally or informally assigned more than a fraction of the long-range planning process. Frequently past groups concentrated on the pursuit of fruitful technological challenges or the delineation of likely future capability shortfalls. Neither of these facets nor their combination addresses more than a small part of the process.

What is needed is a process for translating the senior leaders' clearly stated objectives into coherent strategies. Once suitable strategies are being formulated and analyzed, the foresight and willingness to make sufficient funds available for well-considered investment must sooner or later emerge. 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. In today's climate of fiscal stringency, readiness and modernization are components of a zero sum game. The demand on the military leadership is seen to be even greater when one realizes that future threats can never be made as vivid as the current military situation. Military leaders quite properly want to deter war on their watch and to win if deterrence fails. Long-range planning requires a leader with the wisdom of a prophet; and, perhaps even more than that, a prophet's necessarily thick skin. The latter is required because a prophet is seldom honored "in his own country." That is the challenge of long-range planning.

The study group learned that the services do long-range planning much as it is practiced by corporations and that big business has as much to learn from the Air Force as vice versa. Which is not to say that there is nothing to be learned from business planning processes. What most corporations call1orig-range planning is close to what the military calls programming. Few businesses seem to have planning processes formally separated from programming because costs intrude on the process at every point. But the military cannot permit costs to dominate the planning process: the Air Force and the other services have vast and awesome responsibilities and must often develop unique capabilities, sometimes without regard to cost (and never with regard to profit), to deter war or to win if deterrence fails. The complexity of military planning and operations, furthermore, transcends by a wide margin the programmatic acquisition and profit dimensions of business. The myriad of uncertainties confronting military planners, moreover, greatly exceed those of business enterprises. In short, few corporations are as large as the Air Force, and those that are larger are not so complicated. And none have the same pressures and complex dilemmas that face Air Force planners and leaders. Perhaps because of the difficulties facing the military, DOD has developed the formal planning-programming-budgeting system, a vehicle superior to almost everything the study group explored in the business world.

This was certainly true in terms of time horizons. Of the corporations that consider themselves in the long-range planning game, most (about 75 percent) plan (really program) no further than we do in the Five Year Defense Plan or Program Objective Memoranda (POMs). Very few carry the process as far as the Air Force Objective Force, and practically none as far as the Extended Planning Annex. One front-runner, Texas Instruments, has a long-range planning horizon of three years. American giants like General Motors, IBM, and Ford have a five to seven year horizon. Only utility companies routinely plan further into the future than the military and not much further at that.

The dissatisfaction with the existing Pentagon approach, nonetheless, was too abundant to ignore, and the fact that corporations planned (or programmed) no further than the Air Force was no comfort. The study group was aware that there was no existing process by which the future was routinely and explicitly made a part of the planning equation, and business was investigated for its methods of making the future, near-term as it usually was, influence the present.

The study group learned that businesses which do long-range planning divide into two broad groupings. A minority could be called scenario builders: they try to forecast a comprehensive view of the future (or a range of views), note their shortcomings when measured against the future world (s), and shape strategies for redressing their insufficiencies. The programming philosophy is characteristic of such companies because there is little if any planning to reshape the future nor any deliberate look at different future missions. Most such companies are satisfied that they can react early to looming threats or exploit distant opportunities.

Many other companies, however, consider scenario building barren. They do not try to create coherent snapshots of the future world that will be believable to a majority of decision-makers. They try, instead, to determine the long-term consequences of alternative near-term decisions in an attempt to choose the best when measured against the long-range goals of the company leadership. Such companies study the future but ask their questions first and let the decision alternatives drive much of the research. A weather-eye is kept to warn of threats to the company's existence or to inform of dramatic opportunities for exploitation, but always within the context of company objectives. In trying to determine the relative merits of these approaches, the study group first experimented with scenario building. It found that the future was very slippery indeed. It seemed that the study group was subject almost daily to challenge by that morning's Washington Post. The further into the future the group pushed the horizon, the more tortured became the assumptions, the more hedged became the projections, the less clear-cut became the scenario, until the forecasters became convinced that they could make no scenario simultaneously believable to enough of the decision-makers to make any difference. The benefits of such an approach appeared marginal when measured against the enormous efforts expended.

The group was nonetheless more certain than ever that the future had to be examined and that the horizon had to be scanned for harbingers of change if future threats were to be met or bested and future opportunities seized. The consensus of the study group, however, was that the weight of emphasis in future study had to be placed on trying to determine the long-term consequences of current decision alternatives. Even there, part of the data used to accomplish that task comes from scanning the future environment.

Brought down to the mundane--if the Air Force is considering building a system to replace one that is aging, planners must ask: What objectives will it help meet in the future? Should the Air Force continue with (or will it be able to accomplish) the mission performed by the system through the end of its useful life cycle? Will there be resources to build the new system when it emerges from the blueprints? Will there be fuel to operate it? Will there be a force able to maintain and fly it? Will there be an enemy to fly it against? Will there be allies to support it, bases to fly it from and recover it on? Considering that it takes ten years or more of gestation, will there be money in future budgets to purchase it? What will have to be given up to acquire it? What research and development opportunities will be lost over the entire cycle because this system is chosen? What other goals may be threatened if we choose a system to satisfy a specific objective? Successful corporations place the highest emphasis in their long-range planning processes in seeking answers to such questions.

How do businesses go about answering such questions? In the first place, the company chief executive calls for answers. Successful long-range planning in business is characterized by the active participation in the planning process of the company chief. Business long-range planning, which front-running corporations choose to call "strategic planning," proceeds through a top-down approach. The long-range, or strategic, portion of the company plan is developed by the senior official(s) in concert with a small long-range planning staff. This portion of the plan is very definitely the boss's statement and not one simply prepared for his signature.

The study group visited three multibillion-dollar-per-year corporations and found that their chief executives had daily contact with the strategic planning staffs during the trimester in which the long-term plan is formulated. This is to ensure that the company's future direction remains in the hands of those responsible to the stockholders. The main product of the interaction of the planners with the chief is guidance, usually in the form of a memorandum, to key individuals in the firm. It establishes objectives, orients the entire planning cycle (with the future at the front end, and not the back), and sets the broad financial limits within which operational planners are to propose alternative strategies to meet company goals. The chief insisted that operational or short-range plans were to be in harmony with the long-range guidance, and the company president continued to meet with the long-range planners out of cycle to ensure that the process remained on track. Guidance produced with the participation of the company president is almost ensured adherence.

Readers familiar with the Department of Defense might consider the Consolidated Guidance (CG) satisfactory for such purposes, but it is not. First of all there is no Air Force counterpart to make explicit those areas left ambiguous or open to interpretation, nor does the CG contain any comprehensive set of Air Force goals. Most significantly, the CG is a relatively short-term programming document in which the future does weigh heavily. It comprises relatively nearterm programmatic guidance and is insufficient for Air Force long-range planning.

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. The further into the future the organization plans, the greater the problem. Corporations differ widely in their methods for dealing with uncertainty. Some choose elaborate computer models that make a dynamic simulation of the company for the entire strategic planning period to assist in making choices between complex alternatives. Others employ advanced decision analytic techniques, some of which border on the mystical. Evaluating alternatives in the face of uncertainty is probably the core difficulty with today's military planning process and led up to the chartering of the study group. Apparently, decisions are made late in the POM process on bases other than the best for the long-term. Choosing the alternative with the best future implications presumes some type of modeling or analysis on which to base judgments. At present, the Mission Area Analysis (MAA) process uses a model that might be adapted for these purposes, but that process prioritizes alternatives within mission categories and not across them. Once the MAA process is capable of providing priorities across the mission areas, the Air Force will be able to construct a more rational POM.

Mission Area Analysis searches fifteen years into the future for mission capability shortfalls, and that appears to be a rational planning horizon for forecasting. Time horizons used in business were instructive: they suited the companies for which they were designed, and the comparisons made earlier with the services were not necessarily invidious ones. Three years is probably adequate for Texas Instruments because of the expected shelf life of its products and the short product development time. The development period is so long for defense systems, however, that out environmental scanning and planning must be pushed out much further. One of the difficulties here is that intelligence estimates go no further into the future than ten years, and the threat at the end of the estimated decade is inevitably uncertain. While some things are surely knowable beyond ten years, the threat, for which we must prepare, is not completely predictable. Yet, even without a firm threat projection, we know of our eternal interests as a country, and these form the basis for enduring national goals or objectives unaffected by changes in political administrations or short-term perturbations in allied or adversary politics.

The nature of enduring national military objectives irrespective of the threat is only one reason for the Air Force to choose a time horizon greater than the five to seven years observed in most industries. If such a short planning period were adopted--given the extremely lengthy development times for military products--one would never be able to factor expected gains from new acquisitions into the military planning equation. With a time horizon shorter than the probable development time, only the burdensome development costs would be visible in planning and not the future mission enhancements being purchased. With a planning horizon too short, it is difficult, indeed, to see how any new equipment would ever be purchased since the relative economy of modification is irresistible unless one folds in the expected quantum improvements purchased with totally new systems. Probably the most important reason for long-range planning is that it permits the timely acquisition of new equipment to better accomplish missions that are themselves realistic elements of strategies constructed to meet objectives.

The study group suggested a fifteen-year forward scan for harbingers of change and trends that outline threats, opportunities, and uncertainties that face the future Air Force. A thirty-year projection (or more) of costs seemed also to be useful in identifying financial bow waves.

Finally, the look into the future, the formulation of meaningful objectives, the creative costing of systems, the answering of numerous questions regarding future implications of alternative decisions--all are important because the long-range planning process itself is more important than its product. It is a guaranteed device for evading the tyranny of the in-basket and for providing a mind-set that always asks for the implications of the decision alternatives. When one hears discussions over decision alternatives, one will know that long-range planning is institutionalized whether or not products carry that name. The long-range planning process ensures that the future intrudes on the present.

The Air Force has recently formed an organization to bring the future into the board and council room, and, if nurtured, the long-range planning process will improve tomorrow's Air Force.

Lieutenant Colonel Alan L. Gropman (Ph.D., Tufts University) is a staff officer, Hq USAF, Operations, Plans and Readiness. He has been an air operations staff officer at Hq USAFE, Ramstein Air Base, Germany; a branch chief in USAFE Operations; served in the C-130 in TAC and PACAF; and taught military, European, and minority history at the USAF Academy. He is author of The Air Force Integrates, 1945-1964 (1978) and a previous contributor to the Review. Colonel Gropman is a Distinguished Graduate of Air War College.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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