Combat Operations in World War II

 

post has two assignments

The Military Decision Making Process (MDMP) exam is worth 60% of the C600 block grade and is due after lesson C634. Specifically, this exam has seven requirements for you to apply the MDMP to a tactical scenario.

“Rangers: Selected Combat Operations in World War II,” Dr. Michael J. King notes that “The rescue of 511 American and Allied prisoners from a Japanese POW compound near Cabanatuan in the Philippines by elements of the 6th Ranger
Battalion, reinforced by Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas, was the most complex operation that Rangers conducted during World War II. It was also one of the most successful.”

That rescue has been chronicled in the 2005 movie The Great Raid and several books including Hour of Redemption by Forrest Bryant Johnson, The Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides, and is the focus of Chapter 6 of King’s work. Although the movie and other references may help you understand the scenario more, this examination scenario is based solely on the information provided in King’s work. You may refer back to the C600 online lessons and readings to review key concepts about MDMP. ADRP 1-02 dated September 2013 and FM 6-0 dated May 2014 are the primary doctrinal references for this examination. Additionally, you should review the Military Review article by Dr. Tom Clark and the three student aids posted with the exam.

Read Chapter 6 “Cabanatuan” of Leavenworth Papers #11, and then provide your responses to the seven requirements which begin on page three of this document. A PDF version of the CSI publication is available in Blackboard, posted with this exam. It is also available online at www.cgsc.edu/carl/download/csipubs/king.pdf .

If you state information from the lessons, readings, doctrinal manuals or other references as part of your answer, you must include a citation in accordance with ST 22-2. You may use parenthetical citations, endnotes or footnotes.

Mission Analysis: Through mission analysis, the commander and staff should understand the problem and the resources available to solve that problem. Each staff member is responsible for conducting his or her own running (staff) estimate that provides very detailed information within his or her area of responsibility. The staff then analyzes that information and synthesizes (packages) it into the mission analysis brief. The essence of staff work involves distilling mountains of information into nuggets of knowledge. One method through which staff officers do this is to process the facts (or WHAT) into information (by asking SO WHAT?), analyze the information to increase knowledge (by asking WHICH MEANS?), and apply judgment to gain an understanding (by asking THEREFORE?)

2:Organizational Readiness and Risk Culture

Order Description

Note: The assignments are a series of papers that are based on the same case, which is located in the Student Center of the course shell. The assignments are dependent upon one another.
Review the assigned case study and complete this assignment.
Write a five to seven (5-7) page paper in which you:
Analyze how the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) apply to the facts of the case study. Provide examples to support your analysis.
Determine the project benefits, organizational readiness, and risk culture of the company in the case study. Provide justification for your response.
Develop at least three (3) project risk recommendations based on the analysis from criteria number 1 and 2 of this assignment.
Identify the initial categories of risk (RBS Level 1 and 2) that you see as being present in the case study using the Example Risk Checklist (Figure A-2, Hillson & Simon text).
Use at least four (4) quality resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar Websites do not qualify as quality resources.

Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The PCNet Project (B)

Dynamically Managing Residual Risk

04/2005-527
CASE STUDY

written by Christoph H. Loch, Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD. It is based on real events, but the names of all companies and participants have been disguised. Any similarity with existing companies is accidental. The case is intended to be used as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate the effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.

Copyright © 2005 INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France.

The unexpected events that worried Jack Muller represented “residual risk”. In a project of such complexity, no amount of planning can ever anticipate all events, no matter how thorough; there will always be some events that are not planned for. Therefore, it is key to build the capability of dealing with residual risk as it comes along.

The direct outcome of the 18 September meeting was a strengthening of the aggregate oversight body (for the entire merger), not in the sense of it exerting more pressure, but in terms of adding experience and enhancing its problem-solving and advice-giving capacity. First, the Integration Management Committee Meeting became the Performance Monitoring Meeting, with a dedicated manager (who followed up issues), expanded membership to add relevant areas of expertise, and a more systematic synergy follow up.

The Risk Management Office

At the level of the IT integration, Max Schmeling had already begun to build a structure for managing residual, unforeseen contingencies during execution. The Risk Management Office (RMO) was put in place as a complement to the Project Management Office (PMO). Whereas the PMO followed up on actions and on reporting, the RMO focused on responding to deviations. It was a central control point to which all teams were required to call in at least once a day to report on progress and problems that arose.

The RMO achieved two things. First, it represented a problem-solving resource – Metal Resources Co. had its own technical experts present in this center, plus experts on call from all technical areas at the main systems vendors (such as HP and IBM for PCs, Cisco for routers, Microsoft for operating systems, SAP for R3, EDS for the network operation, etc), and experts in culture and change management were also on call. Thus, when an unforeseen problem occurred, the center diagnosed it with the team in question and then helped to mobilize the expertise to bring about, or plan, a solution as quickly as possible. Second, the rapid information exchange helped to set off alarm bells (early warnings) as well as solution approaches, across the many parallel teams. As they were working on very similar issues at multiple sites, a problem occurring at one site might well subsequently occur at one of the others, and thus the transfer of solutions was efficient. The rapid communication of relevant warnings from one team to another was dubbed “the hotwire”.

Thus, at each local deployment, a representative of the next local deployment team (in another state or country) was present so that they could become familiar with the logistical as well as technical issues. The Latin American deployment went very smoothly as a result of this approach. Similarly, problems that arose in the application migration to the new platform in Singapore were subsequently avoided throughout the Southeast Asian region.

Both the PMO and the RMO also attempted to prevent certain risks by enforcing strict standards (thus reducing the complexity and number of things that could go wrong), such as all of North America having to move to a single SAP system configuration (there was a separate central control center for that project alone, which worked with all the organizational units to produce a common standard that satisfied most of the needs). Many technical and business software applications were standardized (such as statistical analysis packages, geological expert systems etc.), which, in turn, reduced the number of different problems that could occur and facilitated the sharing of solutions across teams.

The activities of the RMO enabled the organization to work with budget and schedule variances (deviations) in a more sophisticated way, for example, by performing variance analysis. There was significant overspending in Phase 3, because some work originally foreseen for Phase 4 was in fact carried out at this point due to small “design changes” or improvements in protocols and processes as the organization learned during the project. The activities of the RMO involved providing explanations and documentation for residual risk and the respective actions required. Thus the organization had a ‘trace’ that offered a thorough explanation of deviations and an institutionalized effort to learn from such changes.

The following example illustrates the effect of such learning: the early PC deployments took several man days per person as the migration team was learning and stabilizing the components of the network, whereas later deployments required only a few hours (a reduction of 75%) and were much more stable. Overall, the project remained slightly under budget, although it took 6 months longer than originally planned.

Dealing With Individual Residual Risks

The problem of lost e-mails and corrupted e-mail capabilities had to be attacked at two levels. The first level was technical: when the lost file incidents were examined, the root problem turned out to be that Microsoft XP did not have a translator to automatically modify files. In response, the Microsoft developers made their own in-house translator software available which systematically eliminated the problems and improved the overall robustness of the network. Several similar fixes contributed to overall network stabilization. The second solution level concerned change management processes: over time, the merger team put such processes in place (“who can change what system features, after discussing it with whom”), and convinced employees to comply with them, which eliminated incompatibilities introduced by local changes.

The Sri Lankan government partner eventually came on board, although at its own pace. This contributed to a six-month delay but did not “stop the show”.

The refining manager who refused the deployment was won over with a combination of carrot and stick. On the one hand, the IT organization conducted a security audit at his site, which exposed serious vulnerability to external attacks and other breakdowns. This allowed the team to show him how badly it might get for him locally (carrot) and make it clear that he could not be permitted to pose a risk for the rest of the organization (stick).

The cajoling and convincing of the refining plant manager was then generalized to a standardized, prepared, compelling argument that was used with operating managers who thought they had no time for off-line activities like IT migration (Exhibit 1). The argument again combined carrot and stick – on the one hand it explained the benefits to the operating units themselves and emphasized that they could get help; on the other it threatened them that their network would no longer be supported if they did not migrate. This standard argument was, of course, complemented by personal visits and face-to-face explanations.

Overall Project Success

Martin Folz, CEO

The ITC organization did learn to “walk, whistle and chew gum at the same time”, as the CEO demanded. They took the metaphor seriously enough to define it: walking meant to not disrupt ongoing operations, whistling to lead the project with state-of-the-art methods, and chewing gum stood for status reviews and dealing with residual risks. At the end, no unexpected event was serious enough to break the project. The thorough planning, combined with the flexibility of the RMO and the hotwire, was so powerful that the huge IT merger became a convincing success. The total IT merger project beat its target by $20 million, producing $230 million of synergies in the first year, and the PCNet project made a significant contribution to this overfulfillment (partially driven by an extra $10 million in PC discounts that came out of the proactive negotiations).

Critical to this success was the support and constancy of purpose of top management: the CEO listened to the business case and stayed the course. No IT migration budgets were cut, in spite of the lean economic times, and the project was able to maintain priority and focus.

Exhibit 1
Communication Document for Operating Company Compliance

The PCNet Deployment Consultant team presents…

The Top Ten List of “Reasons why you should quickly and carefully decommission your legacy IT environment”

10. Dual environments will make it more difficult to maintain IP compliance, particularly once Microsoft ceases support of NT 4.0.

9. Dual environments are impacting our networks due to unnecessary traffic from the legacy infrastructures such as file replication, Exchange Global Catalog replication, SMS inventory and package traffic, as well as WINS and DNS traffic.

8. Increased vulnerability to security attacks and viruses as vendors start dropping maintenance support for Win9x, nT4 and W2K, and our internal centralized efforts are no longer funded for these environments.

7. Increased cost for support as troubleshooting by support staff becomes a lot more complex due to having to follow separate processes and using different tools in order to support two environments. Cost also increases due to reduced reliability and increased break/fix calls as hardware has lived long past its planned life-cycle.

6. Legacy Master Account NT4 and AD domains will be decommissioned, leaving resource domains with no trusts. The old PC and workstation environments will lose connectivity. There will also be performance issues as Master Account domain controllers are removed one by one.

5. The decommissioning effort is part of Metal Resources and RBD synergy cost-savings and the realization of these savings now becomes our responsibility.

4. The business case for the synergies will be compromised by having to support dual infrastructures.

3. Manpower can be redirected towards strategic projects once deployment and decommissioning efforts are completed (and we can take our vacations now!).

2. Old computing standards monthly costs will be increased by x2, x4 and x6 the longer you keep your old hardware. Costs to maintain old infrastructure will be divided by the number of remaining old standard users.

And the #1 Reason is …

1. The old desktop has been declared “non-standard”. Yes, it is true. The sun has set on the old standard, with the IT design team only providing Anti-Virus updates and major security patches. Having old standard machines at your site makes your site “Non-Standard”.

Documents to help you in your efforts to decommission:

Decommission Legacy Systems Guide

Decommissioning Server Assets

Decommissioning Workstation Assets

COA Development: “A COA is a broad potential solution to an identified problem” (FM 6-0 pg 9-16). Serving initially as lead planner, Captain Robert Prince developed a broad plan which included a truck movement, dismounted infiltration, flawless actions at the POW camp, and an elaborate exfiltration. With virtually no room for error, CPT Prince refined and rehearsed the plan to resource his main effort, nest the supporting efforts, and eliminate wasted efforts. As a result, every Ranger, Alamo Scout and Guerrilla in every platoon and special element contributed to the success of the mission.

Commander’s Critical Information Requirements: Commanders use information and judgment to make decisions. In many instances, several pieces of information contribute to one decision. In those instances, the commander may arrange the information in an IF, AND/OR, THEN sequence, illustrated by this simple example:

Commander’s Judgment: While CCIR helps the commander make an anticipated decision, commanders must often make decisions that they and their staffs did not anticipate. LTC Mucci’s decision to delay his actions on the objective until 30 January 1945 may have been his most difficult and most important decision. In hindsight, his judgment was correct. Despite the benefits, LTC Mucci accepted the risk that the Japanese would detect his force, or sense that 6th Army was too close and consequently kill or move the POWs.

COA Analysis, Comparison and Recommendation: According to page 9-25 of the 2014 FM 6-0: “War-gaming is a disciplined process, with rules and steps that attempt to visualize the flow of the operation, given the force’s strengths and dispositions, enemy’s capabilities and possible COAs, impact and requirements of civilians in the AO, and other aspects of the situation.”
It further states that “COA analysis enables commanders and staffs to identify difficulties or coordination problems as well as probable consequences of planned actions for each COA being considered. It helps them think through the tentative plan. COA analysis may require commanders and staffs to revisit parts of a COA as discrepancies arise. COA analysis not only appraises the quality of each COA but also uncovers potential execution problems, decisions, and contingencies. In addition, COA analysis influences how commanders and staffs understand a problem and may require the planning process to restart.”

MDMP is an adaptation of the Scientific Method. A Problem is an Observation, Mission Analysis- Research, Mission- Hypothesis, and Course of Action Analysis (Wargame)- Experiment. Like a scientist, the tactician can use a simple process to analyze and compare options.

a. List facts and assumptions. Here, you do not need to repeat facts and assumptions from your Requirement #1 Running Estimate. Focus on facts and assumptions which you may not have included in your movement estimate when you assumed the locals could provide enough carts. Place all facts and assumptions before the analysis of your COAs, rather than listing (and repeating) facts for each COA.

b. Establish measurable evaluation criteria. If you were buying a car, you might consider cost, carrying capacity, and fuel economy. DO NOT USE SCREENING CRITERIA. LTC Mucci feels that each of HIS suggestions is feasible, suitable, distinguishable and acceptable to him. None is yet complete, but he is confident his staff will make them so. Likewise, broad undefined terms such as the Principles of War are normally not useful criteria for evaluating a unique problem. As in an experiment or car purchase, evaluation criteria must be variables, rather than constants. If experimenting with pendulums, pendulum length, weight, and arc are each variables, which the scientist measures when analyzing the period of motion. In this scenario, the speed of the POWs movement is a constant (and should be listed as a fact or assumption); while the time until link-up with 6th Army is different for each COA (in which one or both forces are moving different distances) and could serve as a useful evaluation criteria.

c. Analyze each COA against each evaluation criterion.
• Although there is a tendency to organize the course of action analysis by the evaluation criteria, Step 4 of the MDMP (FM 6-0 p 9-25 through 9-34) focuses on an analysis by course of action. In other words, you don’t have to write a paragraph for each evaluation criterion as you explain your COA analysis.
• For instance, we would NOT have a paragraph in which we analyze the “Time from initiation of the assault until completion of link-up with 6th Army” in which we use comparative terms (such as fastest and slowest), and then have another paragraph which analyzes the COA against another evaluation criterion.
• Instead, we should analyze each COA against the evaluation criteria (be sure to include ALL of the criteria), using our facts and assumptions. For example, if we assume that without carts the POWs could walk at 1 mph during daylight and .5 mph at night, and further assume that the Rangers will begin their assault at 2000 hrs, then through analysis we may estimate that the POWs and Rangers could get to Guimba in about 60 hours.
• For part c, your answer should be approximately a half-page narrative for each contingency presented in Requirement #7.

d. Compare the COAs to each other using a decision matrix or other technique.
Clearly indicate if high or low scores are best, and explain any weighting you apply.

e. Make and justify a recommendation.

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