Theater Exercise Planning Layer

I walked into the wrong meeting at the right time.

It was the mid-1990s. Seoul. I was a junior officer assigned to Commander Naval Forces Korea, working in the operations department — ten OPLANs on my desk at one point, each one six hundred pages. My additional duty was exercise coordinator for Ulchi Focus Lens, at the time the world’s largest computer-simulated military exercise.

I didn’t know it yet, but I was about to witness a problem I’d spend the next thirty years trying to fix.

The meeting

The exercise planning meeting brought together all of the functional staff elements who had a role in the exercise. Each one had slides. Each one had a brief for the Admiral.

I sat at the end of the table. Brand new guy, junior enough that nobody was watching me. Senior enough to be in the room.

The Embassy rep stood up. Noncombatant Evacuation Operation. Here are the marshalling areas and airports we’ll need to move civilians out of the peninsula.

The Marine rep stood up. AV-8B air operations. Here are the airfields we’ll need to sustain sortie rates through the first seventy-two hours.

The Seabee stood up. Construction battalion operations. Here are the ports we’ll need to move heavy equipment.

Medical. Logistics. Airborne mine countermeasures. Naval coastal warfare. Harbor defense.

I didn’t keep count, but I saw the same airports and seaports again and again. Most arriving at the same time. I assumed I must be missing something.

After the meeting, I found the logistician.

“Has anyone looked at whether that infrastructure can actually handle all of this simultaneously?”

He paused.

“That’s a good question.”

To me, it wasn’t a good question. It was a question that should’ve been asked long ago and by folks a lot smarter about this stuff than I was. And the fact that nobody had an answer — in the planning cycle for one of the world’s largest command post exercises — told me everything I needed to know about how joint planning actually worked. Or didn’t.

I spent the next several years finding out whether I’d missed something. The answer was always the same.

What I was looking at

Each staff section had done its job correctly with the planning systems they had on hand. The NEO plan was sound. The AV-8B employment concept was perfect. The engineer estimate was solid. The problem wasn’t competence. The problem was that there was no shared environment underneath all of it — no common model that tracked who had allocated what infrastructure, for what purpose, across what time window.

The deconfliction that should have happened in a system happened, eventually, in conversations between people. Slowly. Manually. Incompletely. On PowerPoint.

JOPES and the TPFDD were supposed to handle this. For transportation and logistics feasibility — sequencing force movements, matching units to lift, modeling port and airfield throughput — JFAST could do exactly that. What JOPES was never designed to do was look past the port. The system managed force flow to the POD. What happened after that — reception, staging, onward movement, integration into the joint force — was JRSOI, and that planning was the supported commander's problem, built separately, outside the TPFDD.

In most theaters that seam was manageable. In a forward-presence environment where the threat was close enough that the POD and the point of employment were nearly the same location, it wasn't.

And that still wasn't the problem I was watching. The problem was upstream of all of it. Components were building their operational concepts in parallel — each working through their own planning process, each claiming the same infrastructure for different purposes — with no shared model to flag the collision before it got baked into the plan. JOPES had already done its job. The seam it left behind was where the problem lived.

In an exercise, that costs you planning time and creates friction.

I learned later that in a real operation, miscommunication like this cost you something else.

The problem didn’t get solved. It moved.

A decade later, I went on to work in Future Operations at USCENTCOM. I watched different sets of staff officers brief different Admirals and Generals with the same pattern — well-reasoned plans, built in parallel, colliding on shared resources and real estate that nobody’s system knew was already spoken for.

The tools got better. The briefs got cleaner. PowerPoint got prettier.

The gap stayed exactly the same, but this time it was costing much more.

Because the gap was never a technology problem. It was an information architecture problem. There was no canonical model underneath the planning process that represented what was allocated, to whom, for what purpose, and when — in a form that any system could read and any staff section could trust.

I spent the first half of my career watching this problem from the operator’s side, trying to find workarounds. The second half trying to fix it through acquisition — T&E and requirements. The last ten years actually building a solution.

The model still doesn’t exist in any fielded system.