Military planners and planning: What does this really mean, and what do they actually do?
In the background, working alongside colleagues in the NHS and many other areas of government are teams of military planners from across the Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force (RAF)
Planning is a crucial part of the military contribution to the UK’s national effort to tackle Coronavirus, but — critical as it is — it’s not something you see much of. What you do see, be it the delivery of PPE, the new NHS Nightingale Hospital or transport of a seriously ill patient by the RAF are all underpinned by an enormous amount of meticulous, and often very fast-paced planning by teams of expert military and civilian planners.
So, why are the military involved? At times of national emergency, where the demands of a situation are extraordinary, the military can offer a significant amount of planning expertise to support national, regional or local efforts — and able to plug in at very short notice with their civilian counterparts.
The Armed Forces have both generalist and specialist planners, covering disciplines such as engineering, medical, logistics, transport and catering, and combinations of these such as medical logistics. They can also plan for all environments — on land, in the air or at sea. Importantly, all those involved in planning will also know what it’s like to have to make plans work on the ground in difficult and testing circumstances — so they understand the realities of what’s needed to get the job done and how critical it is to get the plan right.
These planners will have an extraordinary depth of expertise, drawing on professional training and decades of experience on operations overseas — maintaining Royal Navy ships around the world, Army bases or RAF stations overseas. These activities, while military in nature, still require what the military terms RLS — Real Life Support — and that means power and water, infrastructure and transport, feeding and administration and all the other crucial ingredients that enable operational bases to function.
The military also needs to do this in an ‘expeditionary’ way — basically picking up everything it needs for a particular operation or exercise, and setting it up in austere conditions, at short notice and under pressure … and then practicing the activity they’re undertaking and sustaining themselves all the while. Usually referred to as going on exercise, this is what all three Services practice week-in week-out, sometimes at low level with just a handful of service personnel for a few days on a local training area, sometimes with many thousands of troops from all three Services, operating many hundreds of miles from home for a prolonged period. All this takes complex and detailed planning, often working with other countries and with civilian counterparts — planning staff have no shortage of problems to solve, relationships to maintain and changes to respond to.
There are two main types of planning any planners will be familiar with: (1) planning to execute a decision — basically, something that is going to happen, and (2) contingency planning — anticipating requests and making sure there is a plan that can be developed rapidly if required. Very often the military will not be involved in the activity they help civilian authorities to plan, though that doesn’t make quite such an exciting story.
Military planners are currently working hard in the background alongside civilian colleagues across the UK, quietly getting on with the business of helping the country get through the Coronavirus crisis.
