SUSTAINMENT: Responsiveness, Improvisation & Simplicity

Yesterday we hit two of the 8 Principles of Sustainment. Today we cover three more. Each one addresses a distinct and equally important consideration for sustainment planning -- both for sustainers and those they sustain. Remember, A CRISIS Exists will help you recall them if you happen to see them on a quiz sometime soon.

As always, italics added for our emphasis, and […] indicates we cut out stuff we thought was fluff. And, as always: you’re smarter reading the pub yourself to be exactly sure

Big Chunks:

Responsiveness

Improvisation

Simplicity

The major takeaways:

Responsiveness is the ability to react to changing requirements and respond to meet the needs to maintain support.

Improvisation is the ability to adapt sustainment operations to unexpected situations or circumstances affecting a mission. It includes creating, arranging, or fabricating resources to meet requirements.

Simplicity means processes and procedures to minimize the complexity of sustainment.

Diving deep in the doctrinal details:

RESPONSIVENESS

1-9. Responsiveness is the ability to react to changing requirements and respond to meet the needs to maintain support. It is providing the right support in the right place at the right time. It includes the ability to anticipate operational requirements. Responsiveness is facilitated by a common operational picture facilitated by the Army Readiness-Common Operating Picture, and follow-on business intelligence tools associated with Army enterprise resource planning systems. That common operational picture enables commanders to see all supported forces, anticipate requirements based on situational understanding, and provide support when and where needed. Responsiveness involves identifying, accumulating, and maintaining sufficient resources, capabilities, and information necessary to meet rapidly changing requirements. Through responsive sustainment, commanders maintain operational focus and pressure, set the tempo of friendly operations to prevent exhaustion, replace ineffective units, and extend operational reach.

SIMPLICITY

1-10. Simplicity relates to processes and procedures to minimize the complexity of sustainment. Unnecessary complexity of processes and procedures leads to confusion. Clarity of tasks, standardized and interoperable procedures, and clearly defined command relationships contribute to simplicity. Simplicity enables economy and efficiency in the use of resources, while ensuring effective support of forces. Simplicity is also a principle of financial management.

IMPROVISATION

1-14. Improvisation is the ability to adapt sustainment operations to unexpected situations or circumstances affecting a mission. It includes creating, arranging, or fabricating resources to meet requirements. It may also involve changing or creating methods that adapt to a changing operational environment. Sustainment leaders must apply operational art to visualize complex operations and understand additional possibilities. These skills enable commanders to improvise operational and tactical actions when enemy actions or unexpected events disrupt sustainment operations. While deception is related to survivability in that deception contributes to survivability, improvisation is where logisticians can actively achieve deception of enemy forces. Improvisation is also a principle of financial management

What’s the simplest way to master the fundamentals of sustainment? Take A Doctrine Deep Dive into sustainment with a read of ADP 4-0 here.