During the 2018 graduation week series, I offered that “elite field grade officers know how to plot and manage a Long-Range Calendar (LRC) with high fidelity, even when the entire enterprise above them conspires against them.” This article describes in detail the seven rules of thumb for successful LRC management that I outlined in 2018.

Start with the LRC

When managing the life cycle of a unit – training, sustaining, fighting, living – the LRC is fundamental. Look at it through the lens of the operations process and how your commander drives the operations process. The LRC is the starting point for understanding, visualizing, and describing the unit’s future. The LRC will be rich with intent, priorities, transitions, anticipated risk, and if used correctly, will be a source of balance. FM 7-0 suggests that Brigades and Battalion’s have a 1-year planning horizon and I believe that is doable. I’ve seen it done with high fidelity in conventional units. It should certainly look ahead by three quarters. Start here.

There are NOT 52 Weeks in a Year

Embrace our favorite step of MDMP – mission analysis. Fact: there are only ~47 weeks in the year for a unit to meaningfully schedule because you should lose four weeks of opportunity leave and holiday breaks. There are even fewer weeks to dedicate to intensive training when you plot your federal holiday weekends; oh, and that awesome year when Independence Day is on a Wednesday. While you’re at it, see where the first and last day of school fall…Halloween…the Super Bowl…the final four…banner week. You feel me, right? This all matters and it all conspires against your goal, which is to produce a winning, ready team that is whole and in love with our Profession. Acknowledging sources of temporal tension on your LRC allows you to optimize the use of time around them.

Plot the Transitions

You often hear that field grade officers manage unit transitions – those moments when the unit is broadly re-orienting. The LRC provides a framework that allows you to understand, visualize, and describe these transitions. Generally, there are two types of transitions.

• Event: The first, which Majors are usually good at spotting, are the objective or event-centric transitions, e.g., to/from an FTX, to/from deployment (when you must plan for the transition out of the event weeks before the vent started), summer personnel turnover (when you realize you will need to recertify broken crews or untrained staffs), fiscal transition (when you risk standing down expensive collective training),  and software upgrades (that must be synchronized around C4-intensive events). The fatal error in event transitions seeing them but failing to plan for them weeks before they are upon you.

• Concept: The second type is more subjective and more concepts-based, e.g., the unit is going to be tired this fall, that unit is ripe to reinvest in the LGOP, we are going to be misaligned with our higher HQ in that quarter. Commanders and Command Sergeants Major often spot these transition points.

Block Leave ≠ T-weeks

This is an event-type transition fail that we see all the time so I feel we must call it out separately. It simply comes down to math. FM 7-0’s Appendix H describes how the T-week Concept provides a good backwards planning tool. I wish Table H-1 included two weeks of block leave, then you could see this issue in an instant. Bottom Line, if your training management horizon normally goes out to T+6, but at the moment includes two weeks of leave, then you have to plan out to T+8 to account for the lost work weeks. Is this a short-range or long-range problem? Fair question, but it takes looking at macro-events on the LRC to spot the issue.

Establish and Enforce Business Rules

This gets back to the concept of balance mentioned above. This is why I do not refer to this calendar as the LR”T”C.  You are balancing the creation of readiness with the consumption of readiness. Two units I served in classified their weeks as either preparation, training, recovery, or leave weeks. The definitions of these were published. Business rules then included (as examples): a training week will never follow a leave week; units will not conduct > eleven training weeks in two quarters without special approval; etc. Company, battery, and troop level leaders need such logic for planning. For this, the LRC is the best planning tool for them and the best enforcement tool for

LRC ≠ SRC

I often hear field grade officers lament that their HQ makes it impossible to manage an LRC beyond 90 days. This is usually not because it is true. More often it is because we confuse the purpose of the. The LRC looks at months, weeks, and days. The SRC is the better tool to direct. It looks at weeks, days, and hours. Do not substitute one tool for the other. The SRC is the lifeblood of unit training management at the Battalion or Squadron level and should be the go-to source inside of T+6 (this varies by installation). The transition of the operations process from one calendar to another must be synchronized by a talented staff.

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Properly managed, the LRC is your tool for understanding, visualizing, and describing macro intent, priorities, and synchronizing major events. It provides ballast and predictability to the unit and its families. Hopefully, these pointers will allow field grade leaders to learn to stop worrying and love the LRC.

Colonel Teddy Kleisner is a contingency planner at the USEUCOM. A graduate of SAMS, SAIS, and the NWC, he has served in light, Ranger, and Stryker formations where he learned everything in this article the hard way. He is slated to command a BCT in FY21.