The Mission Profile

Sorry guys, no TDG this week. They take several hours for me to prepare, and I’m preparing for the Team Leader Class this weekend on top of a bunch of other stuff I gotta handle right now. Instead, I want to approach a related topic that pertains to your own mental preparedness, the mission profile.
Your mission profile is, simply put, a list of mission/operation types that you anticipate having to conduct in the future. This will vary greatly from group to group, as we all have our own unique set of scenarios that we forsee ourselves in, and we prepare accordingly. For example, a neighborhood protection team organized to defend against rioters/looters will have a vastly different mission profile than a militia in a rural area preparing to fight an occupying army.
However, mission profiles that exist merely in our heads are useless because not everybody in your group will be on the same page. Sure, your neighborhood protection team all understand that your goal is to protect your homes and families, but everyone has different ideas about what exactly that entails. Setting up checkpoints? Internal patrols at night? What about security patrolling outside your perimeter?
The point I’m trying to make is that everyone in your team needs to be on the same page with what exactly you are preparing to do. The only way to do this is to sit down with every member of your team and a whiteboard, and discuss exactly how you plan to accomplish your mission in the future. There will be disagreement, even debate as you discover that not everybody is on board with the idea of patrolling 10 miles and staying in the field for a week at a time like you envisioned. Be respectful, be polite, and have good reasons for what you propose. Listen to your people, they probably have legitimate concerns that you hadn’t thought of. Once all is said and done, you will all walk away with a common vision and clear goals for your training and preparedness.
Once you have this talk and everyone is on the same page, you can begin to craft a training schedule that supports your mission profile. You plan to establish observation posts watching a nearby intersection? Spend a Saturday in your “OP” documenting the traffic that passes by. You want to use vehicles for covert team insertion/extraction? Practice doing that, coordinating with your driver over radios. Make your own TDGs for your mission profile, and wargame both sides.
We can only accomplish so much on our own, gentlemen. Make sure you have clear and common objectives so you can train your people effectively for what’s headed our way.
Schweiß spart blut