Strategies to Tasks: A Framework for Linking Means and Ends,

Abstract : The purpose of this document is to describe the strategies-to-tasks framework. Strategies to tasks provides an audit trail from the broadest national objectives and strategies down to operational activities at the tactical engagement level. The framework explicifly disaggregates these activities into key functional elements encompassing the tactics, organizations, and systems that enable the successful execution of missions; it also gives high visibility to the interrelationships among these elements. It is meant to help identify high-priority needs for improved operational capabilities. By specifying the role played by individual systems in operational concepts, the framework can be a useful tool for force planning. It can help expose systems and functions necessary for executing missions, and it links them hierarchically to national objectives. It can also provide an operationally oriented basis for making inforrned choices and tradeoffs among system concepts. The framework, displayed in Figure 5.1, establishes the link between means and ends through a hierarchy of objectives. With this hierarchy, one can track the relationship between broad objectives and strategies that the President defines to operational tasks that force elements accomplish, and do so in only four steps-from national security objectives to national mffitary objectives, from national military objectives to campaign objectives, from campaign objectives to operational objectives, and finally, from operational objectives to operational tasks. ((KAR) P. 8