I'm Down with O.P.E.
-Yeah, you know me.
We all have to walk point on our own patrol, but it’s easier when you have a tribe behind you. Thanks for being a part of our tribe! -JAD
One of the missions that special operations units are often tasked with is Operational Preparation of the Environment or OPE.
OPE missions are undertaken to “help military personnel prepare for potential military operations and improve their situational awareness and operational responsiveness.”
We do OPE to learn as much as we can about an area, its people, and their activities so that we are prepared in case we need to operate in that area.
We can use the tenets of OPE to prepare ourselves to get better at getting better.
According to Joint Pub 3-13, OPE has three key components:
“Orientation activities (OA) aimed at providing area familiarization and developing plans, information, and operational infrastructure that enable future operations;”
We can view this as gathering information about potential future goals or ambitions. If you want to run your first marathon next year, this is doing the research, talking to marathon runners, and googling training plans.
2. “Target development which seeks to acquire real-time target-specific information to facilitate potential target prosecution;”
This could be researching to select a marathon you want to run, researching the course, its difficulty, expected weather, and gathering the equipment you will need to complete your race.
3. “Preliminary engagement of the target to find, fix, track, monitor, or influence the objective prior to conduct of operations.”
This might look like training runs at the race location or a similar site, and shorter duration races that you schedule to rehearse your pace, fueling, and hydration plan to prepare you to do your best on race day.
If you’re not performing OPE you are failing to prepare, and if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail.
Keep your head on a swivel.
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I recently had the chance to sit down with Ryan Fugit of Combat Story for a 2 part podcast. This is part 1.
. See you next Thursday!
The quote we all use is the one attributed to Ben Franklin, and I love it.