What Is The Advance To Contact And How Can It Help Me With My Business?
What is The Advance to Contact?
The "Advance to Contact" is a military strategy that involves moving towards the enemy to engage them directly and gain intelligence on their position and strength. In a business context, this translates into proactively seeking-out opportunities, engaging with challenges head-on, and gathering critical information to inform strategic decisions. It sounds sensible, doesn’t it? But like much else in starting a new enterprise it is not as straightforward as it sounds. It can all be overwhelming, actually, particularly without a clear track to run on. In this case, the military example can help significantly.
The Military Context
In a military context, The Advance to Contact is an offensive task, normally given to a Mechanized Combat team (reinforced company) or Battle Group (reinforced Battalion) designed to develop the situation and establish or regain contact. It creates favorable conditions for subsequent tactical actions.
The fundamentals of the Advance to Contact are:
1. Seize and Maintain the Initiative. The advance offers a commander many opportunities to use his initiative and imagination to defeat the enemy by superior tactics rather than brute force. The aim should be to outmaneuver him, thus rendering his position worthless and forcing him to fight, if he chooses, under our conditions of time and place.
2. Wide Reconnaissance. Wide reconnaissance applies mainly to the covering troops who must provide information on the enemy and group so that timely actions may be taken to deal with new situations that arise so that the momentum may be maintained.
3. Balanced Force. A balanced force will be achieved by a careful appreciation of the enemy and terrain. It contains maneuver, firepower, mobility and administrative elements. The appreciation will determine their mix. Balance implies that the commander is able to create the conditions necessary to overcome the enemy and terrain. Vital ground and locations important to the enemy’s defense system should be seized and held. These may be dominating ground, bridges, defiles and built-up areas that serve as communication centers.
4. Maintain Momentum. Momentum is created by an advancing force, and is maintained only by quick, aggressive action designed to bypass or destroy the enemy.
5. A Simple Plan. A complex plan by its very nature will slow down the advance. Therefore the plan must be simple allowing as much freedom of action as possible to manoeuver commanders.
The military commander conducts an advance to contact when the enemy situation is vague or not specific enough to conduct an attack. Forces executing this task seek to make contact using the smallest friendly force possible, preserving the main body’s combat power so it can deploy in a position of advantage. This allows us to seize and maintain the initiative. A movement to contact may result in a meeting engagement, a combat action occurring when a moving force engages an enemy at an unexpected time and place. Once making contact with an enemy force, the leader has five options: attack, defend, bypass, delay, or withdraw and reposition. The latter is often the case. If serious opposition is encountered on a particular path, the commander will actively seek a more favourable path to the objective within the boundaries given. If opposition cannot be by-passed, other resources may be committed to remove the obstacle from the line of advance.
While the advance to contact is basically "we know the enemy is somewhere in front of Phase Line Red, move until you find him." It's also usually tied to some limiting factors, like time and space. It's not quite "conduct an advance to contact from Normandy to Berlin". Phase Lines and intermediate objectives could well be involved. A specific Advance to Combat tasking may be a part of a much larger operation to achieve an ultimate objective.
What purpose the advance to contact really serves is to figure out where the enemy is, and enable the commander to make choices based on that. For example. if I'm trying to attack from phase line Blue to Red, I need to know where the enemy positions actually are in order to deal with them. Once I find the enemy I can start thinking what to do about it. For example: We'll need to do a hasty attack to clear the enemy off Hill 123. We can assume the enemy has forces in village B, so I'll need to bring up infantry to seize that, but because the enemy wasn't encountered until after town A, and Hills 321 and 111, those locations just need someone to hastily clear them for stragglers instead of needing to detach forces to conduct a full attack or something. I know where the enemy starts, and my line of control ends, and we're making good life choices.
How Can It Help Me And My Business?
The Advance to Contact is uniquely designed to deal with uncertain, fluid and rapidly changing situations, much like our contemporary business environment. This approach is particularly useful in today's fast-paced business environment for several reasons:
1. Proactive Engagement: It encourages businesses to actively seek opportunities and confront challenges, rather than waiting for issues to arise. This can lead to faster responses and more effective problem-solving.
2. Informed Decision-Making: By engaging directly with the market and competitors, businesses can gather valuable data and insights. This intelligence is crucial for making informed strategic decisions and staying ahead of the competition.
3. Agility and Adaptability: This paradigm fosters a culture of agility, where businesses are continuously moving, adapting, and responding to changes in the environment. This is essential in a world where market conditions and consumer preferences can shift rapidly.
4. Risk Management: Direct engagement with potential risks allows businesses to identify and mitigate them early. This proactive risk management can prevent small issues from becoming major problems.
Concepts that are transferable to the business environment include:
1. Establishing A Clear Objective: Just as in the military, businesses need a clear and well-defined objective. Without one, it's challenging to focus efforts and resources effectively.
2. Reconnaissance and Planning: Military commanders create detailed strategies to achieve their objectives. Similarly, businesses should consider the obstacles they may face in achieving their goals and develop strategies to reach them. This involves assessing strengths and weaknesses, identifying opportunities and threats, and devising a plan that maximizes strengths and mitigates weaknesses.
3. Adaptability: In both the military and business, adaptability is crucial. Plans rarely unfold exactly as intended. The ability to adjust tactics and strategies in response to changing circumstances is essential. This is often referred to as "agile" or "flexible" thinking or, in terms of the contemporary business language, “failing early and pivoting”.
4. Resource Allocation: Military commanders must allocate their resources wisely, making the best use of available assets. In business, this translates to budget allocation, staffing decisions, and resource management to optimize efficiency and effectiveness.
5. Risk Assessment: The military conducts thorough risk assessments before launching an operation. In business, understanding potential risks, whether they are financial, competitive, or operational, is critical to making informed decisions.
6. Leadership: Effective leadership is essential in both military and business contexts. Leaders must inspire and guide their teams, make tough decisions, and maintain morale.
7. Communication: Clear and efficient communication is essential for coordinating actions and ensuring everyone understands their roles and responsibilities. This is true on the battlefield and in the boardroom.
8. Decision-Making Under Pressure: Military leaders often make life-and-death decisions in high-pressure situations. Business leaders also face high-stakes decisions, and the ability to make them confidently, thoughtfully, and quickly is paramount. In a fast-paced, fluid environment time is of the essence; and so is maintaining momentum.
9. After-Action Reporting (AAR): In the military, AARs are conducted to analyze what went right and wrong in an operation and to learn from the experience. In business, post-project evaluations and continuous improvement processes serve a similar purpose.
Things still seem daunting, however, don’t they? These concepts may appear to be self- evident, but the DOING of them, incorporating them into your business practice, requires some adjustment to your way of thinking, some new tools, techniques and practices, and some training of your “team”, whether that be just you or you and some others. The Good news is that the military example can provide a clear track to run-on, step-by-step, to do all of these things. They have substantial experience and expertise in doing exactly that.
These Advance to Contact procedures are transferable to the business context AND they are scaleable. The same steps and procedures apply regardless of the size of your operation. From a section size (the smallest tactical element in the military) up to several Armies ( we are talking in the million plus employee range here). In the business world that would equate from the smallest, newest enterprise up to a mega multi-national corporation.
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