Giving Time Back to the Rifle Company

Abstract

In the last two years, the United States and its allies have pushed artificial intelligence into the planning and targeting processes at of combatant commands and alliance headquarters. Four echelons down, in the company office—where plans become action—most leaders are still working with tools wholly unsuited for small unit operations. This article argues that what slows planning at that level is not a shortage of decision-making capacity, but an unnecessary slog of hours of mechanical labor.

It is late in the company office, the night before an order is due. One platoon commander has a map, a protractor, and a fine-tip pen. Another is fighting a losing battle against a general-purpose mapping website, like CalTopo. A third is rebuilding the same concept-of-operations slide for the third time tonight, because the scheme of maneuver has changed again and the screenshot on slide four is now wrong.

Elsewhere, in the same profession, the planning process looks nothing alike. In 2025, the Marine Corps licensed Palantir’s Maven Smart System for the entire service. NATO fielded its own variant across Allied Command Operations and declared it fully operational in June 2026. In March 2026, during Operation Epic Fury, CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper told reporters that advanced artificial intelligence tools were turning work that once took “hours and sometimes even days into seconds.” In January 2026, the Department of War directed the services to become an “AI-first” force, front to back.

None of this investment is misplaced, nor should advanced capabilities be distributed evenly across every echelon. But at the lowest levels of command, the problem is not simply a smaller version of the one facing higher headquarters. It is a different problem altogether. Company and platoon commanders do not need artificial intelligence to choose a support-by-fire position. Junior officers need the repetitive mechanics of planning to stop consuming the time that they should be giving back to their platoons and—most importantly—to the staff NCOs, NCOs, junior Marines, and soldiers responsible for carrying out the plan.

The Friction Tax

The one-third, two-thirds rule is meant to protect preparation time: leaders use no more than one-third of the time available to develop the plan and leave the rest to those responsible for executing it. When that budget is overspent, the penalty is not paid by the commander who has overspent it. It is levied from the platoon receiving the order late, the squad leader who must translate it into action, and the Marines left with fewer hours to rehearse, inspect their equipment, understand their roles, and prepare for the mission ahead.

At the company and platoon level, that time is rarely lost because a tactical problem is unusually difficult. It is lost due to mechanics. Building a scheme of maneuver by hand or with general-purpose software requires plotting dozens of grid coordinates, calculating grid and magnetic azimuths, accounting for declination, tracing weapon ranges and lines of sight, and drawing the battlespace geometries that keep supporting fires away from friendly forces. Then the plan changes—as plans always do—and much of that work must be repeated. One of our own planning sessions consumed nearly eight hours across two days in a general-purpose mapping tool. The result, shown below, was an overlay that was harder to brief than the execution of the plan it was trying to convey.

Figure 1: Figure 1. A company plan built over two days in a general-purpose mapping platform (CALTOPO). Every marker, line, and polygon was placed and labeled by hand.

Source: Authors.

That is not a skill problem. Small-unit leaders analyze a mission, read terrain, and turn intent into action, and they are good at it. The friction lives in the tooling. It is also invisible to the institution, because the hours are expended at night by lieutenants and sergeants, and hours wasted that way never appear in a readiness report. What is never measured never becomes a requirement, and what never becomes a requirement is never bought.

Learn It by Hand First

None of this is an argument against analog planning. Map pens, protractors, compasses, and acetate are not quaint traditions. They are fundamentals. A leader who cannot read a map, plot a grid, shoot an azimuth, account for declination, and build an overlay by hand has no business using software that does those things for him, because he cannot tell when the output is wrong and he cannot function when the battery dies, the screen cracks, or the network drops. Degraded operations are not a thought experiment, and a fallback only works if somebody has trained for it.

We keep coming back to the comparison of basic math and the calculator. We make students do math by hand not because calculators are scarce, but because someone who does not understand the arithmetic itself cannot spot a wrong answer. Once that intuitive understanding is there, nobody asks an engineer to do long division on paper as a character-building exercise. Learn the map, plot the grids, and measure the azimuths until it is second nature. Then, why spend three hours a night on work that purpose-built software can finish in ten minutes?

General-Purpose Tools, Purpose-Built Problems

Most leaders who move past hand-drawing end up with a general-purpose mapping platform like CalTopo, which is a reasonable landing spot. No knock on those products. They are very good at what they were built for: recreation, land management, search and rescue. They were not built around gun-target lines, minimum safe lines, the MIL-STD-2525 military symbol set, or the production cycle of an operation order. So, the infantry leader picks up the slack through translation work, and the friction stays, because the software has no idea what its user is trying to produce.

The Layer Nobody Built

What is missing is a planning tool organized around the small-unit planning cycle rather than around a map; a tool to enable tactical decision making rather than one that makes no tactical decisions at all. The tool would not choose the support-by-fire position, sequence an assault, or decide where the casualty collection point goes. It would measure, plot, draw, redraw, and format outputs.

Concretely, that means generating battlespace geometries from three inputs: a friendly position, an enemy position, and the gun-target line between them. The underlying logic is derived from the weapons-safety standards and surface-danger-zone criteria in Army Regulation 385–63 and Marine Corps Order 3570.1D, and with declination between grid and magnetic north handled for the unit’s location. It means exact MIL-STD-2525 symbology, rather than shapes improvised to look close enough. It means routes that report azimuths and distances by leg and time-space analysis running in either direction, from a pace to an arrival time or from a no-later-than time and the pace that would be required. It means viewshed and weapon range rings, so engagement areas stop being a matter of argument. And it means output that survives a change of plan: text that drops into an operation order, and graphics that arrive in presentation software as movable objects rather than a flat screenshot.

None of that is a research problem. Two lieutenants managed to build a working version of it in their off-duty hours, which is either evidence of how tractable the problem is or an indictment of how long it has gone unaddressed. We think it is both.

Figure 2: The same class of product built in purpose-built planning software: a battlespace geometry generated from a friendly position, an enemy position, and the gun-target line between them. Source: Authors.

Recovering the Time

We first tested the workflow as a rifle company during PHIBRON-MEU Integration Training (PMINT), the integration of a U.S. Navy Amphibious Squadron (PHIBRON) and a Marine Expeditionary Unit. The PMINT sees compressed shipboard timelines that make an honest test of any planning process.

In previous evolutions, company- and platoon-level planning required hours of manual measurement, handwritten grids, individually constructed geometries, and slides to be rebuilt whenever the plan changed. But this time, geometries were generated, grids populated, and briefing products could be exported rather than rebuilt. The company and its platoons worked from the same planning picture. Both levels recovered several hours for enemy analysis, tactical refinement, rehearsal, and—most importantly—preparing the Marines who would execute the plan.

We repeated it during the Amphibious Ready Group/Marine Expeditionary Unit Exercise and the results held. The company and platoons again recovered several hours, received updated planning products earlier, and avoided recreating work already completed at another level.

That exercise also produced two uses we had not anticipated, and both helped us to diagnose the nature of the friction. Amphibious Combat Vehicle sections used the same tooling to coordinate a boat lane with the ship, working from a shared picture with headings and distances already calculated instead of reconciling two versions over the radio. Leaders also used the overlays for an interactive tactical decision game, building, sharing, and comparing schemes of maneuver on the same terrain. Neither was a use case anyone designed for. Both were places where hand measurement had quietly been the limiting factor.

These are two training evolutions, observed and reported by the same people who built the software, and not a controlled comparison. They are enough to show that the friction is tangible and compressible. While they are not enough to say how many hours a typical unit would recover, that question certainly deserves a structured look by somebody with no stake in the answer.

Conclusion

The joint force is right to invest in speed and advantage at its highest levels. But modernization should also reach the company and platoon leaders who translate those decisions into action. At their level, the greatest opportunity may be better tools for the routine frictions of planning—the measurements, graphics, calculations, and products that consume time.

The fundamentals must remain. Leaders should know how to plan with a map, compass, and protractor when conditions require it. But the mastery of those skills should provide a foundation, not impose a permanent workflow. The next step is to measure where time is being lost, listen to the practitioners closest to the problem, and give them the freedom to adopt better tools. Every hour recovered from the friction which the current mechanics of planning produce is another hour returned to analysis, rehearsal, and most important, the Marines and Soldiers preparing to execute the mission.

Readers interested in seeing the planning tool discussed in this article can explore Scheme O here.

Disclosure and Disclaimer

Conflict of interest: the authors created Scheme O, the software referenced below, and hold a financial interest in the company that develops it. They received no compensation for this article, and no government entity has endorsed, procured, or sponsored the platform.

The opinions expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not reflect the views of the Department of War, the United States Marine Corps, the United States Army, or any other government entity. All figures are the authors’ own screenshots, taken on unclassified training data, and contain no controlled unclassified information.