The British way of war – Balancing fire and manoeuvre for warfighting

"Contemporary British staff officers have developed ‘decision point tactics’ as a framework with which to fight a battle. The general idea is that a commander will never fully understand the enemy picture and must, therefore, not commit to a course of action until there is a clear understanding of the adversaries intent. Advanced decision support matrixes form the basis of most military planning methods. Decision point tactics loosely follow Napoleon’s dictum that he never made firm plans but exploited the principals of war. Theoretically, this allows a commander to understand what they might do at what time in what place. At divisional level it risks over whelming subordinate manoeuvre formations. To be done well, it requires numerous contingency and branch plans attached to each decision that simply cannot be processed by either the formation HQ nor understood by subordinate battle groups. This means that decisions often only commit the more agile elements of fighting power, such as attack aviation. Given the British Army’s paucity of deep fires assets, this reduces the resource available for the close battle, diluting the impact of ground manoeuvre."