Week 9: First Graded OPORD

Ok so I admit I was stoked to be back in the classroom this week for some good R and R. Sadly though, I was mistaken. Given the physical aspects of this week arent that bad at all. We had some pretty rough PT, but nothing too crazy. What was killer was the OPORD. As I mentioned in week 5 the OPORD's are incredibly detailed. For our platoon you really needed to put at least 40 hours into it. The hard part is that you still work a 60 hour week. So in order to put 40 more hours into your product you will have some sleepless nights. Yes, even in the classroom CPT Morris somehow takes all my sleep away. Anyway you will receive the company OPORD in slideshow format. The phrase "there's more than one way to skin a cat" perfectly applies here on how you want to break down your own OPORD. What I do is try to complete paragraph one over the weekend. Other than paragraph three this will take most of your time to complete. I do terrain analysis first, doing my GTAO is literally my first step, then simply following down the Company OPORD and doing my own as it applies to key terrain, avenues of approach, etc. Then I begin the enemy analysis, which is crucial to passing your OPORD. If you enemy analysis is bad, especially your enemy sittemp, they youre screwed. Your whole plan will suck and you will fail. It happened to a lot of guys. Think of the enemy as yourself. Basically create a whole separate scheme of maneuver for them. Not with all the graphics, but how you would fight if you were them. If you spend some legitimate time doing this things will be a lot easier. But dont get sucked in to thinking there is only one thing or one way the enemy can fight. Make sure to have something like a PACE plan for how the enemy will fight. THen once you have that you can start writing up their COA statements and then easily slide right into your own COA statement and Task Org. Mission statement takes two seconds then the big daddy. Paragraph Three. If you have good enemy analysis and good COA statements for both you and the enemy this will be a lot easier. Start out writing a detailed concept of the operation, then basically take your concept of the operation and turn it into 30-40 slides. Show movement at LEAST at the squad level, but you really  need to break it down into teams. Once you get done with this, paragraph four and five are basically copied from the company and you can move on. I think everyone in the platoon had at least once sleepless night while we worked on our OPORD's. Especially because we were on a short week for Memorial Day. The presentation itself is 45 minutes. If you get done before 40 minutes you are a fool and you are almost guaranteed to fail. Make sure to talk really fast. Most guys that passed that a specific script and just read off of it. This is not like ROTC or LDAC where they care about how engaging you are. You could be as interesting as a block of wood but as long as you have the info, youre set. Anyways, about a third of the platoon passed. Which means already 2/3's of the platoon are already on the chopping block in week 11. But if you were at least over a 60/100 you should be set for week 11.