Ness, I feel you on this one. I just assessed to USAR as an AGR and have struggled at this. A couple of thoughts right off the bat:

1. Geography matters. How close are you to a USAR Mission Training Complex or to your assigned 1st Army partner brigade?  Both can be leveraged to provide some mentors to facilitate MDMP during your BA weekends. When trying to get the staff synced it sometimes helps to have a neutral facilitator to help you work through your own problems.

2. Establish an endstate for your MDMP. It’s tough to get a fully developed orders process going during a drill weekend and follow up during the week with TPUs and all the competing priorities. Yes, it’s expected to meet all requirements, but at the expense of retention when the stakes aren’t high.

3. Get commanders planning guidance up front before starting the process. Sometimes MA becomes Directed COA without any actual staff input, and really you just get into orders production quick in the reserve and guard. You’ve probably seen the CSTX/WFX phenomenon of staff spinning wheels to just get at the answer to the problem statement that is “ENDEX”, and often times, unless it’s supporting a greater overall exercise, that’s what annual training becomes.

If you can nail all these, you might be able to develop a fully thought out seven minute drill and potentially MOPs/MOEs around the planning effort that defines success as “staff understanding of the execution matrix and production of necessary annexes”. The hard lesson I learned coming from combat arms and exercise design world into the aviation community was that we weren’t all taught (more accurately did not all exercise) the same way to get to a published order, and that MDMP is a process and not an output. By working through what they knew, I was able to direct towards a shared understanding which is what we are getting at anyways. The order may look weak, but executed flawlessly. That’s the amazing part of my time in the reserve components; the ability to execute on par with many active units, just without a lot of wasted time.

As far as implementation outside of business hours, sometimes it has to be done, but by establishing clear due outs that are attainable, it can be minimally intrusive.

Patrick