• Diminish adversary’s freedom of action while improving our freedom of action, so that our adversary cannot cope—while we can cope—with events/ efforts as they unfold.
• Probe and test adversary to unmask strengths, weaknesses, maneuvers, and intentions.
• Employ a variety of measures that interweave menace-uncertainty-mistrust with tangles of ambiguity-deception-novelty as basis to sever adversary’s moral ties and disorient or twist his mental images, hence mask-distort-magnify our presence and activities.
• Select initiative (or response) that is least expected.
• Establish focus of main effort together with other (related) effort and pursue directions that permit many happenings, offer many branches, and threaten alternative objectives.
• Move along paths of least resistance (to reinforce and exploit success).
• Exploit, rather than disrupt or destroy, those differences, frictions, obsessions, etc., of adversary organism that interfere with his ability to cope with unfolding circumstances.
• Subvert, disorient, disrupt, overload, or seize adversary’s vulnerable, yet critical, connections, centers, and activities that provide cohesion and permit coherent observation-orientation-decision-action in order to dismember organism and isolate remnants for absorption or mop-up.
• Observe-orient-decide-act more inconspicuously, more quickly, and with more irregularity as basis to keep or gain initiative as well as shape and shift main effort to repeatedly and unexpectedly penetrate vulnerabilities and weaknesses exposed by that effort or other effort(s) that tie up, divert, or drain away adversary attention (and strength) elsewhere.
to maintain cohesion of overall effort and sustain appropriate pace of operations within available resources
• Decentralize, in a tactical sense, to encourage lower-level commanders to shape, direct, and take the sudden/sharp actions necessary to quickly exploit opportunities as they present themselves.
• Centralize, in a strategic sense, to establish aims, match ambitions with means/talent, sketch flexible plans, allocate resources, and shape focus of overall effort.