The NJ Police Chief Magazine Volume 23, Number 7 | Page 15

of first responders and commanders. Understandable means that the end user can digest it in less than a minute
and put it into action.
Imagine if you and every member of your department could have every emergency plan and floor plan for all of
the schools and critical infrastructure in your jurisdiction right on the smart phone in your pocket. Imagine if you
looked at a plan on your phone and could see yourself and the other first responders on that plan in real time.
On the surface, this seems like an insurmountable task. Fortunately for us, a well-known and highly successful
organization has handed us a proven, battle-tested solution. The United States Military Special Operations
Command has spent more than a decade and billions of dollars fighting the global war on terror. Faced with the
challenge of an ever-accelerating pace and the need to coordinate numerous teams from multiple branches,
SOCOM perfected the art of planning with pictures. Visual planning is the foundation of every special operations
mission conducted by SOCOM. Gone are the voluminous text-based plans that took weeks to prepare. In their
place are highly-functional visual plans that contain aerial imagery combined with a scale alpha-numeric grid and
key plan components. Speak to any operator from the SOCOM world and they will surely tell you that they
wouldn’t dream of going out on a mission without one of these visual plans.
When SEAL Team 6 was tasked with killing or capturing Usama Bin Laden during Operation Neptune Spear,
they had every conceivable resource of the United States government at their disposal. Should they have
requested it, they could have had any tool they desired to plan that operation. With nearly limitless resources
and options, they chose a singular piece of paper—the visual plan.
That plan, known in the military as a Gridded Reference Graphic (GRG), can be seen sitting unassumingly in
front of Secretary Clinton in the famous White House Situation Room photo captured during the operation. The
power of that photo is just now being realized. Back in May of 2011, while US public safety professionals still
plodded along with text-based plans, everyone connected with Neptune Spear—from the President of the United
States to the SEAL operator in Abbottabad, Pakistan half a world away—was looking at the same piece of paper:
a GRG of the plan.
The Gridded Reference Graphic has now come home, and is
available as its domestic evolution—the Collaborative
Response Graphic (CRG®). CRGs combine aerial imagery,
floor plans, critical features, and key plan components into a
simple to decipher geospatially accurate graphic. When viewed
on a GPS-enabled smart device, the user is plotted on top of the
plan in real time.
The grid allows for a common language and instant visualization
of plan components. A contact team trying to communicate the
location of a shooter in the band room doesn’t need to know
Source: Pete Souza / Official White House photo
anything about the building. They simply need to transmit that
the shooter is in the room located within grid square E3. Whether or not you’ve ever set foot in the fictional
National High School (depicted below), it takes mere seconds to gain full spatial awareness.
14