Operational Approach Mapper

What this is

The Operational Approach Mapper is a classroom-ready planning tool that walks students through the JP 5-0 operational approach and draws a live visual as they go.

Joint planning doctrine lays out what goes into an operational approach, including the end state, objectives, conditions, effects, lines of effort, decisive points, and the logic that ties them together. Understanding each piece on its own is the easy part. The hard part is building one that holds up under scrutiny and saying it clearly on a single slide, and that is what this tool gives students room to practice.

How it works

On first run the app loads a worked example so students can see a complete, coherent operational approach before they build their own. As they enter their own data the visual updates in real time, showing the construct take shape and making the dependencies between elements easy to see.

The output is capped at a single slide on purpose. That limit is the teaching point, because it forces students to decide what matters enough to include instead of dumping everything into a long document that puts the choices off.

Work exports to JSON and imports back, so a session can be saved and resumed or handed to an instructor for review.

Classroom deployment

The tool is Codespaces-ready, so an instructor can have a student working in the browser in under two minutes with nothing to install. It also runs locally with a standard npm install and npm run dev. No outside services, no accounts, and no cloud dependency during class.