With most military planning, it is feasible to work from the top down, define the strategic objective and then work out the actual requirements of the operation in advance. This is not true of psychological warfare.[39] The objectives may be defined, and in the process of definition the general needs of a propaganda agency may be clarified. If a plan calls for a press or a radio, somebody can requisition a Davidson Press or a Hallicrafter radio and get ready to use it. But the plan cannot define goals, set time limits for the achievement of the goals, relate the goals to one another in a scheduled pre-fixed program of success, establish terms whereby psychological victory can be told from psychological defeat. Psychological victory exists only in terms of the military victory which it is designed to assist. Psychological defeat, no matter how much critics or the enemy propagandist may allege it, can be proved to exist only when an actual defeat makes it real. Psychological plans are always contingency plans for the assistance of military operations. They are dependent on the military operation and they cannot be checked against fact except in terms of the military operations they ostensibly support. Unfortunately, they were not always written with these reservations in mind. =Needs of the Operator: Materials and Guidance.= American officers, assisting foreign troops, could not plan logistics until they found out what the foreign troops actually required. How much did they eat, and what? How much could they carry, and for how long? How much tonnage had to be sent them, and how often? Such questions had to be asked about the needs of the individual men before unit planning, not to mention national planning, became possible at all. Similarly, in psychological warfare, planning can be made realistic if it starts with the individual operation for the control of which the planning is done. Define the operator as anyone having a task in the actual preparation, production or transmission of propaganda materials, whether through electric communications or by print. The operator is not usually a person with a high security classification, yet he plays his indispensable part in fulfilling the highest and most secret strategy of the war. How can a plan be written that will be useful in carrying out the actual (and highly secret) strategy of the war while meeting the needs of an inexpert individual way down at the bottom of the control system? The answer is, of course, that no such plan can be prepared. Different plans are needed for successive phases.