An invention was developed to improve the performance and survivability of units in a competitive environment. Cryptic Command, Control, and Planning, and Management increases to apparent randomness of a plan from an opponent's perspective without increasing the randomness that is apparent to friendly parties. Friendly systems each carry a keyed pseudo-random or chaotic number generating process and a known method for mapping the numbers to behavioral modifications. Since the opponent does not know the key, the sequence, or the mapping, the result from his point of view is increased randomness and degraded predictive capability. Since friendly systems know each other's key, sequence, and mapping, they can predict each other's behavior or generate compatible controls or plans. This improves coordination of friendly units while forcing the opponent to revert to reactive responses rather than maintaining predictive responses. The process is less sensitive to communications degradation than are standard methods of maintaining coordination. This is because communications are only required when elements of the situation change and when these changes are not sensed by all the parties being coordinated.