Defense Minister

Maintenance and Training
Expenditures for Maintenance + Training (M+T) can be adjusted from your DD's Spending Panel. M+T is pivotal to how well your armed forces perform on the battlefield. M+T is the main contributing factor to you unit Efficiency, which boosts many of their important combat ratings.

Pathing
The Defense Department Panel also contains many controls that must be properly set for your Units to do their job properly. One of these is the "Unit Pathing" permissions on the Defense Condition Panel.

Here you will find the three buttons that activate permission for your units to path into territories With transit treaties, Without transit treaties and into Enemy territory. Unless you activate the appropriate pathing buttons you will find your Units milling around the border, unable to proceed to the hexes that you have ordered them to move to.

Global ROE Panel
From the Global ROE Panel you can set the Rules Of Engagement for all of your Units at once, or for all units that are created or acquired in the future. These Rules are well described here:Global ROE Panel.

This Global ROE panel is supplemented by the Individual ROE panel that allows you to customize the ROEs for specific Units. The use of both ROE panels is well described here: Global Crisis Rules of Engagement.

If you have allowed your DM control of your armed forces then you can be assured that garrisons have been sent to many towns and cities and that many of your units have been deployed by the DM to guard your capital, military facilities and other important facilities in your region.

At this high/global level of strategy you should be concerned about how the ROEs that you set effect the over-all stance of you armed forces - what is the appropriate manner for each of your deployed units to behave in the context of your current defense posture?

If you are expecting an attack, then you should have a lot of deployed defensive units and they should be issued ROEs that allow them a great deal of initiative in order for them to react aggressively towards an attack. You want to assure that your units will engage invading enemy units and not shy away from combat.

If you are occupied with day-trading stocks of uranium or establishing treaties with African nations then you should give you DM command of your armed forces so that it can immediately respond to some sneak attack while you are occupied with other matters of State.

Most of the five Speed, Route, Initiative, Contact and Tolerance G-ROE options are oriented towards offensive military operations. If your armed forces are on the offenses then use these the Opportunity Fire and Capture Enemy Land settings.

Enabling the auto-deployment of missiles is probably appropriate for either a defensive or an offensive mode.

Keep in mind that you have at your command a supplementary Individual ROE control panel that will allow you to assign customized ROEs for each of your battle-groups, unit types or single deployed unit on the game Map.