Understanding Military Doctrine

A Multidisciplinary Approach

Harald Hoiback

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136760310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book puts military doctrine into a wider perspective, drawing on military history, philosophy, and political science.

Military doctrines are institutional beliefs about what works in war; given the trauma of 9/11 and the ensuing 'War on Terror', serious divergences over what the message of the 'new' military doctrine ought to be were expected around the world. However, such questions are often drowned in ferocious meta-doctrinal disagreements. What is a doctrine, after all?

This book provides a theoretical understanding of such questions. Divided into three parts, the author investigates the historical roots of military doctrine and explores its growth and expansion until the present day, and goes on to analyse the main characteristics of a military doctrine. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the book concludes that doctrine can be utilized in three key ways: as a tool of command, as a tool of change, and as a tool of education.

This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, civil-military relations, strategic studies, and war studies, as well as to students in professional military education.

Part I

Preliminaries

1 Outlines and sidelines

In 1805, the year of Trafalgar, Admiral Nelson was handed a Navy list and invited by his superiors to choose his own officers. Nelson refused and handed the list back: ‘Choose yourself, my Lord. The same spirit actuates the whole profession. You cannot choose wrong’.¹ Since time immemorial, men have searched for a way to create and maintain a community of thought, such as the Royal Navy apparently enjoyed during Nelson’s time.

Military community of thought can be created and sustained in several ways. The most common, at least historically, is by cultural means, where new recruits are socialised into the ranks by veterans, without any formal codification of the curriculum. It can also be done directly by the commander, as Nelson did when he gathered his ‘Band of Brothers’ in his cabin: a cumbersome and even dangerous procedure, especially in bad weather, as boat crews had to row their captains to Nelson’s flagship. In our own days, the creation of this semi-mythical brotherhood is not only hampered by bad weather, but made virtually impossible by modern forces’ size, complexity, and extension, modern information technology notwithstanding. A more feasible method today is to promulgate a doctrine, a document containing ‘an approved set of principles and methods, intended to provide large military organizations with a common outlook and a uniform basis of action’.²

In this chapter, we will first give a preliminary description of what a military doctrine actually is and why it is made. Then we will look at some particularly strong arguments against having doctrines. Finally, the chapter ends by stating the scope of this book.

The quintessence of military doctrine

In team sports, for instance football, there are, in principle, two ways to make the most of the team. One way is to muster the best players available and arrange them on the field according to their talents, competence, and inclinations. During the match, the players use their skills and judgement as proficiently as they possibly can in order to take advantage of those opportunities that present themselves on the pitch, supported by sporadic orders from the coach on the sideline.

The second approach is to develop a permanent system and a particular way to play. The players are picked and trained according to the system and the different roles therein, and they play each game in accordance with institutionalized imperatives and a predetermined scheme. This is the doctrinal approach, whose main purpose is to make the total greater than the sum of the parts. By facilitating synergetic effects via doctrinal harmonisation of decision making and action, you can have the best team without having the best players. Doctrine provides cohesion.³ By providing a conceptual compass and a mental counter-weight, the team can also handle more chaos and confusion than they can without.

A doctrine, which, in a competitive field such as this, is a device that tells us how to play in order to win, has to contain three essential elements: theory, culture, and authority. First of all, a doctrine has to be based on assumptions about what works and what leads to victory in the contemporary environment. The foundation of such beliefs can vary considerably, and the persuasive power of the reasons given for doctrinal choices differs correspondingly. All the same, a doctrine needs an element of theory of some sort because statements backed by reason have a rhetorical power and a privileged persuasiveness that mere opinion lacks. A doctrine depends significantly on the power of the arguments supporting it.

Second, you have to take your own team into consideration. Who are they? What can you expect from them? What motivates and convinces them? What drew them to the pitch? Would they prefer to go down gloriously rather than to win ugly? In other words, you have to take cultural elements into consideration.

Finally, doctrine has to carry some form of authority in addition to the ‘unforced force of the better argument’.⁴ The players have to take the doctrine seriously in order to give it effect. They cannot constantly second-guess it. They also have to know the nature of the doctrine’s obligations. Do they have to stick to the doctrine, come rain or shine, or do they have some conditional leeway?

Obviously, the sport metaphor has important limitations apart from its potentially trivialising effect on questions about war and peace. A fundamental idea in sport is that the competitors have roughly the same access to material and numerical resources, at least on the pitch itself. That is definitely not the case in war, where technology, geostrategy, alliances, and economic muscle can make very unequal sides. Hence, material shortcomings and numerical inferiority are usually the main drivers behind doctrinal ingenuity.⁵

At the peak of both world wars, for instance, Germany was always materially inferior to its opponents, at least at the geostrategic level. Its war-making brilliance thus rested on something non-material. Trevor Dupuy claims that this ‘something’ gave the German Army an advantage of 20 per cent compared to the Allies:

In other words, 100 Germans in combat units were the equivalent of about 120 British or American troops in combat units, and equivalent to about 250 Russians in combat units. In the recent Arab–Israeli wars the Israeli CEV [combat effectiveness values] has been over 2.00; i.e. 100 Israelis in combat units were the equivalent of more than 200 Arabs in combat units.⁶

The point is not that any given German soldier was 2.5 times smarter, stronger, or braver than a Russian soldier, but, put together in units, the Germans had an average output 2.5 times the Russian.

Doctrine is by no means the only way to enhance combat effectiveness, but is the one we are investigating here.⁷ Moreover, military doctrine is currently regarded as a crucial element of military power: ‘In fact it would have been impossible for us to have run any sort of navy at all without doctrine, even if it wasn’t referred to as such’.⁸ NATO’s acclaim is unconditional: ‘The successful execution of military operations requires a clearly understood and widely accepted doctrine, and this is especially important when operations are to be conducted by allied multinational or coalition forces’.⁹

Despite the fact that different countries, driven by different concerns, utilise doctrines in different ways, it is still possible to pinpoint the quintessential rationale for issuing doctrines, as done by Jeffrey S. McKitrick and Peter W. Chiarelli:

1 A doctrine can provide ‘prescribed routines for handling simple tasks’.

2 A doctrine can identify ‘key assumptions and concepts to provide a common basis for understanding operational thinking’.

3 A doctrine can provide a ‘point of reference from which commanders can adapt as appropriate to the situation’.

4 A doctrine can provide a ‘conceptual vehicle for debate, discussion, and evolutionary change’.

5 A doctrine can provide a ‘vehicle for achieving the primacy of integrated, joint operations and forces over the more parochial concerns of the services’.

6 A doctrine can provide a ‘model for training reservist and mobilized forces unable to train sufficiently to develop innovative approaches’.¹⁰

The hazards and dangers of doctrine

Despite the establishment’s strong backing of military doctrines, there has always been an undercurrent of doctrinal scepticism, which even today can be quite strong: ‘The word has unfortunate historical associations, from half-remembered schoolroom lessons on the Reformation, counter-Reformation, Spanish Inquisition etc: a manipulative “official line” preached to a credulous and bullied laity’.¹¹

The main risk of doctrine is rather easy to grasp, namely its propensity to ossify: ‘There are no shortages of examples in twentieth-century military history to support the contention that doctrine tends to solidify like a slowly moving lava flow’.¹² Instead of making you more agile, doctrine becomes a heavy burden: ‘For once a doctrine and its articles become a dogma, woe to the army which lies enthralled under its spell’.¹³

During Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, for instance, some observers questioned parts of the American air campaign:

[O]ne might ask what effect was envisioned in the massive bombing of empty ministries and party headquarters – all long since abandoned by bureaucrats. The attacks on those buildings destroyed much of the documentary evidence on which a full-scale examination of Saddam’s crimes would have to depend. History itself was the loser.¹⁴

One explanation of this strange and self-defeating behaviour is that it is part of air doctrine to knock out enemy leadership: ‘The key advantage of air power, over other military forces, is the ability to strike directly at the heart of the enemy, disrupting critical leadership functions, war-sustaining resources and strategy’.¹⁵

To crush empty offices is a waste of military power. What is worse, however, is that if you stubbornly stick to a prefabricated scheme of conduct, the opposing side can relatively easily second-guess you, and eventually crush you if it has sufficient means available. Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., captured the dilemma:

For a leader and his staff, the challenge is to construct good doctrine that is prescriptive without being constrictive. If doctrine is constructed and construed so rigidly that initiative is destroyed, then its forcefulness will be channelled too narrowly; the enemy will know what to expect and learn to evade the highly focused combat energy that results. On the other hand, a doctrine that denies its own prescriptive nature must – insofar as the denial is believed by those it affects – be powerless.¹⁶

Such doctrinal dilemmas have caused many to discard doctrine as too prone to backfire:

[M]ilitary doctrine carries a number of risks. These derive from the basic doctrinal dilemma: doctrine must be explicit and specific to achieve useful empirical content; to the degree that this occurs, however, dogmatism and doctrinal righteousness too often prevail. Efforts to avoid this pitfall often result in doctrine that is so abstract as to be of no value in the field.¹⁷

A doctrine can also be counterproductive if it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, of the negative sort. For instance, Frederick the Great once claimed that ‘we cannot have any enemies except our neighbours’.¹⁸ However, Frederick’s own uttering of the sentence could, if it were picked up by others, actually influence whom Prussia would have as enemies in the future. If a non-neighbour was tempted to believe that Prussia had no precautionary measures prepared against it, Frederick’s statement might have been self-undermining. Frederick was himself part of the reality to which his sentence referred, just as any other doctrine maker is.

A doctrine can, of course, also be mistaken or inadequate. The imperatives it offers may not work. In the summer of 2006, for instance, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) ran into unexpected problems in their fight against Hezbollah due to, among other factors, a flawed doctrine:

After the war, one Israeli General observed that the new doctrine was ‘in complete contradiction to the most important basic principles of operating an army in general … and is not based upon, and even ignores, the universal fundamentals of warfare.… This is not a concept that is better or worse. It is a completely mistaken concept that could not succeed and should never have been relied upon’.¹⁹

The problem was, among other things, that the doctrine, and its most central concept of ‘effects based operations’, assumed a ‘level of unachievable predictability’; it called for an ‘unattainable level of knowledge of the enemy’; and it discounted ‘the human dimensions of war’.²⁰ In effect, it overlooked the most crucial element of war: the quirks of human beings.

Presumably, the Israeli general’s main worry was the content of the current doctrine, not the idea of doctrine itself. Another doctrine would presumably have served the IDF better. However, some would claim that it is the very idea of doctrine that is the problem:

In itself the danger of a doctrine is that it is apt to ossify into a dogma, and be seized upon by mental emasculates who lack virility of judgement, and who are only too grateful to rest assured that their actions, however inept, find justification in a book, which, if they think at all, is, in their opinion, written in order to exonerate them from doing so. In the past many armies have been destroyed by internal discord, and some have been destroyed by the weapons of their antagonists, but the majority have perished through adhering to dogmas springing from their past successes – that is, self destruction or sui...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Preliminaries
• Part II The anatomy of doctrine
• Part III Why doctrine?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index