Lessons from the Past: Getting the Army’s Doctrine ‘Right Enough’ Today
Abstract
This paper sets the scene for the 2006 Chief of Army’s Exercise on mission command and the importance of systems thinking. The paper describes a US perspective and outlines various key developmental positions over the past twenty years within the US Army.
Today’s Army must create adaptable doctrine, force structures and equipment through its institutions and encourage all elements to adapt as necessary to changing mission needs. The Army and its soldiers must learn and adapt much more rapidly under far more complex conditions. Officers will require the ability to think both critically and creatively about changes in the military science and art. They must understand both hierarchical and very complex organisations, and also the principles that shape force development, new concepts for operations, and military leadership in a dynamic and uncertain future.
Introduction
No doctrine is perfect, but getting it ‘right enough’ is strategically important. Operating without applicable doctrine can have strategic consequences. The lessons from the US Army’s struggle to get the doctrine ‘right enough’ after Vietnam are worth heeding as the present generation carries out the current revision of our Service’s capstone operational doctrine. There are important parallels between the current period of military reform and those that began in 1973 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the biggest challenges of the earlier period was framing the strategic and operational problem well enough to produce a useful doctrine. That continues to be the principal challenge today. This paper has two purposes. The first is to offer lessons about how the US Army arrived at a doctrine that was ‘right enough’ for the closing decade of the Cold War. The second is to share insights of what ‘right enough’ doctrine might be, and what it might be about.
The US Army of the early 1970s needed to address new and serious realities very quickly. It also needed to revise an outdated doctrine, and do it quickly. The challenges facing the US Army today are even greater, but similar enough. Besides being deployed and at war for several years in situations and against adversaries for which it has had little useful doctrine—and daily facing novel conditions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places not as familiar—the US Army is going through revolutionary changes. Not only is the Army completely reorganising into a more modular force, it is also radically reorganising from an Army that primarily mobilises to meet sudden and large strategic emergencies to one that meets steady-state strategic demands constantly. To meet such demands, it readies, deploys, and then regenerates its brigades in three-year life cycles. It has become an expeditionary rather than forward-based Army. To provide the intellectual guidance for current reforms, the US Army is in the process of revising its capstone operational doctrine.
Doctrinal revisions since the 1991 Gulf War were heavily influenced by Army experiments into the power of digital communications, command and control systems, and the so-called ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA). During the 1990s, the more technical Services provided the intellectually attractive ideas that began to shape joint doctrine and concepts. From this enthusiasm for information technology-based weaponry, surveillance systems, networks and high-speed computers emerged a number of concepts that appealed to important audiences outside the Services: ‘Shock and Awe’, ‘Global Reach – Global Power’, ‘Operational Maneuver from the Sea’, ‘Rapid Decisive Operations’, ‘Network Centric Warfare’ and ‘Effects Based Operations.1 These ideas were attractive because they suggested that far fewer people would be needed, especially in the ground forces, and that such savings would pay for the required technological investments. The US Army, for many complex reasons, did not challenge the intellectual flaws in the groupthink of the time.2 Instead, it put forward a technical solution that fitted into the prevailing logic. First, shrink the tonnage of its heavy armoured and mechanised divisions by reducing the combat platoon fraction by one fifth and replacing those soldiers with ‘digitisation’. Secondly, form medium-weight motorised brigades that could be transported to trouble spots by air more quickly within current air-lift constraints. These efforts failed to change the essential flow of procurement funding over two Administrations and eight Congresses. Moreover, until recently the doctrines of the US Army and the advice of its leaders was heavily criticised by many in the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense for being behind the times and slow to respond to new opportunities. Even into the summer of 2003, many defence intellectuals advised reductions of up to two Army divisions in order to afford technical transformation, believing that the course of events in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq had vindicated RMA-based concepts.
Another similarity between the period of the transition from fighting in Vietnam to facing down the Soviet threat and the present one is the need to address new realities head-on. An important weakness of the early post-Vietnam doctrine was an incomplete framing of the problems the doctrine needed to address. Until very recently, the US Army and the other services relied primarily on scenarios that were a mere down-scaling of the principal strategic problem of the Cold War for their investigations of future concepts and requirements.3 These familiar paradigms left to the host sovereign the problems of public support, rear-area protection against unconventional threats, maintaining security and control of the population, humanitarian assistance, reconstruction planning and other messy complications. These were issues Cold War doctrine did not need to address. Changing regimes, enforcing peace and warring with angry and implacable transnational political movements introduce a host of new problems. Not only has the nature of major combat operations changed significantly, but also the insurgencies of the Cold War were very simple compared to those the US Army is now facing. It is time to try to make sense of it. An important part of this effort should be to recognise what is different, what is new, and how to create and express useful doctrine.
Toward Active Defense
The so-called Active Defense Doctrine emerged between 1973 and 1976. It refocused the US Army from Vietnam to the Central Front of Europe. Active Defense also emphasised the ‘First Battle’ against Soviet aggression, highlighted the new ‘battle calculus’ founded on experiences during the Yom Kippur War, and described the optimum tactical employment of new weapons in the defence. Tactical commanders were to control the current defence, the preparation of the next defence, and the planning of the third, all simultaneously. The doctrine concentrated narrowly on what was new and topical at the time: the first defensive battle against the Soviet Army in the Fulda Gap.
This new doctrine was centrally conceived and written by ‘the boathouse gang’—a small group of bright officers convened at Fort Monroe, Virginia. With minimal consultation with the field, Active Defense was published in 1976. It was creative and radical, but the Army was not well-prepared to receive its teachings. Internal critics felt the new doctrine was too mechanistic, paid too little attention to the human or ‘moral’ dimension of combat, and ignored the potential impacts of not only electronic warfare but also chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Some deplored the deletion of the traditional Ten Principles of War. Others called attention to the important conceptual terrain neglected since WWII, namely the art of campaigning or, as the Soviets then called it, ‘operational art’.
Between 1976 and 1980, outside critics such as William S Lind, Edward N Luttwak, John Boyd, Jeffrey Record and others took the Army to task for a number of sins. They argued that the Army placed too much value on lethal technology and too little on maneuver and cunning, preferring ‘attrition warfare’ consisting of direct, stereotyped frontal engagements oriented against enemy strength and tailored to whittle the enemy down to size by destroying his fighting men and machines. They saw US Army officers as hidebound bureaucrats cultivating managerial skills over leadership, being wedded to archaic methods, ignoring the study of military history and theory, and favoring safer technology over innovative military art. They said the Army compensated for lack of imagination with sophisticated materiel and a tendency to treat military challenges as if they were simple engineering problems.
In truth, efforts in leading these early intellectual efforts and overseeing the production of the 1976 version of Field Manual (FM) 100-5 are given far too little credit today. While it is true that the 1976 revision stirred debate and controversy, it also got the Army’s attention and shifted its focus to concrete new developments. The physics of the battlefield were as much misunderstood during the early 1970s as was counterinsurgency warfare in the immediate wake of 11 September 2001. The US Army did require a doctrinal wake-up call, and ‘Active Defense’ was the first, and crucial, step of what turned out to be a three-step reform. As a result, the officer corps became intimately aware of tactical details it had ignored for many years. With a firm foundation in the new physics, the profession could turn to other new complexities, such as how to maintain unit cohesion and unity of purpose on a very stressful and messy battlefield, and how to prolong the strategic defence in the shadow of nuclear release.
Reframing the Problem Again
In late 1979, General Edward C. Meyer, the Chief of Staff of the US Army, directed the TRADOC Commander to develop a revised version of FM 100-5. This action, the first of several reforms he launched, instigated the second stage of the post-Vietnam transformation. However, it took until 1982 to write and field the revision. The new TRADOC Commander, General Donne Starry, made some immediate changes in the way the revision would be done. He would stay personally involved, but he would place the actual responsibility on the Department of Tactics in the Command and General Staff College faculty.
Preparatory study included the best examples of previous United States, German and Soviet doctrine, as well as writings on military theory and history: for instance the 1940 US Army FM 100-5; the recent revision of the German HDv 100/100 Truppen Führung; translations of Soviet General Rheznichenko’s Taktika; Soviet Colonel Siderenko’s The Offensive; the current literature of internal and external critics; as well as the writings they often referenced. The crucial breakthrough in the preparatory work was to grasp the real problems allied forces faced against the Soviet threat in Europe. Reading the Soviet authors helped, as did the histories of the battles and campaigns from which Soviet authors drew their inspiration, like the Battle of Kursk and the Manchurian Campaign. From studying these works, it became obvious that thinking primarily in terms of winning successive line-of-sight engagements, as the 1976 doctrine emphasised, was a sure path to failure for reasons more profound than the several the critics had outlined. US forces would have to be flexible and robust enough to endure certain penetration and comprehensive and systemic disruption. This was expected to be caused by a combination of specialised mechanised formations designed to penetrate on narrow fronts and large numbers of unconventional, highly trained special forces infiltrating to great depths. Dealing with this challenge comprised what later came to be known as the ‘rear battle’.
The problem of the ‘close battle’ was recognised by the 1976 doctrine, but the remedy of engaging the enemy at arms length and from successive defensive positions was too predictable—and psychologically disabling—and it would require the infusion of preplanned counter attacks at various levels, the acceptance of open flanks, and much greater non-linearity across the forward edge of the battle area. The greater challenge, however, was to coordinate the close and rear battles with a very systematic attack of the Soviet formations in depth. This was intended not only to attack their ability to mass and generate overwhelming artillery and rocket fires, but also their ability to regulate the flow of successive echelons into gaps found or created by penetrating and close battle forces before defending forces could react laterally. The reach of Army weapons was insufficient for this, and the Air Force, under a joint and combined command, would have to carry out what would become known as the ‘deep fight’. There was no such doctrine in place. Finally, if these were not challenges enough, allied forces would have to fight in the shadow of nuclear release. This meant that whatever doctrine was developed it would have to work both in the period before selective release of nuclear weapons by either side and during all the subsequent stages until conflict resolution.
Dealing with this combination of challenges led to a number of doctrinal innovations. The logic for the ‘Close, Deep, and Rear’ organising framework prompted leaders at all levels to frame solutions to address these challenges simultaneously. The Army’s adoption of the ‘mission orders’ command philosophy in the face of a very centralised command and control culture was not just a new paradigm, it was essential to survival and robust performance in this environment. The doctrine also addressed important issues in the psychological/leadership dimension, raising the level of focus to division-level tactical maneuver and leading to a more systemic approach to thinking about combined-arms operations and the integration of other Service support. Finally, this manual broke with Army doctrinal tradition by differentiating not only between the tactical and strategic perspectives, but added a third between them—the perspective of major operations and campaigns. This was called the ‘operational level of war’. Little consensus had developed within the Army leadership on just what differentiated the operational level of war from those below and above it, and it was wise not to impose immature ideas too soon. In 1981, there were those who saw the operational level of war simply as a long range fire-power employed intelligently to reduce the size and coherence of second-echelon Warsaw Pact forces. However, doctrine needed to also address operational level maneuver, which the Army had virtually abandoned thinking about after the atom bombs exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Doctrine needed to assume the possibility that both sides might delay nuclear release long enough for large-scale maneuver to play a role before conflict termination. Doctrine needed to address how to do it. The introduction needed to be accomplished in two stages. Not only was there a competition over what operational art comprised, but also the institution needed more time to explore how to think and talk about operational art. The 1982 manual spoke of tactics as engagements and battles. It also addressed how the latter were fought, using long-range fires in depth delivered by missiles and aircraft complemented by and complementary to large-scale maneuver.
The resulting manual was very innovative and much more theoretical than its predecessor in very subtle ways. The title, AirLand Battle, was chosen to emphasise that neither defensive nor offensive maneuver were possible in contemporary warfare without a close integration of air and ground forces. It urged commanders to look beyond the range of their weapons and picture the enemy in organisational wholes within the context of higher commands and support, arrayed on the terrain and postured to perform missions. To the foundational understanding of the physical dimension of modern war, this manual added the enduring complexities of the human dimension and the effects of fear, fatigue, fog, friction and leadership. It synthesised the tradition of decentralised command from the American mounted forces of World War II with the more developed theory of ‘Mission Orders Command’ borrowed from German doctrine. The battlefield framework may have been a spatial one of close, deep and rear areas, but the conceptual emphasis was on the synergy of organisational functions taking place in those areas during performance of the mission in a contest with an opposing force also performing such functions. The manual not only described offensive and defensive tactical methods but added short, clear discussions of the enduring theory and principles underlying current method. It specifically addressed tactical methods in an environment where electronic warfare would be normal, and chemical, biological, and of nuclear weapons could be initiated by the enemy at any time. In one holistic embrace, this manual outlined the physical, moral and intellectual logic of modern engagements, battles, major operations, and campaigns, but it also raised the focus of the doctrine from fighting engagements and battles to the conduct of major operations and campaigns. This proved to be fortuitous because it prevented operational art from becoming only the art of deep fires. Some predicted that it would take a decade for the Army to absorb this more conceptual or theoretical substructure and they were proved right.
Largely because of the openness of the process, including wide consultation, field acceptance was positive. However, it also appeared that some aspects of the doctrine were misunderstood. For instance, some interpreted the doctrine as a shift from defence to offense where a balanced treatment was intended. Consequently, those engaged in writing the manual anticipated the need for what became the 1986 revision even before the 1982 manual was published in order to clarify misunderstandings and to build-up the content on the operational level of war. This version took less time, even though two drafts were circulated widely. The collegiality of content discussions between general officers and authors was maintained in the drafting process. The final draft and the manual were published by mid-1986.
The Context of these Reforms
The decade after the Vietnam War was a rare period for the US Army, when the pursuit of ideas was as serious and intense as the pursuit of technological solutions. The depth, breadth and substance of the doctrine, and the understanding of it, had reached levels never before attained. A comparison of the 1986 FM 100-5 text and the soon-to-follow Joint Publication 3.0, the joint doctrine for the operational level of war, would reveal a striking similarity and underscore the acceptance of AirLand Battle in the joint world. The logic of AirLand Battle also became the logic of not only joint doctrine but also of the ‘Reagan Build-up’. It impressed adversaries and contributed in no small way to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ground-breaking advances in training followed. Several of these involved significant cultural changes. The Combat Training Centers evolved, beginning with the National Training Center at Ft Irwin, California, and culminating with the Battle Command Training Program at Ft Leavenworth in the late 1980s. Even before the establishment of the combat training centers, military training transitioned from emphasising process to analysing outcomes. Training doctrine was based on criterion referenced training principles. This training approach helped focus the drive for excellence in technical and tactical performance under the new conditions. Whatever soldiers and units needed to be able to do was soon delineated in terms of tasks, conditions, and standards. Gone were the age-old and vague training evaluation checklists. Performance could now be rated on a ‘go’ and ‘no go’ basis. This was revolutionary.
The Army also abandoned scripted command-post exercises designed to test communications and staff procedures. In their stead, the Army adopted simulation-driven exercises. Now, suddenly, colonels and generals had to make decisions that mattered, the enemy now had a vote in mock battle outcomes, and scarce resources had to be combined effectively to avoid embarrassment. This forced leaders to exercise their military artistry and tested their understanding of doctrine. Before this decade, all unit-level tactical training involved ‘umpires’ with adjudication rulebooks and subjective professional judgment. After this decade, trainers could simulate most of the physical phenomena of the line-of-sight battle and many of the indirect fire effects, even at home station. At the National Training Center, it was possible to diagnose battalion level battles to individual soldier and platform detail. The rigour of training rose to all-time heights. Today we take facilitated after-action reviews (AARs) for granted. Before AARs, as we now know them, training event critiques focused on staff processes and avoided the sensitive issues of command decisions. Commanders learned to participate in frank discussions of what happened and why. In fact, mission failures became an opportunity to learn. This was a significant change in the Army’s culture.
In the 1980s, the US Army also took other important steps to improve the understanding and practice of the military art and science. The Combat Studies Institute and the Center for Army History changed from emphasising institutional history to the history of warfare and operations. The Center for Army Lessons Learned was established to quickly share good ideas from the field with the institution and then back to the field. The predecessor of the Foreign Military Studies Office was established to examine the thinking of our adversaries and allies. The TRADOC Analysis Center (TRAC) was organised from its predecessor and began using more advanced and varied analytical methods. The US Army established a relationship with the Arroyo Center, an agency of the Air Force sponsored ‘think tank’, the Rand Corporation, and the Army Research Institute became more heavily engaged in examining questions of human performance in combat and organisational design.
However, even more important than all of these innovations taken together was the fact that the Army’s attitude toward military education changed significantly during this time. Officer education advanced in breadth by having all officers attend a 12-week Combined Arms and Services Staff School (CAS3), and by instituting the study of the theory underlying Army doctrine at the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). Prior to this decade, the majority of Army officers received no formal military education after their fourth of fifth years of service. All in all, it was an exciting decade in every aspect of doctrine, training, and leader development. However, the time for doctrinal innovation has only just begun. An initial draft of the new FM 3.0 – Full Spectrum Operations was published in June 2006.
Lessons for Today
Sound and useful doctrine is anything but doctrinaire. At the core of any adaptable doctrine are a number of enduring ideas. Historically, armies that have evolved successfully adapt doctrine, organisation, weapons and equipment as opponents, technology, conditions, and strategic missions change. Of course, when these all change rapidly and simultaneously, the business of evolving useful doctrine is greatly complicated.
A doctrine is actually a sum total of the ‘thought models’ that commanders in the field, their staffs, and their subordinates share. ‘Thought models’ are mental frameworks or ways to think to solve problems. In the military profession they address, for instance, how to combine arms or capabilities to gain concentrations of effort and synergy, or how successful defences or offences are composed. Such abstractions are the enduring foundation underlying successful methods and they become the basis for the evolution of new ones. To produce very useful and elegantly simple abstractions, we naturally reduce mental frameworks to bare essentials, stripping away ideas irrelevant to explaining the logic of relationships and features. However, the profession must remain vigilant because changes may elevate the importance of former irrelevancies to prominence. Experts learn ‘thought models’ through experience and education and apply them intuitively. Sound doctrine records, propagates, and renews those most useful.
Wise doctrine and wise commanders respect their foes, recognising that enemy leaders are also thinking and adaptive. Nothing is more interactively complex than groups of human beings engaged in warfare. Any doctrine that is mostly concerned with managing internal processes and relationships, rather than coming to grips with the military problem, the mission, or the enemy, will fail. Current doctrine must address how internal processes and organisational relationships serve the institution in future contests with uncooperative adversaries and within unforeseeably more complex environments filled with viscous matter and unpredictable frictions.
Doctrine for such contests cannot provide ready-made formulas. It must encourage commanders to leverage their own advantages and mitigate their own vulnerabilities, maximise the potential of their own and supporting capabilities, organise flexibly, and delegate decision authority to leaders most familiar and up-to-date with changes in the local situation. Sound doctrine shares the virtues of a sound operations plan in many ways. For instance, doctrine can be excellent without being perfect, but it needs to be acceptable to the profession, outline the best wisdom available to guide current operations, explain it well, and provide a basis for evolutionary change. Good enough doctrine sooner is better than perfect doctrine later. Doctrine refreshed frequently is better, and more readily absorbed, than doctrine which changes at long intervals. A controlled evolution, even if rapid, is easier to ‘get right’ in the creation and easier to digest in the field. This is increasingly important as the rate of change continues to accelerate.
Changes in doctrine, as in a plan, must explain clearly both what is new, and what endures. Such balance results in better understanding, especially when clear and concise language avoids broad generalisations and mis-communication. Doctrine, like an acceptable operations order, must be expressed in clear, unambiguous language. Broad generalisations are less useful than clear, nuanced definitions. Definitions should be as ‘backward compatible’ as is good software.
Like a plan, less doctrine is more. Every idea, theory, taxonomy, thought model, process, approach, or method must be useful toward solving some relevant problem of the present or near-term future. Useful doctrine is regularly stripped of useless intellectual adornments. Minimising the number of doctrinal publications reduces both the number of authoritative sources the profession needs to consult and the burden of keeping them up to date. There were fewer doctrinal manuals to update during the stable Cold War-period than now exist in this turbulent time. In the interest of economy, the Army could have only one authoritative doctrinal reference on the essentials of ground force military science and art. It does not need a strategic, operational, and tactical capstone manual. The advice of AirLand Battle doctrine was as applicable to task force commanders as it was to corps and field army commanders and staffs. It addressed the essential logic for every kind of operation relevant to the strategic missions of the day, every level of organisation, and left the details of method to manuals devoted to organisational echelons and functional areas.
Sound doctrine, like an operational plan, is in large part the manifestation of all accumulated wisdom projected onto current strategic problems articulated in the language of the present. Just as in a flawed plan, superiority in numbers, effort or technology cannot overcome basic conceptual flaws. While technology may radically transform military methods, the logic of military force acting on an adversary is rooted in human behavior and social dynamics. One major failing of the Active Defense Doctrine was that it simply ignored the Army’s doctrinal roots. The AirLand Battle revision built on the excellent 1940 version of FM 100-5, as well as its immediate successor after World War II, and brought their relevant wisdom forward. The 1986 FM 100-5 was also influenced by what was learned from all of our adversaries since 1940 (especially the Germans and the Soviets), and it was influenced by Sun Tzu, the most enduring theoretician, and Clausewitz, the most comprehensive. The language and early industrial age analogies used by Clausewitz may be dated, but the meaning of ‘fog’, ‘friction’, ‘chance’, and ‘moral dimension of war’ can easily be translated into modern interactively complex systems and chaos theories. That’s why roots need to be cultivated and brought forward using modern analogies and language. Similarly, while much of the AirLand Battle taxonomy and mental frameworks are outdated, many key ideas of AirLand battle merely require re-cultivation.
Revising or updating doctrine, like military planning, is inherently a creative process. Such processes are normally idiosyncratic and non-linear. The planning process provides a framework for organising and controlling the work, establishing timelines, ensuring that certain perspectives are heeded, and shaping the product. However, it is not the process that creates a unique and useful plan. Genius finds and uses the line of least expectation and least resistance to the enemy’s center of gravity by way of an unguarded vulnerability. Senior generals who are blessed with creative operational genius, and happen to like thinking about tactics and operational art, invariably produce creative plans. Commanders who have a genius for finding and harnessing the genius of others also produce creative plans. Creative genius is rarely the product of a committee in which all members have an equal say. Military genius is not evenly distributed within the profession, nor does rank, education or experience necessarily correlate with it.
Like a plan of action, doctrine is based on assumptions and hypotheses about the impossible-to-foretell future. Better initial framing of the problem leads to better doctrine. However, all doctrine necessarily has a limited life-span. This period for AirLand Battle doctrine extended through the First Gulf War of 1991. It remained applicable to a counter-aggression campaign against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as it was to the defence against communist aggression in Europe and Korea. However, some faulted AirLand Battle Doctrine as early as the late 1980s for not addressing the many small operations even then in evidence, such as the invasion of Grenada, the insurgency in El Salvador, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Beirut bombing, several emergency non-combatant evacuations, the incipient stages of what is now termed ‘The Global War on Terror’, or even the 1989 invasion and ‘regime change’ in Panama.
As it turned out, the long-delayed revision of AirLand Battle following these campaigns was influenced more by emerging technology and the lessons learned during the ‘counter-aggression campaign’ fought in a pristine, depopulated desert environment and not by the ‘regime change’ campaign fought among the people of Panama. In retrospect, the key to getting the Cold War–era doctrine ‘right enough’ was to frame the problem properly. Just as the first post-Vietnam doctrine revisions failed to frame the problem adequately, so have the post–Cold War revisions up to now.
To usefully describe the challenges the Army will face, and evolve useful operating concepts, will require looking forward and reframing the problem yet again. The future is likely to pose a wide range of strategic problems that cannot be portrayed usefully on any linear spectrum. Given the variety of missions the Army has performed in the past decade, and looking forward to similar challenges ahead, it is difficult to picture what a ‘full spectrum operation’ might be. The problem of all Army operations is not only balancing offence, defence and stability operations. It will be much more complicated.
The logic of mission categories must make sense in grand strategic terms, as they did during the Cold War, and operating concepts must explain the logic of various mission types within such categories. Current doctrine authors should avoid categorising missions by distinctions that contribute little utility and bear in mind that the logic of operating concepts and campaign design is less about intensity and scale and more about other things. The most useful distinctions will address strategic aims and salient conditions. The purposes American military operations will serve, and the likely conditions under which forces will be committed, will differ greatly. In many cases, US forces must be prepared for operational maneuver from strategic distances and under some very unfavorable and complex initial conditions, and in some cases operational maneuver can commence from forward deployed, established and familiar locations. War aims will differ between those that seek merely to restore pre-aggression conditions and those that seek to transform political regimes and the international system regionally, if not globally. Some wars will necessitate sudden reactions to the unexpected initiative of an adversary, and some will be at the time and place of our choosing. Some wars will pose escalatory risks and some not. Some of these may risk horizontal escalation to include regional neighbors or other global powers, and some may risk vertical escalation to weapons of mass destruction of varying kinds under different conditions. The book to describe the fundamental logic for employing Army forces, FM 3.0, should be clear about the relevant aspects of possible strategic missions and how to think usefully about them.
In conclusion, no doctrine survives ‘first contact’ with a new strategic problem whole and intact. Every strategic problem will be unique. The strategic context, the ends of strategy, the ‘enemy’, the physical conditions, social contexts, and technologies will change constantly, and doctrinal methods are mere points of departure for adaptation. To be sound and useful, however, doctrine cannot be a vague discussion of hypothetical cases. It has to provide solutions for very real, specific, and salient strategic problems. When the key elements of that set of problems change, the doctrine loses utility and can no longer provide sound precepts. Given the rate of change in the challenges the US Army will face during this century, it will be impossible to maintain the currency of any method and process-based doctrine. Meaningful abstractions that capture the considerations most important today and in the near term future will be most useful. A doctrine that is firmly rooted in a durable conceptual base not only absorbs nuanced change more readily, but also facilitates adoption of new methods and approaches.
Then and Now
Efforts by the US Army to discern the requirements of a rapidly changing strategic and technological landscape have been underway for more than a decade and a half. They began almost immediately after the Persian Gulf War with the Army’s ‘Louisiana Maneuvers’ and continued throughout the 1990s with a series of Advanced Warfighting Experiments and ‘Army After Next’ studies and wargames. The Army then extended these efforts through a more focused series of Army Transformation studies and experiments, including major wargames such as the annual ‘Vigilant Warrior’ series and field exercises at Fort Hood, Fort Lewis, and the National Training Center. These did not foresee the specific nature and extent of the al-Qaeda attacks on 11 September 2001, but they did anticipate the threat of combinations of terrorist networks and criminal syndicates based on the territory of rogue nations and shielded by their conventional military forces. In Financial Year 2003, the Vigilant Warrior Series morphed into the Unified Quest series. These jointly sponsored Army and Joint Forces Command exercises anticipated some of the complications of ‘regime change’ in Iraq by pointing out the fundamental imprecision of war, the deadly possibilities of adversaries who combine regular with irregular forces using modern technologies, the manpower cost of securing attacking forces, and the challenges of stability operations in the wake of large scale offensives. In combination, and with a healthy dose of historical perspective, these provided a sound basis for the Army to undertake meaningful revisions in its doctrine. The difficult challenge for the Army’s doctrine writers will be to describe the relevant aspects of possible strategic missions and the fundamental logic for employing Army forces successfully. It may be useful to begin by differentiating the past from the present.
The AirLand Battle Army planned deliberately for a known threat under familiar conditions; trained to perform missions that could be decomposed into specific tasks, conditions, and standards; adapted doctrine, force structure and equipment through institutions responsible for adaptation over the longer term; and operated within boundaries established by fixed chains of command, fixed doctrine, fixed force structure, and within a stable and well understood grand strategic construct. Soldiers lived in a world of near certainty within these boundaries. The Army was largely forward deployed and stood ready to engage the enemy within 48 hours. Those soldiers stationed at home, whether active or reserve, stood by to react to standing plans for preconceived contingencies. Being able to do all of this represented a potent deterrent to an adversary who understood what they could do. If soldiers had fought, they would mainly have fought on the soil of a host-nation ally to expel an invader. For this brief period in history, doctrine could focus on a much more narrow set of issues. In the world of AirLand Battle doctrine, there were many conceptual problems to overcome, but the technical ones were dominant and proved to be decisive in the conclusion of the Cold War. United States forces became accustomed to differentiating cases of war by scale and intensity because the other factors that matter in war planning and campaign design were broadly similar among cases within the greater embrace of the Cold War.
Today’s Army must plan more conceptually and adapt quickly to changing and unpredictable strategic challenges and missions. It must create adaptable doctrine, force structures and equipment through its institutions and encourage all elements to adapt as necessary to changing mission needs. Its training programs must rely on intensive (and lengthy in comparison) mission specific pre-deployment preparations. Further, it must operate with flexible, ‘modular’ chains of command with dynamically variable force structures and situational allies against often ill-defined opponents that tend to evolve rapidly and unpredictably. Soldiers live in a world of far greater uncertainty today. Only one symptom of this variability is that it is far more difficult to devise standardised training programs based on generic tasks, conditions and standards.
Additionally, soldiers have traded the uncertainty of when and whether they will engage for uncertainty about whom and where. Instead of needing to react to a hair trigger, the US Army now serves a nation that can chose much more often whether and when it will engage, and soldiers are less likely to fight near where they are garrisoned and their families live. While more of the force is stationed at home, even those stationed abroad deploy and serve the national interest elsewhere in a cyclical rhythm. That brief window in history when doctrine could comfortable concentrate primarily on defeating regular military forces was made redundant when the Warsaw Pact began to collapse in 1989, with the exception of countering the invasion of Kuwait in 1991.
The AirLand Battle authors envisioned the requirement for inter-Service operational-level integration. In fact, the conceptual leap from the Active Defense to AirLand Battle doctrine involved the realisation that, even in the continental environment of Central Europe, the idea of ‘landpower’ made no sense at the levels of war that mattered. Those who care to check will find no reference in the 1986 manual to ‘landpower’. That doctrinal term was just no longer useful, and it is a mistake to revive it. The requirements for tight integration of Service operations have increased. This trend will compel changes in methods of integration beyond increasingly impractical spatial ‘deconfliction’. The logic of the joint commander should be to use the tools and capabilities of whatever Service provides him the greatest ‘comparative advantage’ under the circumstances. The current doctrinal revision should embrace this concept.
Conclusion
Changes in warfare also favour tightly integrated joint task forces capable of projecting ‘power on the ground’ that is discriminating and focused. The nation’s security interests will be contested increasingly in populated and urbanised terrain or remote hidden outposts. Strong, agile, discriminating and knowledgeable land-component forces will be required to contest control of the ground domain. Careful review of operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq lead to the same conclusions. Naval, air, and space forces may gain information about objects and activities on the ground and they may influence activities and strike objects. However, only truly integrated operations employing sufficient ground forces can control activities of adversaries and enforce desired outcomes in all cases. Naval, air, and space forces may be able to do so in special circumstances when the strategic aim is to deter, warn, suppress, or punish. Yet, when implacable foes have to be defeated and the desired outcome is a specified new condition, only unified action including a significantly large land force can secure it.
The implications of these lessons clear for the Army as an institution. The changes in warfare tend to favor ‘labour intensive’ over ‘capital intensive’ solutions. However, ‘labour intensive’ solutions will emphasise quality or ‘street smarts’ over quantity. The Army and its soldiers must learn and adapt much more rapidly under far more complex conditions. Officers will require the ability to think both critically and creatively about changes in the military science and art. They must understand both hierarchical and very complex organisations, as well as the principles that shape force development, new concepts for operations, and military leadership in a dynamic and uncertain future. This means that doctrine and the military art and science must evolve to keep pace with relevant changes. Its evolution must remain coherent, comprehensible, and disciplined. Today, these overly simplistic and technology-based formulas for modern war have lost their appeal and war is recognisable again as a complicated and deadly struggle of human groups within an increasingly complex global environment.
The one inescapable aspect of warfare in this new century will be ‘warfare amongst the people’. Population densities are increasing everywhere, especially in underdeveloped and failing states. Knowledge of social dynamics and the cultural mosaic is an imperative. Even when soldiers engage in warfare with other states, they may also make war against stateless allies while they cooperate with some social groups or communities within it, compete with some, and maintain neutrality toward others. Rules of engagement have become more specific and of greater strategic importance. This trend will continue. Not only will conventional and unconventional forces become more synergistic, conventional forces will increasingly adopt means and methods formerly thought unconventional. For instance, it will be difficult to imagine cases in which psychological operations and civil affairs specialists should not be embedded in ‘conventional’ staffs and units.
More recently, much of the profession has returned to the literature of irregular warfare, and that too will provide some wisdom, even though ‘class struggle’ insurgencies of the last century and the 21st century struggles for power in failed or failing states, or among transnational organisations and states, are quite different. In addition to wisdom in these areas, the profession needs to understand more about how human beings think and how ideas are propagated through societies. Warfare is as much about influencing the decisions of others as it is forcing adversaries to accept our terms. The best preparation the authors of the new FM 3.0 could have would be to read about the science of how people think and how social groups are influenced.
In the world of AirLand Battle doctrine, the technical problems were more dominant than the conceptual ones. In the future this condition is reversed. This will require the re-interpretation of the recent and ongoing technical revolution, the renewal and enrichment of old or forgotten concepts, an adjustment of command and control doctrine, a new and more specific logic for estimating the need for ground forces, and a broader reframing of the problem to arrive at a more satisfactory logic for mission categories and operational concepts. The current challenge is well beyond that of the Active Defense/AirLand Battle era and there are some very important differences that make writing sound doctrine much more difficult today. However, today’s Army is far better educated, it has conducted some very useful studies of future challenges, the accumulated experience since Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada has provided useful intuition, and the current Army leadership is as capable as any the US Army has ever had.
Endnotes
1 There is more of a literature in support of these ideas than against them, for instance: Harlan Ullman, James Wade, Jr. with LA Edney, Frederick Franks, Jr., Charles Horner, Jonathan Howe, and Keith Brendley, Shock & Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology (ACT), funded by the C4ISR Cooperative Research Program of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (C3I), Department of Defense, USA, 1996; David S Alberts, John J Garstka and Frederick P Stein, Network Centric Warfare, Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology (ACT), funded by the C4ISR Cooperative Research Program of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (C3I), Department of Defense, USA, 1999; William A Owens, Lifting the Fog of War, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, New York, 2000). One could easily add the Defense Science Board “Summer Study” Task Forces of 1998 and 1999. See also ‘A Critique of RDO’ by your author published in Army Magazine, June 2002, based on A Concept For Rapid Decisive Operations, J9 Futures Lab, USJFCOM, 9 August 2001.
2 For instance see ‘A Critique of RDO’ by your author published in Army, June 2002 based on A Concept For Rapid Decisive Operations, J9 Futures Lab, USJFCOM, 9 August 2001. See also ‘Using Information Technologies to Reduce the Army’s Echelons’ by Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, US Army (Retd) in Army Magazine, April 2002, p. 8.
3 See Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, US Army (Ret), ‘Wargaming Insights’, Army Magazine, February 2003. Also Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, US Army (Ret), ‘The Close Combat Imperative: Some Compelling Ideas on the Road to a Future Army’, Armed Forces Journal, August 2002.
