Where Should Doctrine Writers go to School?

This video is a brief overview of the concepts of design and conceptual and detailed planning.  It's about what commanders do in preparation for commencing an operation.



It seems to me that, if doctrine is written for the operational Army, then the Army would benefit most from writers who have experience in planning and conducting operations.  A good place to round out or deepen the education of doctrine writers would be at an institution that taught operations--or how to think about operations ... how to conceptualize them ... how to design and plan for them ... and the art and science of conducting them. Places like the School for Advanced Military Studies or the Command and General Staff College, both located at Fort Leavenworth, or the Army War College at Carlisle Pennsylvania would provide excellent intellectual training for new doctrine writers.

As a new writer, I was sent recently to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to the Army Force Management School, to take the 4-week Army Force Management Course.  I came away with a much clearer understanding of how the generating force works--they call it, "teaching how the Army runs."  But I learned nothing at all about how to write and develop doctrine for the operational Army.

At the Signal Center of Excellence, doctrine development is placed within the Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate (CDID).  I don't know if that is the case with the other TRADOC schools and centers who also have the same level of proponent responsibilities for the development of doctrine.  But it is not done that way at the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, where the development of doctrine Army-wide is overseen.  At the Combined Arms Center, the commander has placed his Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate outside of his CDID organization.  CDIDs are all about development and fielding new capabilities, be they organizational, training, materiel, leader development and education, personnel, or facilities--in other words, everything in the 'DOTMLPF' acronym except for the 'D.'  Doctrine development is out of place in a CDID.  It should be a separate organization, oriented not towards the Army Requirements and Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) but towards the Combined Arms Center--the intellectual center of the Army.

The video is not about doctrine; it's about design.  But design is about how to think and in that way is a near cousin of doctrine.  Doctrine is the way the Army thinks about how it will operate in order to conduct the nation's business.  The place to educate those who write and evaluate emerging Army doctrine is in a place where they teach commanders how to think and how to plan and how to design their operations.

General George Casey used to say that Doctrine must be the driver of everything else.  Well, it will never be that if we keep sending doctrine writers to schools that teach the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development Systems, Army acquisition, and the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Process. Those things are important and they have their place. But they don't equip doctrine writers with the tools they need to understand broad, overarching ideas about how the Army operations in pursuit of national objectives, about how it goes about to conduct combined arms maneuver and wide area security. So we need to do something else. We need to send our writers to places like the Army War College, to the CGSC, to the SAMS, and to joint schools. They must be trained on how the Army operates, not just on how it "runs."