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| Delivering publications in spite of the need ... for actual doctrine |
As
one long interested in military history, lately become a student of it, the
subject of military doctrine fascinates me.
This happened quite by accident.
In 2007 barely started on a new job as a civilian training specialist, having retired
from active duty only a couple years before and working as a contractor since,
my former boss called me one day with an offer, should I be inclined, to leave
government civil service after just a few months, to become a contractor once again, as a doctrine
writer. To make a short story longer, I accepted the offer and made
the move, which took me out of the training side of the TRADOC house—where,
counting my service time, I had been working for twenty-five years—and placed
me in another world.
Ostensibly,
the name of this other world was doctrine development, but I soon discovered
that the larger universe which doctrine inhabited at the time was the realm of
capability development, every bit as interesting as anything else I had
experience in my quarter century’s association with the Army—all of which was
in signal, I should add. My first six months in this new world was a struggle
just to learn the new vocabulary and a new set of regulations associated with
doctrine and capability development and integration. Not to mention a new way of thinking. Maybe to say six months is to give the
impression that during that phase I mastered all there is to know about these
areas. That certainly was not the case. Far from it.
Almost six years later I find myself still
learning, like I’m starting from scratch sometimes—which is one of the reasons
I find doctrine so fascinating.
