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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.
My
first stab at writing was a manual concerning Army satellite communications
operations which never saw the light of day and probably never will. (Which is a good thing.) Of course, I was no SATCOM expert so I set
about to do some research. What I
discovered, in addition to learning a lot about the world of SATCOM, was that I
enjoyed doing research. During my first
year or two as a doctrine writer, I got to research a range of subjects like,
just to give a few examples, electromagnetic spectrum management, cyberspace, cable
and wire activities, tactical radios, wave forms, emerging systems and new
capabilities, roles and responsibilities of signal officers at different
echelons, Army conceptual literature, and the larger sphere—outside of
signal—of Army doctrine. In the process,
I found I was learning a lot about an even bigger topic—the United States
Army. It was as I gained this
perspective that I began to sense that my years-long interest in military
history was but a prelude to something more serious. So, in 2010, I went back to school.
It
interests me that there is such a close connection between doctrine and
history. Doctrine is the body of
institutional thought, infused into the force mostly through education and
training, of how the Army intends to fight and operate. History, at least in one sense, is the record
of how those intentions turned out. In
Vietnam, for example, the Army went to war with its basic high intensity
conflict, heavy divisions-type doctrine it had honed in World War II. But things didn’t turn out so well using that
prescription. In another sense, history
provides real-life lessons to the institutional Army which uses them to improve
its doctrine. Sometimes that works well
and sometimes not. A generation after Vietnam,
we beat our heads against the same wall in the Iraq war. Doctrine is the foretaste; history is the experience
we remember. Doctrine is the forecast;
history is the storm we cannot forget.
In a sense, doctrine is history written before it happens; history is
doctrine written after the smoke clears.
History
never ignores doctrine—which is one of the things that make history so
interesting; unfortunately, the reverse is not always true. An example of this dynamic may be seen in World
War II with how the Army handled tank warfare.
Tanks, at the dawn of the Second World War, were new capabilities. They had begun to emerge as the First World
War drew to a close, and soon-to-be prominent WW2 generals, like Patton and
Eisenhower, had seen them in action.
After WWI, Eisenhower and Patton and a few of their fellow officers
contemplated the use of tanks in future warfare. They, especially
the two famous generals, “were students of military doctrine” who believed
“that the tank had a greater role in the army of the future than merely as a
subordinate arm of the infantry, as it had been during World War I.”[1] The two of them took tanks apart and put them
back together again. They met at each
other’s homes, many times with their “converts,” just to talk tanks, “analyze
tactics, and create scenarios in which tanks were employed under a variety of
situations and conditions.” They
published articles in the Infantry
Journal. Eisenhower later called the
sometimes marathon discussions he had with Patton and others “the beginnings of
a comprehensive tank doctrine.” For
these efforts, which according to one historian “would alter the whole doctrine
of land warfare,” Eisenhower, an infantryman, was reprimanded—reprimanded!—by Maj. Gen. Charles S.
Farnsworth, the chief of infantry.[2]
So,
for a time, as World War II got underway, not only was the U.S. Army without
anyone but a middle-aged cavalry officer in its fledgling tank corps, it had no
doctrine to guide the employment of tanks in battle. In the course of events came the North
African campaign and, within a few months, the Allied defeats at Kasserine Pass
and Sidi Bou Zid. In those near
disasters the U.S. formations repeated the mistakes their British counterparts
had made in earlier fights with Axis forces commanded by the German tank
master, Rommel. At the root of these
twin calamities lay incompetent U.S. leadership in the field and a lack of a
sound operational doctrine respecting the employment of tanks. Said one news correspondent, in reference to
the latter, “[a]rmies never learn from other armies. They have to learn by themselves, and a lot of
the tactics that we used were those the British had used disastrously two years
earlier and discarded.”[3]
Poor
leadership in the field and an unsound operational picture—doctrine—cost the
U.S. a couple of early battles in World War II.
Those same kinds of problems, in Vietnam, cost them the war. For the most part, the Army fought Vietnam
with a WW2 mindset of high intensity warfare.
Only grudgingly, and too late to affect the war’s outcome, did it start
employing the lessons learned from fighting an insurgency. Ironically, we had fought an insurgency before,
in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, so it was inexcusable that
in Vietnam we were so doctrinally unprepared.
But we have already noted the U.S. Army’s tendency toward
unpreparedness, and to ignore lessons learned.
[On the subject of unpreparedness, I recommend to you T. R. Fehrenbach’s
book, This Kind of
War: A Study in Unpreparedness,
the story of the United States Army in the Korean War.]
Reinforced
by our overwhelming victory in the Persian Gulf War against a fourth-rate
power, and using an operational doctrine we called AirLand Battle, which we had developed for an anticipated
high-intensity war against the heavily armored forces of the Soviet Union in
Europe, we discarded the counterinsurgency lessons learned in Vietnam. Predictably, we found ourselves with an
inadequate doctrinal underpinning when we faced, in the early days of the 21st
Century, insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet again, we had failed to
incorporate the lessons of history into our operational doctrine. True, the publication of FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, in 2006, did much to overcome our entirely avoidable
predicament. However, it was the classic
case of closing the barn door after having
lost a lot of the precious livestock.
We
continue to develop doctrine without historical context. Reading today’s capstone war fighting manual,
ADP 3-0, Unified Land Operations, unless
one knew better, one might wonder whether “America’s force of decisive action,”
as the manual describes the Army, had ever seen war. Saturated with the clinical air of academe,
ADP 3-0 has got to be the very last thing an operational commander would ask
for to intellectually prepare his troops for war. Completely absent from its pages is any
reference to any actual war in which Army Soldiers have fought and in which any
of the manual’s precepts might have been applied. It is twenty-eight pages of dry, abstract,
academic theory. It’s companion
reference publication, ADRP 3-0, offers more of the same—seventy-six more pages
of vague generalizations and a collection of terms and definitions divorced
from any operational context—in more excruciating detail. No historical context. No application. No illustrations of what right looks like. Taking ADP/ADRP 3-0 into combat has to be
tantamount to going to war with no doctrine at all.
Something
as simple as the blue text box on page III-6 of Joint Publication 3-0, to
illustrate the historical complexity of command and control, or the photograph
on page I-10 of the same manual, giving historical context to counterinsurgency
operations doctrine are invaluable components of effective doctrine. Why can’t the Army write like that?
Truth
be told, the Army can write like
that. JP 3-0 wasn’t written by a
committee of writers from the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines. Army writers were involved too, and they
probably wrote the lion’s share of it.
But nothing like the two examples above, under “Doctrine 2015,” would
survive in any doctrinal publication for which the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command has final say.
In
the recently published leadership manuals, ADP and ADRP 6-22, this shortcoming
is perpetuated. The Army has had many
great leaders during its rich 237-year history, its Washingtons, its Grants, its
Pershings, its Marshalls, and its Eisenhowers.
It has also had its share of poor ones, its Benedict Arnolds, its
William Calley’s, its Lloyd Fredendalls, and its Williams Westmorelands. But not a single one of these leaders, good
or bad, effective or not, competent or not, inspiring or not, is given space in
the Army’s doctrine on leadership. The
great young leaders of today’s Army, admonished by their institution to “lead
by example,” are denied by their institution of having their own examples in
the institution’s doctrinal literature.
Little
wonder that the Chief of Staff of the Army’s recommended reading list contains
not a single selection from the Army’s library of doctrinal literature.
None
of this is accidental. Or maybe it
is. But it cannot be. A conscious decision has to have been made to
disallow that which would give the bland, timid, abstract, academic theory of
today’s doctrine some life. But who with even a passing acquaintance with
history would make such a decision? Consensus
must have reigned. Or perhaps the
institution is adrift.
Nor
is this a problem caused by Doctrine 2015, for the problem existed long before
General Dempsey and the wizards from the intellectual center of the Army set
their minds to making some sense of the Army’s doctrinal library. The reason we have a Doctrine 2015 project
ongoing is because the Army’s doctrine publication program, by the time of
Dempsey’s tenure as TRADOC commander, was in a colossal mess. Doctrine 2015 is about the third
reorganization of the Army’s doctrinal literature program over the last
decade. Way too many manuals; way too
little actual doctrine. But it is vain
to believe that Doctrine 2015 will improve the deficiency in the content of the
Army’s doctrine that I have been describing.
It may in the long term, starting sometime beyond the year 2015 perhaps;
but for present, the sole, driving purpose of the initiative is to put some
discipline upon the literature’s organization, not to infuse its staid contents with any life or imagination, and
certainly not to infuse it with any historical weight.
For
that we may have to be content to wait for the next generation of Army doctrine
writers.
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