A Primer on Military Doctrine

Doctrine

The blueprint for forces in combat.[1]

Fundamental principles by which the military forces, or elements thereof, guide their actions in support of national objectives.  It is authoritative but requires judgment in application.[2]

It is the “fundamental principles by which the [operational Army] and elements of the generating force that directly support operations guide their actions in support of national objectives.[3]  [Emphasis mine].

“The principles that shape military operations are based on centuries of experience and institutional refinement and are used almost universally.  When codified and applied in training and wartime operations, such principles are called doctrine.  Doctrine (principles) usually applies to operations (by specifying how to conduct campaigns and extended battles) and to tactics (how to conduct a single engagement or series of similar engagements), but not to strategy.  “Strategic doctrine” is an oxymoron since strategy is defined by contingent war aims.”[4]

Principle—a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption.[5]  The 12 principles of war [objective; offensive; mass; economy of force; maneuver; unity of command; security; surprise; simplicity; restraint; perseverance; legitimacy] are defined in JP 3-0, Appx A.

Principles illustrated

“George C. Marshall, whose 1941 war manual served as a model for the 1982 [FM 100-5 Operations], had warned that mobile combat was ‘a cloud of uncertainties, haste, rapid movements, congestion on the roads, strange terrain, lack of ammunition and supplies at the right places at the right moment, failures of communication, terrific tests of endurance, and misunderstandings in direct proportion to the inexperience of the officers.’”[6]  Consistent with the Joint definition of doctrine, General Marshall, in that war manual of his, just listed nine fundamental principles of mobile warfare.

“Tactical doctrine—institutionally recommended ways of fighting used to train individuals and units before they enter combat.”[7]

“A military organization’s doctrine spells out the conceptual framework that determines how the organization will fight.”[8]

Under the Army’s Doctrine 2015 concept, doctrine is defined as the fundamental principles by which military forces or elements thereof guide their actions in support of national objectives.  It is authoritative but requires judgment in application.  Army doctrine includes not only principles, but also tactics and procedures.  Field manuals are defined as a Department of the Army publication that contains principles, tactics, procedures, and other doctrinal information.  It describes how the Army and its organizations conduct and train for those operations. [9]

 "Effective doctrine is current, relevant, well-researched, flexible, understandable, consistent, concise, enduring, and timely … a system of thought.” [10]

“Army doctrine is a systematic body of thought describing how Army forces intend to operate as a member of the joint force in the present and near term, with current force structure and materiel.”  Doctrine “describes how … to think … and what to train.”[11]

If doctrine represents how the Army intends to fight, and history is a record of how its operations were actually conducted, then, for better or worse, history and doctrine are practically mirror images of each other.

 “Write with an understanding of the current fight, but remember, doctrine is not just about today, it’s about posturing us intellectually as a profession for the next fight.” [12]

“Joint doctrine promotes a common perspective from which to plan,

train, and conduct military operations.  It represents what is taught,

believed, and advocated as what is right.”[13]

  

“One of the most persistent trends is the lack of signal corps officers, noncommissioned officers (NCOs), and Soldiers who understand their duties and responsibilities. Let’s face it; we as signaleers do not have an established and written doctrine to follow like the infantry or field artillery.” [14]

Perennial problem:  the Army’s implicit or tacit expert knowledge … gained by [Soldiers] in the field [and] in the classroom, is [normally] well ahead of its explicit expert knowledge, which is recorded in doctrine.[15]

Doctrine and Lessons Learned

Early in World War II, the British army’s “most serious problem was failing to develop a coherent combined-arms doctrine based on a thorough study of the last war.”[16]

On the other hand, the Germans developed Leadership and Battle with Combined Arms (1923)—the 1933 version of which became Truppenfuehrung—written by Generals [!] Werner von Fritsch and Ludwig Beck [which] provided [their] doctrine for the coming war.”[17]

General Hans von Seeckt, commander of the German army in the interwar years, on lessons learned:  “It is absolutely necessary to put the experience of the war in a broad light and collect this experience while the impressions won on the battlefield are still fresh and a major portion of the experienced officers are still in leading positions.” [18]

U.S. General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing performed such an analysis which “culminated in the Field Service Regulation of 1923, the army’s basic doctrinal manual [The ADP/ADRP 3-0 of that day], which explains why the U.S. was able to adapt so quickly to the tactical conditions of combat in World War II.”[19]

General William DePuy “personally wrote [!] much of the 1976 version of FM 100-5.”[20]

“The rule of officer training [the same could be said about doctrine] is to reduce the conduct of war to a set of rules and a system of procedures—and thereby to make orderly and rational what is essentially chaotic and instinctive.”[21]

“…extended range of procedures which have as their object the assimilation of almost all of an officer’s professional activities to a corporate standard and common form.”[22]

“ … instantly recognizable and universally comprehensible vocabulary.”[23]

“ … formalized … ‘observations’, ‘conclusions’, and ‘intentions’.[24]

“ … he [the young officer] learns ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ … by reference to simplified manuals …”[25]

The purpose of [doctrine] is to equip the young officer with the ability “to organize his intake of sensations [in battle], to reduce the events of combat to as few and as easily recognizable a set of elements as possible …”[26]

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[1] Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993), 252.

[2] JP 1-02.

[3] TR 25-36, Final Draft, 8 July 2011, para. 3-3a(1).

[4] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: 2000), 586.

[5] Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10^th Ed.

[6] Rick Atkinson, 253.

[7] Murray and Millet, 589.

[8] Murray and Millet, 22.

[9] ATZL-MCK-D memo, Subj: Review of TRADOC Regulation 25-36, The TRADOC Doctrinal Literature Program, dated 31 October 2011.

[10] TR 25-36.

[11] TR 25-36, Final Draft, 8 July 2011.

[12] General Robert W. Cone, Commander, U.S. Army TRADOC Memorandum, subject: Doctrine 2015 Guidance, dated 23 August 2011.

[13] JP 1 Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States.  I am of a mind that we should not distinguish between ‘joint’ and ‘service’ doctrine.  Doctrine is doctrine; if it is a fundamental principle, it is doctrine, no matter who writes it.

[14] JRTC Signal Newsletter, Vol. IV (12-04), 9.

[15] Antulio J. Echevarria II, “Transforming the Army’s Way of Battle: Revising Our Abstract Knowledge,” The Future of the Army Profession, 2^d Ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill), 374.

[16] Murray and Millet, 24.

[17] Murray and Millet, 22.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Murray and Millet, 28.

[20] Robert Scales, Jr., “Certain Victory: The U.S. Army in the Gulf War (Washington: Brassey’s), 13.

[21] John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 20.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 20-21.

[24] Ibid., 21

[25] Ibid., 21

[26] Or officer training, Ibid., 22.

The Falaise Pocket

The battle of the Falaise Pocket, which took place from 16 to 19 August 1944, took its name from a combat situation that developed late in the Normandy Campaign, subsequent to the Allied breakout which turned the direction of the Allied invasion eastward toward Germany. A popular military history website has postulated, concerning this battle, that it actually gave rise to the operational thinking behind the more famously known operation—MARKET-GARDEN. The gist is that the “unexpected” success of Operation OVERLORD, the Normandy Campaign, created an opportunity for striking Germany’s industrial region much more quickly than earlier thought possible. For it had been anticipated that the advance of the western front towards Germany would be a long, hard slog—and it was that until about eight weeks into the Normandy Campaign when, rather suddenly, the German defenses in front of the southward advance of the Allied right flank, in the west around the town of St. Lo, collapsed. “What actually happened,” writes the author of this particular posting—

“was that the Allies were bogged down for many weeks in a virtual stalemate in Normandy and that the German defense … virtually collapsed overnight leading to the Falaise pocket, which was a complete disaster for the Germans, of the same magnitude as Stalingrad had been on the Eastern Front.”[1]

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery

Now, while it is somewhat of a stretch to compare the impact upon the Third Reich of battle of the Falaise Pocket with the stupendous disaster at Stalingrad, it is no stretch to say that the German lines fronting St. Lo did collapse virtually overnight. Because of the generally steady advance of British armor-supported infantry operations in the vicinity of Caen, on the Allies left flank—in the east and therefore much closer to Paris—German forces in the west, facing the steady advance of U.S. forces in the west faced the possibility of being cut off. Quite literally overnight those western units were pulled back to shore up the defense of the approaches to the Seine River—and to Paris. Their pull-back, coupled with the rapid advance and eastward turning of the U.S. divisions under Bradley, the so-called Allied breakout, created a “pocket” or an ever-dwindling space between the advancing Allied front on the right (west), as it wheeled eastward, and then northeastward, and the rear of the Allied (Dempsey’s) forces on the left (east). For a time there was a very real possibility that 80,000[2] Germans might be caught in this pocket and be totally wiped out. That they were not destroyed was the result of a combination of factors, the most significant being the Allied ground commander, Montgomery’s, propensity for over-cautiousness, the slowness of the Allied operational machinery to take swift advantage of developing battlefield situations, and the length of the Allied lines of communications, particularly behind the right wing advance of Bradley’s. The very last thing the Allied commanders wanted was to make the kind of mistake that would put their forces into the kind of predicament the Germans in the vicinity of the town of the town of Falaise found themselves in late August, 1944. Hence, though much of their equipment was destroyed,[3] “something over 20,000” German soldiers, “with only the clothes on their backs and personal weapons,”[4] lived to fight another day.

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[1] Unknown, “Operation Market-Garden,” History of War.org, http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/
battles_arnhem.html (accessed 27 July 2012).

[2] Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy (New York, E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1983), 430.

[3] Maps of World War II: Battle of the Falaise Pocket: August 16-19, 1944, On War.com, http://www.
onwar.com/maps/wwii/westfront/falaise.htm (accessed 27 July 2012).

[4] Max Hastings, OVERLORD: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 314.

Kursk

Soviet T-34 Tank

Kursk had been “the springboard from which the [Germans] had launched [their] summer (1942) offensive,” during which they had pushed southeastward into the Caucus region, and westward towards Stalingrad.[1] But in July 1943, the Russians had pushed the front back almost to where it had started the year before. At Kursk, there occurred the largest tank battle of World War II. It was “an immense knotted mass of tanks,” according to a Soviet colonel who fought there,[2] a showcase, perhaps, of armored warfare as the Soviet T-34 main battle tank took on the German Panzers and Tigers. Above all, Kursk was the climactic battle of the German’s Operation ZITADELLE (Citadel), 4 – 13 July 1943. 

The aim of Operation ZITADELLE was cut off the Russian forces that had invested Kursk. Perhaps it is only a bit of a stretch to describe what happened at Kursk as the eastern front’s equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge. As in the west once the Allies had established their lodgment in Normandy, the Germans line of advance in the east had, since mid-1942 been steadily retreating. Germany was on the defensive. B. H. Liddel-Hart, in his history of the Second World War called the events of 1942 “the turn.” Similar to his thrust through the Ardennes that he would make in December 1944, the purpose of which was to open a hole in the Allied lines and cut off the enemy lines of communications from north to south, Hitler sought to make a “break-through” of the Soviet lines running north-to-south by “pinching off the great salient” of Kursk. It was the principle that “‘attack is the best defense.’”[3]

Model’s Ninth Army struck south from Orel while Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army struck north from Kharov. “Altogether, the attacking German forces numbered 435,000 soldiers, 9,960 artillery pieces and mortars, and 3,155 tanks …. Against these the Soviets brought a million soldiers, 13, 013 artillery pieces and mortars, and 3.275 tanks; in reserve, [they had] 449,133 soldiers, 6, 536 artillery pieces and mortars, and 1,506 armored fighting vehicles.”[4]

The key to the Soviet’s victory at Kursk was that they knew in advance what the German plans were, thanks to Ultra intercepts the British had shared with them. Plus, they had prepared extensive, layered defenses within the city, and they kept a substantial reserve—tactics they had learned during course of the war. “When Hitler abandoned Operation Citadel on July 13, the Germans' last opportunity to influence events on a strategic level in the East was lost.”[5]

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[1] B. H. Liddel-Hart, History of the Second World War (Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Konecky and Konecky, 1970), 480. 

[2] Robert M. Citino, “The Greatest Tank Battle of All Time,” History Net.com, http://www.historynet.com/the-greatest-tank-battle-of-all-time.htm (accessed 28 July 2012). 

[3] Liddel-Hart, 485. 

[4] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War To be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 296. 

[5] George M. Nipe, Jr., “Battle of Kursk: Germany’s Lost Victory inWorld War II,” History Net.com, http://www.historynet.com/battle-of-kursk-germanys-lost-victory-in-world-war-ii.htm (accessed 28 July 2012).

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For both sides, combined, the number of tanks in the battle of Kursk was close to 8,000.  At El Alamein, the number was 2,000.  In the Persian Gulf War, the total number of tanks and other armored vehicles in the conflict was approximately 10,000.  [Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 249-250].

On the Passing of Sir John Keegan (15 May 1934 – 2 August 2012)

John Keegan

Renowned military historian, John Keegan has passed away.  A colleague of his, Mr. Con Coughlin of the London Telegraph, has published a tribute.

I was just getting to know Mr. Keegan --- reading recently his Six Armies at Normandy and The Face of Battle.  Through these, I am finding out that he was a man very much worth knowing.

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More tributes ...

From the New York Times.

From OP-FOR.

From History Today.

From the Telegraph.

From Orion Books.

From The Other Side of Paris.

FORTITUDE

FUSAG was fake, but
Patton was very real.

Allied Operation FORTITUDE was a program of deception—and a supplemental operation—to Operation OVERLORD, the Normandy Campaign. At the center of the FORTITUDE deception was the entirely fictitious First United States Army Group (FUSAG) ostensibly commanded by the very well-known American officer, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton. In what today would be termed a military information support operation, FUSAG was given a network of installations, had its own imaginary organizational structures, fabricated radio message traffic, conjured up plans, missions, and briefings, even false insignia. The ghost command had its own— 

“training grounds, a communications network, plans, orders of battle, and a specific target, the French coast between Calais and Boulogne, or even, so the Germans were encouraged to believe, farther northeast [and thus further away from Normandy] on the Belgian and Dutch coasts.”[1]

German intelligence agents in England repeatedly confirmed much of this “evidence” which completely fooled the German high command, including Hitler, as to both the magnitude of the Allied forces available and the intended target for their imminent cross-channel attack So convinced were the Germans of the reality of FUSAG, that even after the Normandy landings had begun, the German high command kept the powerful 15th Infantry Division positioned, and most of their Panzer units held in reserve, to defend against what they were sure would be soon coming, the main cross-channel attack by Patton’s forces striking the Calais area, 100-150 miles northeast of Sword Beach. 

As evidenced by the German high command’s decisions regarding its Panzer reserves and its heavily armed 15th Infantry Division, not only is the Third Reich’s strategy for its defense of its western approaches discovered, but the fundamental purpose of Operation FORTITUDE is revealed. Its purpose was to fool the Germans into thinking the invasion would come at a place far away from the area of the actual landings. German uncertainty as to where the landings would occur left them with no choice but to defend well over a thousand miles of coastline from Denmark in the north to the Bay of Biscay in the west, forcing them to violate Frederick the Great’s dictum that he who defends everything defends nothing. Once the invasion came, the deception wrought by FORTITUDE remained so strong that senior commanders up to and including Hitler remained steadfast in their conviction that it was just a feint and that the real invasion would come further up the coastline. 

__________________________
[1] Martin Gilbert, D-Day (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2004), 61.

Never Lost a Battle

Marshal Zhukov

Gregori Zhukov (1896-1974) achieved the rank of marshal in the Soviet Army and, in Russian lore, is known as “the man who never lost a battle.”[1] Zhukov’s military experience included World War I, the Russian Civil War, and World War II or The Great Patriotic War as it was known in Stalin’s Russia. Between the two world wars, Zhukov studied the tactics, techniques, and procedures armored warfare, then just emerging, incorporating what he learned into Russian military doctrine. In WWII, Zhukov led Soviet forces against the Japanese in fighting along the Mongolian-Manchurian border, emerging triumphant after the “Battle of Lake Khasan” and “was [afterwards] made a Hero of the Soviet Union.”[2] Zhukov successfully defended Moscow during the German’s ill-fated Operation BARBAROSSA. Later, along with Aleksandr Vasilevsky, Zhukov “planned Operation URANUS”[3] which caused the defeat of Nazi General von Paulus at Stalingrad. The Soviets’ employment of Zhukov’s armored warfare doctrine along with the T-34 Tank, which Zhukov championed,[4] plus the Marshal’s leadership, enabled the Russians to defeat the Germans at Kursk and gain a firm upper hand on the eastern front. Zhukov also planned led the victorious Red Army in Operation BAGRATION—the ‘liberation’ of Belorussia and Poland—and in the Battle of Berlin which brought the war in Europe to its conclusion.

____________________________
[1] Military Commanders of World War II, History Learning Site, http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/georgy_
zhukov.htm (accessed 25 July 2012).

[2] Kennedy Hickman, “World War II: Marshal Georgy Zhukov,” About.com (Military History), http://military
history.about.com/od/1900s/p/zhukov.htm (accessed 25 July 2012).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Publications International, Ltd., Ed., “T-34 Medium Tank,” How Stuff Works, http://science.howstuffworks.com/t-34-medium-tank.htm (accessed 25 July 2012).



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There's a new book out about Marshal Zhukov, called Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov, by Geoffrey Roberts.

Ultra in a Nutshell

Enigma device

Ultra was a codename used by the Allied powers to refer to the signals intelligence gained via the clandestine interception of encrypted German communications via their so-called Enigma encryption devices. Intercepted German transmissions were decoded by Allied intelligence experts then disseminated to senior commanders.

The breaking of the Enigma code was “largely the work of Polish intelligence services,” who shared their knowledge with British and French intelligence in 1939 as it became clear that there would soon be war.[1] During the war, Allied Ultra operations were conducted in secrecy at Bletchley Park in England. By April, 1940 “some messages were being read within 24 hours of dispatch …. By the time of the D-Day landings, the Naval Enigma was being broken almost instantly.”[2]

The Germans never suspected that a vulnerability existed within their communications procedures and that the Allies were so effectually exploiting it. ‘Ultra intercepts,’ as they were called, were like a “secret weapon” for the Allies. Unfortunately, the intelligence gained from those intercepts was never a guarantee that the best military decisions would be made. In the run up to Operations MARKET-GARDEN, for example, it was learned through Ultra that “some of Germany's best panzer divisions would be refitting in the town selected as the goal of the British 1st Airborne Division and the operation's final objective on the Rhine [River]—Arnhem.”[3] Though Field Marshal Montgomery’s headquarters was aware of the intelligence, they altered nothing in their plans, and the rest, as is often said, is history.


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[1] John Barrat, “Enigma and Ultra: The Cypher War,” Military History Online, http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com
/wwii/atlantic/enigma.aspx (accessed 25 July 2012).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Williamson Murray, “World War II: Ultra—The Misunderstood Allied Secret Weapon,” Historynet.com, http://
www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-ultra-the-misunderstood-allied-secret-weapon.htm (accessed 25 July 2012).