Religion or reason? exploring alternative ways to measure the quality of doctrine

ABSTRACT

In this article, we address the often ignored issue of quality standards for doctrine. In doing so, we contribute to the existing literature on military doctrine, since much of previous research has focused on outlining the effects of doctrine or the causes of particular doctrinal content, rather than how we should measure its quality. The predominant way of understanding quality of doctrine is based on the rationalist understanding of doctrine as a force multiplier. However, rationalist aims do not necessarily tell us anything about the contents of doctrine. Hence, a doctrine can be seemingly of high quality, but ultimately impede or lead armed forces astray. Rather than focusing on the utilitarian side of doctrine, we suggest that doctrine should mainly be understood as articles of faith or a belief system. And thus the quality of doctrine becomes inextricably linked to military norms and military identity. Writing doctrine thus becomes part of ritual, rather than reason.

KEY WORDS:

• Doctrine
• education
• command
• force multiplier
• religion

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to the helpful comments from the anonymous reviewer, from participants at the 25–26 June 2014 Doctrine Conference in Oslo, and from the War Studies Seminar at the Swedish National Defence College, Stockholm in September 2014.

Notes

¹ Jan Angstrom and J.J. Widen, Contemporary Military Theory: The Dynamics of War (London: Routledge, 2015), 5.

² Swedish Armed Forces Headquarters, Doctrine for Joint Operations (Stockholm: Swedish Armed Forces, 2005); idem, Doctrine for Ground Operations (Stockholm: Swedish Armed Forces, 2005); idem, Doctrine for Naval Operations (Stockholm: Swedish Armed Forces, 2005); idem, Doctrine for Air Operations (Stockholm: Swedish Armed Forces, 2005).

³ Jerker Widén and Jan Ångström, Militärteorins grunder (Stockholm: Swedish Armed Forces, 2005). This book has now been revised, updated and published in English: Angstrom and Widen, Contemporary Military Theory.

⁴ Jeffrey S. Sychterz, ‘Rethinking the Culture Wars at the Naval Academy’, in Douglas Higbee (ed.), Military Culture and Education (London: Ashgate, 2010), 75–90.

⁵ James J. Tritten, ‘Implications for Multinational Naval Doctrine’, in Sam Tangredi (ed.), Globalization and Maritime Power (Washington: National Defense University Press, 2002), 259–80. The resources on doctrinal research gathered by Chapman do not alter this basic duality either. See Bert Chapman, Military Doctrine: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2009).

⁶ See, e.g., James S. Corum, Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992). For the wider debate, see, e.g., Stephen Biddle, Military Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Brian Bond, The Pursuit of Victory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Robert Pape, Bombing to Win: Airpower and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (eds), The Changing Character of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Michael E. Brown, Owen R. Coté Jr, Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven A. Miller (eds), Do Democracies Win Their Wars? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); John Stone, Military Strategy (London: Continuum, 2011); Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); T.V. Paul, Patrick Morgan and James Wirtz (eds), Complex Deterrence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

⁷ See, e.g., Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Robert M. Citino, The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920 –1939 (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999); Mary R. Habeck, Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); J.J. Widen, ‘Julian Corbett and the Current British Maritime Doctrine’, Comparative Strategy 28/2 (2009), 170–85; Willard C. Frank, Jr and Philip S. Gillette (eds), Soviet Military Doctrine from Lenin to Gorbachev, 1915–1991 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992); Alistair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

⁸ Geoffrey Till, Seapower: A Guide for the 21st Century, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2013), 51–53.

⁹ Chapman, Military Doctrine: A Reference Handbook, 2.

¹⁰ Aaron P. Jackson, The Roots of Military Doctrine (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2013).

¹¹ Harald Høiback, ‘What Is doctrine?’, Journal of Strategic Studies 34/6 (2011), 879–900; Harald Høiback, Understanding Military Doctrine: A Multidisciplinary Approach (London: Routledge, 2013).

¹² See, e.g., Till, Seapower, 52, 81, 115; Alberto Palazzo, From Moltke to Bin Laden: The Relevance of Doctrine in the Contemporary Military Environment (Canberra: Land Warfare Studies Centre, 2008), 1.

¹³ This fourth category is only implied by Høiback and is not part of his main categorization; he refers to it as ‘fourth-generation doctrine’. We chose to label it differently and give it a slightly different meaning. Høiback, ‘What Is Doctrine?’, 895–97.

¹⁴ See e.g., Jackson, The Roots of Military Doctrine, 47–50.

¹⁵ See e.g., Eitan Shamir, Transforming Command: The Pursuit of Mission Command in the U.S., British, and Israeli Armies (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Wayne P. Hughes, Jr, ‘The Power of Doctrine’, Naval War College Review 48/3 (1995), 9–31.

¹⁶ See, e.g., Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff (eds), The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002).

¹⁷ Michael Howard, ‘Military Science in an Age of Peace’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, 119 (1974), 7.

¹⁸ A good case in point is the development of modern British maritime doctrine. Being naturally sceptical of formal doctrine, believing it risky and inhibitive, the Royal Navy had often shunned such endeavours and they rarely used doctrines in military education. At the end of the Cold War, however, the British Army (1989) and the Royal Air Force (1991) had published single-service doctrines and in the early 1990s the Royal Navy found itself the only service without a formal doctrine. Work on such a doctrine soon began on an ad-hoc basis, but when plans for the production of a joint doctrine surfaced the Navy leadership saw the danger of being left behind and decided to speed up the process. The result became the first edition of the famous BR 1806 (finally published in 1995). See Eric Grove, ‘The Discovery of Doctrine – British Naval Thinking at the Close of the Twentieth Century’, in Geoffrey Till (ed.), The Development of British Naval Thinking – Essays in Memory of Bryan McLaren Ranft (London: Routledge, 2006), 182; Markus Mäder, In Pursuit of Conceptual Excellence – the Evolution of British Military-Strategic Doctrine in the Post-Cold War Era, 1989-2002 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 175.

¹⁹ Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Peter Paret and Michael Howard (London: Everyman, 1993).

²⁰ For an understanding of military doctrine as a belief system, see Jackson, The Roots of Military Doctrine, 1. For a contemporary doctrine explicitly adhering to this approach, see Ministry of Defence, Army Doctrine Primer (Shrivenham, 2011). Here doctrine is defined as ‘a set of beliefs or principles held and taught’. Ibid., 1-1.

²¹ There is, of course, a huge literature stressing the importance of ideational structures in framing our understanding of war itself, how it should be conducted and legitimised and what it means to belong to a military organisation. See, e.g., Sean Lawson, ‘Articulation, Antagonism and Intercalation in Western Military Imagineries’, Security Dialogue 42/1 (2011), 39–56; Christophe Wasinski, ‘On Making War Possible: Soldier, Strategy and the Grand Military Narrative’, Security Dialogue 42/1 (2011), 57–76; Astrid Nordin and Dan Öberg, ‘Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard’, Millennium 43/2 (2015), 392–410.

²² Karl Ydén, Kriget och karriärssytemet (Göteborg: BAS, 2008); Marina Nuciari, ‘Models and Explanations for Military Organizations: An Updated Reconsideration’, in Giuseppe Caforio (ed.), Handbook of the Sociology of the Military (Norwell, MA: Springer, 2006).

²³ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Black Swan, 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jan Angstrom

Jan Angstrom is Professor of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. He earned his PhD from the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, and is also Associate Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University. His latest book (co-authored with J.J. Widen) is Contemporary Military Theory: The Dynamics of War (Routledge, 2015).

J.J. Widen

J. J. Widen is Associate Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. He earned his PhD in history from Åbo Akademi University. His works include Theorist of Maritime Strategy: Sir Julian Corbett and his Contribution to Military and Naval Thought (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).