Foreword: Military doctrine and the management of uncertainty

ABSTRACT

Organization theorists have long argued that the management of uncertainty is a major motive of organizational behavior. Military organizations must deal with very high levels of uncertainty. Some uncertainty comes from the international political environment that gives the Military organizations life; some arises from the possibility of direct intervention by formal authorities upon whom the organization depends for critical resources; some emerges from the mixed motives of organizational participants; some arises from the fact that Military organizations do not get much realistic practice; and some arises from the very nature of combat. Doctrine is one of the many ways that militaries address these uncertainties. But doctrine writers make tradeoffs among these problems, tradeoffs that are themselves reflective of the politics of the moment.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctrine
• uncertainty
• combat
• politics
• interdependence

Introduction

Military organizations that face the prospect of actual combat need a set of institutionalized principles about how to fight. Modern militaries call this set of principles doctrine. Doctrine exists at almost every level of military activity, from the lowly infantry company to the nuclear forces of a Cold War superpower. But it is high-level doctrine, which encompasses all of a state’s military power, that has perhaps most captured the interest of political scientists, historians, and military theorists. There is no agreed term for this subject. It is sometimes called ‘joint doctrine’, because it must specify how various branches will cooperate, usually in large campaigns. It is sometimes called ‘political military doctrine’ because it must reflect the key strategic choices that statespersons have made about threats and opportunities. In past work, I simply called this body of principles ‘military doctrine’.¹

Military doctrine performs more functions than might be intuitively obvious. These functions, in one way or the other, help to reduce organizational uncertainty. All modern organizations strive to reduce uncertainty, as I will discuss below. But military organizations seem to work harder at it, and doctrine is a means to this end.

Doctrine performs at least four major tasks. First, it performs strategic functions, by focusing the military on the preparation for possible battles that are critical to the success of a state’s foreign policy. Doctrine sets priorities and directs effort. Because doctrine is hard to hide, it also sends diplomatic messages – deterring (or coercing) adversaries and reassuring allies. Second, doctrine speaks to the society that must provide the key contributions of people and money that the organization depends upon to do its work. Doctrine explains what the organization does. In modern democracies, doctrine also reassures society that the military is focused only on those tasks that civilians have specified, that it is not a foreign policy or domestic menace.

Third, doctrine provides useful guidance to military leaders on how to fight. Because doctrine is meant to be a shared conceptual framework, it helps to enable battlefield coordination and cooperation. Because the guidance is meant to be practiced and tested, it provides a source of cohesion when the fighting starts. It creates a fictive certainty about an inherently uncertain activity. Finally, doctrine helps to provide the individual members of the organization with reasons to work for the organization’s purposes. Militaries ask quite a lot of their membership; doctrine paints a picture of the organization that valorizes the soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

Approaches to organizational analysis

Broadly speaking, there are two major theoretical perspectives in the study of large organizations. The more traditional approach may be called ‘Structural’, and stresses the organization’s overriding commitment to a rational pursuit of formal purpose. A second school may be termed ‘Human Relations’, and stresses the variability of human beings, and their natural propensity to seek, from their lives inside the organization, rewards that may have little connection to the pursuit of formal purpose.² Both perspectives highlight sources of uncertainty, which organizations strive to reduce.

The structural approach

Formal organizations arrange people and physical resources for the mass production of rationality.³ Organizations are established to ensure that some purpose is regularly and systematically pursued on a large scale. Purpose or function is therefore the principal driver of the organization’s structure and its processes. Over time, a rational distribution of power and authority within the organization is developed to pursue these purposes. The organization’s managers carefully consider the ‘best way’ to accomplish sub-tasks, often on the basis of hard won experience. Because resources are inevitably scarce, decisions are influenced by ‘cost-benefit’ calculations. The ‘best way’ is locked in through the evolution of standard operating procedures (SOPs) and more elaborate programs that combine SOP’s in standard routines or patterns. New members are trained in these programs, and are promoted on the basis of their mastery. A record is maintained of the organization’s accumulated wisdom, and this record is often consulted. Even when the organization encounters contingencies for which its programs and SOPs may be inappropriate, it first looks to its own experience.

The biggest barrier to the rational achievement of purpose is uncertainty. Uncertainty may arise from the people within the organization, or from the environment outside the organization. The organization wants to control as many sources of uncertainty as possible in order to protect its ability to act rationally. Modern organization theorists have long since abandoned the notion that people are perfectly rational, and also perfectly controllable. Rationality is understood to be bounded, which is one of the reasons why so much attention must be paid to the distribution of power and authority in the organizations, to the evolution of programs and SOPs, and to the careful socialization of organizational leaders. The structure thus evolved ensures that the purpose will be pursued, but at the same time it makes the organization difficult to change. Resistance to innovation is an unintended consequence both of the organization’s reason for being, and the limitations of human capacity.

The organization’s environment presents a host of other kinds of uncertainties. An organization’s ability to execute its own programs and SOPs can be disrupted by others. For example, organizations depend on contributions from the environment to survive. They act to protect and normalize the flow of those contributions as best they can. Government bureaucracies spend considerable time trying to protect their budget shares. Historically, large businesses have often colluded to divide markets. Businesses today try to have very close relationships with their suppliers, to ensure that the materials or sub-assemblies they need will be available when needed, in the necessary quantities, and appropriate quality. Still other kinds of uncertainty arise from the necessity to cooperate with other organizations, whose behavior cannot be controlled.

Uncertainties may arise from the fact that others have some kind of formal authority over you. In western democracies, political authorities, whether in the executive or legislative branches may have the ability to reach deep into the organization’s business to try to achieve peculiar ends. If this happens too often, and too successfully, a bureaucracy will soon find rationality to be impossible. Thus bureaucracies try to preserve their autonomy from outside authority.

Organizations may also face basic ambiguity about cause–effect relationships. This is the hardest kind of uncertainty for formal organizations committed to rationality. Organizations may be able to rationalize internal processes but they still may not quite understand how to make things happen in the world. Indeed, in the end they may not know how to achieve the organization’s purpose at all. So they imagine what might contribute to the purpose and rationalize that.

The Human organization

The Human Relations school takes as its starting point that people simply are not cogs in the machine. This is not only a consequence of the limits to rationality discussed above. Rather, humans are complicated. They want more from organizations than remuneration. Some people are in the organization for money or power, others because they believe deeply in its purposes, and still others because they simply like being part of a team, they like associating with other people. Often, people have mixed motives. Executives must understand the full range of reasons people ‘cooperate’ in an organization, and manipulate these reasons to get them to work toward the common goal. The formal authority of organizational leaders can only be exercised though a kind of systematic campaign to manipulate these various incentives.⁴ Whether or not managers understand this, the humans in the organization will either find a way to bend the organization in the direction of providing the satisfactions that they want, or expend much energy in the effort. Like the organization as a whole, individuals may struggle to create their own little islands of autonomy. They may try to reduce uncertainty for themselves. They protect themselves from organizational managers, and the authority they wield. All of this individual self-protection can become a barrier to the pursuit of organizational purpose.

Military organizations

Military organizations live much of their lives in one environment – peace; but they live for another environment – war. The environment they live for gives them their purpose or function, and thus their existence. But they spend very little time in that environment. This double existence is itself a great cause of uncertainty.

Military Purpose

Military organizations do something unusual – they try to destroy one another, directly. There are no other formal organizations with this explicit purpose. Competition, yes; destruction through failure in the market place, yes; direct destruction of one another, no. This purpose makes warfare very competitive, and the environment of warfare extremely competitive, often feverishly competitive. Much of warfare consists of long periods of inaction. But when the action comes, it is brutally stressful. After the fact, the margin of success can appear very thin. Delay in the assessment of the situation, the decision to reinforce, or the decision to withdraw can have deadly consequences – even if the decisions are right.

Mistakes potentially have very great consequences. Many organized activities involve some risk. Almost none risk the lives or political freedom of family members and friends not present. The consequences of failure for one’s self, ones associates, ones country are absurdly great. This is not always true, but it is true often enough that it affects how military organizations prepare for war. As Churchill remarked, during the First World War, Admiral Jellicoe, the commander of the High Seas fleet, was the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon.

Perhaps less dramatically, during the Battle of Britain, Keith Park, commander of Number 11 Group defending the approaches to London, probably could not lose the whole war with a single mistake. Failure to intercept and disrupt any given German raid could, however, produce very serious consequences on the ground, either for industrial targets, or for the critical air bases the Germans were trying to destroy.⁵

The purpose of mutual destruction creates a special environment

Clausewitz observed that the purpose of mutual destruction gives warfare an inherent competitive quality far more intense than almost any other aspect of social life. Clausewitz also talks about friction and the dearth of good information, often referred to as fog. And he talks about danger, which produces fear. Friction, fog, and fear combine to make the special environment of war. Military organizations hope that doctrine will help them navigate into and through this treacherous environment.

Friction captures the fact that it is difficult to make anything happen on the battlefield – even when the adversary is not fighting very hard. Partly this arises from the normal kinds of organizational problems discussed above; the fact that war is waged with human beings. Friction may also arise because these organizations are particularly large and unwieldy, and have to drag everything they need along with them. And they are dangerous, even to themselves, as the rate of peacetime accidents suggests. They carry vast quantities of explosives and fuel, and command machines of incredible power. During the Cold War, occasional accidental explosions of Soviet conventional ammunition dumps appeared very like small nuclear explosions to US reconnaissance satellites. The adversary may attack at any time, and this consciousness affects all movement.

On land at least, if the adversary does attack, even a small attack can produce disproportionate consequences from the point of view of mere movement. Moreover, armies in particular must often move through environments that are not really designed for them, and which they can only sometimes prepare in advance. The German army increased railroad capacity opposite the Belgian border prior to 1914, but it could not increase railroad capacity on the Belgian side of the border. And it could not reliably prevent the withdrawing enemy from dynamiting key rail installations. The same is true of roads and bridges and even airfields.

It is hard to figure out what is happening on the battlefield; the fog of war obscures all. Clausewitz probably drew his analogy to fog from the basic problem of the thick clouds of smoke created by the black powder weapons of his time, but the notion of the ‘fog of war’ has persisted. Fog is created in part by the fact that reports about the battlefield are in the first instance made by humans, who may be making their observations under conditions of danger, and who therefore may not be accurate. It may also arise from the problem of time, information does not usually reach commanders from all sources in real time; it dribbles in. The adversary knows you want accurate information, so he works with some energy to keep good information out of your hands. Moreover, adversaries want you to have bad information. Insofar as you know this, all information is both precious and suspect. Finally, it is often true that the best information has the highest price. Sometimes one has to fight the adversary in order to get useful information.

Within this environment, these organizations are in a relative sense ‘fragile’. There is a very high level of internal interdependence in modern militaries, which has grown since the industrial revolution. Most modern military organizations attempt to coordinate the ‘rational’ application of a range of technologies, each of which requires a little administrative tail to maintain, fuel, arm and sometimes replace it. The combat organization also has a head (a command element), a nervous system (a communications network) and senses (reconnaissance and intelligence assets). Modern combat organizations do not maintain their combat power unless all of these elements are functioning to some extent. In the campaign in the Low Countries in 1940, it took the Germans about six weeks to destroy the better half of the French Army. A good bit of the German success can be explained by the disruption caused by the speed and depth of German armored attacks. Similarly, a new term was introduced during Desert Storm, ‘emissions control’ or EMCON suicide. The Iraqi army’s main headquarters tried to elude US electronic intelligence assets by the very sparing use of its radio communications networks, termed ‘emissions control’ in military parlance. This worked, but at the cost of letting the Iraqi army more or less disintegrate.

Modern militaries are fragile in another way. They are often surprisingly dependent on relatively small numbers of very high cost, high value platforms. In modern times navies have been especially prone to this problem, and among wealthy great powers, navies may be the place where this problem is the most common. As both sides usually know this, the high value assets get a lot of destructive attention, and the balance of forces can thus change quickly. Fear of such losses caused both the German and the British battle fleets to behave with such extreme caution in the First World War that only one significant engagement occurred, Jutland. The Japanese Imperial Navy, on the other hand, lost four fleet carriers in a single day at Midway, all that they had operational at the time. Air Forces are not immune. The Israelis destroyed most of the Egyptian Air Force in a day in 1967, most Air Forces learned a lesson from this episode and hardened up their airbases, so this risk arises less often now. That said, in 1982 the IAF blew nearly a hundred Syrian fighters out of the sky in short order, so there are other ways to lose a lot of aircraft quickly.

Military organizations must also deal with a frightening gray area, the ‘Transition to Conflict’, the moment when peace turns into war either for the organization as a whole, or for inexperienced units in an organization already at war. This transition is fraught with uncertainty, given what the organization knows in a general way about the course and risks of combat, coupled with the fact that the normal peacetime existence of the organization, regardless of training regimen, is quite different from war. War on a map or on the exercise ground cannot simulate real war with much fidelity. Will the organization’s programs and SOPs prove adequate to the enemy’s strategy and capabilities. Members of the organization must not only deal with their own fears, they must reset their mental clocks, their understandings of endurance and persistence, and their moral codes. How do you get your organization through this transition intact?

War at some level becomes a struggle of rival organizations that goes beyond each side’s array of weaponry and even its particular military strategy. The combination of friction, fog, and fragility with fear and competitiveness creates a very high degree of uncertainty. The understanding of the rigors of combat, and the deep uncertainty about the peace–-war transition produces a very high premium on simplicity, stability, and acceptance and internalization of doctrine. Organizational cohesion is a very high value. A stable, agreed way of warfare, a doctrine, is a very appealing way to achieve that cohesion, especially at the moment of the transition from peace to war.

Moreover, the adversary has the same set of problems and fears, and the same set of incentives. Military organizations want to ‘operate’ their own doctrine, and deny the adversary theirs; they want to impose their plans on the other side. Their golden rule is to do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first. The offense is more honored than the defense. Striking first is tempting, and surprise is honored. One key aspect of this is secrecy. For purely functional reasons militaries wish to keep a lot of things secret, it helps in the process of imposing your own doctrine and denying the enemy theirs.

The peacetime environment is comfortable, but not instructive

Most military organizations spend years with no reliable test of their capabilities – technological, organizational, doctrinal, tactical. This is an absolutely critical fact of life. Given the description I have offered of the wartime environment, it is reasonable to suggest that there is virtually no way to reliably simulate warfare. Militaries try fairly hard to simulate warfare, and can often do a remarkably good job with some elements of the process. Commanders have used war games to simulate the decision making for, and plausible paths of, campaigns in particular regions against particular enemies. Maneuvers can provide commanders with some understanding of the challenges of moving large formations or units across land, sea, or in the air, and provide valuable experience for those who actually have to make those movements happen. Combat can even be simulated with some fidelity, at least among ‘small’ units. But it is very difficult to bring all of this together, and it is more difficult to simulate the actions of a courageous, clever, determined and, most of all, lethal enemy.

Moreover, realistic maneuvers are quite costly. This is particularly true of continental warfare, where it is hard to get together the large units of land war, such as multi-division corps of as many as 90,000 people. And it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find enough real estate for such maneuvers. Finally, truly realistic combat training is dangerous; training deaths are a common occurrence, and the military of a democracy at peace probably cannot suffer many deaths before it attracts unwanted outside political scrutiny.

Peace is full of military uncertainty. During long periods of peace, much can change from the organization’s last combat experience. New adversaries arise, or civilian leaders choose new ones, with new or at least different methods of warfare, in different climates and topography. Civil society, which provides the materiel and human contributions for war, may change – altering notions of acceptable costs of combat, available resources, and even what it is permissible to do to the enemy. The civilian economy throws off new technologies, which old or new adversaries may exploit, or which some members of one’s own organization, or its clients, want the organization to exploit.

Doctrine must lend some utility and coherence to the necessarily disjointed and partial peacetime simulations of the rigors of war. It must strike a balance between the need for an ‘agreed way of war’ to get the organization through the transition to conflict, and to fight the campaigns that follow, and the need to be responsive both to the possibility of real change in the world, and the claims of change that will be advanced by organization entrepreneurs and outside audiences. Without a doctrine at time T, there is no baseline against which to judge what comes after.

War may be an extension of politics, but politicians are a source of uncertainty

The domestic political environment in modern societies is a source of uncertainty centering on the basic purpose of the organization. Most modern states, to a greater or lesser degree, subscribe to nominal civilian control over foreign policy, and over the military. The military’s function is not merely to manage violence, but to manage violence in service of state policy. But how can this be achieved?

Early organization theorists made a distinction between policy and administration. Carried into the military this would mean, as soldiers still like to believe, that statesmen make policy and provide a military mission, and then stand back to watch the neutral tool, the military, execute. Organization theorists don’t believe this anymore. Clausewitz did not believe it either. He is usually cited for the aphorism that war is merely an extension of policy by other means. Less well known is his insistence that policy had to somehow infuse every aspect of the conduct of war, even the posting of sentries.

How is the infusion of war with policy to be achieved? There is no formula. Clausewitz did not have many good ideas on how to do this. But this gives rise to a very basic source of uncertainty for soldiers. Senior soldiers can try to become statesmen themselves, but at the risk of neglecting their prime responsibility, the management of violence. Should civilians be allowed to oversee closely the conduct of military operations? Soldiers can’t really prevent this if it is what civilians choose to do, but this threatens the organization’s ability to plan its core mission. Soldiers don’t like it and they struggle to preserve their autonomy. It is at this point that the fetish for secrecy to deceive enemies without, becomes a handy rationale for fending off meddlers at home. Or, as Max Weber said, secrecy is the fighting posture of the bureaucracy. During the Cold War, the Strategic Air Command worked hard and successfully to provide civilians with as little access as possible to the Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war. Indeed, the military kept a very close hold on all its war plans.

Doctrine can be a tool to help manage the risk of direct civilian intervention into military affairs, especially in war time. It can help protect operational autonomy. If militaries develop doctrine that is responsive to what appears to be the foreign policy preferences of civilians, then this may reassure them that their wishes will be followed. Doctrine can, in some sense, defend itself.

Responsive doctrine may also allay deeper concerns about what the military may do with all its power. From time to time, militaries may need to include in doctrine elements that seem ancillary to the generation of combat power. The post-war German Army has long inserted principles that suggest it understands that individuals ought not to surrender their consciences when they put on the uniform.

Inter-service relations

In most countries, especially in modern times, there are several military organizations, armies, navies, and air forces. In rich countries there may also be an independent Marine Corps, an autonomous nuclear force, or an autonomous national air defense organization.

In wartime, some military operations require cooperation among two or more services; this interdependence create much uncertainty. Armies may need to move by air or sea. Ground forces require assistance from air forces for defense against enemy attack. Where navies lack their own significant air power, they require the support of their air force, as the German Navy did in the Second World War. The initial failure of the Luftwaffe to provide such support helped British maritime patrol aircraft send many German U-Boats to the bottom of the Bay of Biscay in 1943. Air forces may not need direct help from ground forces most of the time, but sometimes they need ground forces to take air bases for them. Less critically, ground forces may control anti-aircraft weapons necessary for air base defense, and, in particularly, fluid situations may need to defend air bases against direct attack by enemy ground forces, or special operations forces. For years the Royal Air Force maintained its own small ground forces to defend its airfields in Germany against such threats.

Fratricide is the most graphic example of inter-service interdependence gone awry, and the most graphic instances have to do with airplanes. Desert Storm saw a few poignant examples of fratricide, such as the USAF fighter that struck a Marine armored vehicle killing all those inside. But these pale by comparison with the Second World War. General Leslie McNair, the organizer of US Army ground forces in the Second World War, was killed by US bombs that fell short in the preparatory air strike for Operation Cobra, the 25 July 1944 breakout from the Normandy Peninsula. One hundred and eleven other American soldiers died, and 490 were wounded in the same accident.⁶ During the invasion of Sicily in the same war, twenty-three C47s loaded with US army paratroopers were shot down by the US Navy.⁷

These interdependencies are keenly felt. Military organizations know that they may need certain capabilities at critical moments during combat. But they do not have much influence over these capabilities when they are in the hands of another service, unless central, cross-service management institutions are very strong, which has seldom proved the case. Each organization has some incentives to get into those aspects of the other’s business that affect it the most. This can cause tension and rivalry, and ultimately redundancy, and the over-consumption of scarce resources.

Only the US can afford to address the uncertainties of these interdependencies by allowing the organizations to do what they prefer, which is absorb the most critical capabilities within their boundaries. The US Navy has its own air force. It also has its own army (the Marine Corps), which has its own air force, Marine aviation. The US Army is prevented from having a large conventional air force, but controls thousands of helicopters for battlefield airlift, and hundreds of attack helicopters for close support. And it is buying long-range missiles that will, to some extent, compete with air force tactical aviation for interdiction missions. Although the USAF has never lost air superiority over the battlefield to any opponent since the North African campaign of 1942, the Army does not rely very heavily on the Air Force for air defense. While it would be foolish to leave ground forces utterly bereft of anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles, the US Army has remained lushly equipped with air defense weapons, indeed the US Army’s 1960s’ vintage Hawk air defense missile was probably superior to anything else in the world at the time; in its few times in combat it proved very effective. Its successor, the Patriot has not yet been challenged by enemy aircraft, but would prove even more deadly.

Nevertheless, even the US is not rich enough to solve all interdependencies by allowing each organization to cover its most critical requirements. Thus, at least in the US, another solution has been advanced, ‘Jointness’. Jointness is the term for close cooperation among the services. It is to be caused in part by a strong all-service coordinating institution, the Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it is also to be caused by mandating a significant number of ‘joint’ assignments for officers who hope to reach Flag rank – General or Admiral. These solutions were embodied in the Goldwater–Nichols act, which reorganized the US command structure in 1986. A good deal of the political impetus for this act was created by a number of horror stories of poor inter-service cooperation that circulated in the national security establishment in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The people

Like other organizations, militaries have to recruit, motivate, and train their people. For the most part they need to do this in times of peace but, as already stated, they need somehow to be ready to transition to war. One tendency of peacetime military organizations might be termed ‘traditional preparation for war’. Although much of the organization is formally getting ready to wage war in a particular way, with particular weapons, the ‘human’ organization is simply preparing individuals for the experience. Doctrine plays a subtle role in this process.

The first thing that militaries do is cultivate certain traits in combat officers that they believe will at least hold the organization together under the stresses of combat. This gives rise to the characteristic type of officer portrayed so often in literature and films. Commanders must be able to approach some level of rational thinking, on a sustained basis, under very arduous conditions: danger, adversity, ambiguity, sleeplessness, and poor food. They need an ability to suspend sensitivity to loss of life, at least in the short term, if they are to command the organization in battle. These qualities are so common among great commanders that they go unremarked, perhaps because to call attention to them subjects the observer to the charge of stereotyping.

Among figures most familiar to me, these qualities are shared by Irwin Rommel, Germany’s World War II armor commander; James Gavin, United Army World War II paratrooper commander; Matthew Ridgeway, World War II paratrooper and commander of US troops in Korea immediately after the intervention of the Chinese Communist forces; Harold Moore, commander of the first US air cavalry battalion to fight it out with the North Vietnamese Army in the Drang River valley in 1965; Keith Park, commander of Number 11 Group during the Battle of Britain; and Manuel Quesada, commander of the US Army Air Force 9th Tactical Air Command in Normandy. There are dozens if not hundreds of others. Although we cannot know in precisely what ways doctrine helped these commanders get through the regular crises they faced, it is at least plausible that it not only provided a repertoire of solutions from which to choose, but also provided confidence that they might work, and a way to accept the risks and costs inherent to making weighty decisions.

Self concept

Like other organizations, militaries must mix material, purposive, and soldierly incentives. Militaries don’t usually make their members wealthy. And although the purpose of defense of one’s country may provide some patriotic motivation, the infrequency of war may take the edge off. Militaries do provide plenty of soldierly benefits, which may be their strong suit in times of peace. The organization often adopts intermediate goals, conducive to soldierly.

One possible source of non-monetary incentives is allegiance to the weapons and tactics of the last glorious episode, experienced by the service or service branch. Such stories are legion. The survival of the horse cavalry well into the machine age is a favorite example, but this long-suffering beast ought not to carry the exemplary burden alone. The piloted fighter aircraft will almost surely hang around a lot longer than makes any sense. The aircraft carrier advocates faced a hard fight against the battleship admirals in the 1930s, a fight they really did not win until the Japanese took much of the battleship force out of play at Pearl Harbor. And the carrier itself will probably hang on longer than makes technical sense. There are many reasons for the survival of old arms well past their time, but one is that they have been ‘infused with value’ by those who wield them.

Doctrine too seems to provide a role in the creation of soldierly incentives. To recruit and retain capable officers and enlisted personnel, and to induce them to perform under dangerous and stressful conditions, the organization needs a motivating story about what it does. Why one story works, and another does not, is too complicated to be treated here. But it is probably the case that defining a military organization as principally a peace keeping force for the United Nations, or a rescue force for natural disasters, will not draw people to the organization who are pretty serious about learning to fight, and about fighting itself.

Moreover, even seemingly subtle distinctions can matter. In the late 1970s, General William Depuy tried to transform US Army doctrine to ready the force for armored warfare, after years of counterinsurgency in Vietnam. DePuy developed a reasonable response to what was known about armored warfare at the time, and what the US Army might face in Central Europe. The doctrine elicited a great deal of resistance, and not all because many officers simply could not leave counterinsurgency behind. DePuy’s doctrine had a technicist quality, which stressed the tactical management of modern tanks and anti-tank missiles for the purpose of killing the greatest number of enemy vehicles. It did not say much about maneuver or counter-offensives. Even progressive officers who understood that the Army had to reform itself if it were to be able to fight the ‘Group of Soviet Forces Germany’ successfully, found this kind of reform to be alien to their understanding of war. They may or may not have been correct about the deficiencies of DePuy’s doctrinal ideas, but at least some of their antipathy arose from the fact that the doctrine did not ‘feel’ right.

Conclusion

Military organizations must deal with very high levels of uncertainty. Some uncertainty comes from the international political environment that gives them life, some arises from the fact that they do not get much realistic practice, and some arises from the very nature of combat. Doctrine is one of the many ways that militaries address these uncertainties. In liberal democratic states especially, doctrine must speak to many audiences. Doctrine writers face dilemmas and cross- cutting pressures. The first purpose of military officers who are responsible for doctrine is to figure out how to fight. But as Clausewitz argued, politics affects all aspect of warfare, including the writing of doctrine. Where threats seem distant or diffuse, or where national security seems to depend on the actions of greater powers or coalitions, or where civil society has simply stopped taking war seriously, doctrine writers may find themselves focusing less on combat and more on the military’s contributions to foreign policy, coalition management, peace keeping, disaster relief, and civil society. The core uncertainty remains, however. Combat is a difficult and mysterious affair. If a state bothers to pay for a military, this must reflect some deep seated suspicion that it may someday need one. Somewhere in the doctrine there needs to be some guidance for how to get through that day.

Notes

¹ Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 13–14.

² Mauro F. Guillen, Models of Management, Work, Authority, and Organization in Comparative Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10–11. Guillen actually cites a third school, ‘Scientific Management’. The third school, although influential in the management world, largely evolved with reference to the factory floor management of production workers. Guillen chronicles the evolution of ‘management’ theory, and divides it into these three schools. Management theory is, however, closely related to organization theory, and indeed claims many of the same theorists as its own. Management theory is distinguished by its instrumental rather than analytic concerns. Guillen’s intellectual history and his typology of theories is developed from the viewpoint of managers, and is especially concerned with production. But it is a very useful work from the more general perspective of organization theory.

³ Max Weber, ‘Bureaucracy’, in Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds). From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, Chapter VIII (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, 1958), 196–244.

⁴ Chester Barnard, Functions of the Executive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938, 1968, 1975), Chapter XI, ‘The Economy of Incentives’, pp. 139–60. It is not entirely fair to saddle Barnard with the burden of the Human Relations School. In my judgment, he brings both the structural and human approaches together in a compelling synthesis.

⁵ Vincent Orange, A Biography of Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park (London: Methuen, 1984), 89, 96, 101–2, 119.

⁶ Martin Blumenson, Breakout and Pursuit, United States Army in World War II, The European Theater of Operations (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1961, 1989), 235–37.

⁷ James M. Gavin, On to Berlin, Battles of an Airborne Commander, 1943–1946 (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 43.