Locating the Human in Doctrine

Abstract

In 2013, top U.S. Army, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command military leaders chartered the Strategic Landpower Task Force to examine the concept of a human domain and inform whether to adopt it into doctrine. The Department of Defense (DoD) should not adopt human domain into doctrine. However, examining human in war illuminates opportunities to improve joint doctrine by developing precise terminology for the many facets of humanness in war. This article explores human domain, human dimension, human factors, and human capital. It also proposes re-evaluating defeat mechanisms to consider human factors and how military operations influence adversary decisions. Human domain concepts have gained attention in the land services and special operations, especially in population-centric conflicts, but the importance of human factors goes beyond these limited viewpoints. Since war is an inherently human endeavor, DoD should evaluate human factors across all domains and joint operations so the concepts are not unnecessarily constrained.

Keywords:

• human domain
• human dimension
• human factors
• human terrain
• human capital
• special operations forces (SOF)
• doctrine
• information operations

Notes

1. Definitions of each domain can be found in U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff JP 1-02 (2016), but the description of a domain is the author’s. This definition varies slightly from the U.S. Army’s in its Army Operating Concept: “An area of activity within the operating environment in which operations are organized and conducted by components.” (U.S. Department of the Army, 2014a, p. 46). It could be argued that cyberspace is not a physical environment, but it is made up of physical components, information that resides on physical components, and even transmissions across the electromagnetic spectrum, which does have distinct physical properties.

2. “There are two basic defeat mechanisms to accomplish this: attrition and disruption. The aim of disruption is to defeat an enemy’s ability to fight as a cohesive and coordinated organization. The alternative is to destroy his material capabilities through attrition, which generally is more costly and time-consuming. Although acknowledging that all successful combat involves both mechanisms, joint doctrine conditionally favors disruption because it tends to be a more effective and efficient way of causing an enemy’s defeat” (U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2011, p. III-30).

3. “Since people live on land, landpower is the most effective means of influencing will and behavior” (Goure, 2014, p. 44); “Landpower is particularly important in the human domain largely because it puts U.S. forces in direct contact with those they seek to influence” (Metz, 2013).