The Anatomy of Doctrine and Ways to Keep It Fit

ABSTRACT

The word ‘doctrine’ has been part of military terminology for more than 100 years. Even though the word is ubiquitous in modern military literature, it is still ambiguous and tends to put very different ideas into readers’ mind. In order to make the concept less vague and thus more useful, this paper explores the historical and pragmatic origin of the concept, and points out some of its potential pitfalls. The main message of the article is that, although it can be extremely hard to make a viable doctrine, it is worth the effort.

KEYWORDS:

• Military
• Doctrine
• Military History
• Ambiguous Terminology
• Civil–Military Relations

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank the anonymous referee for providing insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and above all my brother in arms Jared Jack Domin, for inspiring and encouraging conversations about this chapter. Our medicine balls felt soft and cosy compared with your doctrinal punches.

Notes

¹ I owe it to the reader to plead guilty. The manuscript was mine. I also owe it to the reader and Routledge to mention that Routledge reached another conclusion, and published the manuscript in 2013.

² This section of the article rests rather heavily on Harald Høiback, Understanding Military Doctrine: A Multidisciplinary Approach (: Routledge 2013).

³ Richard Holmes (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001), 262.

⁴ Arron P. Jackson, The Roots of Military Doctrine: Change and Continuity in Understanding the Practice of Warfare (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, US Army Combined Arms Center 2013).

⁵ Bill James, quoted in Chris Anderson and David Sally, The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know about Football Is Wrong (London: Penguin 2013).

⁶ Quoted in Paul Lockhart, The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 104.

⁷ Cf. Honig’s article in this issue.

⁸ Ladislaus Herbert Richard Pope-Hennessy, ‘The Place of Doctrine in War’, Edinburgh Review 215/439 (1912), 21.

⁹ Andrew Gordon, ‘The Doctrine Debate: Having the Last Word’, in M. Duffy, T. Farrell and G. Sloan (eds), Doctrine and Military Effectiveness (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1997), 47.

¹⁰ Pope-Hennessy, ‘The Place of Doctrine in War’, 26, 27.

¹¹ Høiback, Understanding Military Doctrine, 180–86.

¹² Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 61, 183.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Harald Høiback

Harald Høiback is a Lieutenant Colonel and lectures at the Norwegian Defence University College, Oslo. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oslo (2010).