Unpacking military emulation: absorptive capacity and German counterinsurgency doctrine during ISAF

ABSTRACT

Which organisational activities promote effective military emulation? Which variables facilitate and impede the emergence of these activities? Drawing upon the academic literatures on military change and management studies, as well as semi-structured interviews within the British and German militaries, this article identifies five key organisational activities which promote effective inter-organisational doctrinal learning. In doing so, the article improves understanding of the contribution that management studies can make to multi-disciplinary scholarship on military learning. The article examines the variables which facilitate the emergence of activities which support effective inter-organisational doctrinal learning through a case study of Bundeswehr doctrinal absorptive capacity during ISAF. It also explores the impact of these activities on doctrine development. The article demonstrates the crucial importance of active and well-informed civilian oversight of the activities which support military learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Absorptive capacity
• counterinsurgency
• German military
• inter-organisational learning
• military emulation
• military learning

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Gerda Henkel Foundation for funding the research and the ZMSBw for hosting him during the empirical research and writing-up process. He would also like to express his gratitude to Dr. Heiko Biehl, Major Francis Brackely and Lieutenant-Colonel Klaus Gosenheimer for their assistance with arranging interviews. In addition, the author is very grateful for Dr Fabrizio Coticchia's helpful comments on an early draft of the article and for the advice provided by the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Dyson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics and IR, Royal Holloway College, University of London. At the time of writing he was also a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Military History and the Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr.

ORCID

Tom Dyson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8360-646X

Notes

1 Organisation studies and management studies have also failed to sufficiently examine military organisations. See Visser (2008, p. 127).

2 On US military learning, see Davidson (2011), Downie (1998), Hoffmann (2016, pp. 22–29) Nagl (2002), Russell (2010) and Serena (2011); On British and German military learning, see Dyson (2019b); on British military learning, see Catignani (2014) and Foley et al (2011). On learning within the Israel Defence Force, see Marcus (2015; 2019). On the impact of historical lessons on doctrine and operational strategy, see: Fitzgerald (2013) and Sangar (2014). On the neglect of “bottom-up” learning in military studies, see Grissom (2006).

3 Military innovation can be considered as: “ … the discovery of new knowledge, invention of new practices or their recombination in new forms” (Resende-Santos 2007, p. 72). On military innovation studies, see Grissom (2006) and Griffin (2017).

4 Inter-organisational learning capability in doctrine refers to the capacity to identify innovations and best-practice in other nations’ doctrinal publications and from emerging ideas within their warfare centres. It also incorporates the ability to assess the relevance of potential allied doctrinal innovations or best-practice through critical analysis of (i) “bottom-up” individual and group learning by a military’s own personnel deployed in the field/on exercises (including learning which derives from interaction with allied troops in multinational operations); (ii) the experiences (where relevant) of external partners such as NGOs, OGDs, and, (iii) the insights of academic scholarship.

5 Up-to-date doctrine is of little utility if officer education does not include the study of doctrine relevant to operational requirements, or provide officers with the critical thinking skills to interpret and evaluate doctrine in the light of the specific challenges they face. In its focus on improving knowledge transformation, the article highlights key organisational activities and processes which will not only improve doctrinal learning, but also the ability of an organisation to enhance its wider culture of experimentation and creativity, with positive implications for officer education. However, systematic examination of officer education best-practice is beyond the article’s scope. On the perils of deficits in officer education, see Alderson (2013, p. 287) and Catignani (2014, pp. 44–46).

6 In doing so, the article builds upon the scholarship of Horowitz (2010) by adding greater nuance to understanding of the organisational features which promote “adoption capacity” (the capacity of states to adopt military innovations).

7 Knowledge ambiguity refers to: “the inherent and irreducible uncertainty as to precisely what the underlying knowledge components and sources are and how they interact” (van Wijk et al., 2008, pp. 832–833).

8 The literature emphasises the importance of large volumes of relationships, mutual trust and reducing cultural distance (van Wijk et al., 2008, pp. 834–835; Coticchia and Moro 2016, p. 700).

9 A similar argument is made by Goldman (2006), who posits that cultural and ideological orthodoxies of political and military elites are the key variables explaining the scope, pace and extent of the cross-national diffusion of military innovations.

10 Email correspondence, two former SOWI academics, 20 August 2019.

11 On “institutional protection” for civilian efforts to steer change within military organisations, see Rynning (2001/02), pp. 108–110.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation under Grant number AZ 05/KF/15.