Military doctrine


Military doctrine is the expression of how military forces contribute to campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements. A military doctrine outlines what military means should be used, how forces should be structured, where forces should be deployed, and the modes of cooperation between types of forces. "Joint doctrine" refers to the doctrines shared and aligned by multinational forces or joint service operations.
There are three broad categories of military doctrines: Offensive doctrines aim to punish an adversary, Defensive doctrines aim to deny an adversary, and Deterrent doctrines aim to disarm an adversary. Different military doctrines have different implications for world politics. For example, offensive doctrines tend to lead to arms races and conflicts.

Defining doctrine

's definition of doctrine, used unaltered by many member nations, is:
In 1998 the Canadian Army stated:
A U.S. Air Force Air University staff study in 1948 defined military doctrine functionally as "those concepts, principles, policies, tactics, techniques, practices, and procedures which are essential to efficiency in organizing, training, equipping, and employing its tactical and service units".
A U.S. Army essay written in 2016 similarly defined military doctrine as "consist of tactics, techniques, and procedures ".
In 2005 Gary Sheffield of the Defence Studies Department of King's College London/JSCSC quoted J F C Fuller's 1923 definition of doctrine as the "central idea of an army".
In 1965 the Soviet Dictionary of Basic Military Terms defined military doctrine as "a state's officially accepted system of scientifically founded views on the nature of modern wars and the use of the armed forces in them.... Military doctrine has two aspects: social-political and military-technical." The social-political side "encompasses all questions concerning methodology, economic, and social bases, the political goals of war. It is the defining and the more stable side." The other side, the military-technical, must accord with the political goals. It includes the "creation of military structure, technical equipping of the armed forces, their training, definition of forms and means of conducting operations and war as a whole".

Relationship between doctrine and strategy

Military doctrine is a key component of grand strategy.
NATO's definition of strategy is "presenting the manner in which military power should be developed and applied to achieve national objectives or those of a group of nations." The official definition of strategy by the United States Department of Defense is: "Strategy is a prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve national or multinational objectives."
Military strategy provides the rationale for military operations. Field Marshal Viscount Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff and co-chairman of the Anglo-US Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee for most of the Second World War, described the art of military strategy as:
"to derive from the aim a series of military objectives to be achieved: to assess these objectives as to the military requirements they create, and the pre-conditions which the achievement of each is likely to necessitate: to measure available and potential resources against the requirements and to chart from this process a coherent pattern of priorities and a rational course of action."
Instead, doctrine seeks to provide a common conceptual framework for a military service:
  • what the service perceives itself to be
  • what its mission is
  • how the mission is to be carried out
  • how the mission has been carried out in history
  • other questions.
In the same way, doctrine is neither operations nor tactics. It serves as a conceptual framework uniting all three levels of warfare.
Doctrine reflects the judgments of professional military officers, and to a lesser but important extent civilian leaders, about what is and is not militarily possible and necessary.
Factors to consider include:
  • military technology
  • national geography
  • the capabilities of adversaries
  • the capability of one's own organization

    Military doctrine by country

China

military doctrine is influenced by a number of sources including an indigenous classical military tradition characterized by strategists such as Sun Tzu and modern strategists such as Mao Zedong, along with Western and Soviet influences. One distinctive characteristic of Chinese military science is that it places emphasis on the relationship between the military and society and views military force as merely one part of an overarching grand strategy.
According to French newspaper Le Monde, the Chinese nuclear doctrine is to maintain a nuclear force allowing it to deter and respond to a nuclear attack. However, new evolutions show that China could allow use of its nuclear arsenal in more situations.

France

Following the defeat of the French Army in the Franco-Prussian War, the French military, as part of its movements to increase professionalism, emphasized officer training at the École supérieure de guerre, under the direction of its commandant, Ferdinand Foch, who began developing a consistent doctrine for handling armies, corps, and divisions. Foch's 1906 work, Des principes de la guerre expressed this doctrine.
We have then, a doctrine. All the brains have been limbered up and regard all questions from an identical point of view. The fundamental idea of the problem being known, each one will solve the problem in his own fashion, and these thousand fashions, we may very well be sure, will act to direct all their efforts to a common objective.
Prior to WWI, France had an offensive military doctrine.
In the aftermath of WWI, France adopted a defensive military doctrine where the Maginot Line played a central role in its deterrence of Germany.

Germany

Prussian doctrine was published as Regulations for the Instruction of the Troops in Field Service and the Exercises of the larger Units of the 17th June, 1870. The doctrine was revised in 1887 and published in English in 1893 as The Order of Field Service of the German Army, by Karl Kaltenborn und Stachau, and once again in 1908 as Felddienst Ordnung.
Prior to WWI, Germany had an offensive military doctrine exemplified by the Schlieffen Plan. Germany also devoted considerable resources to building a fleet of battleships, which provoked fears among European powers. During World War II, Germany deployed an operational strategy sometimes referred to as Blitzkrieg in its offensives against Poland and France.
German military doctrine incorporates the concept of Auftragstaktik, which can be seen as a doctrine within which formal rules can be selectively suspended in order to overcome "friction". Carl von Clausewitz stated that "Everything in war is very simple but the simplest thing is difficult". Problems will occur with misplaced communications, troops going to the wrong location, delays caused by weather, etc., and it is the duty of the commander to do his best to overcome them. Auftragstaktik encourages commanders to exhibit initiative, flexibility and improvisation while in command.

India

The current combat doctrine of the Indian Army is based on the effective combined utilization of holding formations and strike formations. In the case of an attack, the holding formations would contain the enemy and strike formations would counter-attack to neutralize enemy forces. In the case of an Indian attack, the holding formations would pin enemy forces down whilst the strike formations attack at a point of Indian choosing.
India's nuclear doctrine follows the policy of credible minimum deterrence, No first strike, No use of nuclear weapons on Non-nuclear states and Massive nuclear retaliation in case deterrence fails.
India has recently adopted a new war doctrine known as "Cold Start" and its military has conducted exercises several times since then based on this doctrine. "Cold Start" involves joint operations between India's three services and integrated battle groups for offensive operations. A key component is the preparation of India's forces to be able to quickly mobilize and take offensive actions without crossing the enemy's nuclear-use threshold. A leaked US diplomatic cable disclosed that it was intended to be taken off the shelf and implemented within a 72-hour period during a crisis.

Israel

Strategic doctrine

Israel's military doctrine is formed by its small size and lack of strategic depth. To compensate, it relies on deterrence, including through a presumed nuclear weapons arsenal. It tries to overcome its quantitative disadvantage by staying qualitatively superior. Its doctrine is based on a strategy of defense but is operationally offensive, by pre-empting enemy threats and securing a quick, decisive victory if deterrence fails. Israel maintains a heightened state of readiness, advanced early warning systems, and a robust military intelligence capability to ensure attackers cannot take advantage of Israel's lack of strategic depth. Early warning and speedy victory is also desired because the Israel Defense Forces rely heavily on reservists during major wars; lengthy mobilization of reservists is costly to the Israeli economy. Israeli doctrine is constructed with the assumption that Israel would be largely self-sufficient in its war-fighting, without nearby allies to assist.
Israel's emphasis on operational offense was espoused by its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, as early as 1948 :
If attack us as they did this time, we shall transfer the war to the gates of their country.... We do not intend to conduct... a static defensive war at the venue where we were attacked. If they attack us again, in the future, we want the war to be waged not in our country, but in the enemy's country, and we want to be not on the defensive but on the attack.

Yitzhak Rabin, who was Chief of the IDF Staff during the Six-Day War, offered a similar explanation for Israel's pre-emptive beginning to the war:
The basic philosophy of Israel was not to initiate war, unless an act of war was carried out against us. We then lived within the lines prior to the Six-Day War, lines that gave no depth to Israel—and therefore, Israel was in a need, whenever there would be a war, to go immediately on the offensive—to carry the war to the enemy's land.