Understanding Military Doctrine by Hoiback Harald;

Author:Hoiback, Harald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1170341
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Part III

Why doctrine?

8 The utility of doctrine

In the previous parts of this book, we have investigated the nature of doctrines and, particularly, the props and justifications you can expect to find in them. In this part, we will round it all off by trying to justify the need to have doctrines at all.

The arch-question in the philosophy of military doctrine making is whether doctrine’s upside compensates for its downside. This predicament is captured by a strict formula (that is probably etched, in one form or another, in every military doctrine in the world), which says that doctrine is ‘authoritative but requires judgment in application’.1 For the individual decision maker, however, the message sounds suspiciously like a catch-22, a cyclical conundrum, where you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.2

Evidently, given the plethora of doctrines in the Western world, doctrinal quandaries have not put states off at least trying to develop feasible doctrines, in one way or another. Why? There are several plausible explanations:

• The conventional explanation: war making is complicated and in order to succeed we ought to think systematically through and deliberately perpetuate the beliefs we have about what works in war.

• The institutional explanation: others have one; hence, we ought to have one as well.

• The sociological explanation: doctrines legitimise the ‘authority, power and privilege of elites’.3

• The strategic-advantage explanation: doctrine is ‘an intangible asset that must be cultivated in order to gain a rare and valuable source of competitive advantage’.4

The first bullet point is presumably the least controversial, but the second is perhaps closer to reality, especially for smaller countries that fight their wars in coalition with big partners, and for the individual services in their battle for funding and political support. For a minor coalition partner, the choice can, in reality, be whether to produce a make-believe doctrine, or to go without it entirely; overtly or covertly resting on the coalition or alliance’s doctrines. To Frederick the Great and Moltke, on the other hand, it is presumably the fourth point that best explains their intentions, while, for the French after 1870, their work must also be seen in the light of the third bullet point.

While recognising that in real life all four explanations must be given their due, this study will argue that the seriousness of war, nonetheless, warrants a systematic contemplation of its means as well as its ends; and if done properly, doctrine can turn out to be a ‘valuable source of competitive advantage’. In the first chapter of this study, we presented a number of arguments against doctrine; in the following, we will give a number of arguments in support of it, and conclude that the weighing up of doctrine’s pros and cons ends up in favour of having it, notwithstanding all its shortcomings.5

The list of objections to doctrine presented in the introduction to this study implies, in a nutshell, that the attempt to crystallise ‘the spirit of war’ into a written doctrine can cause the death of that spirit and

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